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"

As little as my thirst was really quenched, I had nevertheless partially
recovered my strength. The contracted muscles of my throat relaxed--and
the inflammation of my lips in some measure subsided. At all events, I
was able to speak.

"Well," I said, "there can be no doubt now as to what we have to do.
Water has utterly failed us; our journey is therefore at an end. Let us
return."

While I spoke thus, my uncle evidently avoided my face: he held down his
head; his eyes were turned in every possible direction but the right
one.

"Yes," I continued, getting excited by my own words, "we must go back to
Sneffels. May heaven give us strength to enable us once more to revisit
the light of day. Would that we now stood on the summit of the crater."

"Go back," said my uncle, speaking to himself, "and must it be so?"

"Go back--yes, and without losing a single moment," I vehemently cried.

For some moments there was silence under that dark and gloomy vault.

"So, my dear Harry," said the Professor in a very singular tone of
voice, "those few drops of water have not sufficed to restore your
energy and courage."

"Courage!" I cried.

"I see that you are quite as downcast as before--and still give way to
discouragement and despair."

What, then, was the man made of, and what other projects were entering
his fertile and audacious brain!

"You are not discouraged, sir?"

"What! Give up just as we are on the verge of success?" he cried.
"Never, never shall it be said that Professor Hardwigg retreated."

"Then we must make up our minds to perish," I cried with a helpless
sigh.

"No, Harry, my boy, certainly not. Go, leave me, I am very far from
desiring your death. Take Hans with you. I will go on alone."

"You ask us to leave you?"

"Leave me, I say. I have undertaken this dangerous and perilous
adventure. I will carry it to the end--or I will never return to the
surface of Mother Earth. Go, Harry--once more I say to you--go!"

My uncle as he spoke was terribly excited. His voice, which before had
been tender, almost womanly, became harsh and menacing. He appeared to
be struggling with desperate energy against the impossible. I did not
wish to abandon him at the bottom of that abyss, while, on the other
hand, the instinct of preservation told me to fly.

Meanwhile, our guide was looking on with profound calmness and
indifference. He appeared to be an unconcerned party, and yet he
perfectly well knew what was going on between us. Our gestures
sufficiently indicated the different roads each wished to follow--and
which each tried to influence the other to undertake. But Hans appeared
not to take the slightest interest in what was really a question of life
and death for us all, but waited quite ready to obey the signal which
should say go aloft, or to resume his desperate journey into the
interior of the earth.

How then I wished with all my heart and soul that I could make him

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