CHAPTER XXIV. ROVINSKI COMES TO THE SURFACE
When Sammy Block and his companion explorers had journeyed from CapeTariff to Sardis, they found Roland Clewe ready to tender a mostgrateful welcome, and to give full and most interested attention to thestories of their adventures and to their scientific reports. For a timehe was willing to allow his own great discovery to lie fallow in hismind, and to give his whole attention to the wonderful achievement whichhad been made under his direction.
He had worked out his theory of the formation and present constitutionof the earth; had written a full and complete report of what he had seenand done, and was ready, when he thought the proper time had arrived, toannounce to the world his theories and his facts. Moreover, he had sentto several jewelers and mineralogists some of the smaller fragmentswhich he had picked up in the cave of light, and these specialists,while reporting the material of the specimens purest diamond, expressedthe greatest surprise at their shape and brilliancy. They had evidentlynot been ground or cut, and yet their sharp points and glitteringsurfaces reflected light as if they had been in the hands of adiamond-cutter. One of these experts wrote to Clewe asking him if he hadbeen 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 ashe himself once had trod what seemed to him a solid atmosphere. Therewas now nothing that his ambition might point out which would induce himto endeavor to climb higher in the field of human achievement thanthe spot on which he stood. From this great elevation he was perfectlywilling to look down and kindly consider the heroic performances ofthose who had reached the pole, and who had anchored a buoy on theextreme 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 hadmade that memorable voyage on the Dipsey had stories to tell for whicheditors in every civilized land would have paid gold beyond all formerprecedent.
But Roland Clewe did not care to say anything to the world until hecould say everything that he wished to say. It had been known thathe had sent an expedition into Northern waters, but exactly what heintended to do had not been known, and what he had done had not beencommunicated even to the telegraph-operators at Cape Tariff. These hadreceived despatches in cipher from points far away to the north,but while they transmitted them to Sardis they had no idea of theirsignification. When everything should be ready to satisfy the learnedworld, as well as the popular mind, the great discovery of the polewould be announced.
In the meantime there was a suspicion in the journalistic world that theman of inventions who lived at Sardis, New Jersey, had done somethingout 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 beenbrought back. The general opinion was that Clewe had endeavored to founda settlement at some point north of Cape Tariff, probably for purposesof scientific observation, and that he had failed. The stories of thesepeople, however, would be interesting, and several reporters made visitsto Sardis. But they all saw Sammy, and not one of them considered hiscommunications 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 accountof the expedition, written by Clewe himself from the statements of theparty, would be ready for publication; and in the brilliantly lightedsky of discovery which now rested, one edge upon Sardis and the otherupon the pole, there was but one single cloud, and this was Rovinski.
The ambitious and unscrupulous Pole had been the source of the greatesttrouble and uneasiness since he had left Cape Tariff. While there he hadfound that he could not possibly get ashore, and so had kept quiet; butwhen on board the vessel which had been sent to them from St. John's, hehad soon begun to talk to the crew, and there seemed to be but one wayof preventing him from making known what had been done by the expeditionbefore its promoters were ready for the disclosure, and this was todeclare him a maniac, whose utterances were of no value whatever. He wasput into close confinement, and it was freely reported that he had gonecrazy while in the arctic regions, and that his mind had been filledwith 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 thiswould not prevent him from talking; and so, when he arrived in NewJersey, he was sent to an insane asylum, the officers of which were notsurprised to receive him, for, in their opinion, a wilder-looking maniacwas not, to be found within the walls of the institution.
Early on the morning of the day before the world was to be electrifiedby the announcement of the discovery of the pole, a man named WilliamCunningham, employed in the Sardis Works, entered the large buildingwhich had been devoted to the manufacture of the automatic shell, butwhich had not been used of late and had been kept locked. Cunningham wasthe watchman, and had entered to make his usual morning rounds. Hehad scarcely closed the door behind him when, looking over towardsthe engines which still stood by the mouth of the shaft made by theautomatic shell, he was amazed to see that the car which had been usedby Roland Clewe in his descent was not hanging above them.
