uthwest. My uncle made several pauses in order to consult his compass.

The gallery now began to trend downwards in a horizontal direction, with
about two inches of fall in every furlong. The murmuring stream flowed
quietly at our feet. I could not but compare it to some familiar spirit,
guiding us through the earth, and I dabbled my fingers in its tepid
water, which sang like a naiad as we progressed. My good humor began to
assume a mythological character.

As for my uncle he began to complain of the horizontal character of the
road. His route, he found, began to be indefinitely prolonged, instead
of "sliding down the celestial ray," according to his expression.

But we had no choice; and as long as our road led towards the
centre--however little progress we made, there was no reason to
complain.

Moreover, from time to time the slopes were much greater, the naiad sang
more loudly, and we began to dip downwards in earnest.

As yet, however, I felt no painful sensation. I had not got over the
excitement of the discovery of water.

That day and the next we did a considerable amount of horizontal, and
relatively very little vertical, traveling.

On Friday evening, the tenth of July, according to our estimation, we
ought to have been thirty leagues to the southeast of Reykjavik, and
about two leagues and a half deep. We now received a rather startling
surprise.

Under our feet there opened a horrible well. My uncle was so delighted
that he actually clapped his hands--as he saw how steep and sharp was
the descent.

"Ah, ah!" he cried, in rapturous delight; "this take us a long way. Look
at the projections of the rock. Hah!" he exclaimed, "it's a fearful
staircase!"

Hans, however, who in all our troubles had never given up the ropes,
took care so to dispose of them as to prevent any accidents. Our descent
then began. I dare not call it a perilous descent, for I was already too
familiar with that sort of work to look upon it as anything but a very
ordinary affair.

This well was a kind of narrow opening in the massive granite of the
kind known as a fissure. The contraction of the terrestrial scaffolding,
when it suddenly cooled, had been evidently the cause. If it had ever
served in former times as a kind of funnel through which passed the
eruptive masses vomited by Sneffels, I was at a loss to explain how it
had left no mark. We were, in fact, descending a spiral, something like
those winding staircases in use