With an effort—so enfeebled was he by his terrible experience—Silas moved to the door. To his great joy it opened easily, and he flung it wide, admitting a flood of life-giving air.
“Thank Heaven!” he murmured fervently, damping his parched and blackened lips, while he drew in deep draughts of pure, cool air; “another hour and we’d all have passed in our checks.”
Turning, he found his friends already stirring, their recovery hastened by the beneficent influence of the refreshing atmosphere.
Crowding to the door, they stood for some moments filling their exhausted lungs.
“Whatever have we struck?” Seymour asked at length, gazing in amazement at the dripping, glistening walls of the passage.
“A subterranean river, I reckon,” responded Silas, “an’ one with a fairish slope, judgin’ by the speed we’re travellin’ at.”
“I have no doubt,” Mervyn began, “that this strange tunnel is of volcanic origin; at one time probably a lava passage, through which the molten metal was forced from the bowels of the earth to the crater of the volcano we have left far behind us.”
“If that is true,” interrupted Seymour, “we are plunging each instant deeper and deeper into the bowels of the globe, and at the present moment must be far down below the bed of the Polar Sea!”
“Exactly!” returned Mervyn. “We started upon this trip as a North Polar expedition, but it seems we are to end up with a journey to the centre of the earth. Whether we ever return therefrom depends wholly upon Providence.”
“Then where shall we end up?” the inventor asked, his face a picture of incredulous amazement. “I mean, what is there below?”