When the World Screamed Part 3

**Ben Tucker** (0:00)
Part 3 of When the World Screamed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Read by Ben Tucker.
Part 3 There was an annex to the Engine House into which he led me. A number of baggy suits of the lightest tusser material were hanging from the wall. Following Malone's example, I took off every stitch of my clothes and put on one of these suits together with a pair of rubber-soled slippers. Malone finished before I did and left the dressing room. A moment later, I heard a noise like ten dog fights rolled into one, and rushing out, I found my friend rolling on the ground with his arms around the workman, who was helping to stack my artesian tubing. He was endeavoring to tear something from him to which the other was most desperately clinging. But Malone was too strong for him, tore the object out of his grasp, and danced upon it until it was shattered to pieces. Only then did I recognize that it was a photographic camera. My grimy-faced artisan rose ruefully from the floor. Confound you, Ted Malone, said he. That was a new Tengenny machine. Can't help it, Roy. I saw you take the snop, and there was only one thing to do. How the devil did you get mixed up with my outfit? I asked with righteous indignation. The rascal winked and grinned. There are always ways and means, said he. But don't blame your foreman. He thought it was just a rag. I swapped clothes with his assistant, and in I came. An out you go, said Malone. No use arguing, Roy. If Challenger were here, he would set the dogs on you. I've been in a hole myself, so I won't be hard. But I am watchdog here, and I can bite as well as bark. Come on, out you march. So our enterprising visitor was marched by two grinning workmen out of the compound. So now the public will at last understand the genesis of that wonderful four-column article titled Mad Dream of a Scientist with the subtitle A Beeline to Australia, which appeared in The Advisor some days later and brought Challenger to the verge of apoplexy and the editor of The Advisor to the most disagreeable and dangerous interview of his lifetime.
The article was a highly colored and exaggerated account of the adventure of Roy Perkins, our experienced war correspondent, and it contained such purple passages as this hirsute bully of Enmore Gardens, a compound guarded by barbed wire, plug uglies, and bloodhounds. And finally, I was dragged from the edge of the Anglo-Australian tunnel by two ruffians, the more savage being a jack of all trades whom I had previously known by sight as a hanger-on of the journalistic profession, while the other, a sinister figure in a strange tropical garb, was posing as an artesian engineer, though his appearance was more reminiscent of Whitechapel.
Having ticked us off in this way, the rascal had an elaborate description of rails at the pit-mouth and of a zigzag excavation by which funicular trains were to burrow into the earth. The only practical inconvenience arising from the article was that it notably increased that line of loafers who sat upon the south domes waiting for something to happen. The day came when it did happen and when they wished themselves elsewhere. My foreman, with his faked assistant, had littered the place with all my apparatus, my bow-box, my crow's foot, the V-drills, the rods, and the weight, but Malone insisted that we disregard all that and descend ourselves to the lowest level. To this end we entered the cage which was of lattice steel, and in the company of the chief engineer we shot down into the bowels of the earth. There were a series of automatic lifts, each with its own operating station hollowed out in the side of the excavation. They operated with great speed, and the experience was more like a vertical railway journey than the deliberate fall which we associated with the British lift.
Since the cage was lattice and brightly illuminated, we had a clear view of the strata through which we passed. I was conscious of each of them as we flashed past. There were the sallow lower chalk, the coffee-colored Hastings beds, the lighter Ashburn beds, the dark Carboniferous clays, and then gleaming in the electric light, band after band of jet black sparkling coal, alternating with the rings of clay.
Here and there, brickwork had been inserted. But as a rule, the shaft was self-supported, and one could but marvel at the immense labor and mechanical skill which it represented. Beneath the coal beds I was conscious of jumbled strata of a concrete-like appearance, and then we shot down into the primitive granite, where the quartz crystals gleamed and twinkled, as if the dark walls were sown with the dust of diamonds. Down we went, and ever down, lower now than mortals had ever before penetrated. The archaic rocks varied wonderfully in color, and I could never forget one broad belt of rose-colored feldspar, which shone with an unearthly beauty before our powerful lamps. Stage after stage and lift after lift, the air getting ever closer and hotter, until even the light tussler garments were intolerable, and the sweat was pouring down into those rubber-soled slippers. At last, just as I was thinking that I could stand it no more, the last lift came to a stand, and we stepped out upon a circular platform, which had been cut in the rock. I noticed that Malone gave a curiously suspicious glance round at the walls as he did so.