by Mike Ashley
Horror was written on every face. Was this, then, a train of death? Had everyone perished?
“Oh, heavens! How horrible!”
A low whimper of terror — then mad cries of joy! Men had leaped upon the footboard while the train was still running and now flung wide the doors. Inside the carriages, hermetically closed by James Harward’s orders, the chlorine had failed to penetrate. The passengers were safe.
In the last carriage a man lay bleeding, his face blackened and tortured. It was the engineer whose heroic devotion had saved the train. The explosion caused by the shattering of the live rail had hurled him senseless on the line. But his men were fond of him, and one of them had run back and by the light of the flaming arc had found his chief’s body. Nearly suffocated, he had just managed to hoist it into the last carriage when the train started.
Now Harward was stretched on a seat and by his side, sobbing, knelt Blanche Glencoe.
“It was for us,” she murmured, in a broken voice — ” for me — that he sacrificed himself, that he died.”
A doctor approached and examined the engineer. With a sad gesture he replied to the girl’s mute question. All was over.
With streaming eyes Blanche bent over the body of her lover and imprinted on his brow a long, long kiss — the kiss of betrothal — and adieu.
Oh, God! What was that?
Under the girl’s passionate kiss a quiver seemed to run through the lifeless body. A tinge of color crept into the white cheeks! Harward seemed to make an effort to move; his lips trembled, his lids fluttered open! Then consciousness crept into his eyes, and with it a look of ineffable happiness. He tried to raise himself, smiled at Blanche, and fell back exhausted.
“He will live,” said the doctor, after another and more careful examination. And Blanche, overcome by so many emotions, fell sobbing into her father’s arms.
Some months later the London-Africa Express came out of the Gibraltar Tunnel at great speed, bearing on his honeymoon trip to South Africa the new managing director of the Gibraltar Tunnel Railway Company and his charming bride, Blanche Glencoe.
FROM POLE TO POLE
George Griffith
A tunnel from Europe to Africa may be a feat, but why stop there? Why not tunnel right through the Earth? In fact, you may not even need to do that. In the following story Professor Haffkin proposes that when the Earth cooled a hollow tube remained right through the Earth along the axis of rotation, making the Earth like a giant doughnut. Access to the tunnel is via the North or South Pole neither of which, at the time this story was written (1904) had been reached. This idea had been around for nearly a century. It was first proposed in 1818 by John Cleves Symmes (1779-1829), a retired Army captain, who even calculated its position and dimensions. He lobbied government to finance an expedition but was unsuccessful. He caused such a fuss that his ideas were lampooned in Symzonia (1820), credited to its narrator Adam Seaborn. This novel takes the adventurer into the Earth’s interior where he finds another civilization. The idea caught hold and was incorporated by Edgar Allan Poe into The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) which was itself given a new lease of life by Jules Verne who wrote a sequel to the book, The Sphinx of the Icefields in 1897. The idea was thus prevalent in the 1890s and also appeared in William R. Bradshaw’s The Goddess of Atvatabar (1892), a classic hollow-Earth romance.
The fascination of these stories wasn’t just for the idea of a Hollow Earth. It was also the intrigue of polar exploration. There were many valiant and often tragic attempts to reach both poles throughout the “steampunk” period. News and speculation about polar expeditions filled papers and magazines. It was not until 1909 that Robert Peary claimed to have reached the North Pole, though Frederick Cook claimed he had reached there a year earlier. Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole in 1912.
George Griffith (1857-1906) was the first major regular British writer of science fiction and much of his work could be classified as proto-steampunk. He was particularly fascinated with flying machines and future wars, explored in The Angel of the Revolution (1893), Olga Romanoff (1894) and The Outlaws of the Air (1895) right through to his last books The World Peril of 1910 (1907) and The Lord of Labour (1911). Like Ranger Gull, Griffith fell victim to the demon drink and died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1906, aged only 48. — M.A.
I
“WELL, PROFESSOR, what is it? Something pretty important, I suppose, from the wording of your note. What is the latest achievement? Have you solved the problem of aerial navigation, or got a glimpse into the realms of the fourth dimension, or what?”
“No, not any of those as yet, my friend, but something that may be quite as wonderful of its sort,” replied Professor Haffkin, putting his elbows down on the table and looking keenly across it under his shaggy, iron-grey eyebrows at the young man who was sitting on the opposite side pulling meditatively at a good cigar and sipping a whisky-and-soda.
“Well, if it is something really extraordinary and at the same time practicable — as you know, my ideas of the practicable are fairly wide — I’m there as far as the financial part goes. As regards the scientific end of the business, if you say ‘Yes,’ it is ‘Yes.’”
Mr. Arthur Princeps had very good reasons for thus “going blind” on a project of which he knew nothing save that it probably meant a sort of scientific gamble to the tune of several thousands of pounds. He had had the good fortune to sit under the Professor when he was a student at, the Royal School of Mines, and being possessed of that rarest of all gifts, an intuitive imagination, he had seen vast possibilities through the meshes of the verbal network of the Professor’s lectures.
