erful shaft of light still present to their mental visions.

For more than two hours Roland Clewe exhibited the action of his
Artesian ray. Then he called the company to order. He had shown them his
shaft of light, and now he would give them some facts in regard to the
real shaft made by the automatic shell.

Every man who had been concerned in Mr. Clewe's descent into the shaft,
and those who had assisted in the sounding and the photographing, as
well as the persons who had been present when Rovinski was drawn up
from its depths, now came forward and gave his testimony. Clewe then
exhibited the photographs he had taken with his suspended camera, and
to the geologists present these were revelations of absorbing interest;
seeing so much that they understood, it was difficult to doubt what they
saw and did not understand.

Now that what Clewe had just told them was substantiated by a number of
witnesses, and now that they had heard from these men that a plummet, a
camera, and a car had been lowered fourteen miles into the bowels of the
earth, they had no reason to suppose that the great shaft had existed
only in the imagination of one crazy man, and they could not believe
that all these assistants and workmen were lunatics or liars. Still they
doubted. Clewe could see that in their faces as they intently listened
to him.

"My friends," said he, "I have set before you nearly all the facts
connected with my experience in the shaft, but one important fact I have
not yet mentioned. I am quite sure that few, if any of you, believe that
I descended into the cleft of a great diamond lying beneath what we call
the crust of the earth. I will now state that before I left that cavity
I picked up some fragments of the material of which it is composed,
which were splintered off when my shell fell into it. I will show you
one of them."

A man brought a table covered with a blue cloth, and from one of his
pockets Clewe drew a small bag. Opening this, he took out a diamond
which he had brought up from the cave of light, and placed it on the
middle of the table.

"This," he said, "is a fragment of the mass of diamond into which I
descended. I have called it 'The Great Stone of Sardis.'"

Nobody spoke, nobody seemed to breathe. The huge diamond, of the
form and size of a large lemon, lay glowing upon the dark cloth, its
irregular facets--all of them clean-cut and polished, the results
of fracture--absorbed and reflected the light,