by Jules Verne
At five o’clock the next morning we took leave of the Icelandic peasant, my uncle persuading him with some difficulty to accept a suitable remuneration; and Hans gave the signal for departure.
A hundred yards from Gardär, the ground began to change in character; the soil became marshy and the going more difficult. On the right, the chain of mountains stretched away indefinitely like a huge system of natural fortifications, whose counterscarp we were following; often we were confronted with streams which we had to ford, taking care not to wet our baggage.
The solitude became more and more profound; but sometimes we seemed to see a human silhouette fleeing in the distance, and when a bend in the road brought us unexpectedly close to one of these spectres, I experienced a sudden disgust at the sight of a swollen head with shining skin and no hair, and a body revealing repulsive sores through the rents in its miserable rags.
The poor creature did not come and hold out his deformed hand; on the contrary, he fled, but not before Hans had greeted him with the customary ‘Saellvertu’.
‘Spetelsk,’ he explained.
‘A leper!’ my uncle repeated. And this word by itself produced a repulsive effect. This horrible disease of leprosy is quite common in Iceland; it is not contagious but hereditary, so these wretched creatures are forbidden to marry.
These sights were not calculated to offset the depressing effect of the landscape, which was becoming profoundly dismal; the last tufts of grass were dying under our feet. There was not a tree to be seen, apart from a few thickets of dwarf birches which looked more like brushwood. Nor were there any animals, except a few horses for which their owners had no food, and which were roaming wild over the dreary plains. Now and then we saw a hawk soaring among the grey clouds and then darting away towards southern climes. I surrendered myself to the melancholy inseparable from this wild scenery, and my memory carried me back to my native land.
Soon we had to cross several little fjords and then a real gulf; the tide, which was high just then, allowed us to cross without waiting and to reach the hamlet of Alftanes, a mile farther on.
That evening, after fording two rivers full of trout and pike, the Alfa and the Heta, we were obliged to spend the night in a deserted hovel worthy to be haunted by all the goblins in Scandinavian mythology; the Ice King had certainly taken up his abode there, and all the night he showed us what he could do.
The next day was uneventful: the same marshy ground, the same uniformity, the same dismal landscape. But by nightfall we had covered half the distance we had to go, and we slept in the annexia of Krösolbt.
On 19 June, for about a mile, that is an Icelandic mile, we walked on a floor of lava; this sort of surface is called hraun in those parts; the wrinkles in the lava looked like cables, sometimes stretched out, sometimes coiled up; a huge solidified torrent came down from the neighbouring mountains, testifying to the former violence of these now extinct volcanoes. Even now the vapour from a few hot springs could be seen here and there.
We had no time to examine these phenomena; we had to press on. Soon our horses had marshy ground under their feet again, with little lakes every now and then. We were then heading west, having rounded the great bay of Faxa, and the two white peaks of Sneffels appeared in the clouds less than five miles away.
The horses were making good progress, unimpeded by the difficulties of the terrain. For my part, I was beginning to feel very tired, but my uncle remained as fresh and upright as on the first day; I could not help admiring him as much as the guide, who regarded this expedition as a mere excursion.
On Saturday, 20 June, at six in the evening, we reached Büdir, a village on the sea-shore, where the guide claimed his promised wages. My uncle settled with him. It was Hans’s own family, that is his uncles and cousins, who offered us hospitality here; we were well received, and, without wishing to impose on the kindness of these good folk, I would gladly have stayed with them to recover from the fatigue. But my uncle, who had no fatigue to recover from, would not hear of it, and the next morning we had to straddle our faithful animals once more.
The ground revealed the proximity of the mountain, whose granite roots protruded from the soil like those of an old oak. We were skirting the huge base of the volcano.
The Professor never took his eyes off it, gesticulating as if he were challenging it and saying:
‘So that is the giant I am going to defeat!’
