“Yes, it will, if you turn it away all day long. Look, Harry, if you were
to go straight on in this direction, you would come to a Laplander,
harnessing his broad-horned reindeer to his sledge. He’s at it now, I
daresay. If you were to go in this line exactly, you would go through the
smoke and fire of a burning mountain in a land of ice. If you were to go
this way, straight on, you would find yourself in the middle of a forest
with a lion glaring at your feet, for it is dark night there now, and so
hot! And over there, straight on, there is such a lovely sunset. The top
of a snowy mountain is all pink with light, though the sun is down—oh!
such colours all about, like fairyland! And there, there is a desert of
sand, and a camel dying, and all his companions just disappearing on the
horizon. And there, there is an awful sea, without a boat to be seen on
it, dark and dismal, with huge rocks all about it, and waste borders of
sand—so dreadful!”
“How do you know all this, Mr. Sutherland? You have never walked along
those lines, I know, for you couldn’t.”
“Geography has taught me.”
“No, Mr. Sutherland!” said Harry, incredulously. “Well, shall we travel
along this line, just across that crown of trees on the hill?”
“Yes, do let us.”
“Then,” said Hugh, drawing a telescope from his pocket, “this hill is
henceforth Geography Point, and all the world lies round about it. Do you
know we are in the very middle of the earth?”
“Are we, indeed?”
“Yes. Don’t you know any point you like to choose on a ball is the middle
of it?”
“Oh! yes—of course.”
“Very well. What lies at the bottom of the hill down there?”
“Arnstead, to be sure.”
“And what beyond there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Look through here.”
“Oh! that must be the village we rode to yesterday—I forget the name
of it.”
Hugh told him the name; and then made him look with the telescope all
along the receding line to the trees on the opposite hill. Just as he
caught them, a voice beside them said:
“What are you about, Harry?”
Hugh felt a glow of pleasure as the voice fell on his ear.
It was Euphra’s.
“Oh!” replied Harry, “Mr. Sutherland is teaching me geography with a
telescope. It’s such fun!”
“He’s a wonderful tutor, that of yours, Harry!”
“Yes, isn’t he just? But,” Harry went on, turning to Hugh, “what are we to
do now? We can’t get farther for that hill.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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