"
He informed me that they sank the shaft with rotary drilling machines,
cutting a channel one inch wide and five feet in depth, leaving a core
nine feet ten inches in diameter in which four holes were drilled four
feet six inches in depth and loaded with a new explosive as powerful as
dynamite but without its injurious fumes and perfectly safe to handle at
any temperature. They averaged in sinking twelve feet daily and as they
went down the rock became more compact and finer grained. As there were
no hot springs in the vicinity and no signs of volcanic action even in
prehistoric times, the temperature of the rock even at the
sixty-four-thousand-foot level was only one hundred and twenty degrees
Fahrenheit, and any increase of temperature in the workings was owing to
the electric light generating heat in the dense atmosphere of the lower
levels. My companion invited me to weigh myself on the ore scales and to
my astonishment I only weighed one hundred and twenty pounds, and I
exclaimed that something was wrong with the scales, but my companion
offered to take the scales up with us to the surface and test them. We
did so and on weighing myself again the beam tipped at one
hundred and sixty pounds my regular weight.
Pages:
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48