For a long, miserable hour, I lay there in a feverish haze, my mind filled with wild thoughts about what could possibly have awakened our quiet, dependable guide.
I imagined one absurd possibility after another. Nothing made sense. I was so desperate that I think I was half mad already.
Then, suddenly, a sound reached me from somewhere deep in the earth.
Footsteps.
Hans was coming back!
A faint light appeared on the walls of the tunnel. Far down the slope, I saw a figure slowly approaching.
At last, Hans came into view.
He walked straight to my uncle, put a hand on his shoulder, and gently woke him.
My uncle opened his eyes and immediately sat up.
“Well?” he asked.
“Vatten,” Hans said.
I didn’t know a single word of Danish, but somehow I understood him.
“Water!” I shouted.
I clapped my hands and waved my arms like a madman.
“Water!” my uncle repeated, his voice shaking with emotion.
He looked at Hans.
“Hvar?”
“Where?”
“Nedat.”
“Below.”
“Where? Below!”
I understood every word.
I grabbed Hans’s hands and shook them excitedly. He simply looked at me with his usual calm expression.
We didn’t waste another second.
We packed up and hurried down the tunnel.
About an hour later, we had traveled nearly a thousand yards and descended another two thousand feet.
Then I heard something familiar.
A deep, distant roar seemed to run through the granite beneath our feet. It sounded like a waterfall somewhere far away.
For the first half hour, however, we still couldn’t find the spring.
My hope began to disappear again.
My uncle noticed my gloomy expression.
“Hans was right,” he said excitedly. “Listen carefully. That’s the sound of a torrent.”
“A torrent?” I cried.
“Yes. There’s no doubt about it. An underground river is flowing somewhere beside us.”
I said nothing.
I simply hurried forward.
The sound itself gave me new strength. I no longer felt the terrible exhaustion that had nearly stopped me before.
The roar grew louder every moment.
At first, the water seemed to be flowing somewhere above us.
Then the sound moved closer until it seemed to come directly from the left wall.
I could hear rushing, splashing, and roaring water.
Again and again, I ran my hands over the rock, hoping to feel even the slightest trace of moisture.
Nothing.
Another half hour passed.
We kept moving.
It became clear that Hans had not actually found the spring during his earlier search. Somehow, using the instincts he had developed from years of living in the mountains and searching for water, he had sensed the presence of the underground river through the rock.
But he hadn’t been able to reach it.
He hadn’t even been able to bring us a single drop.
Then we made an even worse discovery.
The farther we went, the quieter the river became.
We were moving away from it.
We immediately turned back.
Hans stopped at exactly the place where the sound seemed closest.
I couldn’t stand the suspense anymore.
I sat down against the wall.
The water was roaring just on the other side.
It couldn’t have been more than two feet away.
Yet between us stood a solid wall of granite.
I was almost ready to scream.
Hans looked at me carefully.
For once, I thought I saw the faintest smile on his normally expressionless face.
He stood up, picked up the lamp, and started walking along the wall.
I followed him.
He moved slowly, examining the solid granite.
Then he stopped.
He pressed his ear against the wall.
He moved a little farther.
He listened again.
He repeated this several times with extraordinary patience.
I understood what he was doing.
He was searching for the exact spot where the river sounded loudest.
Soon he found it.
The place was on the left wall, about three feet above the floor.
My heart began pounding.
I could hardly believe what Hans was about to do.
He raised the heavy crowbar.
Then he struck the granite.
“Saved!” I cried.
“Yes!” my uncle shouted, even more excited than I was. “Hans is absolutely right! What a wonderful man! We would never have thought of this!”
And he was right.
The idea was simple, but it had never occurred to us.
Still, it was extremely dangerous.
If the rock suddenly broke open, the underground river might burst through the wall with enormous force.
A tiny opening could become a flood in seconds.
The danger was real.
But our thirst was so terrible that we would have dug through the bottom of the ancient ocean itself if necessary.
