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_ 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 Dipscy
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." _
Read next: CHAPTER XXV - LAURELS
Read previous: CHAPTER XXIII - HE LAST DIVE OF THE DIPSEY
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