But though we were approaching the light of day, to what fearful dangers were we about to be exposed?
Instant death appeared the only fate which we could expect or contemplate.
Soon a dim, sepulchral light penetrated the vertical gallery, which became wider and wider. I could make out to the right and left long dark corridors like immense tunnels, from which awful and horrid vapors poured out. Tongues of fire, sparkling and crackling, appeared about to lick us up.
The hour had come!
“Look, Uncle, look!” I cried.
“Well, what you see are the great sulphurous flames. Nothing more common in connection with an eruption.”
“But if they lap us around!” I angrily replied.
“They will not lap us around,” was his quiet and serene answer.
“But it will be all the same in the end if they stifle us,” I cried.
“We shall not be stifled. The gallery is rapidly becoming wider and wider, and if it be necessary, we will presently leave the raft and take refuge in some fissure in the rock.”
“But the water, the water, which is continually ascending?” I despairingly replied.
“There is no longer any water, Harry,” he answered, “but a kind of lava paste, which is heaving us up, in company with itself, to the mouth of the crater.”
In truth, the liquid column of water had wholly disappeared to give place to dense masses of boiling eruptive matter. The temperature was becoming utterly insupportable, and a thermometer exposed to this atmosphere would have marked between one hundred and eighty-nine and one hundred ninety degrees Fahrenheit.
Perspiration rushed from every pore. But for the extraordinary rapidity of our ascent we should have been stifled.
Nevertheless, the Professor did not carry out his proposition of abandoning the raft; and he did quite wisely. Those few ill-joined beams offered, anyway, a solid surface—a support which elsewhere must have utterly failed us.
Toward eight o’clock in the morning a new incident startled us. The ascensional movement suddenly ceased. The raft became still and motionless.
“What is the matter now?” I said, querulously, very much startled by this change.
“A simple halt,” replied my uncle.
“Is the eruption about to fail?” I asked.
“I hope not.”
Without making any reply, I rose. I tried to look around me. Perhaps the raft, checked by some projecting rock, opposed a momentary resistance to the eruptive mass. In this case, it was absolutely necessary to release it as quickly as possible.
Nothing of the kind had occurred. The column of cinders, of scoriae, of broken rocks and earth, had wholly ceased to ascend.
“I tell you, Uncle, that the eruption has stopped,” was my oracular decision.
“Ah,” said my uncle, “you think so, my boy. You are wrong. Do not be in the least alarmed; this sudden moment of calm will not last long, be assured. It has already endured five minutes, and before we are many minutes older we shall be continuing our journey to the mouth of the crater.”
All the time he was speaking the Professor continued to consult his chronometer, and he was probably right in his prognostics. Soon the raft resumed its motion, in a very rapid and disorderly way, which lasted two minutes or thereabout; and then again it stopped as suddenly as before.
“Good,” said my uncle, observing the hour, “in ten minutes we shall start again.”
“In ten minutes?”
“Yes—precisely. We have to do with a volcano, the eruption of which is intermittent. We are compelled to breathe just as it does.”
Nothing could be more true. At the exact minute he had indicated, we were again launched on high with extreme rapidity. Not to be cast off the raft, it was necessary to hold on to the beams. Then the hoist again ceased.
Many times since have I thought of this singular phenomenon without being able to find for it any satisfactory explanation. Nevertheless, it appeared quite clear to me, that we were not in the principal chimney of the volcano, but in an accessory conduit, where we felt the counter shock of the great and principal tunnel filled by burning lava.
It is impossible for me to say how many times this maneuver was repeated. All that I can remember is, that on every ascensional motion, we were hoisted up with ever increasing velocity, as if we had been launched from a huge projectile. During the sudden halts we were nearly stifled; during moments of projection the hot air took away our breath.