Previous  - next

Where the earth ended and the sea began it was impossible for the eye to
distinguish.

I soon felt that strange and mysterious sensation which is awakened in
the mind when looking down from lofty hilltops, and now I was able to do
so without any feeling of nervousness, having fortunately hardened
myself to that kind of sublime contemplation.

I wholly forgot who I was, and where I was. I became intoxicated with a
sense of lofty sublimity, without thought of the abysses into which my
daring was soon about to plunge me. I was presently, however, brought
back to the realities of life by the arrival of the Professor and Hans,
who joined me upon the lofty summit of the peak.

My uncle, turning in a westerly direction, pointed out to me a light
cloud of vapor, a kind of haze, with a faint outline of land rising out
of the waters.

"Greenland!" said he.

"Greenland?" cried I in reply.

"Yes," continued my uncle, who always when explaining anything spoke as
if he were in a professor's chair; "we are not more than thirty-five
leagues distant from that wonderful land. When the great annual breakup
of the ice takes place, white bears come over to Iceland, carried by the
floating masses of ice from the north. This, however, is a matter of
little consequence. We are now on the summit of the great, the
transcendent Sneffels, and here are its two peaks, north and south. Hans
will tell you the name by which the people of Iceland call that on which
we stand."

My uncle turned to the imperturbable guide, who nodded, and spoke as
usual--one word.

"Scartaris."

My uncle looked at me with a proud and triumphant glance.

"A crater," he said, "you hear?"

I did hear, but I was totally unable to make reply.

The crater of Mount Sneffels represented an inverted cone, the gaping
orifice apparently half a mile across; the depth indefinite feet.
Conceive what this hole must have been like when full of flame and
thunder and lightning. The bottom of the funnel-shaped hollow was about
five hundred feet in circumference, by which it will be seen that the
slope from the summit to the bottom was very gradual, and we were
therefore clearly able to get there without much fatigue or difficulty.
Involuntarily, I compared this crater to an enormous loaded cannon; and
the comparison completely terrified me.

"To descend into the interior of a cannon," I thought to myself, "when
perhaps it is loaded, and will go off at the least shock, is the act of
a madman."

But there was no longer any opportunity for me to hesitate. Hans, with a
perfectly calm and indifferent air, took his usual post at the head of
the adventurous little band. I followed without uttering a syllable.

I felt like the lamb led to the slaughter.

In order to render the descent less difficult, Hans took his way down
the interior of the cone in rather a zigzag fashion, making, as the
sailors say, long tracks to the eastward, followed by equally long ones

Previous  - next