Hans calmly continued working.
My uncle and I could never have shown such patience.
If we had been holding the crowbar, we would probably have attacked the wall wildly and shattered it.
Hans did the opposite.
He worked slowly and carefully.
Strike after strike, he gradually weakened the granite, making a hole only about six inches wide.
I stood beside him, listening.
The roar seemed to grow louder.
At times, I could almost imagine cool water touching my dry lips.
An hour passed.
It felt like an entire day.
Finally, Hans had made a hole deep enough for his crowbar to reach about two feet into the rock.
I was nearly out of my mind with impatience.
My uncle was becoming desperate too.
He was just about to take the crowbar from Hans and attack the wall himself when we suddenly heard a sharp hiss.
Then—
Whoosh!
A powerful jet of water burst through the granite and shot across the tunnel, striking the opposite wall.
Hans was knocked slightly off balance.
He looked shocked and almost cried out in pain.
Then I understood why.
I thrust my hands into the sparkling stream.
And screamed.
The water was boiling hot!
“It’s boiling!” I cried bitterly.
“Don’t worry,” my uncle said. “It will cool down soon.”
The tunnel quickly filled with clouds of steam.
The hot water flowed away into the depths of the earth.
Before long, enough of it had cooled for us to drink.
We drank in huge mouthfuls.
What an incredible feeling!
There was nothing more precious in the world than that water.
Where it came from didn’t matter.
What mattered was that it was water.
It was giving life back to us.
I drank greedily without even thinking about the taste.
Then, after my thirst was almost gone, I noticed something unusual.
“Wait,” I said. “This is mineral water!”
My uncle tasted it.
“Excellent for the stomach,” he said. “And heavily mineralized. This journey has given us something worth more than twenty trips to Spa.”
“It’s actually quite good.”
“I should say so. Water found six miles underground! It even has a strange, slightly metallic taste. Hans has made a remarkable discovery.”
He looked at me.
“What do you say? Travelers usually name their discoveries. Shall we name this stream after Hans?”
“Absolutely.”
And so we named it Hansbach, meaning “Hans’s Brook.”
Hans didn’t seem particularly proud.
After drinking only a little, he calmly sat down in a corner with the same serious expression he always wore.
I looked at the stream.
“There’s no point in letting all this water run away.”
“Why not?” my uncle asked. “The underground source is probably endless.”
“Never mind that. Let’s fill our water bottles and goatskin. Then we should try to close the hole.”
My uncle hesitated, but eventually agreed.
Hans collected the pieces of granite he had broken out of the wall.
He used some cloth he happened to have with him and tried to block the opening.
It didn’t work.
The pressure was far too great.
The hot water simply pushed everything away.
Hans even burned his hands.
Every attempt failed.
“It seems the water is under enormous pressure,” I said.
“Of course,” my uncle replied. “The source must be at a great height above us. If the column of water is perhaps thirty-two thousand feet high, the pressure must be enormous.”
He suddenly paused.
“But I’ve just had another idea.”
“What is it?”
“Why are we trying so hard to close the opening?”
“Because…”
I stopped.
I couldn’t think of a good answer.
My uncle smiled.
“When our bottles are empty again, are we certain we’ll find more water?”
“I suppose not.”
“Exactly. So let’s leave the opening alone. The water will follow our path naturally. It can guide us and keep us supplied with drinking water.”
“That makes perfect sense!”
I was delighted.
“With this little stream beside us, there’s no reason we shouldn’t complete our incredible journey.”
“Ah, my boy,” my uncle laughed. “You’re finally beginning to agree with me.”
“Not only that,” I replied. “I’m now certain we’ll succeed.”
“Not so fast, nephew. First, we need several hours of sleep.”
I had completely forgotten that it was night.
The chronometer reminded me.
We rested.
The water had restored our strength, and before long we had fallen into a deep, peaceful sleep.