by Jules Verne
Such was the succession of phenomena which created Iceland; all of them arose from the action of the internal fires, and to suppose that the mass inside did not still exist in a permanent state of liquid incandescence was folly. But the supreme folly was the idea of trying to reach the centre of the earth …
I consequently felt somewhat reassured about the result of our undertaking as we advanced to the assault of Sneffels.
The way was becoming increasingly difficult; the ground was rising; pieces of rock kept breaking off and the greatest care was needed to avoid dangerous falls.
Hans walked on as calmly as if he were on level ground; sometimes he disappeared behind the huge blocks, and for a moment was lost from sight; then a shrill whistle from his lips would tell us which way to go. Often, too, he would stop, pick up a few stones, and arrange them in a recognizable pattern, so as to provide landmarks to guide us on our return journey. This was a wise precaution in itself, but one which future events were to render useless.
Three hours’ tiring march had brought us only to the base of the mountain. There Hans called a halt, and a frugal breakfast was shared out. My uncle ate hurriedly to get on faster. But since this halt was meant for rest as well as for food, he had to await the pleasure of the guide, who gave the signal for departure an hour later. The three Icelanders, who were just as taciturn as their comrade the guide, did not say a word and ate very little.
We now began scaling the slopes of Sneffels. Its snow-covered summit, by an optical illusion not uncommon in mountainous country, seemed to me to be very close, and yet how many hours it took to reach it! The stones, which were not held together by either earth or grass, kept rolling down to the plain with the speed of an avalanche.
At some places the slopes of the mountain formed an angle of at least thirty-six degrees with the horizon; it was impossible to climb them, and we had to skirt these stony cliffs, an operation which was anything but easy. At such places we helped each other with our sticks.
I must say that my uncle kept as close to me as he could; he never lost sight of me, and on many an occasion his arm provided me with a firm support. As for himself, he must have had an innate sense of balance for he never stumbled. The Icelanders, although heavily burdened, climbed with the agility of born mountaineers.
Judging by the height of the summit of Sneffels, it seemed to me impossible to reach it from our side, unless the slope became less steep. Fortunately, after an hour of tremendous exertion and difficult feats, in the midst of the vast expanse of snow covering the crest of the volcano, a sort of staircase unexpectedly appeared, which greatly simplified our ascent. It was formed by one of those torrents of stones thrown up by the eruptions and called stina by the Icelanders. If this torrent had not been arrested in its fall by the form of the mountain-sides it would have gone on into the sea and formed new islands.
Such as it was, it served us well. The slopes grew steeper still, but these stone steps enabled us to climb them easily, and indeed so rapidly that, having stayed behind for a moment while my companions continued their ascent, I saw them already reduced by distance to microscopic dimensions.
By seven in the evening we had ascended the two thousand steps of this staircase, and we found ourselves on a sort of bulge in the mountain, a kind of bed on which the actual cone of the crater rested.
The sea stretched away three thousand two hundred feet below. We had passed the perpetual snow-line, which is not very high in Iceland on account of the constant humidity of the climate. It was bitterly cold, and the wind was blowing hard. I was exhausted. The Professor saw that my legs were failing me, and, in spite of his impatience, he decided to stop. He accordingly signalled to the guide, but Hans shook his head and said:
‘Ofvanför.’
‘It seems that we have to go higher,’ said my uncle.
Then he asked Hans for his reason.
‘Mistour,’ replied the guide.
‘Ja, mistour,’ repeated one of the Icelanders in a rather frightened voice.
‘What does that word mean?’ I asked anxiously.
‘Look,’ said my uncle.
I looked down in the direction of the plain. A huge column of powdered pumice-stone, sand, and dust was rising into the air, twisting about like a waterspout; the wind was driving it against that side of Sneffels to which we were clinging, and this opaque screen between ourselves and the sun was casting a great shadow over the mountain. If this column were to bend towards us, we should inevitably be caught up in its eddies. This phenomenon, which is not uncommon when the wind blows from the glaciers, is called mistour in Icelandic.
