Beatrice, all at once overcome by sudden giddiness, drew back and hid her face in both hands.
“No bottom to it--no end!” she said in a scared tone. “Here's the end of the world, right here, and beyond this very rock--nothing!”
Stern, puzzled, shook his head.
“That's really impossible, absurd and ridiculous, of course,” he answered. “There must be something beyond. The way this stone falls proves that.”
He pitched a two-pound lump of granite far out into the air. It fell vertically, whirling, and vanished with the speed of a meteor.
“If a whole side of the earth had split off, and what we see down below there were really sky, of course the earth's center of gravity would have shifted,” he explained, “and that rock would have fallen in toward the cliff below us, not straight down.”
“How can you be sure it doesn't fall that way after the impulse you gave it has been lost?”
“I shall have to make some close scientific tests here, lasting a day or two, before I'm positive; but my impression is that this, after all, is only a cañon--a split in the surface--rather than an actual end of the crust.”
“But if it were a cañon, why should blue sky show down there at an angle of forty-five degrees?”
“I'll have to think that out, later,” he replied. “Directly under us, you see all seems deep purple. That's another fact to consider. I tell you, Beatrice, there's more to be figured out here than can be done in half an hour.