It was a kind of gigantic well, on the floor of which and to one side were situated the two little lakes we had seen from above. Considerable water flowed into them from crevices in the walls, and the place was overshadowed at one point by a projecting ledge that formed a portico to a cavernous recess. Leaden colored fish rose and sank in the water of the lakes, and we thought the gulls, who must have penetrated to this remote asylum from Beaufort Sea, had been attracted by them. It proved to be a dreary, bare hole and instilled in us a feeling half despairing and melancholy.
“This isn’t the gayest place in the world,” said Hopkins. “Our insect friends certainly didn’t come here for recreation. Looks like a smuggler’s retreat, or a den of crime. Perhaps we may find here some enchanted troubadour, a chained damsel, a lurking dragon, or the fountain of eternal youth, which those cadaverous anchorites we saw upstairs visit occasionally to keep the life in their shivering shells. Or—”
“What’s this?” exclaimed Goritz, his muffled voice proceeding from the recess into which he had penetrated, entering its prolongation, which became a sort of cave.
We rushed forward, all keyed now to an excited limit of curiosity, so that, as Hopkins expressed it afterwards, “an invitation from the angel Gabriel to step into Paradise, wouldn’t have phased us much, in fact would have been an ordinary incident in our investigations.”
“What is it, Antoine?” I cried as I reached him and found him gazing in bewilderment at a shining nodule of something ahead of him, in the deeper gloom within. I asked no more questions, but stood still with him, wondering. The others came up and we all gazed awhile, transfixed by a common astonishment.
The glowing mass, perhaps about the size of a baby’s closed hand, shed a mellow radiance about the cave; its light draped our own figures, and it was reflected from innumerable bright points which spangled here and there on the floor and walls like minute lamps.
“Diamonds,” murmured Goritz, awestruck.
The place was heated, and the light made us shade our eyes. The Professor had moved alertly forward in an impulse of almost desperate joy. He stood in wrapt contemplation of the luminiferous chunk, then he struck one of the scintillating projections, a piece detached itself, and showered some splinters through the air to the ground. The splinters shimmered like microscopic mirrors.
“Sphalerite,” he cried. “Zinc sulphide! This is literally a chamber of Sphalerite, a huge pocket enclosed in the limestone. It has been worked somewhat; its extension in the rock is probably very deep; and, gentlemen,” this apostrophe accompanied by upraised hands, palms supplicatingly held towards us, always denoted some especially disturbing or exhilarating announcement, “this light proceeds from some natural phosphori. It may be,” he paused to allow our minds to adjust themselves to a new attitude of marveling, “it may be RADIUM. We are in a world of transmutations, the home of the Stone of the Philosopher. In the world we have left—” the language was positive, convincing, for now the feeling of translation from all the familiarities of the world of Europe and America grew persistently, even though plants and animals expressed a similar life—“in that world, the combined product of all its mines, of all its laboratories, scarcely exceeds Two Grammes. Here is perhaps four ounces, or the Quarter of a Pound, and—”
It was then that a black clot, shaping itself in irregular fingers with blue and yellow fringes revolving raggedly around it closed my eyes. But before vision departed, I saw the Professor clutch his breast, stagger forward, and I heard him cry, “Out, out!” and then I felt my knees stung by the pointed stones and, blindly groping, I crawled away.