Finally, after four hours’ walking, the horses stopped of their own accord at the door of the parsonage at Stapi.
14
A Final Argument
Stapi is a village of about thirty huts, built on lava in the rays of sunshine reflected by the volcano. It lies in the bed of a little fjord, shut in by a basalt wall of the strangest appearance.
As is well known, basalt is a brown rock of igneous origin. It assumes regular shapes arranged in the most surprising patterns. Here nature has done her work geometrically, with set-square, compasses, and plumb-line. If elsewhere her art consists in flinging huge masses together in disorder, unfinished cones and imperfect pyramids in a weird jumble of lines, here, wishing to set an example of regularity and anticipating the earliest architects, she has created an order of severe simplicity, unsurpassed by either the splendours of Babylon or the wonders of Greece.
I had of course heard of the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland, and of Fingal’s Cave in one of the Hebrides, but I had never yet set eyes on a basaltic formation. At Stapi this phenomenon was to be seen in all its beauty.
The wall shutting in the fjord, like the whole coast of the peninsula, consisted of a series of vertical columns thirty feet high. These straight, perfectly proportioned pillars supported an architrave of horizontal columns which projected so as to form half an arch over the sea. At intervals, under this natural roof, the eye was caught by beautiful vaulted openings, through which the waves came foaming in. A few fragments of basalt columns, torn from their place by the fury of the ocean, lay on the ground like the remains of an ancient temple, ruins which had remained eternally young and over which the centuries had passed without leaving any trace.
Such was our last halting-place on earth. Hans had brought us here with great skill, and it reassured me a little to think that he was going to stay with us.
On arriving at the door of the rector’s house, a simple low-built cabin, no more imposing or more comfortable than its neighbours, I saw a man shoeing a horse, with a hammer in his hand and a leather apron round his waist.
‘Saellvertu,’ said the guide.
‘God dag,’ answered the blacksmith in perfect Danish.
‘Kyrkoherde,’ said Hans, turning to my uncle.
‘The rector!’ repeated the latter. ‘It seems, Axel, that this good man is the rector.’
Meanwhile our guide was explaining the situation to the kyrkoherde, who, stopping his work for a moment, uttered a sort of cry which is doubtless used between horses and horse-dealers. Immediately a tall, shrewish-looking woman came out of the hut. If she was not six feet tall, she was certainly not far short of it.
I was afraid that she might offer the travellers the usual Icelandic kiss, but she did nothing of the sort, and indeed was none too gracious in inviting us into her house.
The guest-room struck me as the worst in the whole rectory, small, dirty, and evil-smelling. But we had to make the best of it. The rector did not seem to go in for traditional hospitality – far from it. Before the day was over, I saw that we were dealing with a blacksmith, a fisherman, a hunter, a joiner, but not in any respect with a minister of the Lord. Admittedly it was a weekday, and perhaps he was different on Sunday.
I have no desire to say anything against these poor ecclesiastics, who, after all, have a wretched life. They receive a ridiculously small pittance from the Danish Government, and from their parish they get a quarter of the tithe, which does not amount to as much as sixty marks or four pounds a year. Hence the need to work for their living; but after fishing, hunting, and shoeing horses
for a while, one eventually gets into the habit of talking and behaving like hunters, fishermen, and other rather uncultivated people; and that same evening I noticed that sobriety was not one of our host’s virtues.
My uncle soon saw what sort of man he had to deal with; instead of a good and learned man, he was faced with a coarse, vulgar peasant. He therefore decided to begin his great expedition straight away and to leave this inhospitable parsonage. He ignored his own tiredness and resolved to spend a few days on the mountain.
The preparations for our departure were accordingly made the very day after our arrival at Stapi. Hans hired the services of three Icelanders to take the place of the horses in carrying our things; but it was made clear that, as soon as we arrived at the crater, these natives were to turn back and leave us to our own devices.
My uncle was now obliged to explain to the guide that he intended to explore the interior of the volcano as far as he could go.
