When Sammy Block and his companion explorers had journeyed from Cape
Tariff to Sardis, they found Roland Clewe ready to tender a most
grateful welcome, and to give full and most interested attention to the
stories of their adventures and to their scientific reports. For a time
he was willing to allow his own great discovery to lie fallow in his
mind, and to give his whole attention to the wonderful achievement which
had been made under his direction.
He had worked out his theory of the formation and present constitution
of the earth; had written a full and complete report of what he had seen
and done, and was ready, when he thought the proper time had arrived, to
announce to the world his theories and his facts. Moreover, he had sent
to several jewelers and mineralogists some of the smaller fragments
which he had picked up in the cave of light, and these specialists,
while reporting the material of the specimens purest diamond, expressed
the greatest surprise at their shape and brilliancy. They had evidently
not been ground or cut, and yet their sharp points and glittering
surfaces reflected light as if they had been in the hands of a
diamond-cutter. One of these experts wrote to Clewe asking him if he had
been digging diamonds with a machine which broke the gems to pieces.
So the soul of Roland Clewe was satisfied; it seemed to walk the air as
he himself once had trod what seemed to him a solid atmosphere. There
was now nothing that his ambition might point out which would induce him
to endeavor to climb higher in the field of human achievement than
the spot on which he stood. From this great elevation he was perfectly
willing to look down and kindly consider the heroic performances of
those who had reached the pole, and who had anchored a buoy on the
extreme northern point of the earth's axis.
Mr. Gibbs's reports, and those of his assistants, were well worked out,
and of the greatest value to the scientific world, and every one who had
made that memorable voyage on the Dipsey had stories to tell for which
editors in every civilized land would have paid gold beyond all former
precedent.
But Roland Clewe did not care to say anything to the world until he
could say everything that he wished to say. It had been known that
he had sent an expedition into Northern waters, but exactly what he
intended to do had not been known, and what he had done had not been
communicated even to the telegraph-operators at Cape Tariff. These had
received despatches in cipher from points far away to the north,
but while they transmitted them to Sardis they had no idea of their
signification. When everything should be ready to satisfy the learned
world, as well as the popular mind, the great discovery of the pole
would be announced.
In the meantime there was a suspicion in the journalistic world that the
man of inventions who lived at Sardis, New Jersey, had done something
out of the common in the North. A party of people, one of them a woman,
had been taken up there and left there, and they had recently been
brought back. The general opinion was that Clewe had endeavored to found
a settlement at some point north of Cape Tariff, probably for purposes
of scientific observation, and that he had failed. The stories of these
people, however, would be interesting, and several reporters made visits
to Sardis. But they all saw Sammy, and not one of them considered his
communications worth more than a brief paragraph.
In a week Mr. Gibbs would have finished his charts, his meteorological,
his geological, and geographical reports, and a clear, succinct account
of the expedition, written by Clewe himself from the statements of the
party, would be ready for publication; and in the brilliantly lighted
sky of discovery which now rested, one edge upon Sardis and the other
upon the pole, there was but one single cloud, and this was Rovinski.
The ambitious and unscrupulous Pole had been the source of the greatest
trouble and uneasiness since he had left Cape Tariff. While there he had
found that he could not possibly get ashore, and so had kept quiet; but
when on board the vessel which had been sent to them from St. John's, he
had soon begun to talk to the crew, and there seemed to be but one way
of preventing him from making known what had been done by the expedition
before its promoters were ready for the disclosure, and this was to
declare him a maniac, whose utterances were of no value whatever. He was
put into close confinement, and it was freely reported that he had gone
crazy while in the arctic regions, and that his mind had been filled
with all sorts of insane notions regarding that part of the world.
It had been intended to put him in jail on a criminal charge, but this
would not prevent him from talking; and so, when he arrived in New
Jersey, he was sent to an insane asylum, the officers of which were not
surprised to receive him, for, in their opinion, a wilder-looking maniac
was not, to be found within the walls of the institution.
Early on the morning of the day before the world was to be electrified
by the announcement of the discovery of the pole, a man named William
Cunningham, employed in the Sardis Works, entered the large building
which had been devoted to the manufacture of the automatic shell, but
which had not been used of late and had been kept locked. Cunningham was
the watchman, and had entered to make his usual morning rounds. He
had scarcely closed the door behind him when, looking over towards
the engines which still stood by the mouth of the shaft made by the
automatic shell, he was amazed to see that the car which had been used
by Roland Clewe in his descent was not hanging above them.
