After our long starvation, even a small amount of food felt like a priceless treasure.
A few bites of bread, some meat, a little spoiled biscuit, and salted beef were enough to drive away the dark thoughts that had filled our minds.
But after the meal, each of us fell silent, lost in our own thoughts.
I wondered what Hans was thinking. He was a man from the far north, a person with a strange calmness and acceptance of fate.
But I could not understand him.
As for me, my thoughts had returned to the world above.
I saw my old home in the Königstrasse.
I saw my dear Gretchen.
I saw kind Martha.
They appeared before me like memories from a distant dream.
Whenever I heard strange groans echoing through the underground passages, I imagined they were the distant sounds of cities far above our heads.
My uncle, however, cared about only one thing.
Science.
He held up his torch and carefully examined the walls of the shaft.
He studied every layer of rock, trying to discover where we were by studying the earth’s structure.
The calculation was uncertain, but my uncle never lost his confidence.
A true scientist always searched for answers, even in the most hopeless situations.
I listened as he quietly spoke to himself.
“Granite formed by volcanic activity,” he whispered.
“We are still in the ancient layers of the earth.”
“But we are rising.”
“Higher and higher.”
“Who knows what we may find?”
For a moment, he still had hope.
He ran his hand along the rock wall and continued his examination.
“This is gneiss.”
“This is mica schist.”
“These rocks belong to a later period.”
“We must be getting close.”
“But then…”
“What comes next?”
I could not understand how he could possibly know how much earth was above us.
He had no instrument that could measure the thickness of the planet’s crust.
Yet he continued to believe.
Then something changed.
The temperature began rising.
At first, it was uncomfortable.
Then it became unbearable.
The air felt like the heat pouring out of a furnace filled with molten metal.
One by one, Hans, my uncle, and I removed our coats and waistcoats.
Even our lightest clothing felt like a heavy burden.
“Are we moving toward a sea of fire?” I shouted.
My uncle immediately rejected the idea.
“No. Impossible.”
“But the wall is burning!” I cried.
I placed my hand against the rock.
It was almost too hot to touch.
I quickly plunged my hands into the water beside us to cool them.
Then I screamed.
“The water is boiling!”
My uncle did not answer.
He only looked troubled.
Perhaps, deep inside, he had already guessed the terrible truth.
I could not think clearly anymore.
Fear had completely taken control of me.
A terrifying idea slowly formed in my mind.
At first, I refused to believe it.
But the evidence became impossible to ignore.
The rocks around us were changing.
Strange forces were moving through the earth.
Then I checked the compass.
What I saw frightened me more than anything before.
The compass had gone completely crazy.
The needle jumped wildly from one direction to another.
It spun around and returned again, as if it had lost all sense of direction.
I knew the earth’s interior was never completely still.
Deep beneath our feet, enormous forces were always moving.
But this was different.
The shaking, the heat, and the strange behavior of the compass all pointed toward one terrifying possibility.
The earth itself seemed ready to break apart.
Huge explosions began around us.
The sound was like hundreds of heavy wagons crashing over stone roads.
The entire underground world thundered.
The walls trembled.
The rocks cracked.
The compass spun wildly.
I finally understood.
The underground passage was about to collapse.
The earth was going to close around us.
We were nothing more than tiny creatures trapped inside a giant machine of stone and fire.
“Uncle!” I cried.
“We are lost!”
He looked at me calmly.
“What has frightened you now?”
“Can’t you see?” I shouted.
“The walls are moving!”
“The rocks are breaking!”
“The heat is unbearable!”
“The water is boiling!”
“The compass has gone mad!”
“These are all signs of an earthquake!”
My uncle slowly shook his head.
“An earthquake?”
“Yes!”
“My boy,” he said calmly, “you are mistaken.”
“Mistaken?”
“Then what is happening?”
He looked at me seriously.
“An eruption.”
I froze.
“An eruption?”
“We are inside the volcanic passage of an active volcano?”
“I believe so,” he replied.
And then he smiled.
“But this is the best thing that could happen to us.”
The best thing?
I thought my uncle had lost his mind.
