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Journey to the Center of the Earth
Chapter 13. THE SHADOW OF SCARTARIS
Our supper was eaten with ease and rapidity, after which everybody did the best he could for himself within the hollow of the crater.
The bed was hard, the shelter unsatisfactory, the situation painful, lying in the open air, five thousand feet above the level of the sea!
Nevertheless, it has seldom happened to me to sleep so well as I did on that particular night, I didn't even dream.
So much for the effects of what my uncle called "wholesome fatigue."
Next day, when we awoke under the rays of a bright and glorious sun, we were nearly frozen by the keen air.
I left my granite couch and made one of the party to enjoy a view of the magnificent spectacle which developed itself, panorama-like, at our feet.
I stood upon the lofty summit of Mount Sneffels' southern peak.
Thence I was able to obtain a view of the greater part of the island.
The optical delusion, common to all lofty heights, raised the shores of the island, while the central portions appeared depressed.
It was by no means too great a flight of fancy to believe that a giant picture was stretched out before me.
I could see the deep valleys that crossed each other in every direction.
I could see precipices like well-sides, lakes reduced to ponds, ponds to puddles, and rivers shrunk to petty brooks.
To my right were glaciers upon glaciers, and multiplied peaks, topped with light clouds of smoke.
The undulation of these countless mountains, with snowy summits like foam, recalled the surface of a storm-beaten ocean.
If I looked towards the west, the ocean lay before me in all its majestic grandeur, a continuation as it were, of these fleecy hilltops.
Where the earth ended and the sea began it was impossible for the eye to distinguish.
I soon felt that strange and mysterious sensation awakened in the mind when looking down from lofty hilltops.
I was now able to do so without any nervousness, having fortunately hardened myself to that kind of sublime contemplation.
I wholly forgot who I was, and where I was.
I became intoxicated with a sense of lofty sublimity, without thought of the abysses into which my daring was soon about to plunge me.
I was presently brought back to reality when the Professor and Hans joined me on the lofty summit of the peak.
My uncle turned toward the west and pointed out to me a light cloud of vapor, a kind of haze.
He showed a faint outline of land rising out of the waters.
"Greenland!" said he.
"Greenland?" cried I in reply.
"Yes," continued my uncle, who always when explaining anything spoke as if he were in a professor's chair.
"We aren't more than thirty-five leagues distant from that wonderful land."
"When the great annual breakup of the ice takes place, white bears come over to Iceland, carried by the floating masses of ice from the north."
"This, however, is a matter of little consequence."
"We're now on the summit of the great, the transcendent Sneffels, and here are its two peaks, north and south."
"Hans will tell you the name by which the people of Iceland call that on which we stand."
My uncle turned to the imperturbable guide, who nodded, and spoke as usual, one word.
"Scartaris."
My uncle looked at me with a proud and triumphant glance.
"A crater," he said, "you hear?"
I did hear, but I was totally unable to make reply.
The crater of Mount Sneffels represented an inverted cone, the gaping orifice apparently half a mile across, the depth indefinite feet.
Conceive what this hole must have been like when full of flame and thunder and lightning.
The bottom of the funnel-shaped hollow was about five hundred feet in circumference.
This showed that the slope from the summit to the bottom was very gradual.
So we were clearly able to get there without much fatigue or difficulty.
Involuntarily, I compared this crater to an enormous loaded cannon, and the comparison completely terrified me.
"To descend into the interior of a cannon,"
I thought to myself, "when perhaps it's loaded, and will go off at the least shock, is the act of a madman."
But there was no longer any opportunity for me to hesitate.
Hans, with a perfectly calm and indifferent air, took his usual post at the head of the adventurous little band.
I followed Hans without uttering a single syllable, keeping close and silent.
I felt like the lamb led to the slaughter.
Hans took his way down the interior of the cone in rather a zigzag fashion to render the descent less difficult.
He made, as the sailors say, long tracks to the eastward, followed by equally long ones to the west.
We had to walk among eruptive rocks, some shaken from their balance, which rolled with thundering clamor to the abyss's bottom.
These continual falls awoke echoes of singular power and effect.
Many portions of the cone consisted of inferior glaciers.
Hans, whenever he met one of these obstacles, advanced with a great show of precaution.
He sounded the soil with his long iron pole to discover fissures and layers of deep, soft snow.
In many doubtful or dangerous places, it became necessary for us to be tied together by a long rope.
This was so that if any one of us were unfortunate enough to slip, he'd be supported by his companions.
This connecting link was doubtless a prudent precaution, but not by any means unattended with danger.
Nevertheless, and despite all the manifold difficulties of the descent, along slopes with which our guide was wholly unacquainted, we made considerable progress without accident.
One of our great parcels of rope slipped from one of the Iceland porters, and rushed by a short cut to the bottom of the abyss.
By midday we were at the end of our journey.
I looked upwards and saw only the upper orifice of the cone.
It served as a circular frame to a very small portion of sky, which seemed to me singularly beautiful.
Should I ever again gaze on that lovely sunlit sky!
The only exception to this extraordinary landscape, was the Peak of Scartaris, which seemed lost in the great void of the heavens.
The bottom of the crater was composed of three separate shafts.
During periods of eruption, when Sneffels was in action, the great central furnace sent burning lava and poisonous vapors through them.
Each of these chimneys or shafts gaped open-mouthed in our path.
I kept as far away from them as possible, not even venturing to take the faintest peep downwards.
As for the Professor, after a rapid examination of their disposition and characteristics, he became breathless and panting.
He ran from one to the other like a delighted schoolboy, gesticulating wildly, and uttering incomprehensible and disjointed phrases in all sorts of languages.
