XVII

XVII

THE REAL JOURNEY BEGAN. So far our effort had overcome all difficulties, now difficulties would really spring up at every step.

I had not yet ventured to look down at the bottomless pit into which I was about to plunge. The moment had come. I could still either take my part in the venture or refuse to undertake it. But I was ashamed to withdraw in front of the hunter. Hans accepted the adventure so calmly, with such indifference and such perfect disregard for any danger that I blushed at the idea of being less brave than he. If I had been alone I might have once more tried a series of long arguments; but in the presence of the guide I held my peace; my memory flew back to my pretty Virland girl, and I approached the central chimney.

I have already mentioned that it was a hundred feet in diameter, and three hundred feet in circumference. I bent over a projecting rock and gazed down. My hair stood on end with terror. The feeling of emptiness overcame me. I felt the center of gravity shifting in me, and vertigo rising up to my brain like drunkenness. There is nothing more treacherous than this attraction toward the abyss. I was about to fall. A hand held me back. Hans’. I suppose I had not taken as many lessons in abysses as I should have at the Frelsers Kirke in Copenhagen.

But however briefly I had looked down this well, I had become aware of its structure. Its almost perpendicular walls were bristling with innumerable projections which would facilitate the descent. But if there was no lack of steps, there was still no rail. A rope fastened to the edge of the aperture would have been enough to support us. But how would we unfasten it when we arrived at the lower end?

My uncle used a very simple method to overcome this difficulty. He uncoiled a cord as thick as a finger and four hundred feet long; first he dropped half of it down, then he passed it round a lava block that projected conveniently, and threw the other half down the chimney. Each of us could then descend by holding both halves of the rope with his hand, which would not be able to unroll itself from its hold; when we were two hundred feet down, it would be easy to retrieve the entire rope by letting one end go and pulling down by the other. Then we would start this exercise over again ad infinitum.

“Now,” said my uncle, after having completed these preparations, “let’s see about our loads. I’ll divide them into three lots; each of us will strap one on his back. I mean only fragile articles.”

The audacious professor obviously did not include us in this last category.

“Hans,” he said, “will take charge of the tools and a part of the food supplies; you, Axel, will take another third of the food supplies, and the weapons; and I will take the rest of the food supplies and the delicate instruments.”

“But,” I said, “the clothes, and that mass of ladders and ropes, who’ll take them down?”

“They’ll go down by themselves.”

“How so?” I asked.

“You’ll see.”

My uncle liked to use extreme means, without hesitation. At his order, Hans put all the unbreakable items into one package, and this packet, firmly tied up, was simply thrown down into the chasm.

I heard the loud roar of the displaced layers of air. My uncle, leaning over the abyss, followed the descent of the luggage with a satisfied look, and only rose up again when he had lost sight of it.

“Well,” he said. “Now it’s our turn.”

I ask any sensible man if it was possible to hear those words without a shudder!

The professor tied the package of instruments to his back; Hans took the tools, myself the weapons. The descent started in the following order: Hans, my uncle, and myself. It was carried out in profound silence, broken only by the fall of loose stones into the abyss.

I let myself fall, so to speak, frantically clutching the double cord with one hand and buttressing myself from the wall with the other with my stick. One single idea obsessed me: I feared that the rock from which I was hanging might give way. This cord seemed very fragile for supporting the weight of three people. I used it as little as possible, performing miracles of equilibrium on the lava projections which my foot tried to seize like a hand.

When one of these slippery steps shook under Hans’ steps, he said in his quiet voice:

“Gif akt!”

“Attention!” repeated my uncle.

In half an hour we were standing on the surface of a rock wedged in across the chimney from one side to the other.

Hans pulled the rope by one of its ends, the other rose in the air; after passing the higher rock it came down again, bringing with it a rather dangerous shower of bits of stone and lava.

Leaning over the edge of our narrow platform, I noticed that the bottom of the hole was still invisible.

The same maneuver was repeated with the cord, and half an hour later we had descended another two hundred feet.

I do not suppose even the most obsessed geologist would have studied the nature of the rocks that we were passing under such circumstances. As for me, I hardly troubled myself about them. Pliocene, Miocene, Eocene, Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, Permian, Carboniferous, Devonian, Silurian, or Primitive was all one to me. But the professor, no doubt, was pursuing his observations or taking notes, for during one of our stops he said to me:

“The farther I go the more confident I am. The order of these volcanic formations absolutely confirms Davy’s theories. We’re now in the midst of primordial soil in which the chemical reaction of metals catching flame through the contact of water and air occurred. I absolutely reject the theory of heat at the center of the earth. We’ll see, in any case.”

Always the same conclusion. Of course, I was not inclined to argue. My silence was taken for consent, and the descent continued.

After three hours, and I still did not see bottom of the chimney. When I raised my head I noticed how the opening was getting smaller. Its walls, due to their gentle slope, were drawing closer to each other, and it was beginning to grow darker.

Still we kept descending. It seemed to me that the stones breaking loose from the walls fell with a duller echo, and that they must be reaching the bottom of the chasm promptly.

As I had taken care to keep an exact account of our maneuvers with the rope, I could tell exactly what depth we had reached and how much time had passed.

We had by that time repeated this maneuver fourteen times, each one taking half an hour. So it had been seven hours, plus fourteen quarter of an hour or a total of three hours to rest. Altogether, ten hours and a half. We had started at one, it must now be eleven o’clock.

As for the depth we had reached, these fourteen rope maneuvers of 200 feet each added up to 2,800 feet.

At that moment I heard Hans’ voice.

“Stop!” he said.

I stopped short just as I was going to hit my uncle’s head with my feet.

“We’ve arrived,” said the latter.

“Where?” I said, sliding down next to him.

“At the bottom of the vertical chimney,” he answered.

“Is there any way out?”

“Yes, a kind of tunnel that I can see and which veers off to the right. We’ll see about that tomorrow. Let’s have dinner first, and afterwards we’ll sleep.”

The darkness was not yet complete. We opened the bag with the supplies, ate, and each of us lay down as well as he could on a bed of stones and lava fragments.

When I lay on my back, I opened my eyes and saw a sparkling point of light at the extremity of this 3,000-foot long tube, which had now become a vast telescope.

It was a star without any glitter, which by my calculation should be ß of Ursa minor.

Then I fell into a deep sleep.