‘Hastigt! Hastigt!’ cried our guide.
Without knowing Danish, I understood that we had to follow Hans as fast as we could. The guide started skirting the cone of the crater, but diagonally so as to make our ascent easier. Soon the dust-storm fell upon the mountain, which trembled at the shock; the stones caught up in the eddies of the wind rained down as in an eruption. Fortunately we were now on the opposite side and sheltered from any danger. But for our guide’s precaution, however, our mangled bodies, pounded to dust, would have fallen a long way off like the remains of some unknown meteor.
Yet Hans thought it unwise to spend the night on the side of the cone. We continued our zigzag climb; the fifteen hundred feet which remained to be covered took us nearly five hours; what with all the tacking and countermarching we did, the distance must have been at least seven miles. I could not stand it any longer; I was weak from cold and hunger, and the rarefied air was not enough for my lungs.
At last, at eleven o’clock at night, in complete darkness, we reached the summit of Sneffels; and before taking shelter inside the crater, I had time to see the midnight sun, at the lowest point of its course, casting its pale rays on the island sleeping at my feet.
16
Inside the Crater
Supper was rapidly devoured, and the little party settled down for the night as best they could. The bed was hard, the shelter not very substantial, and the situation rather unpleasant, at five thousand feet above sea-level. Yet I slept remarkably soundly that night, one of the best I had had for a long time. I did not even have any dreams.
The next day we awoke half frozen by the sharp air, but in bright sunshine. I got up from my granite bed and went to enjoy the magnificent spectacle which lay before me.
I was standing on the summit of one of Sneffel’s peaks, the one to the south. From that point the view extended over the greater part of the island. By an optical effect common to all great heights, the shores seemed higher than the central part. It was as if one of Helbesmer’s relief-maps were spread out at my feet. I could see deep valleys criss-crossing in all directions, precipices hollowed out like wells, lakes reduced to ponds, and rivers turned into streams. On my right were countless glaciers and innumerable peaks, some plumed with faint wreaths of smoke. The undulations of this infinite succession of mountains, whose patches of snow looked like foam, reminded one of the surface of a stormy sea. If I turned towards the west, there the ocean stretched out in all its magnificence, like a continuation of those foaming summits. The eye could scarcely tell where the land ended and the waves began.
I lost myself in that wonderful ecstasy produced by great peaks, this time without any giddiness, for I was beginning to grow accustomed at last to this sort of sublime contemplation. My dazzled gaze bathed in the transparent rays of the sun. I forgot who I was and where I was, living the life of the elves and sylphs of Scandinavian mythology. In fact, I was intoxicated by the pleasure of altitude, oblivious of the abysses into which my fate was shortly going to plunge me. But I was brought back to an awareness of reality by the arrival of Hans and the Professor, who joined me on the summit of the peak.
My uncle, turning to the west, pointed out to me a light vapour, a mist, or a semblance of land which rose above the horizon of the sea.
‘Greenland,’ he said.
‘Greenland?’ I exclaimed.
‘Ye
s, we are only about a hundred miles away; and during thaws Polar bears are carried here from Greenland on ice-floes. But never mind that. We are at the top of Sneffels, and here are two peaks, one to the south, the other to the north. Hans will tell us what the Icelanders call the one on which we are standing now.’
The question having been put, the guide replied:
‘Scartaris.’
My uncle shot a triumphant glance at me.
‘Now for the crater!’ he cried.
The crater of Sneffels was in the shape of an inverted cone with an opening about a mile across. Its depth I estimated at about two thousand feet. One may imagine the condition of a reservoir of this capacity when filled with thunder and flames. The bottom of the funnel did not measure more than five hundred feet in circumference, so that the fairly gentle slope made it easy to reach its lower part. I was involuntarily reminded of a huge, funnel-shaped blunderbuss, and the comparison alarmed me.
