The year 2000: an inventor has built a shell that can bore to the centre 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 his last, and the technology in it is described with an engraver's patience.