by Jules Verne
‘But,’ I said, ‘who’s going to take the clothes down, and this pile of ropes and ladders?’
‘They will go down by themselves.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘You’ll see.’
My uncle was fond of resorting to drastic measures, and never hesitated. On his instructions, Hans tied all the non-fragile articles in a single bundle, roped them together securely, and threw them bodily down the chimney.
I heard the loud rushing sound produced by the displacement of the layers of air. My uncle, leaning over the abyss, followed the descent of his baggage with a satisfied air, and only stood up when it had disappeared from sight.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Our turn now.’
Now I ask any honest man if it was possible to hear these words without a shudder!
The Professor fastened the package of instruments on his back, Hans took the one containing the tools, and I the one with the arms. The descent began in the following order: Hans, my uncle, and me. It took place in profound silence, disturbed only by the fall of loose stones hurtling into the abyss.
I let myself fall, so to speak, frantically clutching the double rope with one hand and steadying myself with the other by means of my iron-shod stick. A single thought dominated my mind – the fear that the rock from which I was hanging might give way. The rope struck me as very fragile to bear the weight of three persons. I used it as little as possible, performing miracles of equilibrium on the lava projections which my feet tried to grip as if they were hands.
Whenever one of these slippery steps shook under Hans’s feet, he would say in his quiet voice,
‘Gif akt!’
‘Be careful!’ repeated my uncle.
After half an hour we had reached the surface of a rock which was firmly attached to the wall of the chimney.
Hans pulled one end of the rope; the other rose into the air and, after passing round the projecting rock at the top of the chimney, came down, bringing with it a dangerous sort of rain, or rather hail, of stones and pieces of lava.
Leaning over the edge of our narrow ledge, I observed that the bottom of the hole was still invisible.
The manoeuvre with the rope was begun again, and half an hour later we had descended another two hundred feet.
I doubt whether, during this descent, even the most enthusiastic geologist would have tried to study the nature of the surrounding rocks. For my part, I know that I did not trouble my head about them: it was all one to me whether they were Pliocene, Miocene, Eocene, Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, Permian, Carboniferous, Devonian, Silurian, or Primitive. But the Professor was probably making observations or taking notes, for at one of our halts he said to me:
‘The farther I go, the more confident I feel. The order of these volcanic formations fully confirms Davy’s theory. We are in the middle of the primordial stratum, in which the chemical operation took place of metals catching fire at the contact of air and water. I absolutely reject the idea of central heat. In any case, we shall soon see.’
His conclusion was always the same. Small wonder that I felt no desire to argue. My silence was taken for agreement, and the descent began again.
After three hours I still could not see the bottom of the chimney. When I raised my head I saw its opening growing perceptibly smaller. Its walls sloped slightly and were therefore drawing closer to each other. It was gradually getting darker.
Still we kept on descending. It seemed to me that the falling stones were making a duller sound on impact, and that they were reaching the bottom of the abyss sooner.
As I had taken care to keep an exact account of our manoeuvres with the rope, I could calculate precisely what depth we had reached and how much time had gone by.
We had now repeated the operation fourteen times, and each descent took half an hour. That made seven hours, plus fourteen quarters of an hour for rest, or three and a half hours. Altogether ten and a half hours. We had started at one o’clock, so it must now be eleven. As for the depth we had reached, these fourteen operations with a rope two hundred feet long made it 2,800 feet.
At that moment Hans called out:
‘Halt!’
I stopped short just as I was going to hit my uncle’s head with my feet.
‘We have arrived,’ he said.
‘Where?’ I asked, slipping down beside him.
‘At the bottom of the perpendicular chimney.’
‘Isn’t there any other way out, then?’
‘Yes, I can just make out a sort of corridor slanting away to the right. We’ll see about that tomorrow. Let’s have our supper first and then sleep.’
It was not yet completely dark. We opened the bag of provisions, ate our meal, and settled down as best we could on a bed of stones and pieces of lava.
When, lying on my back, I opened my eyes, I saw a bright point of light at the end of the three-thousand-foot tube, which acted like a gigantic telescope.
It was a star which did not appear to sparkle, and which, according to my calculations, must have been B Ursa minor.
Then I fell into a deep sleep.
18
Ten Thousand Feet Below Sea-Level
At eight in the morning a ray of daylight woke us up. The countless facets of the lava walls caught it as it passed and scattered it like a shower of sparks. This light was bright enough to enable us to distinguish surrounding objects.
‘Well, Axel, what do you think about all this? Have you ever spent a more peaceful night in our little house in the Königstrasse? No carts rumbling past, no hawkers crying their wares, no boatmen shouting!’
‘Oh, it’s certainly quiet enough at the bottom of this well, but this very quietness is rather alarming.’
‘Come now!’ cried my uncle. ‘If you are frightened already what will you be like later on? So far we haven’t gone so much as an inch into the bowels of the earth.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that we have only reached the bottom of the island. This long vertical tube, which begins at the crater of Sneffels, ends roughly at sea-level.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘Certain. Look at the barometer.’