Hans simply nodded his head. To go there or anywhere else, to plunge into the bowels of his island or to cross its surface, was all one to him. As for me, I had been distracted by the incidents on our journey and had to some extent forgotten the future, but now fear gripped me once again. But what could I do? The place to oppose Professor Lidenbrock would have been Hamburg, not the foot of Sneffels.
One idea worried me more than all the rest – a terrifying idea calculated to shake firmer nerves than mine.
‘Let me see,’ I said to myself, ‘we are going to climb Sneffels. Good. We are going to descend into the crater. Good. Others have done the same and lived to tell the tale. But that isn’t all. If we find a passage leading into the bowels of the earth, if that confounded Saknussemm spoke the truth, we are going to lose our way among the subterranean galleries of the volcano. Now there is no proof that Sneffels is extinct. How can we be sure that an eruption isn’t brewing at this very moment? Just because the monster has been asleep since 1229, does it follow that it can never wake up again? And if it does wake up, what will become of us?’
This was a matter requiring serious thought, and serious thought I gave it. I could not sleep without dreaming of eruptions; and the more I thought about it, the less the idea of playing the part of a volcanic cinder appealed to me.
Finally I could not bear it any longer, and I decided to state my case to my uncle as cleverly as I could, in the form of a completely impossible hypothesis.
I went to see him and told him of my fears, drawing back to give him room for the expected explosion.
‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ he replied simply.
What did he mean by these words? Was he actually going to listen to reason? Was he thinking of giving up his project? This was too good to be true.
After a few moments’ silence, during which I did not dare to ask him any questions, he went on:
‘I’ve been thinking about that. Ever since we arrived at Stapi, I’ve been pondering over the important question you have just put to me, for we mustn’t be imprudent.’
‘No, indeed!’ I said emphatically.
‘Sneffels has been silent for six hundred years, but it may speak again. Now eruptions are always preceded by certain well-known phenomena. I have therefore questioned the local inhabitants and examined the ground, and I can assure you, Axel, that there will be no eruption.’ This emphatic declaration left me speechless and amazed.
‘You don’t believe me?’ said my uncle. ‘Well, then, follow me.’
I obeyed without a word. Leaving the parsonage, the Professor took a straight path which, through an opening in the basaltic wall, led away from the sea. Soon we were in the open country, if one can give that name to a vast expanse of volcanic debris. The land looked as if it had been crushed under a rain of huge rocks of trap, basalt, granite, and every kind of igneous material.
Here and there I could see white exhalations rising into the air; these vapours, known as reykir in Icelandic, were coming from the hot springs, and their force revealed the volcanic activity underground. This seemed to me to justify my fears, so I was disappointed when my uncle said to me:
‘You see all these vapours, Axel? Well, they prove that we have nothing to fear from the volcano.’
‘I don’t see how they prove anything of the sort,’ I said.
‘Listen,’ the Professor went on. ‘At the approach of an eruption these vapours become twice as active and then disappear completely while the eruption is in progress, for the imprisoned gases, once the pressure has been relieved, escape by way of the crater instead of through the fissures in the ground. So if these vapours remain in their usual state, if their activity doesn’t increase, and if the wind and rain don’t give place to a still and heavy atmosphere, then you may be sure that there is no eruption in the offing.’
‘But …’
‘Enough. When science has spoken, it behoves us to be silent.’
I returned to the parsonage utterly crestfallen. My uncle had beaten me with his scientific arguments. All the same, I had one hope left, and this was that when we reached the bottom of the crater we should find no passage, and that in spite of all the Saknussemms in the world it would be impossible to go any deeper.
I had a terrible nightmare that night, in which I was in the depths of a volcano, from which I was shot into interplanetary space in the shape of an eruptive rock.
