2.10. CHANGING LANDSCAPES.
On reaching the Callisto, Ayrault worked the lock he
had had placed on the lower door, which, to avoid
carrying a key, was opened by a combination. The car's
interior was exactly as they had left it, and they were
glad to be in it again.
"Now," said Bearwarden, "we can have a sound and
undisturbed sleep, which is what I want more than
anything else. No prowlers can trouble us here, and we
shall not need the protection-wires."
They then opened a window in each side — for the large
glass plates, admitting the sun when closed, made the
Callisto rather warm — and placed a stout wire netting
within them to keep out birds and bats, and then, though
it was but little past noon, got into their comfortable
beds and slept nine hours at a stretch. Their strong
metal house was securely at
rest, receiving the
sunlight and shedding the rain and dew as it might have
done on earth. No winds or storms, lightnings or floods,
could trouble it, while the multiformed monsters of
antiquity and mythology restored in life, with which the
terrestrials had been thrown into such close contact,
roamed about its polished walls. Not even the fiercest
could affect them, and they would but see themselves
reflected in any vain assaults. The domed symmetrical
cylinder stood there as a monument to human ingenuity and
skill, and the travellers' last thought as they fell
asleep was, "Man is really lord of creation."
The following day at about noon they awoke, and had
a bath in the warm pool. They saw the armoured mass of
the great ant evidently undisturbed, while the bodies of
its victims were already shining skeletons, and raised a
small cairn of stones in memory of the struggle they had
had there.
"We should name this place Kentucky," said
Bearwarden, "for it is indeed a dark and bloody ground,"
and, seeing the aptness of the appellation, they entered
it so on their charts. While Ayrault got the batteries
in shape for resuming work. Bearwarden prepared a
substantial breakfast. This consisted
of oatmeal
and cream kept hermetically sealed in glass, a dish of
roast grouse, coffee, pilot bread, a bottle of Sauterne,
and another of Rhine wine.
"This is the last meal we shall take hereabouts,"
said their cook, as they plied their knives and forks
beneath the trees, "so here is a toast to our adventures,
and to all the game we have killed." They drained their
glasses in drinking this, after which Bearwarden regaled
them with the latest concert-hall song which he had at
his tongue's end.
About an hour before dark they re-entered their
projectile, and, as a mark of respect to their little
ship, named the great branch of the continent on which
they had alighted Callisto Point. They then got under
way. The batteries had to develop almost their maximum
power to overcome Jupiter's attraction; but they were
equal to the task, and the Callisto was soon in the air.
Directing their apergy to the mountains towards the
interior of the continent, and applying repulsion to any
ridge or hill over which they passed, thereby easing the
work of the batteries engaged in supporting the Callisto,
they were soon sweeping along at seventy-five to one
hundred miles
an hour. By keeping the projectile
just strongly enough charged to neutralize gravitation,
they remained for the most part within two hundred feet
of the ground, seldom rising to an altitude of more than
a mile, and were therefore able to keep the windows at
the sides open and so obtain an unobstructed view. If,
however, at any time they felt oppressed by Jupiter's
high barometric pressure, and preferred the terrestrial
conditions, they had but to rise till the barometer fell
to thirty. Then, if an object of interest recalled them
to sea-level, they could keep the Callisto's inside
pressure at what they found on the Jovian mountains, by
screwing up the windows. On account of the distance of
sixty-four thousand miles from Jupiter's equator to the
pole, they calculated that going at the speed of a
hundred miles an hour, night and day, it would take them
twenty-five terrestrial days to reach the pole even from
latitude two degrees at which they started. But they
knew that, if pressed for time, they could rise above the
limits of the atmosphere, and move with planetary speed;
while, if they wished a still easier method of pursuing
their observation, they had but to remain poised between
the sun and Jupiter, beyond the latter's upper
air,
and photograph or map it as it revolved before them.
By sunset they had gone a hundred miles. Wishing to
push along, they closed the windows, rose higher to avoid
any mountain-tops that might be invisible in the
moonlight, and increased their speed. The air made a
gentle humming sound as they shot through it, and towards
morning they saw several bright points of light in which
they recognized, by the aid of their glasses, sheets of
flame and torrents of molten glowing lava, bursting at
intervals or pouring steadily from several volcanoes.
>From this they concluded they were again near an ocean,
since volcanoes need the presence of a large body of
water to provide steam for their eruptions.
With the rising sun they found the scene of the day
before entirely changed. They were over the shore of a
vast ocean that extended to the left as far as they could
see, for the range of vision often exceeded the power of
sight. The coast-line ran almost due north and south,
while the volcanoes that dotted it, and that had been
luminous during the night, now revealed their nature only
by lines of smoke and vapours. They were struck by the
boldness and abruptness
of the scenery. The
mountains and cliffs had been but little cut down by
water and frost action, and seemed in the full vigour of
their youth, which was what the travellers had a right to
expect on a globe that was still cooling and shrinking,
and consequently throwing up ridges in the shape of
mountains far more rapidly than a planet as matured and
quiescent as the earth. The absence of lakes also showed
them that there had been no Glacial period, in the
latitudes they were crossing, for a very long time.