Further, the kindly Fates had blessed him with a twofold dowry. He had a keen and insatiable thirst for that kind of knowledge which is satisfied only by the demonstration of hard facts. He was a student of physical science simply because he couldn’t help it; and his grandfather had left him ground-rents in London, Birmingham, and Manchester, and coal and iron mines in half-a-dozen counties, which produced an almost preposterous income.
At the same time, he had inherited from his mother and his grandmother that kind of intellect which enabled him to look upon all this wealth as merely a means to an end.
Later on, Professor Haffkin had been his examiner in Applied Mathematics at London University, and he had done such an astonishing paper that he had come to him after he had taken his D.Sc. degree and asked him in brief but pregnant words for the favour of his personal acquaintance. This had led to an intellectual intimacy which not only proved satisfactory from the social and scientific points of view, but also materialised on many profitable patents.
The Professor was a man rich in ideas, but comparatively poor in money. Arthur Princeps had both ideas and money, and as a result of this conjunction of personalities the man of science had made thousands out of his inventions, while the scientific man of business had made tens of thousands by exploiting them; and that is how matters stood between them on this particular evening when they were dining tete-a-tete in the Professor’s house in Russell Square.
When dinner was over, the Professor got up and said —
“Bring your cigar up into the study, Mr. Princeps. I want a pipe, and I can talk more comfortably there than here. Besides, I’ve something to show you.”
“All right, Professor; but if you’re going to have a pipe, I’ll do the same. One can think better with a pipe than a cigar. It takes too much attention.”
He tossed the half of his Muria into the grate and followed the Professor up to his sanctum, which was half study, half laboratory, and withal a very comfortable apartment. There was a bright wood-and-coal fire burning in the old-fashioned grate, and on either side of the hearth there was a nice, deep, cosy armchair.
“Now, Mr. Princeps,” said the Professor, when they were seated, “I am going to ask you to believe something which I dare say you will think impossible.”
“My dear sir, if you think it possible, that is quite enough for
me,” replied Princeps. “What is it?”
The Professor took a long pull at his pipe, and then, turning his head so that his eyes met his guest’s, he replied —
“It’s a journey through the centre of the earth.”
Arthur Princeps bit the amber of his pipe clean through, sat bolt upright, caught the pipe in his hand, spat the pieces of amber into the fireplace, and said —
“I beg your pardon, Professor — through the centre of the earth? That’s rather a large order, isn’t it? I’ve just been reading an article in one of the scientific papers which goes to show that the centre of the earth — the kernel of the terrestrial nut, as it were — is a rigid, solid body harder and denser than anything we know on the surface.”
“Quite so, quite so,” replied the Professor. “I have read the article myself, and I admit that the reasoning is sound as far as it goes but I don’t think it goes quite far enough — I mean far enough back. However, I think I can show you what I mean in a much shorter time than I can tell you.”
As he said this, he got up from his chair and went to a little cupboard in a big bureau which stood in a recess beside the fireplace. He took out a glass vessel about six inches in diameter and twelve in height, and placed it gently on a little table which stood between the easy-chairs.
Princeps glanced at it and saw that it was filled with a fluid which looked like water. Exactly half-way between the surface of the fluid and the bottom of the glass there was a spherical globule of a brownish-yellow colour, and about an inch in diameter. As the Professor set the glass on the table, the globule oscillated a little and then came to a rest. Princeps looked at it with a little lift of his eyelids, but said nothing. His host went back to the cupboard and took out a long, thin, steel needle with a little disc of thin white metal fixed about three inches from the end. He lowered it into the fluid in the glass and passed it through the middle of the globule, which broke as the disc passed into it, and then re-shaped itself again in perfectly spherical form about it.
The Professor looked up and said, just as though he were repeating a portion of one of his lectures —
“This is a globule of coloured oil. It floats in a mixture of alcohol and water which is of exactly the same specific gravity as its own. It thus represents as nearly as possible the earth in its former molten condition, floating in space. The earth had then, as now, a rotary action on its own axis. This needle represents that axis. I give it a rotary motion, and you will see here what happened millions of years ago to the infant planet Terra.”
As he said this, he began to twirl the needle swiftly but very steadily between the forefingers of his right and left hand. The globule flattened and spread out laterally until it became a ring, with the needle and the disc in the centre of it. Then the twirling slowed down. The ring became a globule again, but it was flattened at either pole, and there was a clearly defined circular hole through it from pole to pole. The Professor deftly withdrew the needle and disc through the opening, and the globule continued to revolve round the hole through its centre.
“That is what I mean,” he said. “Of course, I needn’t go into detail with you. There is the earth as I believe it to be today, with certain exceptions which you will readily see.
“The exterior crust has cooled. Inside that there is probably a semi-fluid sphere, and inside that again, possibly, the rigid body, the core of the earth. But I don’t believe that that hole has been filled, simply because it must have been there to begin with. Granted also that the pull of gravitation is towards the centre, still, if there is a void from Pole to Pole, as I hold there must be, as a natural consequence of the centrifugal force generated by the earth’s revolution, the mass of the earth would pull equally in all directions away from that void.”
