Wednesday, August 19th.
Fortunately, the strong wind carried us away from the scene of yesterday’s unbelievable battle. Hans stood at the helm as calmly as ever. My uncle had briefly been pulled out of his deep thoughts by the excitement of the sea fight, but now he had returned to his usual habit of staring impatiently across the endless ocean.
Our journey soon became dull and uneventful. Normally I might have complained about such monotony, but after the dangers of the previous day, I had no wish to see another adventure.
Thursday, August 20th.
The wind had shifted to the northeast and was blowing in irregular bursts. The temperature was extremely high. We were moving at an average speed of about ten and a half miles an hour.
Around noon, a distant sound reached our ears.
It sounded like thunder.
I wrote it down in my journal, but I had no idea what could be causing it. The noise never stopped. It sounded like an enormous sea crashing over a mountain of rocks.
“Far ahead of us,” my uncle said confidently, “there must be a rock or an island where the wind is driving the sea against the shore.”
Without saying a word, Hans climbed to the top of the mast and looked around.
He saw nothing.
The ocean was perfectly flat in every direction.
Three hours passed, yet we still could not see anything. Meanwhile, the sound grew louder and deeper. It now sounded like a gigantic waterfall.
“I think we are heading straight toward a waterfall,” I told my uncle. “What if this entire underground sea is about to pour into some lower cavern and carry us into an abyss?”
My uncle only shook his head.
I was not reassured.
If there really was a waterfall ahead, the current should gradually become stronger as we approached it. I watched the water carefully.
There was no current at all.
I threw an empty bottle into the sea. It simply floated away behind us without being carried in any particular direction.
That made the whole thing even more mysterious.
Where could such a tremendous sound be coming from?
I looked up at the clouds, hoping to find some clue. The great masses of vapor were motionless, glowing under the strange electric light that filled this underground world.
The sky was perfectly calm.
I turned toward the horizon.
Nothing.
No island.
No rocks.
No mist.
Nothing but the endless sea.
Yet the terrible roar continued to grow.
Around four o’clock, Hans climbed the mast again. This time he went all the way to the very top.
From there he could see much farther than we could.
For a long moment, he stared toward the south.
His face remained calm, but his eyes widened slightly.
“He has finally seen something!” my uncle exclaimed.
“I think so,” I replied.
Hans climbed down and stood beside us. Then he pointed south.
“There,” he said.
My uncle immediately raised his telescope.
He stared through it for what seemed like an eternity.
Then he suddenly cried out.
“Yes! Yes! There it is!”
“What is it?” I asked.
“A tremendous column of water rising out of the sea.”
“Another sea monster!” I cried.
“Perhaps,” my uncle replied.
“Then we should steer west immediately! We already know what kind of trouble those prehistoric creatures can cause.”
“Go ahead,” he said.
I looked toward Hans.
He was still at the helm, steering with his usual calm.
But if we could see a column of water rising from a creature’s blowhole from more than a dozen leagues away, that creature must have been unimaginably huge.
Any sensible person would have turned around.
Unfortunately, we had not come into this strange underground world to behave sensibly.
So we continued forward.
The closer we got, the higher the column of water became.
“What kind of creature could possibly swallow that much water and then shoot it into the air like that?” I wondered.
By eight o’clock, we were only about two leagues away.
Now we could see the enormous black body lying across the surface of the sea.
It looked like an island.
Or rather, it looked like a gigantic whale.
I could easily understand how sailors in the old days had mistaken sleeping whales for islands and even climbed onto their backs.
This creature was so enormous that I estimated its length at nearly a thousand fathoms.
What kind of whale was this?
Even Cuvier himself had never imagined such a creature.
It did not move.
The waves broke against its gigantic body, but the creature itself remained completely still.
Above it, an enormous column of water shot nearly five hundred feet into the air before exploding into a cloud of spray.
The roar was deep and heavy.
And we were sailing straight toward it.
I admit it openly—I was terrified.