We can account for the absence of ice-action and
scratches," said Cortlandt, "in one of two ways. Either
the proximity of the internal heat to the surface
prevents water from freezing in all latitudes, or
Jupiter's axis has always been very nearly perpendicular
to its orbit, and consequently the thermometer has never
been much below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit; for, at
the considerable distance we are now from the sun, it is
easy to conceive that, with the axis much inclined, there
might be cold weather, during the Northern hemisphere's
winter, that would last for about six of our years, even
as near the equator as this. The substantiation of an
ice-cap at the pole
will disprove the first
hypothesis; for what we took for ice before alighting may
have been but banks of cloud, since, having been in the
plane of the planet's equator at the time, we had
naturally but a very oblique view of the poles; while the
absence of glacial scratches shows, I take it, that
though the axis may have been a good deal more inclined
than at present, it has not, at all events since
Jupiter's Palaeozoic period, been as much so as that of
Uranus or Venus. The land on Jupiter, corresponding to
the Laurentian Hills on earth, must even here have
appeared at so remote a period that the first surface it
showed must long since have been worn away, and therefore
any impressions it received have also been erased.
Comparing this land with the photographs we took from
space, I should say it is the eastern of the two
crescent-shaped continents we found apparently facing
each other. Their present form I take to be only the
skeleton outline of what they will be at the next period
of Jupiter's development. They will, I predict, become
more like half moons than crescents, though the profile
may be much indented by gulfs and bays, their superficial
area being greatly increased, and the intervening ocean
correspondingly
narrowed. We know that North
America had a very different shape during the Cretaceous
or even the Middle Tertiary period from what it has now,
and that the Gulf of Mexico extended up the valley of the
Mississippi as far as the Ohio, by the presence of a
great coral reef in the Ohio River near Cincinnati. We
know also that Florida and the Southeastern Atlantic
States are a very recent addition to the continent, while
the pampas of the Argentine Republic have, in a
geological sense, but just been upheaved from the sea, by
the fact that the rivers are all on the surface, not
having had time to cut down their channels below the
surrounding country. By similar reasoning, we know that
the canon of the Colorado is a very old region, though
the precipitateness of its banks is due to the absence of
rain, for a local water-supply would cut back the banks,
having most effect where they were steepest, since at
those points it would move with the greatest speed. Thus
the majestic canon owes its existence to two things: the
length of time the river has been at work, and the fact
that the water flowing through it comes from another
region where, of course, there is rain, and that it is
merely in transit, and so affects only the
bed on
which it moves. Granting that this is the eastern of the
two continents we observed, it evidently corresponds more
in shape to the Eastern hemisphere on earth than to the
New World, both of which are set facing one another,
since both drain towards the Atlantic Ocean. But the
analogy here holds also, for the past outlines of the
Eastern hemisphere differed radically from what they are
now. The Mediterranean Sea was formerly of far greater
extent than we see it to-day, and covered nearly the
whole of northern Africa and the old upheaved sea-bottom
that we see in the Desert of Sahara. Much of this great
desert, as we know, has a considerable elevation, though
part of it is still below the level of the Mediterranean.
"Perhaps a more striking proof of this than are the
remains of fishes and marine life that are found there,
is the dearth of natural harbours and indentations in
Africa's northern coast, while just opposite, in southern
Europe, there are any number; which shows that not enough
time has elapsed since Africa's upheaval for liquid or
congealed water to produce them. Many of Europe's best
harbours, and Boston's, in our country, have been dug out
by slow
ice-action in the oft-recurring Glacial
periods. The Black and Caspian Seas were larger than we
now find them; while the Adriatic extended much farther
into the continent, covering most of the country now in
the valley of the Po. In Europe the land has, of course,
risen also, but so slowly that the rivers have been able
to keep their channels cut down; proof of their ability
to perform which feat we see when an ancient river passes
through a ridge of hills or mountains. The river had
doubtless been there long before the mountains began to
rise, but their elevation was so gradual that the rate of
the river's cutting down equalled or exceeded their
coming up; proof of which we have in the patent fact that
the ancient river's course remains unchanged, and is at
right angles to the mountain chain. From all of which we
see that the Eastern hemisphere's crescent hollow — of
which, I take it, the Mediterranean, Black, and Caspian
Sea depressions are the remains — has been gradually
filled in, by the elevation of the sea's bottom, and the
extension of deltas from the detrital matter brought from
the high interior of the continents by the rivers, or by
the combined action of the two. Now, since the Gulf of
Mexico
has been constantly growing smaller, and the
Mediterranean is being invaded by the land, I reason that
similar causes will produce like effects here, and give
to each continent an area far greater than our entire
globe. The stormy ocean we behold in the west, which
corresponds to our Atlantic, though it is far more of a
mare clausum in the geographical sense, is also
destined to become a calm and placid inland sea. There
are, of course, modifications of and checks to the laws
tending to increase the land area. England was formerly
joined to the continent, the land connecting the two
having been rather washed away by the waves and great
tides than by any sinking of the English Channel's
bottom, the whole of which is comparatively shallow.
Another case of this kind is seen in Cape Cod and the
islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, all of which
are washing away so rapidly that they would probably
disappear before the next Glacial period, were we not
engaged in preventing its recurrence. These detached
islands and sand-bars once formed one large island, which
at a still earlier time undoubtedly was joined to the
mainland. The sands forming the detached masses are in
a great processional march
towards the equator, but
it is the result simply of winds and waves, there being
no indication of subsidence. Along the coast of New
Jersey we see denudation and sinking going on together,
the well-known
sunken forest being an instance of the
latter. The border of the continent proper also extends
many miles under the ocean before reaching the edge of
the Atlantic basin. Volcanic eruptions sometimes
demolish parts of headlands and islands, though these
recompense us in the amount of material brought to the
surface, and in the increased distance they enable water
to penetrate by relieving the interior of part of its
heat, for any land they may destroy."