The next day, 23 June, Hans was waiting for us with his companions laden with the provisions, tools, and instruments. Two iron-shod sticks, two rifles, and two cartridge-belts had been set aside for my uncle and myself. Hans, as a cautious man, had added to our baggage a leather bottle full of water, which, together with our flasks, assured us of a week’s water.
It was nine in the morning. The rector and his tall shrew of a wife were waiting at the door. We imagined that they wanted to bid us a kind farewell. But this farewell took the unexpected form of a heavy bill, in which everything was charged for, even the poisonous air we had breathed in the pastoral house. This worthy couple were holding us to ransom like any Swiss inn-keeper, and putting a high price on their dubious hospitality.
My uncle paid without quibbling; a man setting off for the centre of the earth does not haggle over a few rix-dollars.
Once this matter had been settled Hans gave the signal for departure, and a few moments later we had left Stapi.
15
The Summit of Sneffels
Sneffels is five thousand feet high. Its double summit forms the limit of a belt of trachyte which stands apart from the contour-system of the island. From our starting-point we could not see its two peaks against the greyish background of the sky. All that I could see was a huge skull-cap of snow on the giant’s brow.
We walked in single file, led by the guide, who took narrow paths where two people could not have gone abreast. Conversation therefore became more or less impossible.
After passing the basaltic wall of the fjord of Stapi, we came first of all to a fibrous peat bog, the remains of the former vegetation of the peninsula’s marshes. The vast quantity of this as yet unused fuel would be sufficient to warm the whole population of Iceland for a century; this huge bog, judging by the depth of certain ravines, was often seventy feet deep, and revealed successive layers of carbonized remains of vegetation separated by thinner seams of tufaceous pumice.
As befitted Professor Lidenbrock’s nephew, and in spite of my worries, I could not help observing with interest the mineralogical curiosities displayed in this huge natural history museum, and at the same time I recapitulated in my mind the whole geological history of Iceland.
This fascinating island had obviously risen from the depths of the sea at a comparatively recent date. Indeed, perhaps it was still rising imperceptibly. If this was so, its origins could only be attributed to the action of subterranean fires, and in that case Sir Humphry Davy’s theory, Saknussemm’s document, and my uncle’s ideas all went up in smoke. This hypothesis led me to make a close examination of the nature of the ground, and I soon became aware
of the succession of phenomena which had given it birth.
Iceland, which is absolutely devoid of alluvial soil, is entirely composed of volcanic tufa, that is to say an agglomeration of porous rocks and stones. Before the existence of the volcanoes it consisted of trap rocks, slowly raised above sea-level by the action of central forces. The internal fires had not yet broken through.
Later on, however, a wide chasm formed diagonally across the island from south-west to north-east, through which the trachytic paste gradually emerged. At this stage the phenomenon took place without any violence; the amount expelled was enormous, and the melted matter thrown up from the bowels of the earth spread out slowly in vast sheets or hillocked masses. This was the period when the felspars, syenites, and porphyrics appeared.
But thanks to this spread the thickness of the island increased enormously, and consequently its power of resistance. It is easy to imagine what a vast quantity of gases accumulated beneath its surface when, after the cooling of the trachytic crust, it ceased to offer any outlet. A moment therefore inevitably came when the explosive force of these gases was such that they raised the heavy crust and provided themselves with openings in the shape of tall chimneys. Hence the volcano formed by the raising of the crust, and then the crater suddenly pierced at the summit of the volcano.
The eruptive phenomena were then followed by the volcanic phenomena. First of all, through the newly formed outlets there escaped the ejected basalt of which the plain we were then crossing offered such wonderful examples. We were walking over those massive, dark-grey rocks which the cooling process had moulded into hexagonal prisms. In the distance we could see a great number of flattened cones which had once been so many fiery openings.
After the basaltic eruption had spent itself, the volcano, its power increased by the extinction of the lesser craters, provided an outlet for the lava, ashes, and cinders whose long screes I could see stretching down the sides of the mountain like flowing tresses.
