rd. Then the train began to dip down and the steel sides of the
entrance became too high for me to see over. My friend of the silver
hair had already turned off the light, and now I knew by the darkness
that we had entered the Tube. For some time I lay awake thinking of
"Dutch" and the ultimate failure of his life's dream, as he had outlined
it to me, and then I sank into a deep, dreamless sleep.

I was awakened by a terrible shock that hurled me up against the side of
the compartment. A dull, red glow poured through the port-hole, lighting
up the interior with a weird, bloody reflection. I crept painfully up to
the port-hole and looked out. The strangest sight that man has ever
looked upon met my eyes. The side of the wall had blown out into a
gigantic cavern, and with it the rest of the cars had rolled down the
bluff a tangled, twisted mass of steel. My car had almost passed by, and
now it still stuck in the tube, even though the last port-hole through
which I peered seemed to be suspended in air. But it was not the wrecked
cars from which rose such wails of despair and agony that held my
attention, but the cavern itself. For it was not really a cave, but a
vast underground city whose wide, marble streets stretched away to an
inferno of flame and lava. By the terrible light was lit up a great
white palace with its gold-tipped scrolls, and closer to me, the golden
temple of the Sun, with its tiers of lustrous yellow stairs--stairs worn
by the feet of many generations.

Above the stairs towered the great statue of a man on horseback. He was
dressed in a sort of tunic, and in his uplifted arm he carried a scroll
as if for the people to read. His face was turned toward me, and I
marveled even in that wild moment that the unknown sculptor could have
caught such an expression of appeal. I can see the high intellectual
brow as if it were before me at this moment--the level, sympathetic eyes
and the firm chin.

* * * * *

Then something moving caught my eyes, and I swear I saw a child--a
living child coming from the burning city--running madly, breathlessly
from a wave of glowing lava that threatened to engulf him at any moment.
In spite of all the ridicule that has been showered upon me, I still
declare that the child did not come from the wreckage and that he wore a
tunic similar to the one of the statue and not the torn bit of a
nightgown or sheet.

He was some distance from me, but I co