A Journey to the Center of the Earth is an all-time favorite of mine. This delightful book by Jules Verne describes a mad attempt by a nearly mad scientist to reach the center of the earth by descending a volcano. What is interesting at the present moment is that Jules Verne picked a volcano in Iceland as the starting point of his journey!
Jules Verne’s volcano is on the left and the current ash-spewing bane-of-air-travel is south-center.
Here is Jules Verne’s description of the formation of this whole Iceland island:
This extraordinary and curious island must have made its appearance from out of the great world of waters at a comparatively recent date. Like the coral islands of the Pacific, it may, for aught we know, be still rising by slow and imperceptible degrees.
If this really be the case, its origin can be attributed to only one cause—that of the continued action of subterranean fires…
Iceland, being absolutely without sedimentary soil, is composed exclusively of volcanic tufa; that is to say, of an agglomeration of stones and of rocks of a porous texture. Long before the existence of volcanoes, it was composed of a solid body of massive trap rock lifted bodily and slowly out of the sea, by the action of the centrifugal force at work in the earth.
The internal fires, however, had not as yet burst their bounds and flooded the exterior cake of Mother Earth with hot and raging lava.
My readers must excuse this brief and somewhat pedantic geological lecture. But it is necessary to the complete understanding of what follows.
At a later period in the world’s history, a huge and mighty fissure must, reasoning by analogy, have been dug diagonally from the southwest to the northeast of the island, through which by degrees flowed the volcanic crust. The great and wondrous phenomenon then went on without violence—the outpouring was enormous, and the seething fused matter, ejected from the bowels of the earth, spread slowly and peacefully in the form of vast level plains, or what are called mamelons or mounds.
It was at this epoch that the rocks called feldspars, syenites, and porphyries appeared.
But as a natural consequence of this overflow, the depth of the island increased. It can readily be believed what an enormous quantity of elastic fluids were piled up within its center, when at last it afforded no other openings, after the process of cooling the crust had taken place.
At length a time came when despite the enormous thickness and weight of the upper crust, the mechanical forces of the combustible gases below became so great, that they actually upheaved the weighty back and made for themselves huge and gigantic shafts. Hence the volcanoes which suddenly arose through the upper crust, and next the craters, which burst forth at the summit of these new creations.
It will be seen that the first phenomena in connection with the formation of the island were simply eruptive; to these, however, shortly succeeded the volcanic phenomena.
Through the newly formed openings, escaped the marvelous mass of basaltic stones with which the plain we were now crossing was covered. We were trampling our way over heavy rocks of dark grey color, which, while cooling, had been moulded into six-sided prisms. In the “back distance” we could see a number of flattened cones, which formerly were so many fire-vomiting mouths.
After the basaltic eruption was appeased and set at rest, the volcano, the force of which increased with that of the extinct craters, gave free passage to the fiery overflow of lava, and to the mass of cinders and pumice stone, now scattered over the sides of the mountain, like disheveled hair on the shoulders of a Bacchante.
Here, in a nutshell, I had the whole history of the phenomena from which Iceland arose. All take their rise in the fierce action of interior fires, and to believe that the central mass did not remain in a state of liquid fire, white hot, was simply and purely madness.
- Journey to the Center of the Earth, Chapter XII – The Ascent of Mount Snaeffels
Not surprising at all that a whole country formed of volcanic action continues to create trouble in its neighbourhood!
According to Jules Verne, the intrepid scientist and his two companions reach a gigantic ocean inside the earth (with giant sea creatures and all), sail across it and eventually get thrown out to the surface of the earth by another volcano in … read on:
“Where are we?” dreamily asked my uncle, who literally appeared to be disgusted at having returned to earth.
The eider-down hunter simply shrugged his shoulders as a mark of total ignorance.
“In Iceland?” said I, not positively but interrogatively.
“Nej,” said Hans.
“How do you mean?” cried the Professor; “no—what are your reasons?”
…After some delay, the Professor spoke.
“Hem!” he said, in a hesitating kind of way, “it really does not look like Iceland.”
…after two long hours’ march, a beautiful country spread out before us, covered by olives, pomegranates, and vines, which appeared to belong to anybody and everybody. In any event, in the state of destitution into which we had fallen, we were not in a mood to ponder too scrupulously.
What delight it was to press these delicious fruits to our lips, and to bite at grapes and pomegranates fresh from the vine.
Not far off, near some fresh and mossy grass, under the delicious shade of some trees, I discovered a spring of fresh water, in which we voluptuously laved our faces, hands, and feet.
While we were all giving way to the delights of new-found pleasures, a little child appeared between two tufted olive trees.
“Ah,” cried I, “an inhabitant of this happy country.”
The little fellow was poorly dressed, weak, and suffering, and appeared terribly alarmed at our appearance. Half-naked, with tangled, matted and ragged beards, we did look supremely ill-favored; and unless the country was a bandit land, we were not likely to alarm the inhabitants!
Just as the boy was about to take to his heels, Hans ran after him, and brought him back, despite his cries and kicks.
My uncle tried to look as gentle as possible, and then spoke in German.
“What is the name of this mountain, my friend?”
The child made no reply.
“Good,” said my uncle, with a very positive air of conviction, “we are not in Germany.”
He then made the same demand in English, of which language he was an excellent scholar.
The child shook its head and made no reply. I began to be considerably puzzled.
“Is he dumb?” cried the Professor, who was rather proud of his polyglot knowledge of languages, and made the same demand in French.
The boy only stared in his face.
“I must perforce try him in Italian,” said my uncle, with a shrug.
“Dove noi siamo?”
“Yes, tell me where we are?” I added impatiently and eagerly.
Again the boy remained silent.
“My fine fellow, do you or do you not mean to speak?” cried my uncle, who began to get angry. He shook him, and spoke another dialect of the Italian language.
“Come si noma questa isola?”—“What is the name of this island?”
“Stromboli,” replied the rickety little shepherd, dashing away from Hans and disappearing in the olive groves.
…Stromboli! What effect on the imagination did these few words produce! We were in the center of the Mediterranean, amidst the eastern archipelago of mythological memory, in the ancient Strongylos, where AEolus kept the wind and the tempest chained up. And those blue mountains, which rose towards the rising sun, were the mountains of Calabria.
And that mighty volcano which rose on the southern horizon was Etna, the fierce and celebrated Etna!
“Stromboli! Stromboli!” I repeated to myself.
My uncle played a regular accompaniment to my gestures and words. We were singing together like an ancient chorus.
Ah—what a journey—what a marvelous and extraordinary journey! Here we had entered the earth by one volcano, and we had come out by another. And this other was situated more than twelve hundred leagues from Sneffels from that drear country of Iceland cast away on the confines of the earth. The wondrous changes of this expedition had transported us to the most harmonious and beautiful of earthly lands. We had abandoned the region of eternal snows for that of infinite verdure, and had left over our heads the gray fog of the icy regions to come back to the azure sky of Sicily!
- A Journey to the Center of the Earth, Chapter XLIII – Daylight at Last
Maybe the airline industry should look for a solution in Sicily 