Sure enough, the mercury, which had gradually risen in the instrument as we had descended, had stopped at twenty-nine inches.
‘You see,’ the Professor went on, ‘as yet we have only the pressure of one atmosphere, and I am looking forward to the time when we shall have to substitute the manometer for the barometer.’
This instrument would in fact become useless as soon as the weight of the atmosphere exceeded its pressure at sea-level.
‘But,’ I said, ‘won’t this constantly increasing pressure be very painful for us?’
‘No. We shall descend slowly, and our lungs will get used to breathing a denser atmosphere. Aeronauts suffer from a lack of air when they go high up, and we for our part may have too much. But of the two alternatives, this is the one I prefer. Don’t let us lose a moment. Where is the bundle which came down here before us?’
I then remembered that we had looked for it in vain the previous evening. My uncle questioned Hans, who, after gazing around with the keen eyes of a hunter, replied:
‘Der huppe!’
‘Up there.’
True enough, the bundle was caught on a projection about a hundred feet above us. Straight away the agile Icelander climbed up like a cat, and in a few minutes the bundle was returned to us.
‘Now,’ said my uncle, ‘let us have breakfast, bearing in mind that we may have a long journey in front of us.’
We washed down our biscuits and meat with a few mouthfuls of water mixed with gin.
Once breakfast was over, my uncle took out of his pocket a little notebook intended for scientific observations. He consulted his various instruments one after another, and recorded the following data:
Monday, 29 June
Chronometer: 8.17 a.m.
Barometer: 29 inches 7 lines.
Thermometer: 6°C.
Direction: E.S.E.
This last observation, indicated by the compass, referred to the dark gallery my uncle had pointed out to me.
‘Now, Axel,’ exclaimed the Professor in an enthusiastic voice, ‘we are really going to plunge into the bowels of the earth. This then is the precise moment at which our journey begins.’
With these words my uncle took in one hand the Ruhmkorff coil hanging from his neck, and with the other he connected it to the filament in the lamp. A reasonably bright light immediately dispelled the darkness of the gallery.
Hans was carrying the other apparatus, which was also set in activity. This ingenious use of electricity would enable us to go on for a long time by creating an artificial daylight, even in the midst of the most inflammable gases.
‘Forward!’ cried my uncle.
Each of us shouldered his bundle. With my uncle leading the way, Hans coming second, pushing the package of ropes and clothes in front of him, and me third, we entered the gallery.
Just as I was plunging into this dark passage, I raised my head and caught a last glimpse, through the long tube, of that Icelandic sky which I was never to see again.
The lava, in the last eruption of 1229, had forced its way along this tunnel. It still lined the walls with a thick, shining coat, intensifying the electric light a hundredfold by reflection.
Our only difficulty as we made our way along the gallery consisted in not slipping too fast down a slope of about forty-five degrees; fortunately certain irregularities and blisters acted as steps, and we had nothing to do but descend, letting our baggage slide in front of us at the end of a long rope.
But the substance which formed steps under our feet had become stalactites on the walls. The lava, which was porous at certain points, had formed little round blisters; crystals of opaque quartz, studded with limpid tears of glass and hanging from the ceiling like chandeliers, seemed to light up as we passed. It was as if the genii of the abyss were illuminating their palace to welcome their guests from the surface.
‘It’s magnificent!’ I cried spontaneously. ‘What a sight, Uncle! Don’t you admire those shades of lava imperceptibly passing from reddish brown to bright yellow? And those crystals which look like lighted globes?’
‘Ah, so you’re beginning to appreciate all this, are you, Axel?’ replied my uncle. ‘So you consider this splendid, do you? Well, you’ll see even finer sights, I hope. Now, quick march!’
He might more appropriately have said: ‘Quick slide!’ for we were doing nothing but letting ourselves slip effortlessly down steep slopes. This was Virgil’s facilis descensus Averni with a vengeance. The compass, which I consulted frequently, pointed steadily south-east. This lava stream deviated neither to the right nor to the left: it had all the inflexibility of the straight line.
Yet there was no considerable rise in temperature. This seemed to confirm Davy’s theories, and more than once I consulted the thermometer with surprise. Two hours after our departure, it had only reached 10°, an increase of 4°. This led me to think that our descent was more horizontal than vertical. As for the exact depth reached, that was easy to ascertain: every now and then the Professor measured the angles of deviation and inclination, but he kept the results to himself.
About eight in the evening he called a halt. Hans promptly sat down, and we fastened the lamps to projections in the lava. We were in a sort of cave where there was no lack of air: on the contrary, we could feel breezes. What atmospheric disturbance was causing them? This was a question I made no attempt to answer just then. Hunger and fatigue made me incapable of reasoning. A descent lasting seven hours without a break cannot be made without considerable expenditure of strength, and I was utterly exhausted. The word ‘halt’ was therefore music to my ears. Hans spread out some food on a block of lava and we all ate hungrily. One thing worried me, however: our stock of water was half finished. My uncle was counting on replenishing it from underground springs, but so far we had seen no sign of any. I could not refrain from pointing this out to him.
