At all events, I am not
disappointed; and more may yet be procured. There remains much of
interest, in the way of _minutiae_, which I expect to learn to-morrow. I
know now what made that antarctic region more than tropical, and what
the white curtain was--and is. I know how the hieroglyphics came in the
caverns of black marl. That antarctic country exceeds, in the truly
wonderful, anything in the world, old or new, with which I am
acquainted, or of which I have heard."
"But is it true? Have you not been listening to fairy tales?--or,
rather, to sailor tales?"
"When to-morrow I tell you what I have, hour after hour, with brief
rests, drawn from that poor old battered hulk"--he pointed toward
Peters' cot--"and when you consider what he is--then say if he is the
man, or his sailor friends are the men, to invent such a story. I admit
that at times during the day his mind seemed to wander slightly, and
that he has the usual faculty of sea-faring men for exaggeration; so
that at times I had to employ my best discrimination to enable me to
separate the real from the fanciful, that I might retain the true and
discard the untrue. He seems to have lived for more than a year in
proximity to the South Pole, and his experiences were as marvellous as
that country is strangely grand, and its people truly wonderful--Oh,
no--nothing on the Gulliver order; the people are not dwarfs or giants,
and they have no horses either that talk or that do not talk; no
yahoos--nothing in that line.
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