Journey to the Center of the Earth (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (32 page)

At the moment I said these words, my hand had brushed against the water, and I had to pull it back as fast as possible.

“The water is boiling!” I shouted.

This time the professor only answered with an angry gesture.

Then an unconquerable terror overwhelmed my brain and did not go away. I had a presentiment of an approaching catastrophe that even the boldest imagination could not have conceived. An idea, first vague, uncertain, turned into certainty in my mind. I tried to chase it away, but it returned stubbornly. I did not dare to express it. Yet some involuntary observations confirmed my conviction. By the dim light of the torch I noticed irregular movements in the granite layers; a phenomenon was about to take place in which electricity would play a role; then this excessive heat, this boiling water! ... I wanted to check the compass.

It was running wild!

YES, WILD! THE NEEDLE jumped from one pole to the other with abrupt jolts, ran around the entire dial, and spun as if it had been overcome by vertigo.

I knew quite well that according to the most accepted theories, the mineral crust of the globe is never at absolute rest; the changes brought about by the decay of the interior substances, the movement deriving from the great liquid currents, and the impact of magnetism tend to shake it up continually, even if the beings scattered on its surface suspect nothing of this commotion. This phenomenon would therefore not have particularly frightened me, or at least it would not have provoked the dreadful idea in my mind.

But other facts, other unique details could not deceive me for much longer. The detonations multiplied with frightening intensity. I could only compare them to the noise of a great number of carriages driven rapidly across pavement. It was continuous thunder.

Then the compass gone wild, shaken up by electric phenomena, confirmed me in my view. The mineral crust was about to burst, the granite masses were about to fuse, the fissure was about to clog, the void was about to fill up, and we, poor atoms, we would be crushed in this tremendous embrace.

“Uncle, Uncle!” I shouted, “we are lost!”

“What are you in a fright about now?” was the calm rejoinder. “What’s the matter with you?”

“The matter! Look at these walls moving, this mass of rock disintegrating, this burning heat, this boiling water, the thickening steam, the wild needle, all indicators of an earthquake!”

My uncle gently shook his head.

“An earthquake?” he said.

“Yes!”

“My lad, I think you’re mistaken.”

“What! Don’t you recognize the symptoms ... ?”

“Of an earthquake? No! I expect something better than that!”

“What do you mean?”

“An eruption, Axel:”

“An eruption!” I said. “We’re in the chimney of an active volcano?”

“I think so,” said the professor smiling, “and that’s the best thing that could happen to us!”

The best thing! Had my uncle gone mad? What did these words mean? Why this calmness and this smile?

“What!” I roared. “We’re caught in an eruption! Fate has thrown us in the way of white-hot lava, burning rocks, boiling water, and all kinds of volcanic substances! We’re going to be thrown out, expelled, ejected, vomited, coughed up high into the air, along with pieces of rock, showers of ashes and scoria, in a whirlwind of flames, and that’s the best thing that could happen to us!”

“Yes,” replied the professor, looking at me over his spectacles, “because that’s the only chance we have of returning to the surface of the earth!”

I pass rapidly over the thousand ideas which crisscrossed in my brain. My uncle was right, absolutely right, and he had never seemed bolder and more convinced to me than at this moment when he expected and calmly calculated the chances of an eruption!

In the meantime we still went up; the night went by in this movement of ascent; the surrounding noises increased; I was almost choking, I thought my last hour had come, and yet imagination is so strange that I gave myself over to a really childish investigation. But I was the victim, not the master of my thoughts!

It was obvious that we were being driven upwards by an eruptive surge; beneath the raft, there was boiling water, and underneath the water a lava paste, an assortment of rocks that would be hurled in all directions at the summit of the crater. So we were in the vent of a volcano. No doubt in that regard.

But this time, instead of Snaefells, an extinct volcano, we were inside a fully active one. I wondered, therefore, what mountain this might be, and in what part of the world we would be ejected.

In the northern regions, no doubt. Before it went wild, our compass had never deviated from that direction. From Cape Saknussemm we had been carried due north for hundreds of leagues. So had we returned underneath Iceland? Would we be ejected out of the crater of Mt. Hekla or one of the seven other volcanoes on the island? Within a radius of five hundred leagues to the west, I saw at that latitude only the scarcely known volcanoes of the north-west coast of America. To the east there was only a single one at 80° northern latitude, the Esk in Jan Mayen Island, not far from Spitzbergen!
^cc
Certainly there was no lack of craters, and they were spacious enough to vomit up a whole army! But I was trying to guess which one of them would serve as our exit.

Toward morning the ascent accelerated. If the heat increased instead of diminishing as we approached the surface of the globe, this was because it was completely local and due to volcanic influence. Our type of movement could no longer leave any doubt in my mind. An enormous force, a pressure of several hundred atmospheres generated by the accumulated steam was pushing us irresistibly. But to what innumerable dangers it exposed us!

Soon tawny reflections penetrated into the widening vertical tunnel; on the right and on the left I noticed deep openings that resembled enormous tunnels, from which thick steam escaped; tongues of fire lapped the walls and crackled.

“Look, look, Uncle!” I shouted.

“Well, those are sulfurous flames. Nothing more natural during an eruption.”

“But if they engulf us?”

“They won’t engulf us.”

“But if we choke?”

“We won’t choke. The tunnel is widening, and if necessary, we’ll abandon the raft and take shelter in a crevice.”

“But the water! The rising water!”

