The next morning was Tuesday, June 30. At six o’clock, we set off again.
We continued along the lava gallery. It was almost like a natural road, sloping gently downward like the old inclined stairways found in ancient German houses.
We walked on until twelve seventeen. At that exact moment, we caught up with Hans, who had gone ahead and suddenly stopped.
“At last!” my uncle cried. “We’ve reached the end of the shaft.”
I looked around in surprise.
We were standing where four dark, narrow tunnels crossed.
“Which one do we take?” I wondered.
That was a serious problem. There was nothing to tell us which tunnel was the right one.
My uncle clearly did not want to show any uncertainty in front of Hans or me. After a moment, he calmly pointed toward the eastern tunnel.
“That one,” he said.
Without another word, we entered the darkness.
There was really no way to make an informed choice. We had to depend on luck.
The eastern passage was narrow, winding, and gradually sloped downward.
At times, the tunnel opened into a series of high arches. It looked almost like the inside of a Gothic cathedral.
I could not help thinking that the great architects of the Middle Ages would have loved this place. They could have found endless inspiration in these natural arches and strange underground shapes.
About a mile farther on, the appearance of the tunnel changed completely.
We came across a square system of stone arches, much like those used by the ancient Romans to support heavy roofs. These arches seemed to grow directly out of the solid rock.
Then the tunnel became even stranger.
Suddenly, we found ourselves facing low, twisting passages that looked like beaver holes or fox burrows.
We had to crawl through them.
Fortunately, the temperature was still bearable.
But I could not stop thinking about the volcano above us.
I shuddered as I imagined what this tunnel must have been like when Sneffels was active—when smoke, fire, and rivers of boiling lava had rushed through these very passages.
I could almost see the molten rock racing through the tunnels, bubbling and roaring, surrounded by steam, smoke, and the terrible smell of sulfur.
“What would happen,” I thought, “if that old volcano suddenly became active again?”
I kept the thought to myself.
My uncle would not have appreciated such worries. He cared about only one thing: moving forward.
He walked, slid, climbed over piles of broken rock, and even rolled down heaps of loose lava with such determination that I could not help admiring him.
By six in the evening, we had traveled about six miles southward. Yet we had descended less than a mile.
As usual, my uncle ordered us to stop.
We ate our meal in silence and then prepared to sleep.
Our sleeping arrangements were extremely simple.
Each of us wrapped himself in a traveling blanket.
That was all.
We had no reason to worry about the cold, wild animals, or dangerous people.
Travelers crossing the African desert often have to take turns standing guard while the others sleep. The same is true for explorers in the forests of the New World.
But down here, deep beneath the earth, we had nothing to fear.
There were no wild animals.
There were no human enemies.
There was only complete silence and safety.
After a peaceful night’s sleep, we woke feeling refreshed and ready to continue.
Nothing delayed us, so we set off immediately.
Once again, we crawled and walked through the lava tunnel.
I could no longer tell what kind of rock we were passing through.
Something else had changed, too.
The tunnel was no longer going downward.
It had become almost completely horizontal.
After studying the slope carefully, I began to suspect that we were actually going upward.
By about ten o’clock, I was certain of it.
The change made walking much harder, and I finally had to slow down.
Soon I stopped altogether.
My uncle immediately noticed.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I’m exhausted,” I admitted.
“Exhausted?” he cried. “After only three hours of walking? And on such an easy path?”
“It may be easy, but it is tiring.”
“How can it be tiring when we are supposed to be going downhill?”
“I’m sorry, Uncle, but I don’t think we’re going downhill anymore.”
He stared at me.
“For some time now, we’ve been going upward.”
“Upward?” he exclaimed, raising his shoulders. “How is that possible?”
“There’s no doubt about it. For the last half hour, the slope has been rising. If we keep going like this, we may end up back in Iceland!”
My uncle shook his head stubbornly.
He clearly did not want to believe me.
