Doc Fortress Laboratory

An elevator raced Doc up to the eighty-sixth floor. He entered a sumptuously furnished reception room. No one was there. He went to the next room. This was a library, a chamber which contained thousands of the finest technical tomes.

Into another and much larger room, Doc went. This was the laboratory. Marble and glass-topped work tables were everywhere. Scores of huge steel-and-glass cases held chemicals, rare metals, test tubes, siphons, mortars, retorts, tubing and apparatus of which only Doc knew the use. No one was there.

This laboratory was exceeded for completeness by only one on earth--the one which Jerome Coffern had told his fellow chemists that Doc must visit to conduct his great experiments uninterrupted. Jerome Coffern's guess had been right.

Doc had another laboratory, vaster even than this. It was at the spot he called his "Fortress of Solitude." This was built upon a rocky island far within the arctic circle. No one but Doc knew its location. And when he was there, no word from the outside world could ever reach him. It was to his Fortress of Solitude that Doc retired periodically to study and experiment and increase his fabulous store of knowledge.

- The Land of Terror (1933) Chapter 6