gs. In half an
hour all the ice had melted, and in another half hour the water was hot.

"No arctic expedition need freeze to death here," said Bearwarden,
"since all a man would have to do would be to burrow a few feet to be
as warm as toast."

As the island on which they had landed was at one side of the
archipelago, but was itself at the exact pole, it followed that the
centre of the archipelago was not the part farthest north. This in a
measure accounted for the slight thickness of ice and snow, for the
isobaric lines would slope, and consequently what wind there was would
flow towards the interior of the archipelago, whose surface was colder
than the surrounding ocean. The moist air, however, coming almost
entirely from the south, would lose most of its moisture by
condensation in passing over the ice-laden land, and so, like the
clouds over the region east of the Andes, would have but little left to
let fall on this extreme northern part. The blanketing effect of a
great thickness of snow would also cause, the lower strata of ice to
melt, by keeping in the heat constantly given off by the warm planet.

"I think there can be no question," said Cortlandt, "that, as a result
of Jupiter's great flattening at the poles and the drawing of the
crust, which moves faster in Jupiter's rotation than any other part,
towards the equator, the crust must be particularly thin here; for,
were it as thin all over, there would be no space for the coal-beds,
which, judging from the purity of the atmosphere, must be very
extensive. Further, we can recall that the water in the hot spring
near which we alighted, which evidently came from a far greater depth
than we have here, was not as hot as this. The conclusion is clear
that elsewhere the internal heat is not as near the surface as here."

"The more I see of Jupiter," exclaimed Bearwarden enthusiastically,
"the more charmed I become. It almost exactly supplies what I have
been conjuring up as my idea of a perfect planet. Its compensations of
high land near the equator, and low with effective internal heat at the
poles, are ideal. The gradual slope of its continental elevations, on
account of their extent, will ease the work of operating railways, and
the atmosphere's density will be just the thing for our flying
machines, while Nature has supplied all sources of power so lavishly
that no undertaking will be too great. Though land as yet, to judge by
our photographs, occu