CHAPTER SIXTEEN

After a quick dinner, we settled down to sleep for the night. Surprisingly, I slept peacefully all night. It was one of the best nights I had spent in a long time. I didn't even dream.

The next morning, we awoke to a chilly air. We soon began making our way into the mountain's crater. We had to tie ourselves together for safety reasons; if one person fell as he was climbing down, he would be supported by the others. We arrived at the bottom of the crater at noon. I looked up and saw the opening, and saw a small bit of sky, looking perfectly circular. At the bottom of the crater, there were three openings to take us into the Earth. Five hundred years ago, fire-hot magma had come through those holes. Saknussemm had used the July sun to determine which hole to go into, as we would now do, as well. Each of these holes was about a hundred feet wide. I didn't have the courage to look into any of the mysterious holes. My uncle, however, had already examined them, and continued running back and forth to make calculations about how we would enter one of them. Hans and his friends sat down and watched him, obviously viewing him as a madman.

Suddenly, my uncle cried out, and immediately called me to him.

"Axel! Axel!" he shouted. "Come here! Come here!"

I ran to him. Hans and his friends didn't move.

"Look!" the professor said to me.

I then understood the reason for his great shock and amazement. I looked down at a large piece of lava in the middle of the crater. I read on the west side of the rock, in ancient Icelandic characters, the name: Arne Saknussemm.

"Arne Saknussemm!" my uncle said. "Now do you have any doubts?"

Without answering, I went back to sit down, overwhelmed by this new finding. I don't know how long I sat there thinking, but when I finally looked up, I saw only my uncle and Hans on the bottom of the crater. Hans' Icelandic friends had been dismissed, and had already climbed up the inside of Sneffels to return home.

Hans was sleeping peacefully nearby, while my uncle was nervously walking around the crater, making arrangements for our continuing journey. I decided to go to sleep for the night, but I slept terribly, constantly hearing terrible noises or felt movements within the mountain. And that was how we spent our first night in the crater.

The next morning we awoke to a gray, cloudy sky, which greatly upset my uncle. He knew we could not enter the Earth, as we needed the July sun to show a shadow on one of the three holes in the crater. That was the hole we had to enter, just as Arne Saknussemm had before us. The day went by and still no shadow appeared.

On June 26, still no shadow. Hans built a small hut, using bits of lava. My uncle was becoming more impatient. The next day the sky was still cloudy, but on Sunday, June 28, two days from the end of the month, sunlight came into the crater. My uncle waited with excitement until noon, when the sun would be directly above us. We then discovered that we would go through the middle hole.

"There it is! There it is!" he cried. "Let's go into the center of the Earth!" he added in Danish.

I looked at Hans.

"Forut," he said calmly.

"Forward," my uncle translated for me.

It was thirteen minutes past one.

(end of section)