home | authors | books | about

Home -> Jules Verne -> A Journey to the Center of the Earth -> Chapter 42

A Journey to the Center of the Earth - Chapter 42

1. Preface

2. Chapter 1

3. Chapter 2

4. Chapter 3

5. Chapter 4

6. Chapter 5

7. Chapter 6

8. Chapter 7

9. Chapter 8

10. Chapter 9

11. Chapter 10

12. Chapter 11

13. Chapter 12

14. Chapter 13

15. Chapter 14

16. Chapter 15

17. Chapter 16

18. Chapter 17

19. Chapter 18

20. Chapter 19

21. Chapter 20

22. Chapter 21

23. Chapter 22

24. Chapter 23

25. Chapter 24

26. Chapter 25

27. Chapter 26

28. Chapter 27

29. Chapter 28

30. Chapter 29

31. Chapter 30

32. Chapter 31

33. Chapter 32

34. Chapter 33

35. Chapter 34

36. Chapter 35

37. Chapter 36

38. Chapter 37

39. Chapter 38

40. Chapter 39

41. Chapter 40

42. Chapter 41

43. Chapter 42

44. Chapter 43

45. Chapter 44

46. Chapter 45







CHAPTER XLII.

HEADLONG SPEED UPWARD THROUGH THE HORRORS OF DARKNESS

It might have been, as I guessed, about ten at night. The first of my
senses which came into play after this last bout was that of hearing.
All at once I could hear; and it was a real exercise of the sense of
hearing. I could hear the silence in the gallery after the din which
for hours had stunned me. At last these words of my uncle's came to
me like a vague murmuring:

"We are going up."

"What do you mean?" I cried.

"Yes, we are going up--up!"

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

"The torch! The torch!" cried the Professor.

Not without difficulty Hans succeeded in lighting the torch; and the
flame, preserving its upward tendency, threw enough light to show us
what kind of a place we were in.

"Just as I thought," said the Professor "We are in a tunnel not
four-and-twenty feet in diameter The water had reached the bottom of
the gulf. It is now rising to its level, and carrying us with it."

"Where to?"

"I cannot tell; but we must be ready for anything. We are mounting at
a speed which seems to me of fourteen feet in a second, or ten miles
an hour. At this rate we shall get on."

"Yes, if nothing stops us; if this well has an aperture. But suppose
it to be stopped. If the air is condensed by the pressure of this
column of water we shall be crushed."

"Axel," replied the Professor with perfect coolness, "our situation
is almost desperate; but there are some chances of deliverance, and
it is these that I am considering. If at every instant we may perish,
so at every instant we may be saved. Let us then be prepared to seize
upon the smallest advantage."

"But what shall we do now?"

"Recruit our strength by eating."

At these words I fixed a haggard eye upon my uncle. That which I had
been so unwilling to confess at last had to be told.

"Eat, did you say?"

"Yes, at once."

The Professor added a few words in Danish, but Hans shook his head
mournfully.

"What!" cried my uncle. "Have we lost our provisions?"

"Yes; here is all we have left; one bit of salt meat for the three."

My uncle stared at me as if he could not understand.

"Well," said I, "do you think we have any chance of being saved?"

My question was unanswered.

An hour passed away. I began to feel the pangs of a violent hunger.
My companions were suffering too, and not one of us dared touch this
wretched remnant of our goodly store.

But now we were mounting up with excessive speed. Sometimes the air
would cut our breath short, as is experienced by aeronauts ascending
too rapidly. But whilst they suffer from cold in proportion to their
rise, we were beginning to feel a contrary effect. The heat was
increasing in a manner to cause us the most fearful anxiety, and
certainly the temperature was at this moment at the height of 100 deg.
Fahr.

What could be the meaning of such a change? Up to this time facts had
supported the theories of Davy and of Liedenbrock; until now
particular conditions of non-conducting rocks, electricity and
magnetism, had tempered the laws of nature, giving us only a
moderately warm climate, for the theory of a central fire remained in
my estimation the only one that was true and explicable. Were we then
turning back to where the phenomena of central heat ruled in all
their rigour and would reduce the most refractory rocks to the state
of a molten liquid? I feared this, and said to the Professor:

"If we are neither drowned, nor shattered to pieces, nor starved to
death, there is still the chance that we may be burned alive and
reduced to ashes."

At this he shrugged his shoulders and returned to his thoughts.

Another hour passed, and, except some slight increase in the
temperature, nothing new had happened.

"Come," said he, "we must determine upon something."

"Determine on what?" said I.

"Yes, we must recruit our strength by carefully rationing ourselves,
and so prolong our existence by a few hours. But we shall be reduced
to very great weakness at last."

"And our last hour is not far off."

