“Are we ascending to a living fire?” I cried; when, to my horror and astonishment, the heat became greater than before.
“No, no,” said my uncle, “it is simply impossible, quite impossible.”
“And yet,” said I, touching the side of the shaft with my naked hand, “this wall is literally burning.”
At this moment, feeling as I did that the sides of this extraordinary wall were red hot, I plunged my hands into the water to cool them. I drew them back with a cry of despair.
“The water is boiling!” I cried.
My uncle, the Professor, made no reply other than a gesture of rage and despair.
Something very like the truth had probably struck his imagination.
But I could take no share in either what was going on, or in his speculations. An invincible dread had taken possession of my brain and soul. I could only look forward to an immediate catastrophe, such a catastrophe as not even the most vivid imagination could have thought of. An idea, at first vague and uncertain, was gradually being changed to certainty.
I tremulously rejected it at first, but it forced itself upon me by degrees with extreme obstinacy. It was so terrible an idea that I scarcely dared to whisper it to myself.
And yet all the while certain, and as it were, involuntary observations determined my convictions. By the doubtful glare of the torch, I could make out some singular changes in the granite strata; a strange and terrible phenomenon was about to be produced, in which electricity played a part.
Then this boiling water, this terrible and excessive heat? I determined as a last resource to examine the compass.
The compass had gone mad!
Yes, wholly stark staring mad. The needle jumped from pole to pole with sudden and surprising jerks, ran around, or as it is said, boxed the compass, and then ran suddenly back again as if it had the vertigo.
I was aware that, according to the best acknowledged theories, it was a received notion that the mineral crust of the globe is never, and never has been, in a state of complete repose.
It is perpetually undergoing the modifications caused by the decomposition of internal matter, the agitation consequent on the flowing of extensive liquid currents, the excessive action of magnetism which tends to shake it incessantly, at a time when even the multitudinous beings on its surface do not suspect the seething process to be going on.
Still this phenomenon would not have alarmed me alone; it would not have aroused in my mind a terrible, an awful idea.
But other facts could not allow my self-delusion to last.
Terrible detonations, like Heaven’s artillery, began to multiply themselves with fearful intensity. I could only compare them with the noise made by hundreds of heavily laden chariots being madly driven over a stone pavement. It was a continuous roll of heavy thunder.
And then the mad compass, shaken by the wild electric phenomena, confirmed me in my rapidly formed opinion. The mineral crust was about to burst, the heavy granite masses were about to rejoin, the fissure was about to close, the void was about to be filled up, and we poor atoms to be crushed in its awful embrace!
“Uncle, Uncle!” I cried, “we are wholly, irretrievably lost!”
“What, then, my young friend, is your new cause of terror and alarm?” he said in his calmest manner. “What fear you now?”
“What do I fear now!” I cried in fierce and angry tones. “Do you not see that the walls of the shaft are in motion? Do you not see that the solid granite masses are cracking? Do you not feel the terrible, torrid heat? Do you not observe the awful boiling water on which we float? Do you not remark this mad needle? Every sign and portent of an awful earthquake!”
My uncle coolly shook his head.
“An earthquake,” he replied in the most calm and provoking tone.
“Yes.”
“My nephew. I tell you that you are utterly mistaken,” he continued.
“Do you not, can you not, recognize all the well-known symptoms—”
“Of an earthquake? By no means. I am expecting something far more important.”