About four miles to the west, under a rocky promontory which the discoverer of this desolate land had named Cape Adelaide, little thinking what a connection it would have with another Adelaide, there was a small natural harbour, navigable for about five months in the year, constantly crowded with colliers. For over a year it had been packed with them. Before the previous winter set in they had been laden with coal and machinery and building materials, and throughout the long winter Doctor Lamson had relentlessly pushed the work on under rows of electric lights, which rivalled the _Aurora_ itself. The men were well housed and fed and lavishly paid, and so, in spite of the cold and darkness, they had worked well and cheerfully, well knowing that it was impossible for them to get back, save in the steamers that brought them. By the time the ice broke and the vessels were released another long line of them was already making its way up through the still half-frozen waters of Davis Strait and Lancaster Sound, laden with more coal, materials, and machinery. A telegraph line had been taken from Port Nelson across Hudson Bay over Rae Isthmus, and then through the Gulf of Boothia to the works, and this put Dr Lamson in direct communication with Winnipeg and the rest of the world. At intervals of two hundred miles, across the icy desert of the north, groups of huge steel masts, three hundred feet high, had been erected, and these had been continued singly or in pairs over all the principal elevations of the North American Continent, and also over Greenland and Iceland to the north of Scotland, and thence to the rest of the British Islands. It was a miracle that could only have been wrought by millions, but the millions were spent without stint, in the full knowledge that they would be repaid in the days when it was possible to tax the world for the privilege of living. The Storage Works were in the form of a square, measuring four hundred feet each way. In the exact centre of an interior square measuring fifty feet each way was that mysterious spot of earth where the needle of the compass points neither to north nor south nor east nor west, but straight down to the centre of the globe; and over it was built a great circular tower, forty feet in diameter and a hundred feet in height, which contained a gigantic reproduction of the instrument which had stood on Doctor Emil Fargeau's table in his laboratory at Strassburg on that memorable night when he had completed the work which was destined to lead to his own ruin and death and to the revolutionising of the world. From this tower ran underground, in all directions, thousands of copper cables leading to the gigantic storage batteries with which the greater part of the buildings were filled. In the middle of each side of the great square a two thousand horse-power engine was ready to furnish the necessary electrical force in the absorber, as the great apparatus in the centre was called.