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The next moment they saw. Just below them at a distance of about five earth-miles lay an irregularly triangular island, a detached portion of the Continent of Huygens almost equally divided by the Martian Equator, and lying with another almost similarly shaped island between the fortieth and the fiftieth meridians of west longitude.
"Ef a feller was to whirl clear round the world an' cut all the meridians in the same direction as the sun, an' he made the whole trip around jest as quick as the sun did time wouldn't change a mite fer him, would it?" Phoebe gasped at the suggestion. "Why, I should think of course " She stopped and put her hand to her head in bewilderment. "Et's a sure thing!" Droop exclaimed, earnestly.
Phoebe put on what her sister always called "that schoolmarm look" and replied: "Why, it's the turning round of the earth on its axis once in " "Yes yes It's all one all one," Droop broke in, eagerly. "To put it another way, it comes from the sun cuttin' meridians, don't it?"
So, in spite of my conviction, founded, however, on very serious arguments, there was no sign of land, and I was wondering whether it would not be better to steer more to the west, at the risk of removing the Halbrane from that extreme point where the meridians of the globe cross each other.
"Yes, but the meridian of the Palais-Royal is the most exact." I laugh heartily. "Why do you laugh?" "Because it is impossible for all meridians not to be the same. That is true 'badauderie'." My friend looks at me for a moment, then he laughs likewise, and supplies me with ample food to ridicule the worthy Parisians.
He is the only colonial in the British dominions whose goings and comings are chronicled and discussed under all the globe's meridians, and whose speeches, unclipped, are cabled from the ends of the earth; and he is the only unroyal outsider whose arrival in London can compete for attention with an eclipse.
Now, the two icebergs formed but one, which was travelling south at the rate of two miles an hour. At this rate, thirty hours would suffice to bring us to the point of the axis at which the terrestrial meridians unite. Did the current which was carrying us along pass on to the pole itself, or was there any land which might arrest our progress?
The Louisiade Archipelago, reduced to what I conceive to be its natural limits, includes that extensive group of islands comprised between the parallels of 10 degrees 40 minutes and 11 degrees 40 minutes South latitude, and the meridians of 151 degrees and 154 degrees 30 minutes East longitude.
That over against America, for example, was Asia. But it is a calm, and he grows madly skeptical. To his alarmed fancy, parallels and meridians become emphatically what they are merely designated as being: imaginary lines drawn round the earth's surface.
But what was most shocking to me, I found that the variation did not always increase or decrease in proportion to the degrees of longitude east or west; as I had a notion they might do to a certain number of degrees of variation east or west, at such or such particular meridians.
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