Undue toil and troubled thought had been the companions of Roland Clewe for many a year, and their company had been imposed upon him by his poverty; now he would not, nor would his wife, allow that companionship to be imposed upon him by his riches.
The Great Stone of Sardis was sold to a syndicate of kings, each member of which was unwilling that this dominant gem of the world should belong exclusively to any royal family other than his own.

When a coronation should occur, each member of the syndicate had a right to the use of the jewel; at other times it remained in the custody of one of the great bankers of the world, who at stated periods allowed the inhabitants of said planet to gaze upon its transcendent brilliancy.
But the Works at Sardis were not given up.

Margaret was not jealous of her rival, Science, and if Roland had ceased to be an inventor, a discoverer, a philosopher, simply because he had become a rich and happy husband, he would have ceased to be the Roland she had loved so long.
The discovery of the north pole had given him fame and honor; for, notwithstanding the fact that he had never been there, he was always considered as the man who had given to the world its only knowledge of its most northern point.
But in his heart Roland Clewe placed little value upon this discovery.
Before Mr.Gibbs had announced the exact location of the north pole, all the students of geography had known where it was; before the eyes of the party on the Dipsey had rested upon the spot pointed out by Mr.Gibbs, it was well understood that the north pole was either an invisible point on the surface of ice or an invisible point on the surface of water.
If no possible good could result from a journey such as the Dipsey had made, no subsequent good of a similar kind could ever be expected; for the next submarine vessel which attempted a northern journey under the ice was as likely to remain under the ice as it was to emerge into the open air; and if any one reached the open sea upon motor sledges, it would be necessary for them to carry boats with them if they desired so much as a sight of that weather-vane which, no matter how the wind blew, always pointed to the south.
It was the Artesian ray which Clewe considered the great achievement of his life, and to this he intended to devote the remainder of his working days.

It was his object to penetrate deeper and deeper with this ray into the interior of the earth.

He could always provide himself with telescopes which would show him the limit reached by his photic borer, and so long as that limit was a transparent disk, illuminated by his great ray, so long he would believe in the existence of the diamond centre of the earth.