As he continued to descend, his amazement at the wonderful depth of the shaft became greater and greater and his mind was totally unable to appreciate the situation.
Still he was not frightened, and went on down.
At last Rovinski emerged into the cave of light.

There he stopped, the car hanging some twenty or thirty feet above the bottom.

He looked out, he saw the shell, he saw the vast expanse of lighted nothingness, he tried to imagine what it was that that mass of iron rested upon.

If he had not seen it, he would have thought he had come out into the upper air of some bottomless cavern.

But a great iron machine nearly twenty feet long could not rest upon air! He thought he might be dreaming; he sat up and shut his eyes; in a few minutes he would open them and see if he still saw the same incomprehensible things.
The downward passage of Rovinski had occupied a great deal more time than he had calculated for.