"Jules Verne. The Underground City OR The Black Indies" - читать интересную книгу автора

rather than to the warning of his anonymous contradictor.

"Indeed," said he, "the fact of anyone endeavoring to influence my
resolution, shows that Ford's communication must be of great importance.
To-morrow, at the appointed time, I shall be at the rendezvous."

In the evening, Starr made his preparations for departure.
As it might happen that his absence would be prolonged for some days,
he wrote to Sir W. Elphiston, President of the Royal Institution,
that he should be unable to be present at the next meeting
of the Society. He also wrote to excuse himself from two
or three engagements which he had made for the week.
Then, having ordered his servant to pack a traveling bag,
he went to bed, more excited than the affair perhaps warranted.

The next day, at five o'clock, James Starr jumped out of bed,
dressed himself warmly, for a cold rain was falling, and left his
house in the Canongate, to go to Granton Pier to catch the steamer,
which in three hours would take him up the Forth as far as Stirling.

For the first time in his life, perhaps, in passing along the Canongate,
he did NOT TURN TO LOOK AT HOLYROOD, the palace of the former
sovereigns of Scotland. He did not notice the sentinels who stood
before its gateways, dressed in the uniform of their Highland regiment,
tartan kilt, plaid and sporran complete. His whole thought was to reach
Callander where Harry Ford was supposedly awaiting him.

The better to understand this narrative, it will be as well to hear
a few words on the origin of coal. During the geological epoch,
when the terrestrial spheroid was still in course of formation,
a thick atmosphere surrounded it, saturated with watery vapors,
and copiously impregnated with carbonic acid. The vapors gradually
condensed in diluvial rains, which fell as if they had leapt
from the necks of thousands of millions of seltzer water bottles.
This liquid, loaded with carbonic acid, rushed in torrents over
a deep soft soil, subject to sudden or slow alterations of

form, and maintained in its semi-fluid state as much by the heat
of the sun as by the fires of the interior mass. The internal
heat had not as yet been collected in the center of the globe.
The terrestrial crust, thin and incompletely hardened, allowed it
to spread through its pores. This caused a peculiar form of vegetation,
such as is probably produced on the surface of the inferior planets,
Venus or Mercury, which revolve nearer than our earth around
the radiant sun of our system.

The soil of the continents was covered with immense forests.
Carbonic acid, so suitable for the development of the vegetable
kingdom, abounded. The feet of these trees were drowned in a sort
of immense lagoon, kept continually full by currents of fresh