Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne

Author:Jules Verne [Verne, Jules]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141920689
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-04-25T04:00:00+00:00

24

Under the Sea

The next day, we had already forgotten all our past sufferings. At first I was surprised at not feeling thirsty any more, and for a moment I wondered why this was. The murmuring stream running at my feet gave me the answer.

We had breakfast and drank some of this excellent ferruginous water. I felt wonderfully cheered and resolved to go a long way. Why shouldn’t a man as determined as my uncle attain his object, when he was accompanied by a guide as industrious as Hans and a nephew as devoted as myself? Such were the splendid ideas which occurred to me. If anyone had suggested that I should return to the summit of Sneffels, I would have refused with the utmost indignation.

Fortunately, all that we had to do was descend.

‘Let us start!’ I cried, awakening with my shout the oldest echoes in the world.

We set off again at eight on Thursday morning. The winding granite tunnel had all sorts of unexpected bends and seemed as tortuous as a maze, but its general direction was consistently south-east. My uncle kept consulting his compass very attentively, to keep account of the way we had come.

The gallery was almost horizontal, with a slope of one in forty at the most. The murmuring stream ran gently at our feet; I thought of it as a sort of familiar spirit guiding us underground, and now and then I stroked the warm naiad whose singing accompanied our steps. Good humour has always taken a mythological form with me.

As for my uncle, he kept inveighing against the horizontal nature of the path, as an enthusiast for verticals. Our route seemed to be stretching away into infinity, and instead of sliding down the terrestrial radius, as he put it, we were travelling along the hypotenuse. But we had no choice, and as long as we were approaching the centre, however gradually, we could not grumble. Besides, every now and then the slope became steeper, our naiad tumbled down it with a moan, and we went deeper with her.

On the whole, however, that day and the next we made considerable progress horizontally but comparatively little vertically.

In the evening of Friday, 10 July, according to our calculations, we were seventy-five miles south-west of Reykjavik and seven miles down.

Then, all of a sudden, a frightening shaft opened at our feet. My uncle could not help clapping his hands for joy when he saw how steep it was.

‘Now we shall make progress,’ he cried, ‘and without much effort, because the projections of the rock make a regular staircase!’

The ropes were fastened by Hans so as to guard against all possibility of accident, and the descent continued. I can scarcely describe it as perilous, for I was already familiar with this sort of operation.

This shaft was a narrow crack in the granite mass, of the kind geologists call a ‘fault’, and it had obviously been caused by the contraction of the earth’s crust while it was cooling. If it had

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