The Underground City | Page 6

first communication was now without object? Did someone
wish to prevent James Starr from troubling himself either uselessly or otherwise? Might
there not be rather a malevolent intention to thwart Ford's plans?
This was the conclusion at which James Starr arrived, after mature reflection. The
contradiction which existed between the two letters only wrought in him a more keen
desire to visit the Dochart pit. And besides, if after all it was a hoax, it was well worth
while to prove it. Starr also thought it wiser to give more credence to the first letter than
to the second; that is to say, to the request of such a man as Simon Ford, rather than to the
warning of his anonymous contradictor.
"Indeed," said he, "the fact of anyone endeavoring to influence my resolution, shows that
Ford's communication must be of great importance. To-morrow, at the appointed time, I
shall be at the rendezvous."
In the evening, Starr made his preparations for departure. As it might happen that his
absence would be prolonged for some days, he wrote to Sir W. Elphiston, President of the
Royal Institution, that he should be unable to be present at the next meeting of the
Society. He also wrote to excuse himself from two or three engagements which he had
made for the week. Then, having ordered his servant to pack a traveling bag, he went to
bed, more excited than the affair perhaps warranted.
The next day, at five o'clock, James Starr jumped out of bed, dressed himself warmly, for

a cold rain was falling, and left his house in the Canongate, to go to Granton Pier to catch
the steamer, which in three hours would take him up the Forth as far as Stirling.
For the first time in his life, perhaps, in passing along the Canongate, he did NOT TURN
TO LOOK AT HOLYROOD, the palace of the former sovereigns of Scotland. He did not
notice the sentinels who stood before its gateways, dressed in the uniform of their
Highland regiment, tartan kilt, plaid and sporran complete. His whole thought was to
reach Callander where Harry Ford was supposedly awaiting him.
The better to understand this narrative, it will be as well to hear a few words on the origin
of coal. During the geological epoch, when the terrestrial spheroid was still in course of
formation, a thick atmosphere surrounded it, saturated with watery vapors, and copiously
impregnated with carbonic acid. The vapors gradually condensed in diluvial rains, which
fell as if they had leapt from the necks of thousands of millions of seltzer water bottles.
This liquid, loaded with carbonic acid, rushed in torrents over a deep soft soil, subject to
sudden or slow alterations of
form, and maintained in its semi-fluid state as much by the heat of the sun as by the fires
of the interior mass. The internal heat had not as yet been collected in the center of the
globe. The terrestrial crust, thin and incompletely hardened, allowed it to spread through
its pores. This caused a peculiar form of vegetation, such as is probably produced on the
surface of the inferior planets, Venus or Mercury, which revolve nearer than our earth
around the radiant sun of our system.
The soil of the continents was covered with immense forests. Carbonic acid, so suitable
for the development of the vegetable kingdom, abounded. The feet of these trees were
drowned in a sort of immense lagoon, kept continually full by currents of fresh and salt
waters. They eagerly assimilated to themselves the carbon which they, little by little,
extracted from the atmosphere, as yet unfit for the function of life, and it may be said that
they were destined to store it, in the form of coal, in the very bowels of the earth.
It was the earthquake period, caused by internal convulsions, which suddenly modified
the unsettled features of the terrestrial surface. Here, an intumescence which was to
become a mountain, there, an abyss which was to be filled with an ocean or a sea. There,
whole forests sunk through the earth's crust, below the unfixed strata, either until they
found a resting-place, such as the primitive bed of granitic rock, or, settling together in a
heap, they formed a solid mass.
As the waters were contained in no bed, and were spread over every part of the globe,
they rushed where they liked, tearing from the scarcely-formed rocks material with which
to compose schists, sandstones, and limestones. This the roving waves bore over the
submerged and now peaty forests, and deposited above them the elements of rocks which
were to superpose the coal strata. In course of time, periods of which include millions of
years, these earths hardened in layers, and enclosed under a thick carapace of