He dragged Leo to the top of the truncated cone on which he had pitched
his observatory.

"There, look round you," he cried, taking off his hat and wiping the
perspiration from his brow.

"Well, uncle, where is it?" asked Leo, half-amused and half-sceptical.

"Where! why, don't you see it? No, of course you don't. You're looking
_all round it_, lad. Look down,--down at your feet. Leonard
Vandervell," he added, in sudden solemnity, "you're _on it_! you're
standing on the North Pole _now_!"

Leo still looked incredulous.

"What I you don't believe? Convince him, Alf."

"Indeed it is true," said Alf; "we have been testing and checking our
observations in every possible manner, and the result never varies more
than a foot or two. The North Pole is at this moment actually under our
feet."

As we have now, good reader, at last reached that great _point_ of
geographical interest which has so long perplexed the world and agitated
enterprising man, we deem this the proper place to present you with a
map of Captain Vane's discoveries.

"And so," said Benjy with an injured look, "the geography books are
right after all; the world _is_ `a little flattened at the Poles like an
orange.' Well, I never believed it before, and I don't believe _yet_
that it's like an orange."

"But it is more than flattened, Benjy," said Leo; "don't you see it is
even hollowed out a little, as if the spinning of the world had made a
sort of whirlpool at the North Pole, and no doubt there is the same at
the South."

Chingatok, who was listening to the conversation, without of course
understanding it, and to whom the Captain had made sundry spasmodic
remarks during the day in the Eskimo tongue, went that night to
Amalatok, who was sitting in Makitok's hut, and said--

"My father, Blackbeard has found it!"

"Found what, my son?--his nothing--his Nort Pole?"

"Yes, my father, he has found his Nort Pole."

"Is he going to carry it away with him in his soft wind-boat?" asked the
old chief with a half-humorous, half-contemptuous leer.

"And," continued Chingatok, who was too earnest about the matter to take
notice of his father's levity, "his Nort Pole is _something_ after all!
It is not nothing, for I heard him say he is standing on it. No man can
stand on nothing; therefore his Nort Pole which he stands on must be
something."

"He is standing on my outlook. He must not carry _that_ away," remarked
Makitok with a portentous frown.