dim, sepulchral light penetrated the vertical gallery, which
became wider and wider. I could make out to the right and left long dark
corridors like immense tunnels, from which awful and horrid vapors
poured out. Tongues of fire, sparkling and crackling, appeared about to
lick us up.

The hour had come!

"Look, Uncle, look!" I cried.

"Well, what you see are the great sulphurous flames. Nothing more common
in connection with an eruption."

"But if they lap us round!" I angrily replied.

"They will not lap us round," was his quiet and serene answer.

"But it will be all the same in the end if they stifle us," I cried.

"We shall not be stifled. The gallery is rapidly becoming wider and
wider, and if it be necessary, we will presently leave the raft and take
refuge in some fissure in the rock."

"But the water, the water, which is continually ascending?" I
despairingly replied.

"There is no longer any water, Harry," he answered, "but a kind of lava
paste, which is heaving us up, in company with itself, to the mouth of
the crater."

In truth, the liquid column of water had wholly disappeared to give
place to dense masses of boiling eruptive matter. The temperature was
becoming utterly insupportable, and a thermometer exposed to this
atmosphere would have marked between one hundred and eighty-nine and one
hundred ninety degrees Fahrenheit.

Perspiration rushed from every pore. But for the extraordinary rapidity
of our ascent we should have been stifled.

Nevertheless, the Professor did not carry out his proposition of
abandoning the raft; and he did quite wisely. Those few ill-joined beams
offered, anyway, a solid surface--a support which elsewhere must have
utterly failed us.

Towards eight o'clock in the morning a new incident startled us. The
ascensional movement suddenly ceased. The raft became still and
motionless.

"What is the matter now?" I said, querulously, very much startled by
this change.

"A simple halt," replied my uncle.

"Is the eruption about to fail?" I asked.

"I hope not."

Without making any reply, I rose. I tried to look around me. Perhaps the
raft, checked by some projecting rock, opposed a momentary resistance to
the eruptive mass. In this case, it was absolutely necessary to release
it as quickly as possible.

Nothing of the kind had occurred. The column of cinders, of scoriae, of
broken rocks and earth, had wholly ceased to ascend.

"I tell you, Uncle, that the erupti