The year 2000: an inventor has built a shell that can bore to the center of the earth, and another man is fitting out a ship to reach the Pole under electric light — and what the drill finds under Sardis is not rock. Stockton was a wood engraver before he wrote The Lady, or the Tiger?, the most argued-over story in American literature; this 1898 romance is one of his last, and the technology in it is described with an engraver's patience. Eighteen plates of storm and sea by Turner and Melbye give the voyage its weather, from a brewing squall to the calm that follows.