Utterly unable to understand this state of affairs, he ran to the mouthof the shaft. He found the great trap-door which had closed it thrownback, and the grating which had been made to cover the orifice afterthe car had descended in its place. The engines were not moving, andthe chain on the windlass of one of them appeared not to have beendisturbed, but on the other windlass one of the chains had been unwound.Cunningham was so astonished that he could not believe what he saw. Hehad been there the night before; everything had been in order, the shaftclosed, and the trap-door locked. He leaned over the grating and lookeddown; he could see nothing but a black hole without any bottom. The mandid not look long, for it made him dizzy. He turned and ran out of thehouse to call Mr. Bryce.
Ivan Rovinski was not perhaps a lunatic, but his unprincipled ambitionhad made him so disregard the principles of ordinary prudence when suchprinciples stood in his way that it could not be said that he was at alltimes entirely sane. He understood thoroughly why he had been put in anasylum, and it enraged him to think that by this course his enemies hadobtained a great advantage over him. No matter what he might say, it wasonly necessary to point to the fact that he was in a lunatic asylum, orthat 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 threedays' residence in the institution in which he had been placed, heescaped and made his way to a piece of woods about two miles fromSardis, 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 beable, the operations in the Works of Roland Clewe. Having safely reachedhis retreat, he lost no time in sallying forth to spy out what was goingon at Sardis.
He was cunning and wary, and a man of infinite resource. It was not longbefore he found out that the polar discovery had not been announced, buthe also discovered from listening to the conversations of some of theworkmen in the village, which he frequently visited in a guise veryunlike his ordinary appearance, that something extraordinary had takenplace in the Sardis Works, of which he had never heard. A great shafthad been sunk, the people said, by accident; Mr. Clewe had gone down itin 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 besomething very wonderful.
The night after Rovinski heard this surprising news he was in thebuilding which had contained the automatic shell. As active as a cat, hehad entered by an upper window.
Rovinski spent the night in that building. He had with him a darklantern, and he made the most thorough examination of the machinery atthe mouth of the shaft. He was a man of great mechanical ability and anexpert in applied electricity. He understood that machinery, with allits complicated arrangements and appliances, as well as if he hadbu
ilt it himself. In fact, while examining it, he thought of some veryvaluable improvements which might have been made in it. He knew that itwas an apparatus for lowering the car to a great depth, and, climbinginto the car, he examined everything it contained. Coming down, henoticed the grating, and he knew what it was for. He looked over theengines and calculated the strength of the chains on the windlasses. Hetook an impression of the lock of the trap-door, and when he went awayin the very early hours of the morning he understood the apparatus whichwas intended to lower the car as well as any person who had managedit. He knew nothing about the shaft under the great door, but thishe intended to investigate as thoroughly as he had investigated themachinery.
The next night he entered the building very soon after Cunningham hadgone his rounds, and he immediately set to work to prepare for hisdescent into the shaft. He disconnected one of the engines, for hesneeringly said to himself that the other one was more than sufficientto lower and raise the car. He charged and arranged all the batteriesand put in perfect working order the mechanism by which Clewe hadestablished a connection between the car and the engines, using one ofthe chains as a conductor, so that he could himself check or start theengines if an emergency should render it necessary.
Then Rovinski, bounding around like a wild animal in a cage, took out akey he had brought with him, opened the trap-door, lifted it back, andgazed down. He could see a beautifully cut well, but that was all. Butno 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 lookedup at a grating which hung above it and determined to make use of thisprotection. He could not lower it in the ordinary way after he hadentered the car, but in fifteen minutes he had arranged a pulley andrope by which, after the car had gone below the surface, he could lowerthe grating to its place. He got in, started down into the dark hole,stopped the engine, lowered the grating, went down a little farther, andturned on the electric lights.
