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.
Time advanced, and so probably did the works of Barbicane & Co., but where was the mystery.
But if their works were to require a foundry capable of casting a gun a million times larger than a four hundred pounder, and a projectile weighing one hundred and eighty thousand tons, they would want thousands of workmen; and where, oh! where could they be?