“I am not going any closer!” I shouted.
My uncle ignored me.
“I mean it! I’ll cut the sail if you keep going!”
Still no answer.
“You’re completely mad! This is reckless! We nearly died yesterday, and now you’re deliberately sailing toward another monster!”
My uncle said nothing.
Then Hans calmly pointed toward the enormous object.
“Holme!”
“An island!” my uncle cried.
“An island?”
I stared at him.
“You expect me to believe that?”
My uncle suddenly burst out laughing.
“Of course it is!”
“But the waterspout?”
“Geyser,” Hans said.
“Yes, a geyser!” my uncle said, still laughing. “Just like the geysers of Iceland. This one is simply enormous.”
At first, I refused to admit that I had been fooled so completely.
What could be more ridiculous than mistaking an island for a gigantic sea monster?
But there was no arguing with the evidence.
It was an island.
And the enormous creature I had imagined was nothing more than a spectacular natural phenomenon.
As we drew closer, the sight became more magnificent.
From a distance, the island had looked like a gigantic whale with its head rising above the sea.
Now we could see that the enormous jet of water was shooting majestically from its summit.
Every now and then, a dull explosion shook the island.
Then the geyser suddenly burst with renewed force, sending its enormous plume of water high into the clouds.
It stood alone.
There were no other geysers or hot springs nearby. All the volcanic power of this strange region seemed to be concentrated in that single magnificent column.
The strange electric light passed through the falling water, turning every drop into a tiny rainbow.
After watching it in silence for several minutes, my uncle finally spoke.
“Let’s go ashore.”
We had to be extremely careful.
The falling water was so powerful that if it struck the raft directly, it could destroy us in an instant.
Fortunately, Hans handled the raft perfectly and guided us toward the far side of the island.
I was the first to jump onto the rocks.
My uncle followed.
Hans remained on the raft for a moment, completely unmoved by the spectacle. Nothing seemed capable of surprising that man.
We found ourselves standing on granite mixed with siliceous sandstone.
The ground trembled beneath our feet.
It felt like standing beside a giant boiler filled with superheated steam.
The rocks were burning hot.
Soon we reached the small basin at the center of the island, where the geyser was rising from the ground.
I took out my thermometer and lowered it into the bubbling water.
It registered 163 degrees.
So the water was coming from some place of tremendous heat.
That seemed to contradict my uncle’s theories about the temperature inside the Earth.
I could not resist pointing this out.
“Well?” my uncle said sharply. “What does this prove against my theory?”
“Nothing,” I replied dryly.
There was clearly no point arguing with him.
Still, I could not ignore what I had observed.
Until now, we had been incredibly lucky. The temperature throughout our journey had remained surprisingly tolerable.
But sooner or later, we would almost certainly reach regions where the heat from the Earth’s interior became overwhelming—far beyond anything our thermometers could measure.
As I thought about it, images of the ancient underworld came into my mind.
Perhaps the people of old had been right to imagine Hades deep beneath the Earth.
But there was nothing to do except wait and see.
My uncle had developed a favorite expression lately:
“We shall see what we shall see.”
He had already given this volcanic island my name.
Now he turned away from the geyser and signaled that it was time to leave.
I remained there for several minutes, unable to tear my eyes away from the magnificent column of water.
Then I noticed something strange.
The geyser did not rise with the same force all the time.
Sometimes its power weakened.
Then, without warning, it surged upward again with tremendous strength.
I assumed that the pressure of the trapped steam beneath the island must be changing constantly.
At last, we left.
We carefully navigated around the dangerous rocks along the southern side of the island.
While we had been ashore, Hans had also taken the opportunity to repair the raft.
Before we finally departed, I made a few calculations and recorded them in my journal.
Since leaving Port Gretchen, we had traveled about 270 leagues—more than 800 miles—across this enormous underground sea.
We were now about 620 leagues from Iceland.
And, according to my calculations, we were directly beneath England.