Steampunk Prime_ A Vintage Steampunk Reader - Mike Ashley [36]
“Anyway, I think the current ought to be switched out.”
“Yes, cut the current! Stop the current!” Some voices in the crowd took up the cry.
“Switch it off! Switch it off!”
“Perhaps — yes,” acquiesced the managing director. He turned to go towards the works. At this moment enormous waves of chlorine burst from the tunnel, as if driven out by some hidden force, and a dull, rumbling sound could be heard; louder, louder it grew, till the earth shook with its reverberating clamor, and at a hundred miles an hour the menaced train crashed out of the tunnel!
At that moment the current was switched off.
The train gradually lost its momentum and came to a standstill, revealing this dreadful spectacle. There, on the driving-seat; still gripping the lever back to the last notch, a dead man sat, his face horribly contorted in the last agony of asphyxiation. In death, and after death, the motor-man had done his duty!
Horror was written on every face. Was this, then, a train of death? Had everyone perished?
“Oh, heavens! How horrible!”
A low whimper of terror — then mad cries of joy! Men had leaped upon the footboard while the train was still running and now flung wide the doors. Inside the carriages, hermetically closed by James Harward’s orders, the chlorine had failed to penetrate. The passengers were safe.
In the last carriage a man lay bleeding, his face blackened and tortured. It was the engineer whose heroic devotion had saved the train. The explosion caused by the shattering of the live rail had hurled him senseless on the line. But his men were fond of him, and one of them had run back and by the light of the flaming arc had found his chief’s body. Nearly suffocated, he had just managed to hoist it into the last carriage when the train started.
Now Harward was stretched on a seat and by his side, sobbing, knelt Blanche Glencoe.
“It was for us,” she murmured, in a broken voice — ” for me — that he sacrificed himself, that he died.”
A doctor approached and examined the engineer. With a sad gesture he replied to the girl’s mute question. All was over.
With streaming eyes Blanche bent over the body of her lover and imprinted on his brow a long, long kiss — the kiss of betrothal — and adieu.
Oh, God! What was that?
Under the girl’s passionate kiss a quiver seemed to run through the lifeless body. A tinge of color crept into the white cheeks! Harward seemed to make an effort to move; his lips trembled, his lids fluttered open! Then consciousness crept into his eyes, and with it a look of ineffable happiness. He tried to raise himself, smiled at Blanche, and fell back exhausted.
“He will live,” said the doctor, after another and more careful examination. And Blanche, overcome by so many emotions, fell sobbing into her father’s arms.
Some months later the London-Africa Express came out of the Gibraltar Tunnel at great speed, bearing on his honeymoon trip to South Africa the new managing director of the Gibraltar Tunnel Railway Company and his charming bride, Blanche Glencoe.
FROM POLE TO POLE
George Griffith
A tunnel from Europe to Africa may be a feat, but why stop there? Why not tunnel right through the Earth? In fact, you may not even need to do that. In the following story Professor Haffkin proposes that when the Earth cooled a hollow tube remained right through the Earth along the axis of rotation, making the Earth like a giant doughnut. Access to the tunnel is via the North or South Pole neither of which, at the time this story was written (1904) had been reached. This idea had been around for nearly a century. It was first proposed in 1818 by John Cleves Symmes (1779-1829), a retired Army captain, who even calculated its position and dimensions. He lobbied government to finance an expedition but was unsuccessful. He caused such a fuss that his ideas were lampooned in Symzonia (1820), credited to its narrator Adam Seaborn. This novel takes the adventurer into the Earth’s interior where he finds another civilization. The idea caught hold and was incorporated by Edgar Allan Poe into The