CHAPTER XXIV.

WELL SAID, OLD MOLE! CANST THOU WORK I' THE GROUND SO FAST?

By the next day we had forgotten all our sufferings. At first, I was

wondering that I was no longer thirsty, and I was for asking for the

reason. The answer came in the murmuring of the stream at my feet.

We breakfasted, and drank of this excellent chalybeate water. I felt

wonderfully stronger, and quite decided upon pushing on. Why should

not so firmly convinced a man as my uncle, furnished with so

industrious a guide as Hans, and accompanied by so determined a

nephew as myself, go on to final success? Such were the magnificent

plans which struggled for mastery within me. If it had been proposed

to me to return to the summit of Snæfell, I should have indignantly

declined.

Most fortunately, all we had to do was to descend.

"Let us start!" I cried, awakening by my shouts the echoes of the

vaulted hollows of the earth.

On Thursday, at 8 a.m., we started afresh. The granite tunnel winding

from side to side, earned us past unexpected turns, and seemed almost

to form a labyrinth; but, on the whole, its direction seemed to be

south-easterly. My uncle never ceased to consult his compass, to keep

account of the ground gone over.

The gallery dipped down a very little way from the horizontal,

scarcely more than two inches in a fathom, and the stream ran gently

murmuring at our feet. I compared it to a friendly genius guiding us

underground, and caressed with my hand the soft naiad, whose

comforting voice accompanied our steps. With my reviving spirits

these mythological notions seemed to come unbidden.

As for my uncle, he was beginning to storm against the horizontal

road. He loved nothing better than a vertical path; but this way

seemed indefinitely prolonged, and instead of sliding along the

hypothenuse as we were now doing, he would willingly have dropped

down the terrestrial radius. But there was no help for it, and as

long as we were approaching the centre at all we felt that we must

not complain.

From time to time, a steeper path appeared; our naiad then began to

tumble before us with a hoarser murmur, and we went down with her to

a greater depth.

On the whole, that day and the next we made considerable way

horizontally, very little vertically.

On Friday evening, the 10th of July, according to our calculations,

we were thirty leagues south-east of Rejkiavik, and at a depth of two

leagues and a half.

At our feet there now opened a frightful abyss. My uncle, however,

was not to be daunted, and he clapped his hands at the steepness of

the descent.

"This will take us a long way," he cried, "and without much

difficulty; for the projections in the rock form quite a staircase."

The ropes were so fastened by Hans as to guard against accident, and

the descent commenced. I can hardly call it perilous, for I was

beginning to be familiar with this kind of exercise.

This well, or abyss, was a narrow cleft in the mass of the granite,

called by geologists a 'fault,' and caused by the unequal cooling of

the globe of the earth. If it had at one time been a passage for

eruptive matter thrown out by Snæfell, I still could not understand

why no trace was left of its passage. We kept going down a kind of

winding staircase, which seemed almost to have been made by the hand

of man.

Every quarter of an hour we were obliged to halt, to take a little

necessary repose and restore the action of our limbs. We then sat

down upon a fragment of rock, and we talked as we ate and drank from

the stream.

Of course, down this fault the Hansbach fell in a cascade, and lost

some of its volume; but there was enough and to spare to slake our

thirst. Besides, when the incline became more gentle, 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, while

below it ran with the calmness of the Icelandic hunter.

On the 6th and 7th of July we kept following the spiral curves of

this singular well, penetrating in actual distance no more than two

leagues; but being carried to a depth of five leagues below the level

of the sea. But on the 8th, about noon, the fault took, towards the

south-east, a much gentler slope, one of about forty-five degrees.

Then the road became monotonously easy. It could not be otherwise,

for there was no landscape to vary the stages of our journey.

On Wednesday, the 15th, we were seven leagues underground, and had

travelled fifty leagues away from Snæfell. Although we were tired,

our health was perfect, and the medicine chest had not yet had

occasion to be opened.

My uncle noted every hour the indications of the compass, the

chronometer, the aneroid, and the thermometer the very same which he

has published in his scientific report of our journey. It was

therefore not difficult to know exactly our whereabouts. When he told

me that we had gone fifty leagues horizontally, I could not repress

an exclamation of astonishment, at the thought that we had now long

left Iceland behind us.

"What is the matter?" he cried.

"I was reflecting that if your calculations are correct we are no

longer under Iceland."

"Do you think so?"

"I am not mistaken," I said, and examining the map, I added, "We have

passed Cape Portland, and those fifty leagues bring us under the wide

expanse of ocean."

"Under the sea," my uncle repeated, rubbing his hands with delight.

"Can it be?" I said. "Is the ocean spread above our heads?"

"Of course, Axel. What can be more natural? At Newcastle are there

not coal mines extending far under the sea?"

It was all very well for the Professor to call this so simple, but I

could not feel quite easy at the thought that the boundless ocean was

rolling over my head. And yet it really mattered very little whether

it was the plains and mountains that covered our heads, or the

Atlantic waves, as long as we were arched over by solid granite. And,

besides, I was getting used to this idea; for the tunnel, now running

straight, now winding as capriciously in its inclines as in its

turnings, but constantly preserving its south-easterly direction, and

always running deeper, was gradually carrying us to very great depths

indeed.

Four days later, Saturday, the 18th of July, in the evening, we

arrived at a kind of vast grotto; and here my uncle paid Hans his

weekly wages, and it was settled that the next day, Sunday, should be

a day of rest.