zen to their very lowest
depths. Venturesome explorers, I was going to say discoverers, have in
every direction and in the easiest imaginable fashion honeycombed these
immense ice-caps with endless passages much in the same way as the
termites, according to our palaeontologists, bored through the floors of
our fathers. We extend at will these fantastic galleries of crystal,
which, wherever they cross one another, form so many crystal palaces, by
casting on the walls a ray of intense heat which makes them melt. We
take good care to drain the water due to the liquefaction into one of
those bottomless pits which here and there yawn hideously beneath our
feet. Thanks to this method and the improvements it has undergone we
have succeeded in cutting, hewing and carving the solidified sea-water.
We are able to glide through it, to manoeuvre in it, to course through
it on skates or velocipedes with an ease and agility that are always
admired in spite of our being accustomed to it. The severe cold of these
regions is scarcely tempered by millions of electric lamps which are
mirrored in these emerald-green icicles with their velvet-like tints and
renders a permanent stay impossible. It would even prevent us crossing
them if, by good luck, the earliest pioneers had not discovered in them
crowds of seals which had been caught while still alive by the freezing
of the waters in which they remain imprisoned. Their carefully prepared
skins have furnished us with warm clothing. Nothing is more curious than
thus suddenly to catch sight of, as it were through a mysterious glass
case, one of these huge marine animals, sometimes a whale, a shark or a
devil fish, and that star-like flora which carpets the seas. Though
appearing crystallized in its transparent prison, in its Elysium of pure
brine, it has lost none of its secret charm, that was quite unknown to
our ancestors. Idealised by its very lack of motion, immortalised by its
death, it dimly shines here and there with gleams of pearl and mother of
pearl in the twilight of the depths below, to the right, the left,
beneath the feet or above the head of the solitary skater who roams with
his lamp on his forehead in pursuit of the unknown. There is always
something new to look forward to from these miraculous soundings, so
different from the soundings of former time. Never a tourist has come
home without having discovered some interesting object--a piece of
wreckage, the steeple of some sunke