Read "The Purchase of the North Pole" by Jules Verne online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
It was a cannon that hurled the projectile up to the Moon; it was to be a cannon that was to change the terrestrial axis! The cannon! Always the cannon! Barbicane and Co. evidently suffered from chronic attacks of aggravated "cannonism"! Was a cannon the _ultima ratio_ of the world? was it to be the brutal sovereign of the universe? The canon rules theology, was the cannon to give the law to commerce and cosmology?
A cannon was the engine Barbicane & Co. were to bring into action. They had not devoted their lives to ballistics for nothing. After the Columbiad of Tampa Town there was to come the monster cannon of-of-the place _x_! And already there were people who could hear the sonorous command.