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"Light from above only has to pierce forty or fifty ht it's excessively rarified While down below earth-level, of course, it would get more and more dense all the time, till at the bottom of a five-hundred-mile drop the density and pressure would be treazing at filled her with soleed, rent and riven, the rock extended doard Here vast and broken ledges ran along its flanks--red, yellow, black, all seared and burned and vitrified as by the fire of Hell; there huge masses, up-piled, seemed about to fall into the abyss

A quarter-mile to southward, a rivulet had found its way over a projecting ledge Spraying and silvery it fell, till, dissipated by the up-draft froe on which they were lying extended doard perhaps three hundred yards, then sloped backward, leaving sheer empty space beneath them They seemed to be poised in mid-heaven It was totally unlike the sensation on athe clouds; for aup toward an unfathomable, infinite dome above him

He shuddered, despite his cool and scientific spirit of observation

"So on somewhere down there," said he, half to divert his own attention frohts "Smell that sulphur? If this place wasn't once the scene of volcanic activities, I'e!"

A moderate yet very steady wind bleard frohted with a scent of sulphur and some other substance new to Stern

Beatrice, all at once overcoiddiness, 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 "Therebeyond The way this stone falls proves that"

He pitched a two-pound luranite 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 e 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 iave it has been lost?"

"I shall have toa day or two, before I'm positive; but my impression is that this, after all, is only a canyon--a split in the surface--rather than an actual end of the crust"