I tried to explain further, but he refused to answer.
Instead, he simply gave the signal to move on.
I picked up my pack again and followed Hans, who was now walking ahead of my uncle.
I hated the thought of being left behind.
The idea of getting lost alone in that terrible maze of tunnels frightened me more than I wanted to admit.
Still, there was one thing that secretly encouraged me.
If we really were going upward, perhaps we were heading back toward the surface.
That thought gave me hope.
With every step, I became more convinced that we were getting closer to the outside world.
And before long, my imagination was already running wild.
I even began dreaming about returning home and marrying my lovely little cousin.
Around noon, the appearance of the tunnel suddenly changed.
The first thing I noticed was that the light from our lamp no longer reflected as brightly from the walls.
The walls had once been covered with shining lava.
Now they were made of ordinary rock.
In some places they sloped gently.
In others, they rose almost vertically.
We had entered a completely different geological layer.
I became excited.
“This is clear now!” I exclaimed. “These rocks are sedimentary. The ancient seas that once covered the earth must have left behind these layers of shale and limestone.”
I continued enthusiastically.
“We are leaving the granite behind. It’s like traveling from Hamburg to Lübeck by way of Hanover!”
My uncle seemed unimpressed.
I could not contain my excitement.
“What do you think you’re looking at?” he asked seriously.
“Look at these limestone layers. And here—you can see the first signs of slate.”
“And what does that prove?”
“It means we’ve reached the period when the first plants and animals appeared on Earth.”
“You think so?”
“Yes! Look carefully.”
After some effort, I persuaded him to shine his lamp directly onto the tunnel walls.
I expected him to react immediately.
He said nothing.
I could not tell whether he understood what I had discovered.
Perhaps his pride would not allow him to admit that choosing the eastern tunnel might have been a mistake.
Or perhaps he was simply determined to follow it all the way to the end.
One thing was certain: we had left the lava behind.
And this tunnel could no longer lead us back to the crater of Mount Sneffels.
As we continued, I began to question myself.
Perhaps I was reading too much into these changes in the earth’s crust.
Maybe I had mistaken the layers of rock.
There was always a chance that I was wrong.
But if I was right, there should be evidence.
I should find the remains of ancient plants.
“That would settle everything,” I thought. “I need to search carefully.”
I began examining the ground and walls as we walked.
I had gone only about a hundred yards when I found exactly what I was looking for.
The ground beneath my feet suddenly became soft and dusty.
It was covered with the remains of ancient plants and shells.
Then I looked at the walls.
There, clearly preserved in the rock, were the shapes of ancient sea plants—fucus and lycopods.
There was no way to mistake what they were.
My uncle had to see them.
Yet he seemed determined not to look.
He kept his eyes ahead and continued walking as though nothing had happened.
His stubbornness was beginning to annoy me.
I finally lost my patience.
I bent down and picked up an almost perfectly preserved shell.
It had clearly belonged to an ancient creature similar to animals that exist today.
I hurried after my uncle.
“Do you see this?” I asked.
My uncle looked at the shell calmly.
“Yes,” he said. “It is the shell of an ancient crustacean, from the extinct trilobite group. Nothing more.”
I stared at him.
“Nothing more? Don’t you understand what that means?”
He looked at me.
“Well, what conclusion do you draw from it?”
“I thought—”
“I know exactly what you were going to say,” he interrupted.
“And you’re right. Completely right.”
I was surprised.
“We have finally left the lava layer and the passage through which the lava once flowed upward,” he continued.
“I may have chosen the wrong tunnel, but I won’t know exactly where I went wrong until we reach the end of this one.”
I nodded.
“I agree. But there’s one danger we can’t ignore.”
“What danger?”
“Water.”
My uncle paused.
Then he gave a small shrug.
“My dear Henry, there’s nothing we can do about it. We’ll have to ration what we have.”
With that, he turned and continued walking.