Droop went to the engine-room, lessened speed and brought the aeroplanes to the horizontal. He could look directly forward through a thick glass port directly over the starting-handle. Gradually the great machine settled lower and lower. It was now running quite slowly and the aeroplanes acted only as parachutes as they glided still forward toward the black upright line. In silence the three waited for the approaching end of this first stage of their journey. A few hundred yards south of their goal they seemed about to alight, but Droop slightly inclined the aeroplanes and speeded up the propeller a little. Their vessel swept gently upward and northward again, like a gull rising from the sea. Then Droop let it settle again. Just as they were about to fall rather violently upon the solid mass of ice below them, he projected a relatively small volume of gas from beneath the structure. Its reaction eased their descent, and they settled down without noise or shock. They had arrived! Copernicus came forward to the window and pointed to a tall, stout steel pole projecting from the ice a few yards to the right of the vessel. "Thet, neighbors, is the North Pole!" he said, with a sweeping wave of the hand. For some minutes the three voyagers stood in silence gazing through the window at the famous pole. This, then, was the goal of so much heroic endeavor! It was to reach this complete opposite of all that is ordinarily attractive that countless ambitious men had suffered--that so many had died! "Well!" exclaimed Rebecca at length. "I be switched ef I see what there is fer so many folks to make sech a fuss about!" Droop scratched his head thoughtfully and made no reply. Surely it would have been hard to point out any charms in the endless plain of opaque ice hummocks, unrelieved save by that gaunt steel pole. "Where's the open sea?" Rebecca asked, after a few moments' pause. "Dr. Kane said the' was an open sea up here." "Oh, Dr. Kane!" said Droop, contemptuously. "He's no 'count fer modern facts." "What I can't understand," said Phoebe, "is how it comes that, if nobody's ever been up here, they all seem to know there's a North Pole here." "That's a fact," Rebecca exclaimed. "How'd they know about it? The' ain't anythin' in the Bible 'bout it, is the'?" Droop looked more cheerful at this and answered briskly: "Oh, they don't know 'bout it. Ye see, that pole there ain't a nat'ral product of the soil at all. Et's the future man done that--the man who invented this Panchronicon and brought me up here before. He told me how that he stuck that post in there to help him run this machine 'round and 'round fer cuttin' meridians." "Oh!" exclaimed both sisters together. "Yes," Droop continued. "D'ye see thet big iron ring 'round the pole, lyin' on the ground?" "I don't see any ground," said Rebecca, ruefully. "Well, on the ice, then. Don't ye see it lyin' black there against the snow?" "Yes--yes, I see it," said Phoebe.