The Wreck of the South Pole and Other Strange Tales — page 79: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

72 The Wreck of the South Pole. Then came the Great Dissembler’s final move, a move worthy of a great general. One evening, when I called upon him, he said, with as much of a gleam in his eye as he would allow, that he had the enemy exactly where he wanted them. “They are located exactly across from us, the South Pole being directly between us and them. Are you enough of an astronomer to know concerning the preces- sion of the equinoxes as it is commonly called, by which the direction of the poles to the earth’s plane is changed? This also causes a change in the zones of the earth. In the legends of the earth there have been one of these, at least. Ages ago the North Temperate zone was a barren ice field, and countries now covered with ice were in- habited. The change which is about to take place will bring back the old order of things. Climate will change all over the world. “The wrench here at the pole will be sudden, but the changes in other parts of the world be more gradual. In your own home in the United States there will be cyclones and tornadoes and earthquakes. These will gradually in- crease in number and intensity until the climate becomes warmer and at last merges into the tropical. “But all this has nothing to do with the state of affairs here. What it means is that by the position of the revolu- tionary force it will be utterly destroyed. They are on the side of the pole where the reaction will come when we jar the pole from its mooring. “There will be a general breaking up of the ice barriers Gomichbook (E(@)