XLIV

XLIV

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.

This did not have the appearance of an arctic region, admittedly.

When the eye moved beyond this green enclosure, it quickly lost itself on the waters of an admirable ocean or lake, which meant that this enchanted place was an island, scarcely a few leagues wide. To the east one could see a little harbor with a few houses scattered around it, where boats of a peculiar shape floated on the waves of the azure water. Beyond, groups of islets emerged from the watery plain, so numerous that they resembled a big anthill. To the west, distant coasts lined the horizon; on some, blue mountains were outlined in a harmonious arrangement; on others, more distant, there appeared an extremely tall mountain with a plume of smoke at its summit. In the north, an immense expanse of water glittered in the sunlight, with the top of masts or the convex shape of wind-blown sails showing here and there.

The unexpectedness of this spectacle increased its marvelous beauty a hundredfold.

“Where are we? Where are we?” I repeated in a low voice.

Hans closed his eyes with indifference, and my uncle stared without understanding.

“Whatever mountain this may be,” he said at last, “it’s very hot here. The explosions are still going on, and it really wouldn’t be worth escaping from an eruption only to be hit on the head by a piece of rock. Let’s go down, and we’ll find out what’s going on. Besides, I’m dying from hunger and thirst.”

The professor was definitely not of a contemplative disposition. I for my part would have stayed in this place for many hours still, forgetting need and exhaustion, but I had to follow my companions.

The side of the volcano had very steep slopes; we slid into real potholes full of ashes, and avoided the lava streams that flowed down like serpents of fire. While we climbed down, I chattered volubly, for my imagination was too full not to overflow into words.

“We’re in Asia,” I exclaimed, “on the coasts of India, on the islands of Malaysia, or in the middle of the Pacific Islands! We have passed through half the globe and ended up almost at the antipodes of Europe.”

“But the compass?” replied my uncle.

“Yes! The compass!” I said with a confused look. “According to the compass we’ve always gone north.”

“So has it lied?”

“Lied!”

“Unless this is the North Pole!”

“The Pole! No, but .. :”

This was a fact I could not explain. I did not know what to think.

But now we were approaching the greenery, which was a pleasure to look at. Hunger tormented me, and thirst as well. Fortunately, after two hours of walking, a pretty countryside appeared before our eyes, completely covered with olive trees, pomegranate trees, and vines that looked as if they belonged to everybody. At any rate, in our destitute state we were not likely to be particular. What pleasure it was to press these tasty fruits to our lips, and to eat grapes by the mouthful from the purple vines! Not far off, I discovered a spring of fresh water in the grass, under the delicious shade of the trees, into which we plunged our faces and hands voluptuously While each of us surrendered to all the sweetness of rest, a child appeared between two clusters of olive trees.

“Ah!” I exclaimed, “an inhabitant of this happy land!”

It was a poor little wretch, miserably clothed, rather sickly, and apparently very frightened at our appearance; indeed, half naked, with unkempt beards, we looked very bad, and unless this was a land of thieves, we were likely to frighten its inhabitants.

Just as the child was about to run away, Hans went after him and brought him back, in spite of his cries and kicks.

I could feel the heaving of the mountain.

My uncle began by reassuring him as well as he could, and asked in good German:

“What is this mountain called, my little friend?”

The child did not answer. “Well,” said my uncle. “We are not in Germany”

And he repeated the same question in English.

Again, the child did not answer. I was very curious.

“Is he mute?” exclaimed the professor who, proud of his polyglottism, now reiterated the same question in French.

The same silence.

“Now let us try Italian,” resumed my uncle, and he said in that language:

“Dove noi siamo?”cd

“Yes, where are we?” I impatiently repeated.

The child still did not answer.

“Now then! Will you speak?” shouted my uncle, who began to lose his temper, and shook the child by the ears. “Come si noma questa isola?”

“Stromboli”ce replied the little shepherd, who slipped out of Hans’ hands and headed for the plain through the olive trees.

We had not thought of that! Stromboli! What effect this unexpected name had on my imagination! We were right in the Mediterranean, in the middle of the mythological Aeolian archipelago, on ancient Strongyle, where Aeolus‡ kept the winds and the storms chained up. And those blue mountains curving up in the east were the mountains of Calabria! And that volcano rising up on the southern horizon was Mt. Etna, the fierce Mt. Etna!

“Stromboli! Stromboli!” I repeated.

My uncle accompanied me with his gestures and words. We seemed to be singing like a choir!

Ah! What a journey! What a wonderful journey! Having entered through one volcano, we had exited through another, and that other one was more than twelve hundred leagues away from Snaefells, and from that barren landscape of Iceland at the edge of the world! The coincidences of the expedition had taken us into the heart of the most harmonious areas of the earth. We had exchanged the regions of perpetual snow for those of infinite green, and had left the grayish fog of the icy regions over our heads only to come back to the azure sky of Sicily!

After a delicious meal of fruits and fresh water, we set off again to reach the port of Stromboli. Revealing how we had arrived on the island did not seem advisable to us: Italians with their superstitious tendency would inevitably have cast us as demons vomited up from the pit of hell; so we had to resign ourselves to pretending we were only victims of a shipwreck. It was less glorious, but safer.

On the way I heard my uncle murmuring:

“But the compass! The compass that pointed due north! How to explain that?”

“Indeed!” I said with an air of great disdain, “it’s easier not to explain!”

“Absolutely not! A professor of the Johanneum unable to find the reason for a cosmic phenomenon, that would be a disgrace!”

As he spoke these words, my uncle, half-naked, with his leather purse around his waist and adjusting his glasses on his nose, became once more the fearsome professor of mineralogy.

One hour after we had left the olive grove, we arrived at the port of San Vicenzo, where Hans claimed the price of his thirteenth week of service, which was paid out to him with warm handshakes.

At that moment, even if he did not share our natural emotion, he at least allowed himself an unusual expression of feeling.

He lightly squeezed our hands with the tips of his fingers, and began to smile.