I could hear him murmuring geological terms. I could understand them, and in spite of myself I felt interested in this last geological study.
“Eruptive granite,” he was saying. “We are still in the primitive period. But we are going up, up, higher still. Who can tell?”
Ah! who can tell? With his hand he was examining the perpendicular wall, and in a few more minutes he continued:
“This is gneiss! here is mica schist! Ah! presently we shall come to the transition period, and then -“
What did the Professor mean? Could he be trying to measure the thickness of the crust of the earth that lay between us and the world above? Had he any means of making this calculation? No, he had not the aneroid, and no guessing could supply its place.
Still the temperature kept rising, and I felt myself steeped in a broiling atmosphere. I could only compare it to the heat of a furnace at the moment when the molten metal is running into the mould. Gradually we had been obliged to throw aside our coats and waistcoats, the. lightest covering became uncomfortable and even painful.
“Are we rising into a fiery furnace?” I cried at one moment when the heat was redoubling.
“No,” replied my uncle, “that is impossible -quite impossible!”
“Yet,” I answered, feeling the wall, “this well is burning hot.”
At the same moment, touching the water, I had to withdraw my hand in haste.
“The water is scalding,” I cried.
This time the Professor’s only answer was an angry gesture.
Then an unconquerable terror seized upon me, from which I could no longer get free. I felt that a catastrophe was approaching before which the boldest spirit must quail. A dim, vague notion laid hold of my mind, but which was fast hardening into certainty. I tried to repel it, but it would return. I dared not express it in plain terms. Yet a few involuntary observations confirmed me in my view. By the flickering light of the torch I could distinguish contortions in the granite beds; a phenomenon was unfolding in which electricity would play the principal part; then this unbearable heat, this boiling water! I consulted the compass.
The compass had lost its properties! it had ceased to act properly!
Chapter XLIII.
Shot Out Of A Volcano At Last!
Yes: our compass was no longer a guide; the needle flew from pole to pole with a kind of frenzied impulse; it ran round the dial, and spun hither and thither as if it were giddy or intoxicated.
I knew quite well that according to the best received theories the mineral covering of the globe is never at absolute rest; the changes brought about by the chemical decomposition of its component parts, the agitation caused by great liquid torrents, and the magnetic currents, are continually tending to disturb it -even when living beings upon its surface may fancy that all is quiet below. A phenomenon of this kind would not have greatly alarmed me, or at any rate it would not have given rise to dreadful apprehensions.
But other facts, other circumstances, of a peculiar nature, came to reveal to me by degrees the true state of the case. There came incessant and continuous explosions. I could only compare them to the loud rattle of along train of chariots driven at full speed over the stones, or a roar of unintermitting thunder.
Then the disordered compass, thrown out of gear by the electric currents, confirmed me in a growing conviction. The mineral crust of the globe threatened to burst up, the granite foundations to come together with a crash, the fissure through which we were helplessly driven would be filled up, the void would be full of crushed fragments of rock, and we poor wretched mortals were to be buried and annihilated in this dreadful consummation.
“My uncle,” I cried, “we are lost now, utterly lost!”
“What are you in a fright about now?” was the calm rejoinder. “What is the matter with you?”
“The matter? Look at those quaking walls! look at those shivering rocks. Don’t you feel the burning heat? Don’t you see how the water boils and bubbles? Are you blind to the dense vapours and steam growing thicker and denser every minute? See this agitated compass needle. It is an earthquake that is threatening us.”
My undaunted uncle calmly shook his head.
“Do you think,” said he, “an earthquake is coming?”
“I do.”
“Well, I think you are mistaken.”
“What! don’t you recognise the symptoms?”
“Of an earthquake? no! I am looking out for something better.”
“What can you mean? Explain?”
“It is an eruption, Axel.”
“An eruption! Do you mean to affirm that we are running up the shaft of a volcano?”
“I believe we are,” said the indomitable Professor with an air of perfect self-possession; “and it is the best thing that could possibly happen to us under our circumstances.”
The best thing! Was my uncle stark mad? What did the man mean? and what was the use of saying facetious things at a time like this?
“What!” I shouted. “Are we being taken up in an eruption? Our fate has flung us here among burning lavas, molten rocks, boiling waters, and all kinds of volcanic matter; we are going to be pitched out, expelled, tossed up, vomited, spit out high into the air, along with fragments of rock, showers of ashes and scoria, in the midst of a towering rush of smoke and flames; and it is the best thing that could happen to us!”
“Yes,” replied the Professor, eyeing me over his spectacles, “I don’t see any other way of reaching the surface of the earth.”
I pass rapidly over the thousand ideas which passed through my mind. My uncle was right, undoubtedly right; and never had he seemed to me more daring and more confirmed in his notions than at this moment when he was calmly contemplating the chances of being shot out of a volcano!
In the meantime up we went; the night passed away in continual ascent; the din and uproar around us became more and more intensified; I was stifled and stunned; I thought my last hour was approaching; and yet imagination is such a strong thing that even in this supreme hour I was occupied with strange and almost childish speculations. But I was the victim, not the master, of my own thoughts.
It was very evident that we were being hurried upward upon the crest of a wave of eruption; beneath our raft were boiling waters, and under these the more sluggish lava was working its way up in a heated mass, together with shoals of fragments of rock which, when they arrived at the crater, would be dispersed in all directions high and low. We were imprisoned in the shaft or chimney of some volcano. There was no room to doubt of that.
But this time, instead of Snæfell, an extinct volcano, we were inside one in full activity. I wondered, therefore, where could this mountain be, and in what part of the world we were to be shot out.
I made no doubt but that it would be in some northern region. Before its disorders set in, the needle had never deviated from that direction. From Cape Saknussemm we had been carried due north for hundreds of leagues. Were we under Iceland again? Were we destined to be thrown up out of Hecla, or by which of the seven other fiery craters in that island? Within a radius of five hundred leagues to the west I remembered under this parallel of latitude only the imperfectly known volcanoes