The descent of Rovinski was a succession of the wildest sensations ofamazed delight. Stratum after stratum passed before his astonishedeyes, and, when he had gone down low enough, he allowed himself the mostextravagant expressions of ecstasy. His progress was not so regular andsteady as that of Roland Clewe had been. He found that he had perfectcontrol 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 andgreater 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, thecar hanging some twenty or thirty feet above the bottom. He looked out,he saw the shell, he saw the vast expanse of lighted nothingness, hetried to imagine what it was that that mass of iron rested upon. If hehad not seen it, he would have thought he had come out into the upperair of some bottomless cavern. But a great iron machine nearly twentyfeet long could not rest upon air! He thought he might be dreaming; hesat up and shut his eyes; in a few minutes he would open them and see ifhe still saw the same incomprehensible things.
The downward passage of Rovinski had occupied a great deal more timethan he had calculated for. He had stopped so much, and had been socareful to examine the walls of the shaft, that morning had now arrivedin the upper world, and it was at this moment, as he sat with his eyesclosed, that William Cunningham looked down into the mouth of the shaft.
Cunningham was an observing man, and that morning he had picked up apin and stuck it in the lapel of his rough coat, but he had done thishastily and carelessly. The pin was of a recently invented kind, beingof a light, elastic metal, with its head of steel. As Cunningham leanedforward the pin slipped out of his coat; it fell through one of theopenings in the grating, and descended the shaft head downward.
For the first quarter of a mile the pin went swiftly in an absolutelyperpendicular line, nearly at the middle of the shaft. For the nextthree-quarters of a mile it went down like a rifle-ball. For the nextfive miles it sped on as if it had been a planet revolving in space.Then, for eight miles, this pin, falling perpendicularly througha greater distance than any object on this earth had ever fallenperpendicularly, went downward with a velocity like that of light. Itshead struck the top of the car, which was hanging motionless in the caveof light; it did not glance off, for its momentum was so great that itwould glance from nothing. It passed through that steel roof; it passedthrough Rovinski's head, through his heart, down through the car, andinto the great shell which lay below.
When Mr. Bryce and several workmen came running back with WilliamCunningham, they were as much surprised as he had been, and could formno theory to account for the disappearance of the car. It could nothave slipped down accidentally and descended by its own weight, forthe trap-door was open and the grating was in place. They sent ingreat haste for Mr. Clewe, and when he arrived he wasted no time inconjectures, but instantly ordered that the engine which was attached tothe car should be started and its chain wound up.
So great was the anxiety to get the car to the surface of the earththat the engine which raised it was run at as high a speed as was deemedsafe, and in a little more than an hour the car came out of the mouth ofthe shaft, and in it sat Ivan Rovinski, motionless and dead.
No one who knew Rovinski wondered that he had had the courage to makethe descent of the shaft, and those who were acquainted with his greatmechanical ability were not surprised that he had been able to manage,by himself, the complicated machinery which would ordinarily require theservice of several men; but every one who saw him in the car, or afterhe had been taken out of it, was amazed that he should be dead. Therewas 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 andagile devil. Even when a post-mortem examination was made, the doctorswere puzzled. A threadlike solution of continuity was discovered incertain parts of his body, but it was lost in others, and the coroner'sverdict was that he came to his death from unknown causes whiledescending a shaft. The general opinion was that in some way or other hehad been frightened to death.
This accident, much to Roland Clewe's chagrin, discovered to the publicthe existence of the great shaft. Whether or not he would announceits existence himself, or whether he would close it up, had not beendetermined by Clewe; but when he and Margaret had talked over thematter soon after the terrible incident, his mind was made up beyondall possibility of change, and, by means of great bombs, the shaft wasshattered and choked up for a depth of half a mile from its mouth. Whenthis work was accomplished, nothing remained but a shallow well, and,when this had been filled up with solid masonry, the place where theshaft 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 itwas not to be expected that men would plan and successfully constructone which would reach down to the transparent nucleus of the earth. Theterrible fate, whatever it was, which had overtaken Rovinski, shouldnot, if Clewe could help it, overtake any other human being.
"But my great discovery," said he to Margaret, "that remains aswonderful as the sun, and as safe to look upon; for with my Artesian rayI can bore down to the solid centre of the earth, and into it, and anyman can study it with no more danger than if he sat in his armchairat home; and if they doubt what I say about the material of which thatsolid centre is composed, we can show them the fragments of it which Ibrought up with me."
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