Chapter 14The Real Journey Commences

Our real journey had started now. Until now, our courage and determination had handled everything. We were tired sometimes, that was it. Now we were about to face unknown and scary dangers.

I hadn't peeked down the crazy deep hole I was about to drop into yet. But the moment had finally come. I still had a choice - say no or go along with this wild plan. But I was embarrassed to seem more scared than the eider-duck hunter.

Hans seemed totally chill with the journey's challenges, so calm, so indifferent, so fearless, that I actually blushed for being less of a man than him!

If I'd been alone with my uncle, I definitely would have talked it through. But with the guide there, I kept quiet. I thought about my awesome cousin for a sec, then headed to the top of the main shaft.

It was about a hundred feet wide, so like three hundred feet around. I leaned over a rock at the edge and looked down. My hair stood on end, my teeth chattered, my limbs shook. I totally lost my balance, and my head spun like I'm drunk. Nothing's more powerful than this pull toward a deep hole.

I was about to tumble straight into the huge opening when a strong hand pulled me back. It was Hans. I didn’t practice enough at the Frelser's-Kirk in Copenhagen to look down from high places without freaking out!

Even though I only looked down for a few minutes, I got a good look at this massive and even unbelievable shaft. The sides, almost straight up like a well, had lots of bumps that would help us climb down.

It was like a crazy, rough staircase, no railings or anything. A rope was tied up near the top, so it’d hold our weight and let us get to the bottom, but how were we gonna untie it once we were way down there? That felt like a big deal.

My uncle, though, he's one of those guys who always has a plan. He came up with a super simple way to deal with it. He pulled out a rope, about as thick as my thumb, and seriously, like four hundred feet long.

He let about half of it slide down the pit and snag on a huge block of lava right at the edge. Then he tossed the other half after that.

Now we could both climb down, grabbing both ropes with one hand. When we were about two hundred feet down, all the explorer had to do was let go one end and pull the other. The rope would just fall to our feet. To go even further, we just kept doing the same thing.

It was a pretty sweet idea, and probably right. Going down seemed easy enough; it was getting back up that was bugging me.

"Alright," said my uncle as soon as he was done setting everything up, "let's sort out the gear. We gotta split it into three bags, and each of us takes one on our back. I'm talking about the important stuff, the fragile stuff."

My awesome, clever uncle didn’t seem to think we were part of that.

"Hans," he went on, "you take the tools and some of the food. Harry, you grab another third of the food and the weapons. I'll load up with the rest of the snacks and the more delicate instruments."

"But," I said, "what about our clothes, all this rope and ladders - who's carrying that down?"

"They're gonna drop themselves."

"And how so?" I asked. "You’ll see." My uncle wasn't about halfway measures, and he hated any kind of hesitation.

He gave Hans the orders to bundle all the sturdy stuff into one package. Then, he just tossed the securely fastened packet over the edge of the chasm.

I heard the rush of air as it shifted, and the sound of rocks falling. My uncle leaned over the abyss, totally pleased with himself, and didn’t move until his luggage was completely out of sight.

"Alright, our turn!" he shouted.

Honestly, anyone with a brain should’ve felt a chill hearing that energetic shout.

The Professor strapped his instruments onto his back. Hans grabbed the tools, and I took the weapons. Then we started down, in this order: Hans first, my uncle next, and me last.

We moved in total silence - only broken by the rumble of rocks breaking off the sharp sides and crashing into the depths below.

I just let myself slide, holding onto the double rope for dear life with one hand and using my iron-shod pole with the other to keep myself away from the rocks. One thought kept running through my head: I was afraid the upper support would give way.

The rope looked way too flimsy to hold three of us, with all our gear. I used it as little as possible, trusting my own moves and pulling off some crazy feats of strength and agility on the jutting shelves and spurs of lava - my feet seemed to grip them as well as my hands.

The guide went first, like I said, and when one of the slippery supports broke under his feet, he just said, "Gif akt - "

"Attention - look out," repeated my uncle.

In about half an hour, we hit this little terrace, like a bit of rock jutting out from the shaft's walls.

Hans started pulling on the rope on one side, letting the other slide up easy. It dropped a bunch of small stones, lava, and dust - like a gross rain or hail.

While we were chilling on this crazy bench, I peeked down again. Ugh, still couldn’t see the bottom. Were we just heading straight into the Earth?

The rope thing started up again, and fifteen minutes later, we were another two hundred feet down.

Honestly, I doubt even the most hardcore geologist would’ve been checking out the layers of earth around them. I wasn’t even thinking about it. Didn’t matter to me if we were in combustible carbon, Silurians, or just old dirt.

But not the Professor - he’s always on it. He must’ve been taking notes the whole way. He started a little lecture when we stopped.

"The further we go," he said, "the more sure I am about this. These volcanic layers totally back up Sir Humphry Davy’s ideas. We’re still in the original soil, where metals got all fired up when they touched air and water."

"I’m kinda bummed about that old theory of a central fire, though - it’s totally debunked now. But we’ll know the truth soon."

That was his usual ending. I wasn’t really in the mood to chat about it, though. I had other stuff on my mind. My silence meant I was okay with it, so we kept going down.

After three hours, we still looked like we weren't getting anywhere near the bottom of the well. But when I looked up, the opening above was getting smaller every minute. The walls were closing in - we were heading into total darkness! And we kept going down!

Finally, I noticed that when chunks of rock broke off the walls of this crazy-deep drop, they disappeared with less noise than before. The echo faded faster. We were close to the bottom of the abyss!

I’d been super careful to count how many times we’d moved the rope, so I knew exactly how deep we were and how long it had taken.

We’d shifted the rope twenty-eight times, and each move took a quarter of an hour, so that’s seven hours total. Plus, twenty-eight pauses - ten and a half hours in all. We started at one, so it was about eleven at night now.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that twenty-eight times two hundred feet is five thousand six hundred feet - more than an English mile!

While I was doing the math in my head, a voice cut through the silence. It was Hans. "Hold up!" he shouted.

I stopped dead in my tracks, just as I was about to accidentally kick my uncle.

"We’re at the end of our journey," the Professor said, sounding pretty pleased with himself.

"Seriously, the inside of the earth?" I asked, sliding over to his side.

"Dude, no! But we hit the bottom of the well."

"So, no further progress?" I asked, hoping for more.

"Oh, yeah, I can kind of see a tunnel, turning off to the right. We'll check it out tomorrow. Let's eat now, and try to sleep as best we can."

I figured it was time, but didn’t say anything about it. I was totally committed to a crazy plan, and all I could do was keep moving forward, hoping for the best.

It wasn’t even fully dark yet, with light streaming in a really wild way.

We opened our food bag, had a simple dinner, and each of us tried to find a place to crash amongst the rocks, dirt, and lava that had piled up for ages at the bottom of the shaft.

I managed to find the pile of ropes, ladders, and clothes we’d dropped down, and I just flopped onto them. After a day like that, my rough bed felt like the comfiest thing ever!

For a bit, I was in a kind of chill haze.

After lying still for a few minutes, I opened my eyes and looked up. And there it was - a bright little dot at the end of this massive telescope.

It was a star, no twinkle. From what I could tell, it had to be Beta in the Little Dipper.

After that quick stargazing thing, I crashed hard.