Utterly unable to understand this state of affairs, he ran to the mouth
of the shaft. He found the great trap-door which had closed it thrown
back, and the grating which had been made to cover the orifice after
the car had descended in its place. The engines were not moving, and
the chain on the windlass of one of them appeared not to have been
disturbed, but on the other windlass one of the chains had been unwound.
Cunningham was so astonished that he could not believe what he saw. He
had been there the night before; everything had been in order, the shaft
closed, and the trap-door locked. He leaned over the grating and looked
down; he could see nothing but a black hole without any bottom. The man
did not look long, for it made him dizzy. He turned and ran out of the
house to call Mr. Bryce.
Ivan Rovinski was not perhaps a lunatic, but his unprincipled ambition
had made him so disregard the principles of ordinary prudence when such
principles stood in his way that it could not be said that he was at all
times entirely sane. He understood thoroughly why he had been put in an
asylum, and it enraged him to think that by this course his enemies had
obtained a great advantage over him. No matter what he might say, it was
only necessary to point to the fact that he was in a lunatic asylum, or
that he had just come out of one, to make his utterances of no value.
But to remain in confinement did not suit him at all, and, after three
days' residence in the institution in which he had been placed, he
escaped and made his way to a piece of woods about two miles from
Sardis, where, early that year, he had built himself a rude shelter,
from which he might go forth at night and study, so far as he should be
able, the operations in the Works of Roland Clewe. Having safely reached
his retreat, he lost no time in sallying forth to spy out what was going
on at Sardis.
He was cunning and wary, and a man of infinite resource. It was not long
before he found out that the polar discovery had not been announced, but
he also discovered from listening to the conversations of some of the
workmen in the village, which he frequently visited in a guise very
unlike his ordinary appearance, that something extraordinary had taken
place in the Sardis Works, of which he had never heard. A great shaft
had been sunk, the people said, by accident; Mr. Clewe had gone down it
in a car, and it had taken him nearly three hours to get to the bottom.
Nobody yet knew what he had discovered, but it was supposed to be
something very wonderful.
The night after Rovinski heard this surprising news he was in the
building which had contained the automatic shell. As active as a cat, he
had entered by an upper window.
Rovinski spent the night in that building. He had with him a dark
lantern, and he made the most thorough examination of the machinery at
the mouth of the shaft. He was a man of great mechanical ability and an
expert in applied electricity. He understood that machinery, with all
its complicated arrangements and appliances, as well as if he had
built it himself. In fact, while examining it, he thought of some very
valuable improvements which might have been made in it. He knew that it
was an apparatus for lowering the car to a great depth, and, climbing
into the car, he examined everything it contained. Coming down, he
noticed the grating, and he knew what it was for. He looked over the
engines and calculated the strength of the chains on the windlasses. He
took an impression of the lock of the trap-door, and when he went away
in the very early hours of the morning he understood the apparatus which
was intended to lower the car as well as any person who had managed
it. He knew nothing about the shaft under the great door, but this
he intended to investigate as thoroughly as he had investigated the
machinery.
The next night he entered the building very soon after Cunningham had
gone his rounds, and he immediately set to work to prepare for his
descent into the shaft. He disconnected one of the engines, for he
sneeringly said to himself that the other one was more than sufficient
to lower and raise the car. He charged and arranged all the batteries
and put in perfect working order the mechanism by which Clewe had
established a connection between the car and the engines, using one of
the chains as a conductor, so that he could himself check or start the
engines if an emergency should render it necessary.
Then Rovinski, bounding around like a wild animal in a cage, took out a
key he had brought with him, opened the trap-door, lifted it back, and
gazed down. He could see a beautifully cut well, but that was all. But
no matter how deep it was, he intended to go down to the bottom of it.
He started the engine and lowered the car to the ground. Then he looked
up at a grating which hung above it and determined to make use of this
protection. He could not lower it in the ordinary way after he had
entered the car, but in fifteen minutes he had arranged a pulley and
rope by which, after the car had gone below the surface, he could lower
the grating to its place. He got in, started down into the dark hole,
stopped the engine, lowered the grating, went down a little farther, and
turned on the electric lights.
The descent of Rovinski was a succession of the wildest sensations of
amazed delight. Stratum after stratum passed before his astonished
eyes, and, when he had gone down low enough, he allowed himself the most
extravagant expressions of ecstasy. His progress was not so regular and
steady as that of Roland Clewe had been. He found that he had perfect
control of the engine and car, and sometimes he went down rapidly,
sometimes slowly, and frequently he stopped. As he continued to descend,
his amazement at the wonderful depth of the shaft became greater and
greater and his mind was totally unable to appreciate the situation.
