Symzonia: Voyage of Discovery

I was already too well acquainted with the sentiments of this people, not to know that it would be extremely imprudent to suffer any expression to escape me which should discover that a desire of wealth, or of the means of sensual gratification, was among the motives which actuate the externals; such a disclosure being calculated: only to excite their aversion, and contempt. The Best Man indulged me with a long interview; and it was a happy circumstance that I had with me a globe, charts, maps, books, and drawings, to illustrate and corroborate my statements; for otherwise I might have caused him to suspect that I was a most desperate liar, so strange and absurd did many of my representations appear to him. Happily, Surui was already able to read English books; and when I observed an appearance of doubt on the part of the Best Man, I sought out some passage in a printed work to corroborate my statement, which Surui translated into the language of the country. I spoke of the danger I had encountered from ice. This was incomprehensible to him. He assured me that water never congealed in the internal world; that the innate warmth of the earth was sufficient to prevent it, and he could not understand how so great a degree of cold could exist in the external world, so much more exposed to the direct influence of the fountain of light and heat. I endeavoured to account for this by explaining to him the generation of cold by evaporation and absorption, and promised to send to the ship for my air pump, to show him ice artificially produced by absorption in an exhausted receiver. I then proceeded to account for the equable heat in the internal world, and the extreme cold at the icy hoop, upon principles which appeared to me to be very obvious.