Here, then, was the South Pole--a world by itself: and how different from that terrible, that iron land on the other side of the mountains!--not a world of ice and frost, but one of beauty and light, with a climate that was almost tropical in its warmth, and lands that were covered with the rank luxuriance of a teeming vegetable life.

I had passed from that outer world to this inner one, and the passage was from death unto life, from agony and despair to sunlight and splendor and joy.

Above all, in all around me that which most impressed me now was the rich and superabundant life, and a warmth of air which made me think of India.

It was an amazing and an unaccountable thing, and I could only attribute it to the flattening of the poles, which brought the surface nearer to the supposed central fires of the earth, and therefore created a heat as great as that of the equatorial regions.

Here I found a tropical climate--a land warmed not by the sun, but from the earth itself.