‘To go down into a blunderbuss,’ I thought, ‘when it may be loaded, and may go off at the slightest touch, is sheer lunacy.’
But there was no going back. Hans, with an air of indifference, set off in front again, and I followed him without a word.
To make the descent easier, Hans wound his way down the cone in long ellipses. We had to walk among the erupted rocks, some of which, shaken out of their sockets, went bouncing down to the bottom of the abyss. Their fall awoke reverberating echoes which were strangely sonorous.
In some parts of the cone there were glaciers. Here Hans advanced only with extreme caution, sounding his way with his iron stick to discover crevasses. At certain doubtful points we had to fasten ourselves together with a long rope, so that if anyone unexpectedly lost his footing he would be held up by his companions. This was a prudent precaution, but it did not exclude all danger.
In spite, however, of all the difficulties of the descent on slopes with which the guide was unfamiliar, it was accomplished without accident, except for the loss of a coil of rope which slipped from the hands of one of the Icelanders and took the shortest way to the bottom of the abyss.
By noon we had arrived. I raised my head and saw above me the upper aperture of the cone, framing a greatly reduced but almost perfectly circular patch of sky. At one point only the peak of Scartaris stood out, rising into space.
At the bottom of the crater there were three chimneys, through which, in the time of its eruptions, Sneffels had expelled its lava and steam from its central furnace. Each of these furnaces was about a hundred feet in diameter. They yawned open at our feet. I had not the courage to look into them, but Professor Lidenbrock had already made a rapid survey of all three; he was panting for breath, running from one to the other, gesticulating and muttering unintelligible words. Hans and his companions, sitting on blocks of lava, watched him running about and obviously regarded him as a lunatic.
Suddenly my uncle gave a shout. I thought that he had lost his footing and had fallen into one of the three chimneys. But no – I saw him with his arms outstretched and his legs wide apart in front of a granite rock which stood in the centre of the crater like a huge pedestal placed there for a statue of Pluto. His attitude was one of amazement, but amazement soon gave way to delirious joy.
‘Axel! Axel!’ he cried. ‘Come here! Come here!’
I ran over to him. Neither Hans nor the Icelanders stirred a muscle.
‘Look,’ said the Professor.
And, sharing his amazement, if not his joy, I read on the western face of the block, in Runic characters half worn away by time, this accursed name:
‘Arne Saknussemm!’ cried my uncle. ‘Have you any doubts now?’
I made no reply, and returned in consternation to my lava seat, overwhelmed by this piece of evidence.
How long I remained plunged in thought I cannot say. All I know is that when I raised my head I saw only my uncle and Hans at the bottom of the crater. The Icelanders had been dismissed, and they were now descending the outer slopes of Sneffels on their way back to Stapi.
Hans was sleeping peacefully at the foot of a rock, in a stream of lava where he had made himself an improvised bed, while my uncle was circling around the bottom of the crater like a wild beast caught in a trapper’s pit. I had neither the desire nor the strength to get up, and following the guide’s example I abandoned myself to an uneasy slumber, constantly imagining that I could hear noises or feel tremors in the sides of the mountain.
This was how the first night inside the crater went by.
The next day a grey, cloudy, heavy sky settled over the summit of the cone. I noticed this not so much from the darkness inside the crater as from the anger which took hold of my uncle.
I understood the reason for this, and hope dawned again in my heart. Let me explain.
Of the three ways open to us beneath our feet, only one had been taken by Saknussemm. According to the Icelandic scholar, it could be recognized by the circumstance mentioned in the cryptogram, namely that the shadow of Scartaris touched its edge during the last days of June. That sharp peak could in fact be regarded as the gnomon of a sun-dial, whose shadow on a given day pointed out the way to the centre of the earth.