“How can you say that?” I shouted.
“We are inside a volcano!”
“Soon we will be thrown out with burning lava, rocks, and clouds of fire!”
“And you call that fortunate?”
“Yes,” he answered.
“Because it is our only chance to escape from the center of the earth and return to the surface.”
Those words were impossible to describe.
But strangely enough, my uncle was right.
Never had I seen him so confident.
The eruption continued.
We kept rising.
The noise grew louder and louder.
The heat became almost unbearable.
The raft beneath us was being carried upward by a powerful force.
Below us was boiling liquid.
Below that was lava and burning rock.
We were trapped inside the throat of a volcano.
There was no longer any doubt.
But the question remained:
Which volcano?
Where would we finally emerge?
The compass had once shown that we were moving north.
Perhaps we were still somewhere near Iceland.
Perhaps we would burst out through the crater of Mount Hekla.
Or perhaps another volcano waited for us.
But at that moment, it no longer mattered.
All I knew was that we were being thrown upward toward an unknown fate.
As morning approached, our speed increased.
The force carrying us upward was enormous.
The pressure inside the earth was pushing us toward the surface.
Yet reaching daylight did not mean safety.
Death still seemed almost certain.
Soon, a faint light appeared above us.
The passage became wider.
Dark tunnels opened on both sides.
Terrible gases poured from them.
Flames flickered around us like burning tongues trying to consume everything.
“The moment has come!” I shouted.
“Look, Uncle!”
My uncle calmly examined the flames.
“They are only burning sulfur gases.”
“Nothing unusual during an eruption.”
“But what if they surround us?”
“They will not.”
“What if they suffocate us?”
“They will not,” he replied.
“The passage is widening.”
“If necessary, we can leave the raft and hide in a crack in the rocks.”
“But the water!” I cried.
“The water is rising!”
“There is no water anymore,” he said.
“It has become a thick mass of lava and volcanic material carrying us upward.”
He was right.
The water had disappeared.
Only boiling volcanic matter remained.
The heat was beyond imagination.
A thermometer placed there would have shown nearly two hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
Sweat poured from every part of my body.
Without our rapid movement upward, we would have died.
Still, my uncle wisely kept us on the raft.
Those weak wooden boards were the only solid ground we had.
Then, suddenly, everything stopped.
The raft became completely still.
“What happened?” I asked in fear.
“A pause,” my uncle answered.
“Has the eruption stopped?”
“I hope not.”
I stood up and looked around.
Perhaps the raft had become stuck.
Perhaps a rock was blocking our way.
But nothing had happened.
The column of ash, stone, and burning material had simply stopped rising.
“The eruption has ended,” I said.
My uncle looked at his watch.
“No.”
“Do not worry.”
“This pause will not last long.”
“Soon we will continue upward.”
He was right.
A few minutes later, the raft suddenly shot upward again.
The movement was violent and terrifying.
Then it stopped once more.
My uncle calmly checked the time.
“In ten minutes, we will move again.”
“Ten minutes?”
“Yes.”
“This volcano erupts in stages.”
“We must rise and fall with its rhythm.”
Once again, exactly as he predicted, we were thrown upward.
I held tightly to the wooden beams.
The terrifying journey continued.
Each time we rose, we moved faster.
Each time we stopped, we nearly lost consciousness from the heat.
I began to dream of cold air.
I imagined snow.
I imagined the frozen lands of the north.
I wanted nothing more than to lie on ice and feel the cold against my skin.
But my mind could no longer endure.
I became confused.
I lost control of my thoughts.
Only Hans’s strong arms kept me from falling against the hard stone walls.
After that, I remember very little.
I only remember endless explosions.
The shaking of the earth.
The raft spinning wildly.
The burning lava beneath us.
The storm of ashes around us.
The flames rising like a wall of fire.
A powerful wind rushed through the passage like air from a giant furnace.
It was a deadly breath from the heart of the earth.
At last, I saw Hans standing before me, surrounded by fire.
And the only feeling left inside me was the terrible fear of a person facing the final moment before being thrown into the unknown.