A Journey into the Interior of the Earth | Jules Verne | Chapter 15

They had spent the night at the bottom of the crater of Sneffels, and at eight o’clock the next morning a faint dawn of day awoke them—light filtered through the thousand prisms of the lava, reaching them like a shower of sparks. The professor, rubbing his hands with delight, asked his nephew whether he had ever passed a more tranquil night back home in the Königstrasse, with no deafening cartwheels or cries of hawkers. But Axel confessed that there was something terrible in this calm. The professor shot back: “One would say you are already beginning to be afraid. How will you get on presently? Do you know that as yet we have not penetrated one inch into the bowels of the earth?”

The vertical tube, the professor explained, ended at the bottom of the crater on a level with the sea. The barometer confirmed it: the mercury had stopped at twenty-nine degrees. They had only just reached the soil of the island itself. “Let us not lose a moment,” the professor said. After breakfast—biscuit and dried meat washed down with water flavored with schiedam—he took out his notebook and recorded the first official observation of the journey: Monday, June 29, chronometer 8:17 a.m., barometer 29.6 inches, thermometer 6° centigrade (43° Fahrenheit), direction east-southeast. Then he cried out with enthusiasm: “We are truly about to take our first step into the interior of the earth, never before