Hans, the guide, and his humbler companions seated themselves on some piles of lava and looked silently on.
They clearly took my uncle for a lunatic, and, waited the result.
Suddenly the Professor uttered a wild, unearthly cry.
At first I imagined he had lost his footing, and was falling headlong into one of the yawning gulfs, Nothing of the kind.
I saw him standing upright before an enormous pedestal.
His arms spread to widest extent and legs stretched apart, the pedestal high and black enough to bear a gigantic statue of Pluto.
His attitude and mien were that of a man utterly stupefied.
But his stupefaction was speedily changed to the wildest joy.
"Harry! Harry! come here!" he cried, "make haste, wonderful, wonderful!"
Unable to understand what he meant, I turned to obey his commands.
Neither Hans nor the other Icelanders moved a step.
"Look!" said the Professor, in something of the manner of the French general, pointing out the pyramids to his army.
I fully shared his stupefaction, if not his joy.
On the eastern side of the huge block of stone I read the same characters, half eaten away by time's corrosive action.
They spelled the name that was to me a thousand times accursed, "Arne Saknussemm!" "Now, unbeliever, do you begin to have faith?" cried my uncle.
It was totally impossible for me to answer a single word.
I went back to my pile of lava, in a state of silent awe, the evidence was unanswerable, overwhelming!
In a few moments, however, my thoughts were far away, back in my German home, with Gretchen and the old cook.
What would I have given for one of my cousin's smiles, for one of the ancient domestic's omelettes, and for my own feather bed!
How long I remained in this state I know not.
All I can say is that, when at last I raised my head from between my hands, I looked up.
There remained at the bottom of the crater only myself, my uncle and Hans.
The Icelandic porters had been dismissed and were now descending the exterior slopes of Mount Sneffels, on their way to Stapi.
How heartily did I wish myself with them!
Hans slept tranquilly at the foot of a rock in a kind of rill of lava, where he had made himself a rough and ready bed.
MY uncle was walking about the bottom of the crater like a wild beast in a cage.
I had no desire, neither had I the strength, to move from my recumbent position.
Following the guide, I sank into a painful drowsiness and seemed to hear and feel continual heaving and shuddering in the mountain.
In this way we passed our first night in the interior of a crater.
Next morning, a grey, cloudy, heavy sky hung like a funereal pall over the summit of the volcanic cone.
I didn't notice it so much from the obscurity that reigned around us, as from the rage with which my uncle was devoured.
I fully understood the reason, and again a glimpse of hope made my heart leap with joy, I'll briefly explain the cause.
Of the three openings which yawned beneath our steps, only one could have been followed by the adventurous Saknussemm.
According to the words of the learned Icelander, it was to be known only by that one particular mentioned in the cryptograph.
The shadow of Scartaris fell upon it, just touching its mouth in the last days of June.
We were, in fact, to consider the pointed peak as the stylus of an immense sun-dial.
The stylus's shadow pointed one day, like the inexorable finger of fate, to the yawning chasm leading into the interior of the earth.
Now, as often happens in these regions, should the sun fail to burst through the clouds, no shadow.
Consequently, no chance of discovering the right aperture.
We had already reached the 25th June.
If the kindly heavens would only remain densely clouded for six more days, we should have to put off our voyage of discovery for another year.
When that happened, there would certainly be one person fewer in the party.
I already had sufficient of the mad and monstrous enterprise.
It would be utterly impossible to depict the impotent rage of Professor Hardwigg.
The day passed away, and not the faintest outline of a shadow could be seen at the bottom of the crater.
Hans the guide never moved from his place.
He must have been curious to know what we were about, if indeed he could believe we were about anything.
As for my uncle, he never addressed a word to me.
He was nursing his wrath to keep it warm!
His eyes fixed on the black and foggy atmosphere, his complexion hideous with suppressed passion.
Never had his eyes appeared so fierce, his nose so aquiline, his mouth so hard and firm.
On the 26th no change for the better.
A mixture of rain and snow fell during the whole day.
Hans very quietly built himself a hut of lava into which he retired like Diogenes into his tub.
I took malicious delight watching the thousand cascades that flowed down the cone, sometimes carrying streams of stones into the "vasty deep" below.
My uncle was almost frantic, to be sure, it was enough to make even a patient man angry.
He had reached to a certain extent the goal of his desires, and yet he was likely to be wrecked in port.
But if the heavens and the elements are capable of causing us much pain and sorrow, there are two sides to a medal.
And there was reserved for Professor Hardwigg a brilliant and sudden surprise which was to compensate him for all his sufferings.
Next day the sky was still overcast.
On Sunday, the 28th, two days before month's end, a sudden wind shift and a new moon changed the weather.
The sun poured its beaming rays to the very bottom of the crater.
Each hillock, every rock, every stone, every asperity of the soil had its share of the luminous effulgence, and its shadow fell heavily on the soil.
Among others, to his insane delight, the shadow of Scartaris was marked and clear, and moved slowly with the radiant start of day.
My uncle moved with it in a state of mental ecstasy.
At twelve o'clock exactly, when the sun had attained its highest altitude for the day, the shadow fell upon the edge of the central pit!
"Here it's," gasped the Professor in an agony of joy, "here it's, we have found it. Forward, my friends, into the Interior of the Earth."
I looked curiously at Hans to see what reply he'd make to this terrific announcement.
"Forut," said the guide tranquilly.
"Forward it's," answered my uncle, who was now in the seventh heaven of delight.
When we were quite ready, our watches indicated thirteen minutes past one!