Gray nodded. “Andlistened, too. According to Lomonosov, Mercator ‘claimed that this is not the truth’—pointing to the word magnetic—and ‘that it lies elsewhere.’ Can anyone make sense of that?”
Anna stiffened, swearing in Russian, which earned a scowl from Yelagin, who leaned heavily on his staff, clearly exhausted.
“I think I know what he’s talking about,” Anna blurted out, sounding astounded with herself. “A well-documented part of the map’s history is that Mercatorneverbelieved the central mountain he drew was thetrue magnetic pole. He told people many times that the magneticRupus Nigra et Altissima—Nicolas’s Very High Black Cliff—layelsewhere. But no one took heed of him.”
“Where did he believe it was located?” Gray asked.
Anna pulled his attention back to Mercator’s map. She pointed to a spot—an island from the look of it—positioned higher up the map.
“Mercator even labels this spotPolus magnetis—themagnetic pole.” She swung her finger to the center of the map. “While the mountain here he simply namedPolus Arcticus—the Arctic Pole.”
Jason frowned. “Could Mercator have been differentiating between the geographical North Pole and the magnetic pole of the Earth? They’re in different locations. While the geographic pole is fixed, the magnetic one wanders all around.”
Gray had to consider this, but it seemed unlikely, and for good reason. “No one from Mercator’s time made that distinction. It wasn’t recognized as two different locations until the middle of the eighteen hundreds. Three centuries after Mercator drew this map.”
“Then what is that island on his map?” Jason asked.
Gray stared down at the tiny mountain in the ocean. “I think it’s what Nicolas described—some island with a strong magnetic pull, one thatfalselypulled his ship off course, drawing it away fromtruenorth.”
Jason pointed to the large continent in the map’s middle. “And what about the rest of what Mercator drew?”
“I think it was his attempt to expand what couldn’t be drawn on that small spot on his map. Instead, he filled the Arctic’s middle void with what Nicolas had described in hisInventio Fortunata.”
“‘Making large what is not,’” Anna added, quoting Lomonosov.
Bailey leaned to peer at the small island. “But where is this place?”
It was a great question.
Gray stared across the charting and navigation tools spread atop the desk. “I think that’s what Lomonosov was attempting to figure out here. He must have gleaned enough to send out an expedition to pin it down.”
He remembered Anna telling him about the rumors that Catherine the Great dispatched ships on secret missions to the Far North, searching for this lost continent.
“But how do we continue from here?” Anna asked.
“I don’t think we’ll need all these sextants and compasses,” Gray said.
He stared down at his tablet, which still glowed with the image of that strange valley, surrounded by cliffs, circling a swirling pool.
That’s the location we need to find.
He closed the tablet’s window and opened a map of the polar region, one that was not drawn from accounts of long-dead explorers and lost books. It was a modern atlas of the Arctic, produced in exacting detail.
Gray added in a set of crosshairs at the center, marking the geographic North Pole.
He then crossed over and took a few snapshots of Mercator’s handiwork. Once satisfied with the image, he overlaid it atop the modern map. While the sixteenth-century version was not perfect in its rendition of every coastline, one detail was constant between the two, both past and present—the geographical North Pole.
He centered Mercator’s mountainous pole atop the current map’s spot, then played with the rotation until he could fix another point that was equally well mapped in the sixteenth century—the coastline of northern Europe.
With those two points overlapped and fixed, he boxed off the position of the mysterious island, the possible wellspring for all the mythology of Hyperborea.
He showed his handiwork to the others.
“It appears Mercator’s magnetic island lies somewhere in the East Siberian Sea,” Gray announced. “By tasking satellites with magnetometers,we should be able to detect any anomalous fluctuations in the magnetic field within that region and roughly pinpoint the island’s location.”
As the others studied the map, passing the tablet around, Jason waved Gray to the side. He did not look happy. His voice dropped to a whisper. “That’s some fractious waters. The East Siberian Sea is one of the major shipping lanes for Russia’s Northern Sea Route. If that island is far enough out into the remote waters of the Arctic, and Russia can claim it for themselves, it will vastly extend their territorial reach, consuming a large bulk of the polar sea. It risks destabilizing the entire region.”
Gray understood. “We can’t let that Arkangel Society get first crack at reaching the island. If we can expose this discovery—one with enormous historical implications—we may be able to keep a territorial war from starting. But to do so, we need to shine a big light on it.”
