-upon the slip of paper!

David's initials were these--David Innes.

I smiled at my imaginings. I ridiculed the assumption that there was
an inner world and that these wires led downward through the earth's
crust to the surface of Pellucidar. And yet--

Well, I sat there all night, listening to that tantalizing clicking,
now and then moving the sending-key just to let the other end know that
the instrument had been discovered. In the morning, after carefully
returning the box to its hole and covering it over with sand, I called
my servants about me, snatched a hurried breakfast, mounted my horse,
and started upon a forced march for Algiers.

I arrived here today. In writing you this letter I feel that I am
making a fool of myself.

There is no David Innes.

There is no Dian the Beautiful.

There is no world within a world.

Pellucidar is but a realm of your imagination--nothing more.

BUT--

The incident of the finding of that buried telegraph instrument upon
the lonely Sahara is little short of uncanny, in view of your story of
the adventures of David Innes.

I have called it one of the most remarkable coincidences in modern
fiction. I called it literature before, but--again pardon my
candor--your story is not.

And now--why am I writing you?

Heaven knows, unless it is that the persistent clicking of that
unfathomable enigma out there in the vast silences of the Sahara has so
wrought upon my nerves that reason refuses longer to function sanely.

I cannot hear it now, yet I know that far away to the south, all alone
beneath the sands, it is still pounding out its vain, frantic appeal.

It is maddening.

It is your fault--I want you to release me from it.

Cable me at once, at my expense, that there was no basis of fact for
your story, At the Earth's Core.

Very respectfully yours,

COGDON NESTOR,
---- and ---- Club,
Algiers.
June 1st, --.

Ten minutes after reading this letter I had cabled Mr. Nestor as
follows:

Story true. Await me Algiers.

As fast as train and boat would carry me, I sped toward my destination.
For all those dragging days my mind was a whirl of mad conjecture, of
frantic hope, of numbing fear.

The finding of the telegraph-instrument practically assured me that
David Innes had driven Perry's iron mole back through the earth's crust
to the buried world of Pellucidar; but what adventures had befallen him
since his return?

Had he found Dian