The diameter of this enormous pit was fully a thousand feet. The
walls were smooth and appeared to be composed of a black, basaltic
rock.
For a moment the vessel hovered motionless directly above the centre
of the gaping void, then slowly she began to settle into the black
chasm. Lower and lower she sank until as darkness enveloped us
her lights were thrown on and in the dim halo of her own radiance
the monster battleship dropped on and on down into what seemed to
me must be the very bowels of Barsoom.
For quite half an hour we descended and then the shaft terminated
abruptly in the dome of a mighty subterranean world. Below us rose
and fell the billows of a buried sea. A phosphorescent radiance
illuminated the scene. Thousands of ships dotted the bosom of the
ocean. Little islands rose here and there to support the strange
and colourless vegetation of this strange world.
Slowly and with majestic grace the battleship dropped until
she rested on the water. Her great propellers had been drawn and
housed during our descent of the shaft and in their place had been
run out the smaller but more powerful water propellers. As these
commenced to revolve the ship took up its journey once more, riding
the new element as buoyantly and as safely as she had the air.
Phaidor and I were dumbfounded. Neither had either heard or dreamed
that such a world existed beneath the surface of Barsoom.
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