Read "Olga Romanoff" by George Griffith online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
BY the 30th of July the work in the caverns was so far advanced that the Council was able to authorise the departure of Alan and his companions for the outside world. The great vertical sluice-door, a huge sheet of steel forty feet long, twenty wide, and eighteen inches thick, and footed with a great indiarubber pad, was in its place, suspended at the top of the steel-lined grooves, which had been sunk three feet into each of the rock walls of the chasm into which the water-tunnel from the lake opened.
On the morning of the 30th it was sent down into its final position. The momentous experiment proved completely successful. The huge mass of metal descended slowly over the mouth of the tunnel into the black, swift stream at the bottom of the chasm. As its enormous weight crushed the indiarubber pad down into all the inequalities of the floor the outrush of the waters instantly stopped, and the channel ran dry save for the fierce jets of water which spouted out over the top of the plate.