water, however, was cold, or nearly so, and
I drank pints and splashed myself all over. My body seemed to
suck up the fluid as one may see a brick wall suck up rain after
a drought; but where I was burnt the touch of it caused intense
pain. Then I bethought myself of the others, and, dragging myself
towards them with difficulty, I sprinkled them with water, and
to my joy they began to recover -- Umslopogaas first, then the
others. Next they drank, absorbing water like so many sponges.
Then, feeling chilly -- a queer contrast to our recent sensations
-- we began as best we could to get into our clothes. As we
did so Good pointed to the port side of the canoe: it was all
blistered with heat, and in places actually charred. Had it
been built like our civilized boats, Good said that the planks
would certainly have warped and let in enough water to sink us;
but fortunately it was dug out of the soft, willowy wood of a
single great tree, and had sides nearly three inches and a bottom
four inches thick. What that awful flame was we never discovered,
but I suppose that there was at this spot a crack or hole in
the bed of the river through which a vast volume of gas forced
its way from its volcanic home in the bowels of the earth towards
the upper air. How it first became ignited is, of course, impossible
to say -- probably, I should think, from some spontaneous explosion
of mephitic gases.

As soon as we had got some things together and shaken ourselves
together a little, we set to work to make out where we were now.
I have said that there was light above, and on examination we
found that it came from the sky. Our river that was, Sir Henry
said, a literal realization of the wild vision of the poet
{Endnote 10}, was no longer underground, but was running on its
darksome way, not now through 'caverns measureless to man', but
between two frightful cliffs which cannot have been less than
two thousand feet high. So high were they, indeed, that though
the sky was above us, where we were was dense gloom -- not darkness
indeed, but the gloom of a room closely shuttered in the daytime.
Up on either side rose the great straight cliffs, grim and forbidding,
till the eye grew dizzy with trying to measure their sheer height.
The little space of sky that marked where they ended lay like
a thread of blue upon their soaring blackness, which was unrelieved
by any tree or creeper. Here and there, however, grew ghostly
patches of a