1864 2026
This is an AI modernization of A Journey to the Center of the Earth into contemporary English. The original is available from Project Gutenberg. Also available as an epub.
Jules Verne published A Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1864, early in the long run of adventure novels his publisher Hetzel issued as the Voyages extraordinaires. It begins in Hamburg in May 1863, in the house of Professor Otto Lidenbrock, a mineralogist with a bad temper and a first-rate mind, who has just bought a secondhand Icelandic manuscript. A scrap of parchment falls out of it covered in runes. The runes turn out to be a coded Latin message left by a sixteenth-century alchemist named Arne Saknussemm, and it gives directions: go down into the crater of a dead volcano in Iceland, and you will reach the center of the Earth.
The narrator is Lidenbrock's nephew Axel, who does not want to go, says so at length, and goes. He is the reason the book works. He is frightened for most of it, he is honest about being frightened, and his running commentary on his uncle's certainties is funny in a way Verne's reputation does not prepare anyone for. The third man is Hans, an Icelandic eider-hunter hired as a guide, who says almost nothing across the whole descent and saves the party repeatedly without appearing to hurry.
What is underneath was an open scientific question in 1864, not a fantasy. Verne has his two geologists argue it out on the page: one holds that the Earth's interior is molten and that the heat rises steadily with depth, which would make the trip impossible, and the other does not. The arguments are real arguments of the period, and none of the science has been quietly corrected here. Neither have the numbers — Verne tracks depth, temperature, barometric pressure and compass bearing the whole way down, and the tracking is what makes a hole in the ground feel like a place.
English readers were badly served by this book for well over a century. The Victorian translations cut and rewrote it freely, and one went so far as to rename the characters, which is why some older editions have a Professor Hardwigg and a nephew called Harry. This edition is made from Verne's French and is complete, as are the two other Verne novels in this collection. Saknussemm's runes and his Latin are kept exactly as printed, along with the puzzle of how to read them, because the decipherment in the opening chapters is one of the best things in Verne and it is meant to be worked through rather than watched.
On Sunday, the 24th of May, 1863, my uncle, Professor Lidenbrock, came rushing back to his little house at No. 19 König-strasse, one of the oldest streets in the old quarter of Hamburg.
Martha, our good housekeeper, must have thought she was terribly behind, because dinner was only just beginning to sing on the kitchen stove.
"Well," I said to myself, "if he's hungry, my uncle — the most impatient man alive — is going to howl the house down."
"Professor Lidenbrock already!" cried Martha, astonished, easing open the dining-room door.
"Yes, Martha. But dinner has every right not to be ready, because it isn't two o'clock yet. Saint Michael's has only just struck the half hour."
"Then why is Professor Lidenbrock coming home?"
"He'll no doubt tell us himself."
"Here he comes! I'm off. Master Axel, you make him see reason."
And good Martha retreated to her culinary laboratory.
I was left on my own. But making the most short-tempered of professors see reason — that was rather more than my somewhat indecisive character was equal to. So I was preparing to beat a prudent retreat up to my little room on the top floor, when the street door screamed on its hinges, a pair of big feet came cracking up the wooden staircase, and the master of the house, crossing the dining room, plunged straight into his study.
But in that quick passage he had managed to fling his nutcracker-headed cane into one corner, toss his broad, rough-napped hat onto the table, and hurl these ringing words at his nephew:
"Axel, follow me!"
I hadn't had time to stir before the professor was shouting at me again, with a sharp note of impatience:
"Well? You're not here yet?"
I bolted into the study of my formidable master.
Otto Lidenbrock was not a bad man, I'll gladly grant that; but unless something improbable changes him, he will die a terrible eccentric to the very end.
He was a professor at the Johannaeum, where he gave a course in mineralogy during which he lost his temper, as a rule, once or twice a session. Not that he cared whether his students turned up faithfully to his lessons, or how closely they paid attention, or what success they might go on to have; those little details hardly troubled him. He taught "subjectively" — to borrow a term from German philosophy — for himself, and not for anyone else. He was a selfish scholar, a well of learning whose pulley squealed whenever you tried to draw anything up out of it. In a word: a miser.
There are a few professors of this stripe in Germany.
My uncle, unfortunately, was not blessed with a great gift for pronunciation — not in private, at least, but certainly in public, and that is a regrettable flaw in a public speaker. In his lectures at the Johannaeum he would often stop dead; he'd be wrestling with some stubborn word that refused to slide out between his lips, one of those words that dig in their heels, swell up, and finally burst out in the highly unscientific form of an oath. And then: mighty rage.