“There’s no more water, Axel, only a sort of lava paste, which is carrying us up to the outlet of the crater.”

The liquid column had indeed disappeared and given way to rather dense but still boiling eruptive matter. The temperature was becoming unbearable, and a thermometer exposed to this atmosphere would have marked over 70°C! I was streaming with sweat. Without the speed of the ascent, we would certainly have suffocated.

But the professor did not carry out his proposal of abandoning the raft, and he was right. Those few ill-fitted wood beams offered us a solid surface, a support that we could not have found anywhere else.

At about eight in the morning, another incident occurred for the first time. The upward movement stopped suddenly. The raft lay absolutely motionless.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, shaken by this sudden stoppage as if by a shock.

“A halt,” replied my uncle.

“Is the eruption stopping?”

“I hope not.”

I rose. I tried to look around me. Perhaps the raft itself, held up by a projection in the rock, was offering a temporary resistance to the volcanic mass. In that case we had to hurry up and release it as quickly as possible.

But it was not so. The column of ashes, scoriae, and rock fragments itself had ceased to rise.

“Might the eruption be coming to a halt?” I exclaimed.

“Ah!” said my uncle between clenched teeth, “that’s what you fear, my boy. But don’t worry, this moment of calm can’t last long; it has already lasted five minutes, and we’ll shortly resume our journey to the mouth of the crater.”

As he spoke, the professor continued to check his chronometer, and he would again be right in his prediction. Soon the raft was seized again by a rapid but irregular movement that lasted about two minutes, and then stopped again.

“Good,” said my uncle, checking the time; “in ten minutes it’ll start again.”

“Ten minutes?”

“Yes. We’re dealing with an intermittent volcano. It lets us breathe along with it.”

Nothing could be more true. At the predicted time we were again hurled along at extreme speed. We were forced to grip the wood beams tight so as not to be thrown off the raft. Then the surge stopped.

I have since reflected on this strange phenomenon without finding a satisfactory explanation for it. At any rate it was obvious that we were not in the main vent of the volcano, but in a secondary tunnel that was subject to a reflux effect.

How often this maneuver repeated itself I cannot say. All I can say is that at each new start we were hurled forward with increasing force and as if carried along by a real projectile. During the short halts, we choked; during the moments of upward rush, the hot air cut off my breath. I thought for a moment how delightful it would be to find myself suddenly transported to the arctic regions and a cold of 30°C below freezing. My overstimulated imagination went for a stroll on the snowy plains of arctic lands, and I longed for the moment where I would roll on the icy carpets of the pole! Little by little, at any rate, I lost my head, shattered by the repeated shocks. If it had not been for Hans’ strong arm, I would have more than once broken my skull against the granite wall.

I have therefore no exact memory of what happened during the following hours. I have a confused recollection of continuous detonations, the movement of the rock, and a spinning movement that seized the raft. It floated on the flood of lava, amidst a hail of ashes. Roaring flames engulfed it. A hurricane that seemed to come from an enormous ventilator kindled the subterranean fires. One last time, Hans’ face appeared to me in a reflection of fire, and then I no longer had any feeling other than the dark terror of the condemned tied to the mouth of a cannon, at the moment when the shot is fired and scatters their limbs into the air.

 

WHEN I OPENED MY eyes again, I felt the guide’s strong hand hold me by the belt. With the other hand he supported my uncle. I was not seriously injured, but rather bruised by a general aching. I found myself lying on the slope of a mountain, two steps away from a chasm into which I would have fallen with the slightest movement. Hans had saved me from death while I was rolling down the side of the crater.

“Where are we?” asked my uncle, who seemed to me very angry that we had come back to earth.

The hunter shrugged his shoulders as a token of ignorance.

“In Iceland;” I said.

“Nej,” replied Hans.

“What! Not Iceland?” exclaimed the professor.

“Hans is mistaken,” I said, raising myself up.

After the innumerable surprises of this journey, yet another amazing turn was in store for us. I expected to see a mountain cone covered with eternal snow, in the midst of the barren deserts of the northern regions, under the pale rays of an arctic sky, beyond the highest latitudes ; but contrary to all these expectations, my uncle, the Icelander, and I were mid-slope on a mountain charred by the heat of a sun that consumed us with its fire.

I could not believe my eyes; but the all-too-real broiling of my body left no room for doubt. We had come half naked out of the crater, and the radiant star, to which we had owed nothing for two months, was generous to us with light and heat, and poured floods of splendid radiation on us.

When my eyes adjusted to this brightness of which they had lost the habit, I used them to correct the errors of my imagination. At least I wanted to be in Spitzbergen, and I was in no mood to give up this idea easily.

The professor was the first to speak and said:

“Indeed, this doesn’t look much like Iceland.”

“But Jan Mayen Island?” I replied.

“Not that either. This is no northern volcano with granite peaks and a snow cap.”

“Nonetheless ...”

“Look, Axel, look!”

Above our heads, at a height of at most five hundred feet, we saw the crater of a volcano, from which a tall pillar of fire mixed with pumice stones, ash and lava shot out every fifteen minutes with a loud explosion. I could feel the heaving of the mountain, which breathed like a whale and from time to time ejected fire and wind from its enormous blow-holes. Beneath us, down a rather steep slope, sheets of eruptive matter stretched over eight or nine hundred feet, which meant that the volcano’s total height was less than three hundred fathoms. Its base disappeared in a real abundance of green trees, among which I noticed olive trees, fig trees, and vines covered with purple grapes.