Now, if the sun failed to shine there would be no shadow and consequently no guide. It was 25 June. If the sky would only remain cloudy for six days, the expedition would have to be postponed for another year.
I will not attempt to describe Professor Lidenbrock’s helpless anger. The day wore on and no shadow appeared on the bottom of the crater, Hans did not stir from his place even though he must have wondered what we were waiting for – if he ever wondered anything. My uncle did not speak to me once. His gaze, perpetually directed towards the sky, was lost in its grey and misty depths.
On the twenty-sixth there was still no sign. Sleet fell all day. Hans built a hut with blocks of lava. I derived a certain pleasure from studying the countless little waterfalls running down the sides of the cone, making a deafening sound which was amplified by each and every stone.
My uncle could no longer contain himself. The situation was enough to irritate a more patient man than himself, for it was tantamount to sinking within sight of land.
But heaven always mingles great joys with great vexations, and it held in store for Professor Lidenbrock a satisfaction to match his desperate anxiety.
The next day the sky was still overcast; but on Sunday, 28 June, the last day but two of the month, a change in the weather came with the change of the moon. The sun poured its rays into the crater. Every hillock, every rock, every stone, every roughness, had its share of the torrent of light and promptly cast its shadow over the ground. Among them all, that of Scartaris stood out like a sharp edge and started turning imperceptibly with the sun.
My uncle turned with it.
At midday, in the shortest period of its course, it gently touched the edge of the central chimney.
‘It’s there!’ cried the Professor. ‘It’s there! Now for the centre of the earth!’ he added in Danish.
I looked at Hans.
‘Forut!’ said the guide calmly.
‘Forward!’ replied my uncle.
It was thirteen minutes past one.
17
Our Real Journey Begins
The real journey was beginning. So far our labours had been greater than our difficulties; now the latter were literally to spring up at every step.
I had not yet looked down into the bottomless pit into which I was about to plunge, but now the time had come. I could either resign myself to the whole business or refuse to take part in it. But I was ashamed to draw back in the presence of the guide. Hans was treating the adventure so calmly, so unconcernedly, with such a total disregard for any possible danger that I blushed at the idea of being less courageous than he was. If I had been alone I would have brought out all my old arguments, but in the presence of the guide I remained silent. My mind conjured up the memory of my pretty Virlandaise, and I walked across to the central chimney.
I have already said that it was a hundred feet in diameter, or three hundred feet in circumference. I leaned over a projecting rock and looked down. My hair stood on end. The fascination of the void took hold of me. I felt my centre of gravity moving, and vertigo rising to my head like intoxication. There is nothing more overwhelming than this attraction of the abyss. I was on the point of falling when a hand pulled me back; it was that of Hans. It was obvious that I had not taken enough ‘lessons in abysses’ on the Frelsers-Kirk in Copenhagen.
Even so, however brief my examination of the chimney had been, I had seen how it was shaped. Its almost perpendicular walls were covered with countless projections which would facilitate our descent. But, if the staircase was there all right, the banisters were missing. A rope fastened to the edge of the opening might help us on our way down, but how could we unfasten it when we arrived at the other end?
My uncle used a very simple method to get over this difficulty. He uncoiled a rope about as thick as a thumb and four hundred feet long; first he let down half of it, then looped it over a projecting block of lava and threw the other half down. Each of us could then descend by holding on to both halves of the rope, which would not be able to unwind; when we were two hundred feet down, nothing would be easier than to regain possession of the whole rope by letting go of one end and pulling on the other. Then this process would be repeated ad infinitum.
‘Now,’ said my uncle, after completing these preparations, ‘let us see about the baggage; we’re going to divide it into three packages, and each of us will strap one on to his back. I’m talking about the fragile objects only.’
The Professor obviously did not include us under that heading.
‘Hans,’ he went on, ‘will take charge of the tools and some of the provisions. You, Axel, will take another third of the provisions, together with the arms; and I will take the rest of the provisions, and the delicate instruments.’
