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broad "highway" which sometimes widened into a hall and which followed the
circumference of the crater wall. This "highway" alone was over a
half-mile in length. For the most part, the floor of the passages was damp,
muddy, and strewn with broken rock.
The system of tunnels was filled with
strange and threatening noises. Hot steam piped, gurgled, and hissed from
hundreds of places in the ground, carving its way through mud and potholes and
melting the ice on the walls and ceilings, which dripped continuously onto the
ground. At other points there were streams of foul-smelling, poisonous gases.
In many places the path was not only dark but shrouded with clouds of vapor
which concealed everything from view. All the moisture the crater contained
rained down into the depths. Apparently a pond or a lake is located somewhere
deep inside this underworld.
A warm draft was blowing even at the tunnel
entrances, more than 13,000 feet high in the crater wall. The temperature was
40 C. But on top of everything else, it was hot inside the tunnel system! The
steam in the corridors was as hot as 560 C, and at one point the temperature of
the rocky floor was 860 C.
Struggling against the heat, vapor, water,
and gas, the geologists recorded, measured, and made charts of what they found. They
marveled at the steep descents and at the cathedral-like grottoes which had
been melted out of the ice. At one point, when the ice above them was four
hundred feet thick, they made two amazing discoveries. On the ground before them
lay the remains of a bird which as a rule inhabits the coast sixty miles away,
and above them in the icy ceiling of the corridor they found a red woolen
glove!
Mysterious discoveries ought to occur in an
adventure, and this adventure had its share. Up