It soon became necessary to desert the watery defile which we had first entered; it became more and more confined, the banks were literally stone heaps, and after one or two perilous slips which might have accelerated our progress by dumping us into the chasing flood we painfully climbed out over a high rocky ridge on the summit of which our sight was cheered to find low, herbaceous growths. Here we managed to extort a niggardly flame which was assisted by oil Goritz alone had had the prudence to add to his load, and our evening meal was eaten in some gratitude.
The rains, distressing as they were at intervals, when the downpour became most vehement, were on the whole preferable to the fogs. They cleared the air, and we could see our way, calculate interruptions and avoid disaster. As we went on the vegetation increased in quantity, and often smiling—they seemed smiling to our tired eyes although lit by no sunlight—patches around us in sheltered corners afforded welcome though damp camping grounds. Our clothes were torn by frequent falls, and our shoes are turning into tangled shreds. The Professor had sprained his wrist badly—he narrowly escaped rolling down an embankment which might have put him out of the running altogether—and Goritz is in pain. I know it by his limping gait, and the twitches of suffering that cross his face. Something is the matter with me too, fatigue and the insufficient or canned food is telling on me. My muscles are stiff and aching, the joints of my limbs red and swollen, and dark blue spots were showing on my skin. Is it scurvy?
It is the sixth day, and we believe we have made seventy miles. The cloud zone is approaching; our prospect every day grows more extraordinary, more terrifying; we encamp behind a shoulder of rock, on a low upland which separated two roaring rivers. The rain had stopped and a colder atmosphere reveals the scene. The temperature is just above 2° Centigrade, the aneroid shows we had fallen two thousand feet since we had left the Krocker Land Rim. We are immobile, in a sort of stupor, yet fascinated by the spectacle. Hopkins alone remains cheerful and garrulous.
“Professor,” he chatters, “the Rocky Road to Dublin had nothing on this boulevard. The gentleman who, by reason of a congenital failing, which was assisted by circumstances outside of his control, complained of the narrowness rather than the length of the street would be inclined to make some severe reflections on this thoroughfare also. But we can be pretty sure the transformation takes place the other side of the proscenium-show yonder.”
Poor Spruce Hopkins, he kept up his joviality for our benefit, but we didn’t care much and I don’t think he did. We were starving; it was half a pound now a day. But Goritz never wavered a hair, he urged us on, he promised food, rest, recreation even, if we would persevere through the cloud curtain.
And now we were under it, cowering in dread before the awfulness and magnitude of it. It rose in towering gushes of stream, belched forth from a huge crack in the crust of the earth in which poured the full rivers that had accompanied our march. Those rivers entered recesses of the heated earth, and were returned in steam with detonations and earthquakes, so that
The frame and huge foundation of the earth
Shak’d like a coward.
Reviewing it now, as it was revealed to us later upon examination and study, the physiography of the stupendous phenomenon we had reached was this. Some strain had cracked the crust of the earth in a long arcuate rift; it suggested the crevice and it was irregular in the same way, which is seen in the Almannaja in Iceland, but it was profoundly deep, and the area communicated with the igneous interior. The water that was continually condensed from the steam that poured upward from the huge fissure, as continually was returned, and, except for interruptions in the reciprocal exchange produced by meteorological conditions, such as cold, heat and varying winds, this curious equilibration was unbroken, had been for ages. The emergence of the steam was irregular, though it was always coming up at some points, and there was a synchrony between points. We discovered later that at very distant places from our position on the great circular break there was no steam. The rock beneath had become thoroughly cooled and congealed, or the inner fires were absent, and the water entering the chasm was lost within the crust, or else, deviously percolating laterally may have subsequently contributed its supply to the active steam geysers when it touched the heated surfaces which formed the sources of the latter’s energy.
Therefore you may place this picture before your mind, of a steam wall projected from a raggedly edged, very broad earth rift, absorbed by the atmosphere, or condensed in clouds, and intermittently returned to the earth in rain or if transferred by westerly winds, falling outside of the Krocker Land Rim in snow.