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At the Earth Coreby Edgar Rice BurroughsArctic tents PROLOGUE
IN THE FIRST PLACE PLEASE BEAR IN MIND THAT I do not
expect you to believe this story. Nor could you wonder
had you witnessed a recent experience of mine when,
in the armor of blissful and stupendous ignorance,
I gaily narrated the gist of it to a Fellow of the Royal
Geological Society on the occasion of my last trip to London.
You would surely have thought that I had been detected
in no less a heinous crime than the purloining of the Crown
Jewels from the Tower, or putting poison in the coffee
of His Majesty the King.
The erudite gentleman in whom I confided congealed
before I was half through!--it is all that saved him
from exploding--and my dreams of an Honorary Fellowship,
gold medals, and a niche in the Hall of Fame faded into
the thin, cold air of his arctic atmosphere.
But I believe the story, and so would you, and so would
the learned Fellow of the Royal Geological Society, had you
and he heard it from the lips of the man who told it to me.
Had you seen, as I did, the fire of truth in those gray eyes;
had you felt the ring of sincerity in that quiet voice;
had you realized the pathos of it all--you, too, would believe.
You would not have needed the final ocular proof that I
had--the weird rhamphorhynchus-like creature which he
had brought back with him from the inner world.
I came upon him quite suddenly, and no less unexpectedly,
upon the rim of the great Sahara Desert. He was standing
before a goat-skin tent amidst a clump of date palms within
a tiny oasis. Close by was an Arab douar of some eight
or ten tents.
I had come down from the north to hunt lion. My party
consisted of a dozen children of the desert--I was the only
"white" man. As we approached the little clump of verdure
I saw the man come from his tent and with hand-shaded eyes
peer intently at us. At sight of me he advanced rapidly
to meet us.
"A white man!" he cried. "May the good Lord be praised! I
have been watching you for hours, hoping against hope that
THIS time there would be a white man. Tell me the date.
What year is it?"
And when I had told him he staggered as though he had
been struck full in the face, so that he was compelled
to grasp my stirrup leather for support.
"It cannot be!" he cried after a moment. "It cannot be!
Tell me that you are mistaken, or that you are but joking."
"I am telling you the truth, my friend," I replied.
"Why should I deceive a stranger, or attempt to, in so
simple a matter as the date?"
For some time he stood in silence, with bowed head.
"Ten years!" he murmured, at last. "Ten years, and I
thought that at the most it could be scarce more than one!"
That night he told me his story--the story that I give you
here as nearly in his own words as I can recall them.
I
TOWARD THE ETERNAL FIRES
I WAS BORN IN CONNECTICUT ABOUT THIRTY YEARS ago.
My name is David Innes. My father was a wealthy mine owner.
When I was nineteen he died. All his property was to be
mine when I had attained my majority--provided that I
had devoted the two years intervening in close application
to the great business I was to inherit.
I did my best to fulfil the last wishes of my parent--
not because of the inheritance, but because I loved
and honored my father. For six months I toiled in the
mines and in the counting-rooms, for I wished to know
every minute detail of the business.
Then Perry interested me in his invention. He was an old
fellow who had devoted the better part of a long life
to the perfection of a mechanical subterranean prospector.
As relaxation he studied paleontology. I looked over
his plans, listened to his arguments, inspected his working
model--and then, convinced, I advanced the funds necessary
to construct a full-sized, practical prospector.
I shall not go into the details of its construction--it lies
out there in the desert now--about two miles from here.
Tomorrow you may care to ride out and see it. Roughly, it is
a steel cylinder a hundred feet long, and jointed so that
it may turn and twist through solid rock if need be.
At one end is a mighty revolving drill operated by an
engine which Perry said generated more power to the cubic
inch than any other engine did to the cubic foot.
I remember that he used to claim that that invention
alone would make us fabulously wealthy--we were going
to make the whole thing public after the successful issue
of our first secret trial--but Perry never returned
from that trial trip, and I only after ten years.
I recall as it were but yesterday the night of that momentous
occasion upon which we were to test the practicality
of that wondrous invention. It was near midnight when we
repaired to the lofty tower in which Perry had constructed
his "iron mole" as he was wont to call the thing.
The great nose rested upon the bare earth of the floor.
We passed through the doors into the outer jacket,
secured them, and then passing on into the cabin,
which contained the controlling mechanism within the
inner tube, switched on the electric lights.
Perry looked to his generator; to the great tanks that held
the life-giving chemicals with which he was to manufacture
fresh air to replace that which we consumed in breathing;
to his instruments for recording temperatures, speed, distance,
and for examining the materials through which we were to pass.
He tested the steering device, and overlooked the mighty
cogs which transmitted its marvelous velocity to the giant
drill at the nose of his strange craft.
Our seats, into which we strapped ourselves, were so arranged
upon transverse bars that we would be upright whether
the craft were ploughing her way downward into the bowels
of the earth, or running horizontally along some great
seam of coal, or rising vertically toward the surface again.
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