City of Endless Night

by Milo Hastings

Upon arrival at the bottom we were surprised to find it free from water, save for a trickling stream. The second thing we discovered was a pile of huddled skeletons of the workmen who had perished over a century previous. But our third and most important discovery was a boring from which the poisonous gas was slowly issuing. It took but a few hours to provide an apparatus to fire this gas as fast as it issued, and the potash mines of Stassfurt were regained for the world.

My associates were for beginning mining operations at once, but I had been granted a twenty years' franchise on the output of these mines, and I was in no such haste. The boring from which this poisonous vapour issued was clearly man-made; moreover I alone knew the formula of that gas and had convinced myself once for all as to its man-made origin. I sent for microphones and with their aid speedily detected the sound of machinery in other workings beneath.

It is easy now to see that I erred in risking my own life as I did without the precaution of confiding the secret of my discovery to others. But those were days of feverish excitement. Impulsively I decided to make the first attack on the Germans as a private enterprise and then call for military aid. I had my own equipment of poisonous bombs and my sapping and mining experts determined that the German workings were but eighty metres beneath us. Hastily, among the crumbling skeletons, we set up our electrical boring machinery and began sinking a one-metre shaft towards the nearest sound.

After twenty hours of boring, the drill head suddenly came off and rattled down into a cavern. We saw a light and heard guttural shouting below and the cracking of a gun as a few bullets spattered against the roof of our chamber. We heaved down our gas bombs and covered over our shaft. Within a few hours the light below went out and our microphones failed to detect any sound from the rocks beneath us. It was then perhaps that I should have called for military aid, but the uncanny silence of the lower workings proved too much for my eager curiosity. We waited two days and still there was no evidence of life below. I knew there had been ample time for the gas from our bombs to have been dissipated, as it was decomposed by contact with moisture. A light was lowered, but this brought forth no response.

I now called for a volunteer to descend the shaft. None was forthcoming from among my men, and against their protest I insisted on being lowered into the shaft. When I was a few metres from the bottom the cable parted and I fell and lay stunned on the floor below.

~2~

When I recovered consciousness the light had gone out. There was no sound about me. I shouted up the shaft above and could get no answer. The chamber in which I lay was many times my height and I could make nothing out in the dark hole above. For some hours I scarcely stirred and feared to burn my pocket flash both because it might reveal my presence to lurking enemies and because I wished to conserve my battery against graver need.

But no rescue came from my men above. Only recently, after the lapse of years, did I learn the cause of their deserting me. As I lay stunned from my fall, my men, unable to get answer to their shoutings, had given me up for dead. Meanwhile the apparatus which caused the destruction of the German gas had gone wrong. My associates, unable to fix it, had fled from the mine and abandoned the enterprise.

After some hours of waiting I stirred about and found means to erect a rough scaffold and reach the mouth of the shaft above me. I attempted to climb, but, unable to get a hold on the smooth wet rock, I gave up exhausted and despairing. Entombed in the depths of the earth, I was either a prisoner of the German potash miners, if any remained alive, or a prisoner of the earth itself, with dead men for company.

Collecting my courage I set about to explore my surroundings. I found some mining machinery evidently damaged by the explosion of our gas bombs. There was no evidence of men about, living or dead. Stealthily I set out along the little railway track that ran through a passage down a steep incline. As I progressed I felt the air rapidly becoming colder. Presently I stumbled upon the first victim of our gas bombs, fallen headlong as he was fleeing. I hurried on. The air seemed to be blowing in my face and the cold was becoming intense. This puzzled me for at this depth the temperature should have been above that on the surface of the earth.