“I think I see,” said Princeps, upon whom the astounding possibilities of this simple demonstration had been slowly breaking. “I see. Granted a passage like that from Pole to Pole — call it a tunnel — a body falling into it at one end would be drawn towards the centre. It would pass it at a tremendous velocity and be carried towards the other end; but as the attraction of the mass of the earth would be equal on all sides of it, it would take a perfectly direct course — I mean, it wouldn’t smash itself to bits against the sides of the tunnel.
“The only difficulty that I see is that, suppose that the body were dropped into the tunnel at the North Pole, it wouldn’t quite reach the South Pole. It would stop and turn back, and so it would oscillate like a pendulum with an ever-decreasing swing — until it finally came to rest in the middle of the tunnel — -or, in other words, the centre of the earth.”
“Exactly,” said the Professor. “But would it not be possible for means to be taken to propel the projectile beyond the attraction from the centre if those means were employed at the moment when the momentum of the body was being counteracted by the return pull towards the centre?”
“Perfectly feasible,” said Princeps, “provided always that there were reasonable beings in the said projectile. Well, Professor, I think I understand you now. You believe that there is this tunnel, as we may call it, running through the earth from Pole to Pole, and you want to get to one of the Poles and make a journey through it.
“It’s a gorgeous idea, I must confess. You’ve only got to tell me that you really think it possible, and I’m with you. If you like to undertake the details, you can draw on me up to a hundred thousand; and when you’re ready, I’ll go with you. Which Pole do you propose to start from?”
“The North Pole,” said the Professor, quietly, as though he were uttering the merest commonplace, “although still undiscovered, is getting a little bit hackneyed. I propose that we shall start from the South Pole. It is very good of you to be so generous in the way of finances. Of course, you understand that you cannot hope for any monetary return, and it is also quite possible that we may both lose our lives.”
“People who stick at small things never do great ones,” replied Princeps. “As for the money, it doesn’t matter. I have too much — more than anyone ought to have. Besides, we might find oceans of half-molten gold inside — who knows? Anyhow, when you’re ready to start, I am.”
II
Nearly two months after this conversation had taken place, something else happened. The Professor’s niece, the only blood-relation he had in the world, came back from Heidelburg with her degree of Doctor of Philosophy. She was “a daughter of the Gods, divinely tall and most divinely fair,” as became one in whose veins ran both the Norse and the Anglo-Saxon blood. Certain former experiences had led Princeps to the opinion that she liked him exceedingly for himself, and disliked him almost as much for his money — a fact which somehow made the possession of millions seem very unprofitable in his eyes.
Brenda Haffkin happened to get back to London the day after everything had been arranged for the most amazing and seemingly impossible expedition that two human beings had ever decided to attempt.
The British Government and the Royal Geographical Society of London were sending out a couple of vessels — one a superannuated whaler, and the other a hopelessly obsolete cruiser, which had narrowly escaped experimental bombardment — to the frozen land of Antarctic. A splendid donation to the funds of the expedition had procured a passage in the cruiser for the adventurers and about ten tons of baggage, the ultimate use of which was little dreamt of by any other member of the expedition.
The great secret was broken to Brenda about a week before the starting of the expedition. Her uncle explained the theory of the project to her, and Arthur Princeps added the footnotes, as it were. Whatever she thought of it, she betrayed no sign either of belief or disbelief; but when the Professor had finished, she turned to Princeps and said very quietly, but with a most eloquent glow in those big, grey eyes into which he had often looked so longingly —
“And you are really going on this expedition, Mr. Princeps? You are going to run the risk of probable starvation and more than probable destruction; and, in addition
to that, you must be spending a great deal of money to do it — you who have money enough to buy everything that the world can sell you?”
“What the world can sell, Miss Haffkin — or, in other words, what money can buy — has very little value beyond the necessaries of life. It is what money cannot buy, what the world has not got to sell, that is really precious. I suppose you know what I mean,” he said, putting his hands into his pockets and turning to stare in an unmeaning way out of the window. “But I beg your pardon. I didn’t mean to get back on to that old subject, I can assure you.”
“And you really are going on this expedition?” She said, with a deliciously direct inconsequence which, in a beautiful Doctor of Philosophy, was quite irresistible.
“Of course I will. Why not? If we find that there really is a tunnel through the earth, and jump in at the South Pole and come out at the North, and take a series of electro-cinematograph photographs of the crust and core of the earth, we shall have done something that no one else has ever thought about. There ought to be some millions in it, too, besides the glory.”
“And suppose you don’t? Suppose this wonderful vessel of uncle’s gets launched into this bottomless pit, and doesn’t come out properly at the other end? Suppose your explosive just misses fire at the wrong moment, and when you’ve nearly reached the North Pole you go back again past the centre, and so on, and so on, until, perhaps, two or three centuries hence, your vessel comes to rest at the centre with a couple of skeletons inside it — -what then?”
“We should take a medicine-chest with us, and I don’t suppose we should wait for starvation.”
“And so you seriously propose to stake your life and all your splendid prospects in the world on the bare chance of accomplishing an almost impossibly fantastic achievement?”
“That’s about what it comes to, I suppose. I don’t really see how a man in my position could spend his money and risk his life much better.”