Chapter 6 - Page 2

"Speak, my boy, don't be afraid. You are quite at liberty to expressyour opinions. You are no longer my nephew only, but my colleague.Pray go on."

"Well, in the first place, I wish to ask what are this Jokul, thisSneffels, and this Scartaris, names which I have never heard before?"

"Nothing easier. I received not long ago a map from my friend,Augustus Petermann, at Liepzig. Nothing could be more apropos. Takedown the third atlas in the second shelf in the large bookcase,series Z, plate 4."

I rose, and with the help of such precise instructions could not failto find the required atlas. My uncle opened it and said:

"Here is one of the best maps of Iceland, that of Handersen, and Ibelieve this will solve the worst of our difficulties."

I bent over the map.

"You see this volcanic island," said the Professor; "observe that allthe volcanoes are called jokuls, a word which means glacier inIcelandic, and under the high latitude of Iceland nearly all theactive volcanoes discharge through beds of ice. Hence this term ofjokul is applied to all the eruptive mountains in Iceland."

"Very good," said I; "but what of Sneffels?"

I was hoping that this question would be unanswerable; but I wasmistaken. My uncle replied:

"Follow my finger along the west coast of Iceland. Do you seeRejkiavik, the capital? You do. Well; ascend the innumerable fiordsthat indent those sea-beaten shores, and stop at the sixty-fifthdegree of latitude. What do you see there?"

"I see a peninsula looking like a thigh bone with the knee bone atthe end of it."

"A very fair comparison, my lad. Now do you see anything upon thatknee bone?"

"Yes; a mountain rising out of the sea."

"Right. That is Snæfell."

"That Snæfell?"

"It is. It is a mountain five thousand feet high, one of the mostremarkable in the world, if its crater leads down to the centre ofthe earth."

"But that is impossible," I said shrugging my shoulders, anddisgusted at such a ridiculous supposition.

"Impossible?" said the Professor severely; "and why, pray?"

"Because this crater is evidently filled with lava and burning rocks,and therefore -"

"But suppose it is an extinct volcano?"

"Extinct?"

"Yes; the number of active volcanoes on the surface of the globe isat the present time only about three hundred. But there is a verymuch larger number of extinct ones. Now, Snæfell is one of these.Since historic times there has been but one eruption of thismountain, that of 1219; from that time it has quieted down more and.more, and now it is no longer reckoned among active volcanoes."

To such positive statements I could make no reply. I therefore tookrefuge in other dark passages of the document.

"What is the meaning of this word Scartaris, and what have thekalends of