‘Does this absence of springs surprise you?’ he asked.
‘More than that – it worries me. We have only enough water left for five days.’
‘Don’t worry, Axel. I assure you that we shall find water, indeed more than we want.’
‘When?’
‘When we have got through this bed of lava. How do you imagine that springs could break through these walls?’
‘But this stream of lava may go down a long way. It seems to me that we haven’t got very far vertically.’
‘Why do you suppose that?’
‘Because if we had got a long way inside the earth’s crust, it would be much hotter.’
‘According to your theory,’ replied my uncle. ‘But what does the thermometer say?’
‘Hardly 15°, which means a rise of only 9° since we set off.’
‘And what do you conclude from that?’
‘According to the most precise observations, the rise of temperature underground is one degree for every hundred feet. But certain local conditions may modify this figure. Thus at Yakoutsk in Siberia it has been observed that the increase of one degree occurred every thirty-six feet. This difference obviously depends on the conductibility of the rocks. What is more, in the neighbourhood of an extinct volcano, and through gneiss, it has been observed that the rise of temperature is one degree only for 125 feet. Let us take this last estimate, which is the most favourable of all, and calculate.’
‘Calculate away, my boy.’
‘Nothing could be easier,’ I said, putting down some figures in my notebook. ‘Nine times 125 feet gives a depth of 1,125 feet.’
‘Absolutely correct.’
‘Well?’
‘Well, according to my observations we have reached a depth of ten thousand feet below sea-level.’
‘Impossible!’
‘Perfectly possible, or else figures aren’t figures any more!’
The Professor’s calculations were correct. We had already gone six thousand feet beyond the greatest depth hitherto reached by man, as in the mines of Kitzbühel in the Tyrol and Württemberg in Bohemia.
The temperature, which ought to have been 81° here was barely 15°. Which gave me furiously to think.
19
Upwards Again
The next day, 30 June, at six in the morning, we began the descent again.
We were still following the lava gallery, a real natural ramp, as gently sloping as those inclined planes which can still be found in place of the staircase in some old houses. This went on until 12.17, at which moment we came up with Hans, who had just stopped.
‘Ah!’ exclaimed my uncle. ‘We have come to the end of the chimney.’
I looked around me. We were at the intersection of two roads, both of them dark and narrow. Which ought we to take? This was a difficult question to decide.
My uncle, however, did not wish to appear to hesitate before either me or the guide; he pointed to the eastern tunnel, and soon all three of us were inside it.
In any case, any hesitation before this choice of roads would have lasted indefinitely, for there was no indication to guide our choice. We had to trust entirely to chance.
The slope of this new gallery was very slight, and its section extremely variable. Sometimes a succession of arches appeared before us like the aisles of a Gothic cathedral; here the architects of the Middle Ages might have studied all the forms of that religious architecture which developed from the pointed arch. A mile farther on, we would have to bend our heads under low arches of the Romanesque type, resting on thick pillars half embedded in the walls. In some places this arrangement gave place to low substructures which looked like bearers’ workings, and we had to crawl along through narrow tunnels.
The temperature remained at a perfectly bearable level. I could not help thinking of what it must have been when the lava vomited by Sneffels had rushed along this route, now so quiet. I imagined the torrents
of fire breaking against every corner in the gallery and the accumulation of the superheated gases in this confined space.
‘I only hope,’ I thought, ‘that the old volcano doesn’t take it into his head to start that sort of thing now.’
I refrained from communicating these fears to Uncle Lidenbrock, who would not have understood. His one idea was to go on, and he walked, slid, even tumbled with a determination which one could not help admiring.
At six in the evening, after a fairly easy day’s walk, we had gone five miles south, but barely a quarter of a mile in depth.
My uncle called a halt for rest. We ate without much conversation, and went to sleep without much reflection.
Our arrangements for the night were very simple; a travelling-rug each, in which we rolled ourselves, was our only bedding. We had no cause to fear either cold or intrusive visits. Travellers who plunge into the deserts of Africa or the forests of the New World are obliged to watch over each other during the night hours. But here there was absolute solitude and complete safety, with no wild beasts or savages to fear.
We awoke the next day fresh and in good spirits, and resumed our journey, following the path of the lava as before. It was impossible to recognize the nature of the rocks through which it passed. The tunnel, instead of plunging downwards into the bowels of the earth, was tending to become horizontal, and it even seemed to me to be rising slightly. About ten in the morning this rise became so marked and consequently so tiring that I was obliged to slow down.
‘What’s the matter, Axel?’ the Professor asked impatiently.
‘I’m tired out,’ I replied.
‘What, after three hours’ walk over such easy ground?’
‘It may be easy, but it’s tiring all the same.’
‘What, when we’ve nothing to do but go down?’
‘I beg your pardon, but you mean go up.’ ‘Up?’ said my uncle, shrugging his shoulders.
‘Yes, up. The slope changed half an hour ago, and if we keep on like this, we shall certainly return to the surface in Iceland.’
