Читать книгу Beyond the Great South Wall: The Secret of the Antarctic онлайн

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“John Dorinecourte, Knt.”

Crum placed the musty sheets of lettering on the table before him, solemnly took off his spectacles and wiped them, and then stared across quietly at me without a word, as if he would let this astonishing balderdash sink deeply into my all too shallow soul. There was a silence in the office, unbroken save by the buzzing of the blue-bottles at the windows and the distant roar of the Strand, filtered by intervening acres of brickwork. For my part I found no words to express my emotions. For really it came upon me as a shock to think what crack-brained enthusiasts our fathers were. Here was a sound, apparently intelligent, old British seaman, who had knocked about the world more than a little, worrying himself to set curses on the heads of his unborn descendants if they should fail to be just such fools as himself. He meets a half-dozen of forlorn savages in mid-ocean, by purely circumstantial evidence connects them with another band of niggers of whom he has only got word by hearsay, and proceeds to spend ten years of his life in tracking the latter to a lair which probably never existed. And not satisfied, as I say, with this astounding waste of time and energy, but he expects ten other fools to do the same. I stared, therefore, at the good Crum with these unvoiced musings extremely vivid in my brain, the while I thanked God softly below my breath for civilization and common sense.