"The information which I have gained," said Bainbridge, "even could I
procure no more, would suffice to explain all those mysteries that Poe
hints at as fact, and much that he seems to apprehend with that sixth
sense which in the genius approaches a union of clairvoyance and
prescience--mysteries of which he does not speak in language
sufficiently clear for common comprehension. At all events, I am not
disappointed; and more may yet be procured. There remains much of
interest, in the way of _minutiae_, which I expect to learn to-morrow. I
know now what made that antarctic region more than tropical, and what
the white curtain was--and is. I know how the hieroglyphics came in the
caverns of black marl. That antarctic country exceeds, in the truly
wonderful, anything in the world, old or new, with which I am
acquainted, or of which I have heard."

"But is it true? Have you not been listening to fairy tales?--or,
rather, to sailor tales?"

"When to-morrow I tell you what I have, hour after hour, with brief
rests, drawn from that poor old battered hulk"--he pointed toward
Peters' cot--"and when you consider what he is--then say if he is the
man, or his sailor friends are the men, to invent such a story. I admit
that at times during the day his mind seemed to wander slightly, and
that he has the usual faculty of sea-faring men for exaggeration; so
that at times I had to employ my best discrimination to enable me to
separate the real from the fanciful, that I might retain the true and
discard the untrue. He seems to have lived for more than a year in
proximity to the South Pole, and his experiences were as marvellous as
that country is strangely grand, and its people truly wonderful--Oh,
no--nothing on the Gulliver order; the people are not dwarfs or giants,