It was later, I do not know how long, that I recovered my sight and around me, languid and prostrate; though reviving as I was, were my comrades.
“Transmutation?” said Hopkins, feebly smiling. “It was pretty nearly a transference over the river, and no return trip-slip either.”
“Heaven! How my head aches,” groaned Goritz.
“Gentlemen,” the Professor gurgled, flat on his back and sicker than any of us, but with his scientific apparatus under control and working smoothly, “we are on the eve of great discoveries. The papers which I can prepare for the Royal Academy of Sciences will throw a flood of light on a subject hitherto only darkly approached. I am confident that we were in the presence of a monstrous—monstrous comparatively, you observe—mass of radium. Further, I feel sure that the Stationary Sun that maintains a perpetual day in this remarkable land has something to do with radium emanations from the Interior of the Earth!”
The poor gentleman stopped abruptly, some peculiar evidences of his own interior activity just then making him roll over and refrain from speech, because he was otherwise engaged.
“Do you suppose,” asked Hopkins, “that those aeronautical hairpins left that gold brick inside there?”
“Certainly,” answered the dilapidated Goritz. “And they were up to something curious perhaps. Why, somehow I can only think of Aladdin and the lamp in the Arabian Nights. You remember it?”
“Of course, Antoine, but you see there are devilments here that are not so very beguiling or so very profitable. At any rate let us get out of here. The wind has risen; a storm is coming on. The darkness above looks interesting; in this hole it will be just stupidly pitch black. I feel half suffocated in this pit. There isn’t a very promising chance for our survival if we go on into this radium land, with a sun made of radium, when a handful turns us into puppets and pretty nearly into corpses. I say leave it, leave it all. It’s madness to go farther.”
“You are mistaken—mistaken,” interrupted the Professor, who had regained his composure. “The proximity—the reflections—our own unadaptability—fatigue—the closeness of the confined space and the—the—unmitigated monotony of our food made us ill. No—no—We must see it all. It will be the miracle of the century.”
He gasped out his remonstrance and explanations in dissected sentences that measurably restored my good humor, so funny were they. A little later and we had set about getting back to the balsams on the cliff top, and to the small shelter we had so far managed to construct, and whose protection in a storm seemed very attractive. The storm itself in these strange quarters promised new scenic effects, and its meteorological features might exceed all possible anticipation. Three of us had become ecstatically anxious to see everything, one of us (myself) shrank from his own baleful premonition of the future.