Page 46 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

and providing the great empires with special rates for ordinary affairs and “fancy
brands for coronations, battles and other great and particular occasions” (272).
He expects to make billions of dollars with this enterprise, which requires no
expensive plant, and he hopes to be operational within a few days or weeks at the
longest. His first goal is improving the climate of Siberia and clinching a contract
with the Russian czar, which he confidently projects will save both his honor
and his credit immediately. Reminiscent of the purchase of the North Pole by
the Baltimore Gun Club, the daffy colonel confides in his friend and former
colleague Marse Washington Hawkins, “a s t o u t i s h , d i s c o u r a g e d -
l o o k i n g m a n”:

I would like you to provide a proper outfit and start north as soon as I telegraph
you, be it night or be it day. I wish you to take up all the country stretching away
from the North Pole on all sides for many degrees south, and buy Greenland and
Iceland at the best figure you can get now while they are cheap. It is my intention to
move one of the tropics up there and transfer the frigid zone to the equator. I will
have the entire Arctic Circle in the market as a summer resort next year, and will
use the surplusage of the old climate, over and above what can be utilized on the
equator, to reduce the temperature of opposition resorts. (272–273)

Sellers promises to communicate with Hawkins not by earthbound means
such as letter or telegraph, but with a “kiss across the universe” using a cosmic sig-
nal sent from the surface of the Sun itself—a vast attenuation of sunbeams that
will generate envy even among current proponents of solar radiation manage-
ment, especially those who propose to cast a shade on the Earth using orbiting
space mirrors (chapter 8). Sellers writes:

Meantime, watch for a sign from me. Eight days from now, we shall be wide asun-
der; for I shall be on the border of the Pacific, and you far out on the Atlantic,
approaching England. That day, if I am alive and my sublime discovery is proved
and established, I will send you greeting, and my messenger shall deliver it where
you are, in the solitudes of the sea; for I will waft a vast sun-spot across the disk like
drifting smoke, and you will know it for my love-sign, and will say “Mulberry Sell-
ers throws us a kiss across the universe.” (273)

As he promises, Twain ends The American Claimant with an appendix
subtitled “Weather for Use in This Book. Selected from the Best Authorities,”
in which he presents a rich parody of the type of dense weather writing that
he fails to exclude from his own text. Here Twain contrasts the prolixity of

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