The raft

The raft is the expedition’s indispensable, vulnerable conveyance across the subterranean sea. As Hans builds and pilots it, the raft enables the travelers to continue toward Cape Saknussemm; when an explosion turns the sea into a torrent and sweeps them into a flooded passage, it becomes both their sole support and the setting for a catastrophic loss of supplies.

Construction and Preparation

The raft first appears on the sandy shore beyond the promontory that forms the expedition’s natural harbor. Hans has already begun assembling it from beams of an unfamiliar wood, with enough branches, joints, boughs, and other pieces scattered nearby to suggest that the material could supply many more craft. Its construction is thus practical rather than ornamental: the explorers have found wood where they need it, and their guide has made it into a means of crossing the inland sea.

The party leaves its provisions and equipment properly arranged aboard the raft before setting out toward the newly named Cape Saknussemm. Yet this prepared departure does not promise an easy crossing. The craft cannot sail close to the wind and is designed to move before the blast, so an unfavorable wind forces the travelers to push it along with poles. When rocks extend into deep water, they must take long detours. After three tiring hours, they find somewhere to land, but the raft remains securely moored nearby as they investigate a gallery cut into the rock.

Crossing and the Failed Gallery

The expedition’s initial passage shows how the raft’s use depends on both conditions and human effort. It carries the travelers from their natural harbor, but wind and shoreline obstacles dictate their progress; the craft is not a vessel that can simply overcome the underground sea. After landing, the party leaves it fastened to a rock and approaches the nearby tunnel, where an enormous granite block soon bars the way.

The raft becomes central again when the travelers’ attempt to clear that obstruction triggers a much greater danger. An explosion opens a deep abyss, and the sea pours toward it as a powerful current, carrying the raft along. The travelers have not deliberately embarked on this course: their own imprudence has set the water in motion, and their planned voyage is replaced by an uncontrolled descent through the newly opened passage. The raft keeps them afloat, but it cannot steer them clear of the flood.

The Flood and Its Consequences

For one or two hours, the travelers cling to one another on the raft as it strikes the rocky sides of the channel. The impacts grow less frequent, leading the narrator to infer that the passage is widening. The water rushes with extraordinary force; the craft catches in whirlpools and spins as it is driven onward. The account estimates that their speed may be at least a hundred miles an hour, a scale of movement that makes the raft’s frailty as consequential as its usefulness.

The raft also becomes a platform for reading the passage around it. With the electric apparatus destroyed in the explosion, Hans manages to light a lantern despite the strong draft. Its limited illumination gives the travelers glimpses of the wide gallery and of rocks flashing past so rapidly that they seem to form lines enclosing the moving craft. The raft does not give them control, but its passage supplies the changing evidence by which they judge the tunnel’s breadth and the violence of the current.

Once the journey brings them to a halt, an inspection reveals how much the flood has stripped away. Of the nautical and philosophical instruments, only the chronometer and compass remain. The ladders and ropes have been reduced to a short piece of rope attached to the broken mast; the tools are gone, and there is no food, not even enough for a day. The raft has carried the expedition through the flood, but the same ordeal has left its passengers without the practical resources their continued exploration requires.

Narrative Significance

Across these episodes, the raft shifts from a carefully prepared instrument of travel into an unstable refuge borne along by forces the travelers cannot command. Its limitations are visible from the start in its dependence on favorable wind or poles; after the explosion, that dependence becomes absolute, as the current determines where it goes and how fast. Its survival through the torrent does not preserve the expedition’s original readiness: the travelers emerge with the chronometer and compass but without food, tools, or most of their other equipment.

The raft’s role therefore rests on a double consequence. It makes the crossing and helps keep the travelers afloat, yet it also carries them into a passage where their stores and equipment are lost. At the account’s next turn, it remains the means of reaching a newly illuminated water cavern, where the weary travelers find a rugged place to stop. Its journey has not ended in safety or resolution; it has brought them onward while making the cost and uncertainty of continuing newly plain.