But how to raise the wind?"
Scarcely, had the question been asked, when a frightful explosion
shook the iceberg to its foundations. The Doctor rushed to the gasbag.
It was empty. He frowned. Lord JOHN was smoking his pipe; the Colonel
was turning over the pages of an old Algebra. He muttered to himself,
"That ought to figure it out. If _x_ = the amount of non-compressible
fluid consumed by a given labourer in _y_ days, find, by the
substitution of poached eggs for kippered herrings, how many tea-cups
it will take to make a transpontine hurricane. Yes," he went on,
"that's it. Yes, Sirree." And at these words the vast mass of
congealed water rose majestically out of the ocean, and floated off
into the nebular hypothesis. But the Philosopher had vanished.
CHAPTER III.
When the explosion narrated in the last chapter took place, the
Philosopher had been looking out of the window. The shock had hurled
him with the speed of a pirate 'bus through the air. Soon he became
a speck. Shortly afterwards he reached a point in his flight situated
exactly 40,000 miles over a London publisher's office. There was a
short contest. Centrifugal and centripetal fought for the mastery, and
the latter was victorious. The publisher was at home. The novel was
accepted, and the Philosopher started to rejoin his comrades lost in
the boundless tracts of space.
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