pole!" he exclaimed.

Phoebe snatched the spyglass and applied it to her eye.

Yes, on the horizon she could discern a thin black line, rising
vertically from the plain of ice. Even as she looked it seemed to be
nearer, so rapid was their progress.

Droop went to the engine-room, lessened speed and brought the aeroplanes
to the horizontal. He could look directly forward through a thick glass
port directly over the starting-handle. Gradually the great machine
settled lower and lower. It was now running quite slowly and the
aeroplanes acted only as parachutes as they glided still forward toward
the black upright line.

In silence the three waited for the approaching end of this first stage
of their journey. A few hundred yards south of their goal they seemed
about to alight, but Droop slightly inclined the aeroplanes and speeded
up the propeller a little. Their vessel swept gently upward and
northward again, like a gull rising from the sea. Then Droop let it
settle again. Just as they were about to fall rather violently upon the
solid mass of ice below them, he projected a relatively small volume of
gas from beneath the structure. Its reaction eased their descent, and
they settled down without noise or shock.

They had arrived!

Copernicus came forward to the window and pointed to a tall, stout steel
pole projecting from the ice a few yards to the right of the vessel.

"Thet, neighbors, is the North Pole!" he said, with a sweeping wave of
the hand.

For some minutes the three voyagers stood in silence gazing through the
window at the famous pole. This, then, was the goal of so much heroic
endeavor! It was to reach this complete opposite of all that is
ordinarily attractive that countless ambitious men had suffered--that so
many had died!

"Well!" exclaimed Rebecca at length. "I be switched ef I see what there
is fer so many folks to make sech a fuss about!"

Droop scratched his head thoughtfully and made no reply. Surely it would
have been hard to point out any charms in the endless plain of opaque
ice hummocks, unrelieved save by that gaunt steel pole.

"Where's the open sea?" Rebecca asked, after a few moments' pause. "Dr.
Kane said the' was an open sea up here."

"Oh, Dr. Kane!" said Droop, contemptuously. "He's no 'count fer modern
facts."

"What I can't understand," said Phoebe, "is how it comes that, if
nobody's ever been up here, they all seem to know there's a North Pole
here."

"That's a fact,