A strange, indefinable dread had its grip upon me, and yet I was anxious to go, to put the thing to an issue. In all probability, we should not have far to travel. Nor, in fact, did we.
The way was much like the one that we had traversed in the opposite direction. One or two spots were even more dangerous than any we had found up there. And, over these dangerous, terrible places, where a false step or a slip of the foot on tlie smooth rock would have meant a most horrible death—along this airy, dizzy Stygian way, the angel had passed. Well, she was a brave angel, at any rate.
We were descending all the while, sometimes at an angle that I was glad was no steeper. This, does not mean, however, that our distance from the bottom, of that terrible chasm, on our right, was decreasing. The sounds that came up from the black depths of it told plainly that the descent of the stream was as pronounced as that of the ledge we were following, and perhaps more so.
"And here's something that I don't understand," was my remark as we stopped in a particularly broken spot: "to say nothing of our being below sea-level, here this stream has been pouring down for untold centuries, for how many thousands of years no man can even guess, and yet the place isn't full. Where does all the water go?"
"Think," was Milton's answer, "of all the rivers that, for how many millions of years no man can tell, have been running into the sea, and yet the sea is not overflowing."
"I don't see the application of that to this underground world, don't sec how all the water—there must be more streams than this—can possibly return as vapor to the region above."
"I admit," Rhodes said, "that the problem is a formidable one and that, with our present paucity of data, we can not hope to solve it. Still I think my suggestion sound."
"But where are the openings to permit the. escape of so enormous—for enormous it must be—an amount of water vapor?"
"There may be countless vents, fissures, Bill, ways of egress that man will never know. Whatever the explanation, there can be no doubt that the water is going down and that this subterranean world is not full."
"But where docs it go? Down to some sunless sea, perhaps, though, if that hypothesis of yours is a sound one, bathed in light, light never seen, in that world we have left, on land or sea."
Rhodes was a silent for a moment, leaning on his alpenstock. Then: "It is strange, truly, the descent of the waters. And yet it would not, I believe, have been to you so very strange a thing had you known that the sea itself flows into the earth."
"The sea itself?"
Rhodes nodded.
"Surely, Milton—why, the thing is Jules Vernesque!"
"On the contrary, the fact has long been known. At Argostoli in the Island of Cephalonia, the sea flows right into the limestone rock."[1]
"Shades of Lemuel Gulliver, but this old ball that men call the earth is certainly a strange old sphere!"
"How strange," said Milton Rhodes, "no scientist has ever dreamed, though your scientist has
thought of things far stranger than
- ↑ "The cases are certainly not numerous where marine currents are known to pour continuously into cavities beneath the surface of the earth, but there is at least one well-authenticated instance of this sort—that of the mill streams at Argostoli in the island of Cephalonia. It had been Ions: observed that the sea water flowed into several rifts and cavities in the limestone rocks of the coast, but the phenomenon has excited little attention until very recently. In 1833, three of the entrances were closed, and a regular channel sixteen feet long and three feet wide with a fall of three feet, was cut into the mouth of a larger cavity. The sea water flowed into this canal, and could be followed eighteen or twenty feet beyond its inner terminus, when it disappeared in holes and clefts in the rock."—George P. Marsh: Man and Nature.
