Harry's disappearance and rescue

Harry's disappearance and rescue is the episode in which a wrong turn cuts Harry off from Professor Hardwigg and Hans, and an extraordinary acoustic connection gives the separated party a way to find one another. Its decisive reversal is physical as well as emotional: Harry, alone and unable to retrace his route, is directed toward a junction, loses control on the descent, and is finally caught by his uncle.

Separation and the lost route

The separation begins as Harry walks ahead through a tunnel that has become almost horizontal. While Professor Hardwigg and Harry each carry a Ruhmkorff coil, Harry uses his light to examine the granite layers and becomes absorbed in his work. When he turns around, he finds himself alone. At first he supposes that he has simply walked too quickly, or that his companions stopped to rest, and retraces his steps for at least a quarter of an hour. His calls bring no answer; the cavernous passages return only echoes.

Harry initially expects the Hansbach to guide him. He stops to wash his hands and forehead in its water, but discovers that the path beneath him is dry, hard, and strewn with granite gravel. He realizes that while the party halted, the stream must have flowed into another tunnel and he entered a different gallery without noticing. There are no landmarks to identify his route, and his feet leave no trace on the stone. His repeated cry, "Lost! Lost!! LOST!!!", gives the separation its stark measure: he is not merely out of sight of his companions, but unable to tell where they have gone or how to return.

Isolation and the first sounds

Alone underground, Harry loses track of time. After a fall and the loss of blood, he regains awareness in pain and grief, convinced of his abandonment. As he begins to faint again, a distant uproar reaches him, followed by voices that seem to disappear into the depths. At first he considers whether some new geological disturbance is producing the sound. He then listens for it to recur, with no certainty that it will.

Harry eventually recognizes a voice and notices that the sound grows strongest at a particular point along the side of his cavern. The word he hears is "forlorad," a Danish expression spoken by Professor Hardwigg to Hans. This detail identifies the distant voices as those of his companions and redirects Harry's attention from a possible disturbance in the rock to the gallery itself. He reasons that the sound is travelling along the passage rather than through solid granite, and that the place has unusual acoustic properties.

The Whispering Gallery and reunion by voice

Once Harry understands that the gallery can carry speech, he places himself against its wall and calls, "Uncle Hardwigg." The contact is precarious: if Professor Hardwigg and Hans move only a few feet from their position, Harry fears that the acoustic effect will be lost. For Harry, speaking at the right place and keeping the exchange alive are now practical necessities, not just proof that he is no longer entirely alone.

Professor Hardwigg answers that he and Hans have searched in both directions, upward and downward. Believing Harry might still be on the road beside the Hansbach, they descended again and fired guns as signals. Hardwigg explains that the voices can reach one another because of an unusual arrangement of the labyrinth, though hearing each other does not mean they can meet immediately. He tells Harry not to speak if weakness prevents it, and stresses that even this much contact is a gain. The scene turns the tunnel's acoustic structure into a fragile substitute for physical proximity: they can exchange words, but cannot yet reach across the distance.

The voices also give Hardwigg a way to calculate how far apart they are. After Harry repeats the word "Harry," Hardwigg measures forty seconds between the two utterances and estimates that the sound takes twenty seconds to travel one way. Using his stated rate of 1,020 feet per second, he places the distance at 20,400 feet, or a league and an eighth. The estimate is crushing to Harry, but it also establishes that the separation can be measured and that his uncle has located a route to him.

Direction, descent, and rescue

When Harry asks whether he should go up or down, Professor Hardwigg tells him to descend. He explains that Harry has reached a broad open space, a bare crossroads where galleries diverge, and that the passage Harry occupies must lead to the point where the fissures radiate from the great cavern in which Hardwigg and Hans are waiting. He urges Harry to continue by whatever means his strength permits, promising that strong arms will receive him at the end.

Harry takes heart from the reasoning that a voice able to cross such a distance suggests no insuperable obstacle between him and his companions. But he is too weak to walk and has to drag himself down a steep slope. The descent accelerates beyond his control. He clutches at the sides and reaches for projecting rocks, but cannot stop himself; the ground gives way, and he falls through a dark vertical gallery before losing consciousness. The promised route to reunion thus becomes a dangerous fall, and the very passage intended to bring him to the others leaves his survival uncertain.

Harry awakens in dim light on soft coverings, with Professor Hardwigg beside him. Hardwigg watches for signs of consciousness, takes his hand when Harry first sighs, and cries out with joy when he opens his eyes. Hans has tended Harry's wounds and bruises with an Icelandic ointment, and Hardwigg provides food as Harry recovers. The explanation of the rescue completes the episode's reversal: Harry fell to the bottom of the near-perpendicular gallery, carried amid falling stones on a dislodged rock, and landed unconscious in his uncle's arms. Hardwigg calls it a miracle that Harry survived and concludes that the party must take care never to separate again. The reunion answers the initial solitude with renewed closeness, while making the cost and danger of losing contact unmistakable.