XLII

XLII

I THINK IT MUST then have been about ten at night. The first of my senses which began to function again after this last bout was that of hearing. Almost immediately I heard, and it was a genuine act of hearing, I heard silence fall in the tunnel after the roars had filled my ears for long hours. At last these words of my uncle’s reached me like a murmur:

“We’re going up!”

“What do you mean?” I exclaimed.

“Yes, we’re going up! Up!”

I stretched out my arm; I touched the wall, and drew back my hand bleeding. We were going up with extreme rapidity.

“The torch! The torch!” shouted the professor.

Hans managed to light it, not without difficulty, and the flame, staying upright in spite of the rising movement, threw enough light to illuminate the scene.

“Just as I thought,” said my uncle. “We are in a narrow tunnel, less than four fathoms in diameter. The water has reached the bottom of the chasm, rises back up to its level and carries us with it.”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know, but we must be ready for anything. We’re rising at a speed that I’d estimate at two fathoms per second, that’s 120 fathoms per minute or more than three and a half leagues an hour. At that rate, one makes progress.”

“Yes, if nothing stops us, if this well has an exit! But what if it’s blocked, what if the air is compressed through the pressure of this water column, what if we’re crushed!”

“Axel,” replied the professor with great calm, “our situation is almost desperate, but there are some chances of escape, and it’s these that I’m considering. If we might perish at any moment, we might also be saved at any moment. So let’s be ready to take advantage of the most minute circumstance.”

“But what should we do?”

“Recover our strength by eating.”

At these words, I looked at my uncle with a frantic eye. What I had been unwilling to reveal had to be said at last:

“Eat?” I repeated.

“Yes, without delay.”

The professor added a few words in Danish. Hans shook his head.

“What!” exclaimed my uncle. “Our food supplies are lost?”

“Yes, this is all the food we have left! One piece of dried meat for the three of us!”

My uncle looked at me without wanting to grasp my words.

“Well then!” I said, “do you still think we might be saved?”

My question received no answer.

An hour passed. I began to feel the pangs of a violent hunger. My companions were also suffering, and none of us dared touch this miserable rest of food.

In the meantime, we were still rising at extreme speed. Sometimes the air cut our breath short, like aeronauts who ascend too rapidly. But while they feel the cold in proportion to their rise into the atmospheric strata, we were subject to the diametrically opposite effect. The heat was increasing at a disturbing rate and certainly must have reached 40°C at that moment.

What did that kind of change mean? So far, the facts had confirmed Davy’s and Lidenbrock’s theories; so far the special conditions of non-conducting rocks, electricity and magnetism had modified the general laws of nature and given us a moderate temperature, for the theory of fire at the core remained in my view the only true and explainable one. Were we going back to an environment where these phenomena applied in all their rigor, and where the heat was completely melting rocks down? I feared so and said to the professor:

“If we’re neither drowned nor shattered to pieces, nor starved to death, there’s still a chance that we might be burned alive.”

He confined himself to shrugging his shoulders and returned to his reflections.

Another hour passed and, except a slight increase in temperature, no incident changed the situation.

“Let’s see,” he said, “we must make a decision.”

“Make a decision?” I replied.

“Yes. We must recover our forces. If we try to prolong our existence by a few hours by rationing this rest of food, we’ll be weak until the end.”

“Yes, the end, which is not far off.”

“Well then! If a chance of escape appears, if a moment of action is necessary, where are we going to find the strength to act if we allow ourselves to be weakened by starvation?”

“Ah, Uncle, when this piece of meat has been eaten, what do we have left?”

“Nothing, Axel, nothing. But will it do you any more good to devour it with your eyes? Your reasoning is that of man without willpower, a being without energy!”

“Then you don’t despair?” I exclaimed irritably

“No!” replied the professor firmly

“What! You still think there’s a chance of escape?”

“Yes! Yes, certainly! As long as the heart beats, as long as the flesh pulsates, I can’t admit that any creature endowed with willpower needs to be overwhelmed by despair.”

What words! A man who pronounced them under such circumstances was certainly of no ordinary cast of mind.

“Well,” I said, “what do you plan to do?”

“Eat what food is left down to the last crumb and recover our lost strength. If this meal is our last, so be it! But at least we’ll once more be men and not exhausted.”

“Well then! Let’s eat it up!” I exclaimed.

My uncle took the piece of meat and the few biscuits which had escaped the shipwreck; he divided them into three equal portions and distributed them. That resulted in about a pound of nourishment for each. The professor ate greedily, with a kind of feverish eagerness; myself, without pleasure, in spite of my hunger almost with disgust; Hans quietly, moderately, chewing small mouthfuls without any noise, relishing them with the calm of a man untouched by any anxiety about the future. By digging around he had found a flask of gin; he offered it to us, and this beneficial liquor succeeded in cheering me up a little.

“Fortrafflig,” said Hans, drinking in his turn.

“Excellent!” replied my uncle.

I had regained some hope. But our last meal was over. It was at that time five in the morning.

Man is constituted in such a way that health is a purely negative state; once hunger is satisfied, it is difficult to imagine the horrors of starvation; one must feel them to understand them. For that reason, a few mouthfuls of meat and biscuit after our long fast helped us overcome our past suffering.

But after the meal, we each of us fell deep into thought. What was Hans thinking of, that man of the far West who seemed dominated by the fatalist resignation of the East? As for me, my thoughts consisted only of memories, and those took me back to the surface of the globe which I should never have left. The house in the Konigstrasse, my poor Graüben, the good Martha flitted like visions before my eyes, and in the gloomy rumblings that shook the rock I thought I could distinguish the noise of the cities of the earth.

My uncle, always “doing business,” carefully examined the nature of our surroundings with the torch in his hand; he tried to determine his location from the examination of the layered strata. This calculation, or more precisely this estimate, could be no more than approximate; but a scholar is always a scholar if he manages to remain calm, and certainly Professor Lidenbrock had this quality to an uncommon degree.

I heard him murmur geological terms; I understood them, and in spite of myself I got interested in this last study

“Eruptive granite,” he was saying. “We’re still in the primitive period ; but we’re going up, up! Who knows?”

Who knows? He kept on hoping. With his hand he explored the vertical wall, and a few moments later he resumed:

“Here’s gneiss! Here’s mica schist! Good! Soon the Transition period, and then . . .”

What did the professor mean? Could he measure the thickness of the terrestrial crust above our heads? Had he any means of making this calculation? No. He did not have the manometer, and no estimate could replace it.

In the meantime the temperature kept rising at a fast rate, and I felt immersed into a burning atmosphere. I could only compare it to the heat emanating from the furnaces of a foundry at the moment when the molten metal is being poured. Gradually, Hans, my uncle and I had been forced to take off our jackets and vests; the lightest piece of clothing turned into a source of discomfort, even suffering.

“Are we rising toward a fiery furnace?” I exclaimed, at a moment when the heat increased.

“No,” replied my uncle, “that’s impossible! That’s impossible!”

“Yet,” I said, touching the wall, “this wall is burning hot.”

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!