CHAPTER VI. A TELEPHONIC CONVERSATION. Not only had Barbicane announced that he would attain his object—and now the capital at his command enabled him to reach it without hindrance—but he would certainly not have appealed for funds if he was not certain of success. The North Pole was at last to be conquered by the audacious genius of man! Barbicane and his co-directors had the means of succeeding where so many others had failed. They would do what had not been done by Franklin, Kane, Nares, or Greely. They would advance beyond the eighty-fourth parallel. They would take possession of the vast portion of the globe that had fallen to them under the hammer. They would add to the American flag the forty-third star for the forty-third state annexed to the American Confederation. “Rubbish!” said the European delegates. And the means of conquering the Pole—means that were practical, logical, indisputable, and of a simplicity quite infantine—were the suggestion of J. T. Maston. It was in his brain, where ideas were cooked in cerebral matter in a state of constant ebullition, that there had been conceived this great geographical work, and the means devised of bringing it to a successful issue. The secretary of the Gun Club was a remarkable calculator. The solution of the most complicated problems of mathematical science was but sport to him. He laughed at difficulties, whether in the science of magnitudes, that is algebra, or in the science of numbers, that is arithmetic; and it was a treat to see him handle the symbols, the conventional signs which form the algebraic notation, whether letters of the alphabet, representing quantities or magnitudes, or lines coupled or crossed, which indicate the relation between the quantities and the operations to which they are submitted. Ah! The co-efficients, the exponents, the radicals, the indices, and the other arrangements adopted in that language! How the signs leapt from his pen, or rather from the piece of chalk which wriggled at the end of his metal hook, for he preferred to work on a blackboard. There, on a surface of ten square yards—for nothing less would do for J. T. Maston—he revelled in all the ardour of his algebraical temperament. They were no miserable little figures that he employed in his calculations. No; the figures were fantastic, gigantic, traced with a furious hand. His 2’s and 3’s waltzed like shavings in a whirlwind; his 7’s were like gibbets, and only wanted a corpse to complete them; his 8’s were like spectacles; and his 6’s and 9’s had flourishes interminable!