"Well, if there is a chance of safety, if a moment for active
exertion presents itself, where should we find the required strength
if we allowed ourselves to be enfeebled by hunger?"

"Well, uncle, when this bit of meat has been devoured what shall we
have left?"

"Nothing, Axel, nothing at all. But will it do you any more good to
devour it with your eyes than with your teeth? Your reasoning has in
it neither sense nor energy."

"Then don't you despair?" I cried irritably.

"No, certainly not," was the Professor's firm reply.

"What! do you think there is any chance of safety left?"

"Yes, I do; as long as the heart beats, as long as body and soul keep
together, I cannot admit that any creature endowed with a will has
need to despair of life."

Resolute words these! The man who could speak so, under such
circumstances, was of no ordinary type.

"Finally, what do you mean to do?" I asked.

"Eat what is left to the last crumb, and recruit our fading strength.
This meal will be our last, perhaps: so let it be! But at any rate we
shall once more be men, and not exhausted, empty bags."

"Well, let us consume it then," I cried.

My uncle took the piece of meat and the few biscuits which had
escaped from the general destruction. He divided them into three
equal portions and gave one to each. This made about a pound of
nourishment for each. The Professor ate his greedily, with a kind of
feverish rage. I ate without pleasure, almost with disgust; Hans
quietly, moderately, masticating his small mouthfuls without any
noise, and relishing them with the calmness of a man above all
anxiety about the future. By diligent search he had found a flask of
Hollands; he offered it to us each in turn, and this generous
beverage cheered us up slightly.

"FORTRAFFLIG," said Hans, drinking in his turn.

"Excellent," replied my uncle.

A glimpse of hope had returned, although without cause. But our last
meal was over, and it was now five in the morning.

Man is so constituted that health is a purely negative state. Hunger
once satisfied, it is difficult for a man to imagine the horrors of
starvation; they cannot be understood without being felt.

Therefore it was that after our long fast these few mouthfuls of meat
and biscuit made us triumph over our past agonies.

But as soon as the meal was done, we each of us fell deep into
thought. What was Hans thinking of--that man of the far West, but
who seemed ruled by the fatalist doctrines of the East?

As for me, my thoughts were made up of remembrances, and they carried
me up to the surface of the globe of which I ought never to have
taken leave. The house in the Konigstrasse, my poor dear Grauben,
that kind soul Martha, flitted like visions before my eyes, and in
the dismal moanings which from time to time reached my ears I thought
I could distinguish the roar of the traffic of the great cities upon
earth.

My uncle still had his eye upon his work. Torch in hand, he tried to
gather some idea of our situation from the observation of the strata.
This calculation could, at best, be but a vague approximation; but a
learned man is always a philosopher when he succeeds in remaining
cool, and assuredly Professor Liedenbrock possessed this quality to a
surprising degree.

I could hear him murmuring geological terms. I could understand them,
and in spite of myself I felt interested in this last geological
study.

"Eruptive granite," he was saying. "We are still in the primitive
period. But we are going up, up, higher still. Who can tell?"

Ah! who can tell? With his hand he was examining the perpendicular
wall, and in a few more minutes he continued:

"This is gneiss! here is mica schist! Ah! presently we shall come to
the transition period, and then--"

What did the Professor mean? Could he be trying to measure the
thickness of the crust of the earth that lay between us and the world
above? Had he any means of making this calculation? No, he had not
the aneroid, and no guessing could supply its place.

Still the temperature kept rising, and I felt myself steeped in a
broiling atmosphere. I could only compare it to the heat of a furnace
at the moment when the molten metal is running into the mould.
Gradually we had been obliged to throw aside our coats and
waistcoats, the. lightest covering became uncomfortable and even
painful.

"Are we rising into a fiery furnace?" I cried at one moment when the
heat was redoubling.

"No," replied my uncle, "that is impossible--quite impossible!"

"Yet," I answered, feeling the wall, "this well is burning hot."

At the same moment, touching the water, I had to withdraw my hand in
haste.

"The water is scalding," I cried.

This time the Professor's only answer was an angry gesture.

Then an unconquerable terror seized upon me, from which I could no
longer get free. I felt that a catastrophe was approaching before
which the boldest spirit must quail. A dim, vague notion laid hold of
my mind, but which was fast hardening into certainty. I tried to
repel it, but it would return. I dared not express it in plain terms.
Yet a few involuntary observations confirmed me in my view. By the
flickering light of the torch I could distinguish contortions in the
granite beds; a phenomenon was unfolding in which electricity would
play the principal part; then this unbearable heat, this boiling
water! I consulted the compass.

The compass had lost its properties! it had ceased to act properly!




© Art Branch Inc. | English Dictionary