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"Also!" The Doktor Professor turned a lever. "Here goes." An eerie moan sounded from below the floor, climbing slowly in pitch. Motors began to grind and clatter, and the entire machine started to vibrate.

"When do we start?" Rupert asked after the vibration and clatter had gone on for a while. He seemed to have recovered a little of his colour. "It seems to be taking rather a long time. Maybe it isn’t working properly?"

"But we already haff started, mein young friend." Doktor Professor von Schtinkerfussen peered at him, and pointed to a dial on which a hand was crawling slowly across the arc of numbers. "Already we are far beneath der ground."

Startled, for she had felt no descent, Eugenia turned to the window at her shoulder. Through the thick round pane of glass, the world outside was completely dark. The shed and its lights had vanished.

"Soon," said the Professor, "we shall at der depth of der deepest mines be." He rubbed his hands together. "Und dann we will of all the people of the vorlt be the ones, who deepest under der ground haff been."

"But there’s nothing to see outside," Eugenia objected. "I can’t see a thing."

"There will be, when we haff gone deep enough," the Professor said. He fiddled with a knob here, and pressed a lever there, and the moan grew to a whine, and the whine to an eldritch scream. "There," he said, "now we faster descending are."

"You mean," Eugenia said, "we’re drilling through the ground?" It brought to her mind an image of the machine spinning round and round, and that made her feel suddenly queasy. "Is that what we’re doing?"

"No, no, mein dear young Fraülein." The Professor shook his head indulgently. "Atomic rays I discovered have, und made generators for, under der machine which fitted are. They melt der way through rocks und soil, like a hot knife through butter."

"The wonders of modern science," Eugenia murmured. "I shouldn’t really be surprised, since it is almost the end of the nineteenth century, but still, I am."

"Tell us again, Professor, about your theories." Rupert had recovered his normal complexion and only a slight sheen of sweat now lay across his handsome features. His immense shoulders flexed as he adjusted his coat. "What were you saying about the cities at the core?"

"Ja," Doktor Professor von Schtinkerfussen said. "I was saying, das all people wrong are, who say the earth is only a solid ball of rock und iron, floating on top of a molten core. It is not true, und I, Ludwig von Schtinkerfussen, shall prove it once und for all." He took off and polished his spectacles. "Der Earth," he said, "more than only one intelligent species has. Man is not alone. We haff equals, und they live far below us, in cities at der core."

"But how is that possible?" Rupert asked. "The pressure of the rock above –"

"They adapted to it are, of course." The Doktor Professor opened a box and took out a paper. "See here, mein young friends. This is a picture I haff taken by der new X Rays, of der world far down at der core."

Rupert and Eugenia leaned together over the paper. It was as though they were looking down from a mountaintop at a distant plain, Eugenia thought, or from a balloon; and those concentric rings and radial lines were the streets of some town far, far below.

She must have said something of this aloud, because the Professor nodded approvingly. "But precisely, my dear young lady. Those are der avenues of some gigantic city, so great that we cannot even begin to it imagine. You may understand how big if I say das that city bigger than Switzerland, perhaps, is."

Rupert snorted. "You’re imagining things, Professor. It’s just some kind of mineral formation, perhaps."

"Minerals? In those lines so straight? I never haff about such mineral deposits in all my life heard."

"Well, then," Rupert argued, "maybe it’s like one of those buried cities the archaeologists keep digging up. Maybe it’s Atlantis or one of the other cities of the ancients, which got buried with the passage of time."

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