"George Griffith - A Corner in Lightning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Griffith George)

seriously with the distribution of one of the subtlest and least-known forces of Nature, and that the
consequences of such an interference might be most disastrous, not only for those engaged in the work,
but even the whole hemisphere, and possibly the whole planet.

"On the other hand, I think it is only fair to say that nothing more than a temporary disturbance may take
place. You may, for instance, give us a series of very violent thunderstorms, with very heavy rains; or you
may abolish thunderstorms and rain altogether until you get to work. Both prospects are within the
bounds of possibility, and, at the same time, neither may come to anything."

"Well, I think that quite good enough to gamble on, Professor," said Calvert, who was thoroughly
fascinated by the grandeur and magnitude, to say nothing of the dazzling financial aspects of the scheme.
"I am very much obliged to you for putting it so clearly and nicely. Unless something very unexpected
happens, we shall get to work on it at once. Just fancy what a glorious thing it will be to play Jove to the
nations of the earth, and dole out lightning to them at so much a flash!"

"Well, I don't want to be ill-natured," said Mrs. Calvert, "but I must say that I hope the unexpected will
happen. I think the whole thing is very wrong to begin with, and I shouldn't be at all surprised if you blew
us all up, or struck us all dead with lightning, or even brought on the Day of judgment before its time. I
think I shall go to Australia while you're doing it."

II.
A little more than a year had passed since this after-dinner conversation in the diningroom of Mr. Sidney
Calvert's London house. During that time the preparations for the great experiment had been swiftly but
secretly carried out. Ship after ship loaded with machinery, fuel, and provisions, and carrying labourers
and artificers to the number of some hundreds, had sailed away into the Atlantic, and had come back in
ballast and with bare working crews on board of them. Mr. Calvert himself had disappeared and
reappeared two or three times, and on his return he had neither admitted nor denied any of the various
rumours which gradually got into circulation in the City and in the Press.

Some said that it was an expedition to the Pole, and that the machinery consisted partly of improved
ice-breakers and newly-invented steam sledges, which were to attack the ice-hummocks after the fashion
of battering rams, and so gradually smooth a road to the Pole. To these little details others added flying
machines and navigable balloons. Others again declared that the object was to plough out the
North-West passage and keep a waterway clear from Hudson's Bay to the Pacific all the year round,
and yet others, somewhat less imaginative, pinned their faith to the founding of a great astronomical and
meteorological observatory at the nearest possible point to the Pole, one of the objects of which was to
be the determination of the true nature of the Aurora Borealis and the Zodiacal Light.

It was this last hypothesis that Mr. Calvert favoured as far as he could be said to favour any. There was a
vagueness, and, at the same time, a distinction about a great scientific expedition which made it possible
for him to give a sort of qualified countenance to the rumours without committing himself to anything, but
so well had all his precautions been taken that not even a suspicion of the true object of the expedition to
Boothia Land had got outside the little circle of those who were in his confidence.

So far everything had gone as Orloff Markovitch, the Russian Pole to whose extraordinary genius the
inception and working out of the gigantic project were due, had expected and predicted. He himself was
in supreme control of the unique and costly works which had grown up under his constant supervision on
that lonely and desolate spot in the far North where the magnetic needle points straight down to the
centre of the planet.