Still he was not frightened, and went on down.
At last Rovinski emerged into the cave of light. There he stopped, the
car hanging some twenty or thirty feet above the bottom. He looked out,
he saw the shell, he saw the vast expanse of lighted nothingness, he
tried to imagine what it was that that mass of iron rested upon. If he
had not seen it, he would have thought he had come out into the upper
air of some bottomless cavern. But a great iron machine nearly twenty
feet long could not rest upon air! He thought he might be dreaming; he
sat up and shut his eyes; in a few minutes he would open them and see if
he still saw the same incomprehensible things.
The downward passage of Rovinski had occupied a great deal more time
than he had calculated for. He had stopped so much, and had been so
careful to examine the walls of the shaft, that morning had now arrived
in the upper world, and it was at this moment, as he sat with his eyes
closed, that William Cunningham looked down into the mouth of the shaft.
Cunningham was an observing man, and that morning he had picked up a
pin and stuck it in the lapel of his rough coat, but he had done this
hastily and carelessly. The pin was of a recently invented kind, being
of a light, elastic metal, with its head of steel. As Cunningham leaned
forward the pin slipped out of his coat; it fell through one of the
openings in the grating, and descended the shaft head downward.
For the first quarter of a mile the pin went swiftly in an absolutely
perpendicular line, nearly at the middle of the shaft. For the next
three-quarters of a mile it went down like a rifle-ball. For the next
five miles it sped on as if it had been a planet revolving in space.
Then, for eight miles, this pin, falling perpendicularly through
a greater distance than any object on this earth had ever fallen
perpendicularly, went downward with a velocity like that of light. Its
head struck the top of the car, which was hanging motionless in the cave
of light; it did not glance off, for its momentum was so great that it
would glance from nothing. It passed through that steel roof; it passed
through Rovinski's head, through his heart, down through the car, and
into the great shell which lay below.
When Mr. Bryce and several workmen came running back with William
Cunningham, they were as much surprised as he had been, and could form
no theory to account for the disappearance of the car. It could not
have slipped down accidentally and descended by its own weight, for
the trap-door was open and the grating was in place. They sent in
great haste for Mr. Clewe, and when he arrived he wasted no time in
conjectures, but instantly ordered that the engine which was attached to
the car should be started and its chain wound up.
So great was the anxiety to get the car to the surface of the earth
that the engine which raised it was run at as high a speed as was deemed
safe, and in a little more than an hour the car came out of the mouth of
the shaft, and in it sat Ivan Rovinski, motionless and dead.
No one who knew Rovinski wondered that he had had the courage to make
the descent of the shaft, and those who were acquainted with his great
mechanical ability were not surprised that he had been able to manage,
by himself, the complicated machinery which would ordinarily require the
service of several men; but every one who saw him in the car, or after
he had been taken out of it, was amazed that he should be dead. There
was no sign of accident, no perceptible wound, no appearance, in fact,
of any cause why he should be a tranquil corpse and not an alert and
agile devil. Even when a post-mortem examination was made, the doctors
were puzzled. A threadlike solution of continuity was discovered in
certain parts of his body, but it was lost in others, and the coroner's
verdict was that he came to his death from unknown causes while
descending a shaft. The general opinion was that in some way or other he
had been frightened to death.
This accident, much to Roland Clewe's chagrin, discovered to the public
the existence of the great shaft. Whether or not he would announce
its existence himself, or whether he would close it up, had not been
determined by Clewe; but when he and Margaret had talked over the
matter soon after the terrible incident, his mind was made up beyond
all possibility of change, and, by means of great bombs, the shaft was
shattered and choked up for a depth of half a mile from its mouth. When
this work was accomplished, nothing remained but a shallow well, and,
when this had been filled up with solid masonry, the place where the
shaft had been was as substantial as any solid ground.
Now the great discovery was probably shut out forever from the world,
but Clewe was well satisfied. He would never make another shaft, and it
was not to be expected that men would plan and successfully construct
one which would reach down to the transparent nucleus of the earth. The
terrible fate, whatever it was, which had overtaken Rovinski, should
not, if Clewe could help it, overtake any other human being.
“But my great discovery,” said he to Margaret, “that remains as
wonderful as the sun, and as safe to look upon; for with my Artesian ray
I can bore down to the solid centre of the earth, and into it, and any
man can study it with no more danger than if he sat in his armchair
at home; and if they doubt what I say about the material of which that
solid centre is composed, we can show them the fragments of it which I
brought up with me.”