Page:At the Earth's Core.djvu/33

Rh happiness. It was very good, and logical reasoning, and so I embraced it.

At one hundred miles the temperature had dropped to 152½ degrees! When I announced it Perry reached over and hugged me.

From then on until noon of the second day it continued to drop until it became as uncomfortably cold as it had been unbearably hot before. At the depth of two hundred and forty miles our nostrils were assailed by almost overpowering ammonia fumes, and the temperature had dropped to ten below zero! We suffered nearly two hours of this intense and bitter cold, until at about two hundred and forty-five miles from the surface of the earth we entered a stratum of solid ice, when the mercury quickly rose to 32 degrees. During the next three hours we passed through ten miles of ice, eventually emerging into another series of ammonia-impregnated strata, where the mercury again fell to ten degrees below zero.

Slowly it rose once more until we were convinced that at last we were nearing the