XXIV
XXIV
THE NEXT MORNING, WE had already forgotten all our sufferings. At first, I was amazed that I was no longer thirsty, and wondered about the reason. The creek murmuring at my feet provided the answer.
We had breakfast, and drank of this excellent ferrous water. I felt completely restored, and quite resolved to push on. Why would not so firmly convinced a man as my uncle succeed, with so industrious a guide as Hans and so ‘determined’ a nephew as myself? Such were the beautiful ideas that floated into my brain! If it had been proposed to me to return to the summit of Snaefells, I would have indignantly declined.
But fortunately, all we had to do was descend. “Let’s take off!” I exclaimed, awakening the ancient echoes of the globe with my enthusiastic tone.
We resumed our walk on Thursday at eight in the morning. The granite tunnel meandered in sinuous contortions and confronted us with unexpected turns in what appeared to be the intricacies of a labyrinth; but, on the whole, its main direction was always southeast. My uncle constantly checked his compass to keep track of the ground we had covered.
The tunnel stretched almost horizontally, with at most two inches of slope per fathom. The stream ran gently murmuring at our feet. I compared it to a friendly spirit guiding us underground, and with my hand I caressed the tepid naiad whose songs accompanied our steps. My good mood spontaneously led me to this mythological train of thought.
As for my uncle, a man of the vertical, he raged against the horizontal route. His path prolonged itself indefinitely, and instead of sliding down along the earth’s radius, in his words, it followed the hypotenuse. But we did not have any choice, and as long as we were making progress toward the center, however slowly, we could not complain.
From time to time, at any rate, the slopes became steeper; the naiad began to rush down with a roar, and we descended with her to a greater depth.
On the whole, that day and the next we made considerable headway horizontally, very little vertically.
On Friday evening, July 10, according to our calculations, we were thirty leagues southeast of Reykjavik, and at a depth of two and a half leagues.
At our feet a rather frightening well then opened up. My uncle could not keep from clapping his hands when he calculated the steepness of its slopes.
“This’ll take us a long way,” he exclaimed, “and easily, because the projections in the rock make for a real staircase!”
The ropes were tied by Hans in such a way as to prevent any accident. The descent began. I can hardly call it dangerous, because I was already familiar with this kind of exercise.
This well was a narrow cleft cut into the rock, of the kind that’s called a ‘fault.’ The contraction of the earth’s frame in its cooling period had obviously produced it. If it had at one time been a passage for eruptive matter thrown up by Snaefells, I could not understand why this material had left no trace. We kept going down a kind of spiral staircase which seemed almost to have been made by the hand of man.
Every quarter of an hour we were forced to stop, to get the necessary rest and restore the flexibility of our knees. We then sat down on some projecting rock, let our legs hang down, and chatted while we ate and drank from the stream.
Needless to say, in this fault the Hansbach had turned into a waterfall and lost some of its volume; but there was enough, more than enough, to quench our thirst. Besides, on less steep inclines, it would of course resume its peaceable course. At this moment it reminded me of my worthy uncle, in his frequent fits of impatience and anger, whereas on gentle slopes it ran with the calmness of the Icelandic hunter.
On July 11 and 12, we kept following the spiral curves of this singular well, penetrating two more leagues into the earth’s crust, which added up to a depth of five leagues below sea level. But on the 13th, about noon, the fault fell in a much gentler slope of about forty-five degrees towards the southeast.
The path then became easy and perfectly monotonous. It could hardly be otherwise. The journey could not vary by changes in the landscape.
Finally on Wednesday, the 15th, we were seven leagues underground and about fifty leagues away from Snaefells. Although we were a little tired, our health was still reassuringly good, and the medicine kit had not yet been opened.
My uncle noted every hour the indications of the compass, the chronometer, the manometer, and the thermometer just as he has published them in his scientific report of his journey. He could therefore easily identify our location. When he told me that we had gone fifty leagues horizontally, I could not repress an exclamation.
“What’s the matter?” he exclaimed.
“Nothing, I was just thinking.”
“Thinking what?”
“That if your calculations are correct we’re no longer underneath Iceland.”
“Do you think so?”
“It’s easy enough to find out.”
I made my compass measurements on the map.
“I’m not mistaken,” I said. “We have left Cape Portland behind, and those fifty leagues place us right under the sea.”
“Right under the sea,” my uncle repeated, rubbing his hands.
“So the ocean is right above our heads!” I exclaimed.
“Bah! Axel, what would be more natural? Aren’t there coal mines at Newcastle that extend far under the sea?”
It was all very well for the professor to call this so simple, but the idea that I was walking around under masses of water kept worrying me. And yet it really mattered very little whether it was the plains and mountains of Iceland that were suspended over our heads or the waves of the Atlantic, as long as the granite structure was solid. At any rate, I quickly got used to this idea, for the tunnel, sometimes straight, sometimes winding, as unpredictable in its slopes as in its turns, but always going southeast and penetrating ever deeper, led us rapidly to great depths.
Four days later, on Saturday, July 18, in the evening, we arrived at a kind of rather large grotto; my uncle paid Hans his three weekly rix-dollars, and it was settled that the next day, Sunday, should be a day of rest.