hour, I found that it was getting hotter and
hotter, I called to Sir Henry and asked him if he noticed it,
or if it was only my imagination. 'Noticed it!' he answered;
'I should think so. I am in a sort of Turkish bath.' Just about
then the others woke up gasping, and were obliged to begin to
discard their clothes. Here Umslopogaas had the advantage, for
he did not wear any to speak of, except a moocha.

Hotter it grew, and hotter yet, till at last we could scarcely
breathe, and the perspiration poured out of us. Half an hour
more, and though we were all now stark naked, we could hardly
bear it. The place was like an antechamber of the infernal regions
proper. I dipped my hand into the water and drew it out almost
with a cry; it was nearly boiling. We consulted a little thermometer
we had -- the mercury stood at 123 degrees. From the surface
of the water rose a dense cloud of steam. Alphonse groaned out
that we were already in purgatory, which indeed we were, though
not in the sense that he meant it. Sir Henry suggested that
we must be passing near the seat of some underground volcanic
fire, and I am inclined to think, especially in the light of
what subsequently occurred, that he was right. Our sufferings
for some time after this really pass my powers of description.
We no longer perspired, for all the perspiration had been sweated
out of us. We simply lay in the bottom of the boat, which we
were now physically incapable of directing, feeling like hot
embers, and I fancy undergoing very much the same sensations
that the poor fish do when they are dying on land -- namely,
that of slow suffocation. Our skins began to crack, and the
blood to throb in our heads like the beating of a steam-engine.

This had been going on for some time, when suddenly the river
turned a little, and I heard Sir Henry call out from the bows
in a hoarse, startled voice, and, looking up, saw a most wonderful
and awful thing. About half a mile ahead of us, and a little
to the left of the centre of the stream -- which we could now
see was about ninety feet broad -- a huge pillar-like jet of
almost white flame rose from the surface of the water and sprang
fifty feet into the air, when it struck the roof and spread out
some forty feet in diameter, falling back in curved sheets of
fire shaped like the petals of a full-blown rose. Indeed this
awful gas jet resembled nothing so much as a great flaming flower
rising out of the black w