e had perfect
control of the engine and car, and sometimes he went down rapidly,
sometimes slowly, and frequently he stopped. As he continued to descend,
his amazement at the wonderful depth of the shaft became greater and
greater and his mind was totally unable to appreciate the situation.
Still he was not frightened, and went on down.

At last Rovinski emerged into the cave of light. There he stopped, the
car hanging some twenty or thirty feet above the bottom. He looked out,
he saw the shell, he saw the vast expanse of lighted nothingness, he
tried to imagine what it was that that mass of iron rested upon. If he
had not seen it, he would have thought he had come out into the upper
air of some bottomless cavern. But a great iron machine nearly twenty
feet long could not rest upon air! He thought he might be dreaming; he
sat up and shut his eyes; in a few minutes he would open them and see if
he still saw the same incomprehensible things.

The downward passage of Rovinski had occupied a great deal more time
than he had calculated for. He had stopped so much, and had been so
careful to examine the walls of the shaft, that morning had now arrived
in the upper world, and it was at this moment, as he sat with his eyes
closed, that William Cunningham looked down into the mouth of the shaft.

Cunningham was an observing man, and that morning he had picked up a
pin and stuck it in the lapel of his rough coat, but he had done this
hastily and carelessly. The pin was of a recently invented kind, being
of a light, elastic metal, with its head of steel. As Cunningham leaned
forward the pin slipped out of his coat; it fell through one of the
openings in the grating, and descended the shaft head downward.

For the first quarter of a mile the pin went swiftly in an absolutely
perpendicular line, nearly at the middle of the shaft. For the next
three-quarters of a mile it went down like a rifle-ball. For the next
five miles it sped on as if it had been a planet revolving in space.
Then, for eight miles, this pin, falling perpendicularly through
a greater distance than any object on this earth had ever fallen
perpendicularly, went downward with a velocity like that of light. Its
head struck the top of the car, which was hanging motionless in the cave
of light; it did not glance off, for its momentum was so great that it
would glance from nothing. It passed through that steel roof; it passed
through Rovinski's head, through his heart