"And perhaps at this very moment there is a storm above, and ships over our heads are being rudely tossed by the tempest." "Quite probable." "And whales are lashing the roof of our prison with their tails?" "It may be, Axel, but they won't shake us here. But let us go back to our calculation. Here we are eighty-five leagues south-east of Snæfell, and I reckon that we are at a depth of sixteen leagues." "Sixteen leagues?" I cried. "No doubt." "Why, this is the very limit assigned by science to the thickness of the crust of the earth." "I don't deny it." "And here, according to the law of increasing temperature, there ought to be a heat of 2,732° Fahr.!" "So there should, my lad." "And all this solid granite ought to be running in fusion." "You see that it is not so, and that, as so often happens, facts come to overthrow theories." "I am obliged to agree; but, after all, it is surprising." "What does the thermometer say?" "Twenty-seven, six tenths (82° Fahr.)." "Therefore the savants are wrong by 2,705°, and the proportional increase is a mistake. Therefore Humphry Davy was right, and I am not wrong in following him. What do you say now?" "Nothing." In truth, I had a good deal to say. I gave way in no respect to Davy's theory. I still held to the central heat, although I did not feel its effects. I preferred to admit in truth, that this chimney of an extinct volcano, lined with lavas, which are non-conductors of heat, did not suffer the heat to pass through its walls. But without stopping to look up new arguments I simply took up our situation such as it was. "Well, admitting all your calculations to be quite correct, you must allow me to draw one rigid result therefrom." "What is it. Speak freely." "At the latitude of Iceland, where we now are, the radius of the earth, the distance from the centre to the surface is about 1,583 leagues; let us say in round numbers 1,600 leagues, or 4,800 miles. Out of 1,600 leagues we have gone twelve!" "So you say." "And these twelve at a cost of 85 leagues diagonally?" "Exactly so." "In twenty days?" "Yes." "Now, sixteen leagues are the hundredth part of the earth's radius. At this rate we shall be two thousand days, or nearly five years and a half, in getting to the centre." No answer was vouchsafed to this rational conclusion. "Without reckoning, too, that if a vertical depth of sixteen leagues can be attained only by a diagonal descent of eighty-four, it follows that we must go eight thousand miles in a south-easterly direction; so that we shall emerge from some point in the earth's circumference instead of getting to the centre!" "Confusion to all your figures, and all your hypotheses besides," shouted my uncle in a sudden rage. "What is the basis of them all? How do you know that this passage does not run straight to our destination? Besides, there is a precedent. What one man has done, another may do." "I hope so; but, still, I may be permitted--"