Mineralogy has a great many half-Greek, half-Latin names, hard to pronounce — rough, jaw-breaking labels that would flay a poet's lips. I don't mean to run the science down. Far from it. But when a man finds himself face to face with rhombohedral crystallizations, retinasphalt resins, gehlenites, tangasites, molybdates of lead, tungstates of manganese, and titanates of zirconia, even the nimblest tongue is allowed to trip.
Now, all over town this pardonable weakness of my uncle's was well known, and people took advantage of it; they lay in wait for him at the dangerous passages, he flew into a fury, and they laughed — which is not in good taste, even for Germans. And so, if there was always a great crowd of listeners at Lidenbrock's lectures, how many of them followed the course so faithfully mainly to enjoy the professor's magnificent rages?
Be that as it may, my uncle — I can't say it too often — was a genuine scholar. Though he sometimes shattered his specimens by testing them too roughly, he combined the instinct of the geologist with the eye of the mineralogist. With his hammer, his steel point, his magnetic needle, his blowpipe, and his flask of nitric acid, he was a formidable man. From the fracture, the look, the hardness, the fusibility, the sound, the smell, or the taste of any given mineral, he would classify it without hesitation among the six hundred species that science recognizes today.
So the name of Lidenbrock rang out with honor in the schools and the learned societies. Humphry Davy, Humboldt, Captains Franklin and Sabine never failed to call on him when they passed through Hamburg. Becquerel, Ebelmen, Brewster, Dumas, Milne-Edwards all liked to consult him on the most gripping questions in chemistry. That science owed him some rather fine discoveries, and in 1853 there had appeared in Leipzig a Treatise on Transcendental Crystallography, by Professor Otto Lidenbrock — a grand folio volume with plates, which nevertheless failed to cover its own costs.
Add to all this that my uncle was curator of the mineralogical museum of Monsieur Struve, the Russian ambassador — a valuable collection with a Europe-wide reputation.
That, then, is the man who was hailing me so impatiently. Picture a tall, lean fellow, iron-healthy, with a boyish blond coloring that knocked a good ten years off his fifty. His big eyes rolled ceaselessly behind an enormous pair of spectacles; his long, thin nose was like the blade of a knife; the malicious even claimed it was magnetized and pulled in iron filings. Pure slander: it pulled in nothing but tobacco — though a great deal of that, it must be admitted, to be honest.
When I add that my uncle took mathematical strides half a fathom long, and that as he walked he kept his fists firmly clenched — the mark of an impetuous temperament — you will know him well enough not to hanker after his company.
He lived in his little house on König-strasse, a dwelling half wood, half brick, with a scalloped gable; it looked out onto one of those winding canals that crisscross the middle of Hamburg's oldest quarter, which the great fire of 1842 had mercifully spared.
The old house did lean a little, it's true, and thrust its belly out at the passersby; it wore its roof tilted over one ear, like the cap of a student of the Tugendbund; the plumb of its lines left something to be desired; but all in all it held itself up well, thanks to an old elm vigorously wedged into the front wall, which in spring pushed its budding blossoms in through the panes of the windows.
My uncle was not badly off, as German professors go. The house was his outright, contents and all. The contents were his goddaughter Graüben — a young Virland girl of seventeen — our good Martha, and me. In my double capacity as nephew and orphan, I became his assistant-preparator in his experiments.
I'll admit I bit into the geological sciences with a hearty appetite; I had mineralogist's blood in my veins, and I was never bored in the company of my precious rocks.
All in all, one could live happily in that little house on König-strasse, despite its owner's fits of impatience — because, for all his rather brutal way of going about things, he loved me no less for it. But the man simply did not know how to wait; he was in more of a hurry than nature itself.
When, back in April, he had planted seedlings of mignonette or morning glory in the china pots of his sitting room, every morning he would go and faithfully tug them by the leaves to hurry their growth along.
With an eccentric like that, there was nothing to do but obey. So I dashed into his study.
That study was a genuine museum. Every specimen the mineral kingdom has to offer was there, labeled and arranged in the most perfect order, according to the three great divisions of minerals: the flammable, the metallic, and the stony.
How well I knew them, those trinkets of the science of mineralogy! How many times, instead of loafing about with boys my own age, had I amused myself dusting these graphites, these anthracites, these coals, these lignites, these peats! And the bitumens, the resins, the organic salts that had to be shielded from the least speck of dust! And these metals, from iron all the way up to gold, whose relative value vanished before the absolute equality of scientific specimens! And all these stones, enough to rebuild the house on König-strasse from scratch — even with a fine extra bedroom, which I could have made very good use of!
But as I stepped into the study, none of these wonders was on my mind. My uncle alone filled my thoughts. He had buried himself in his big armchair upholstered in Utrecht velvet, and he held a book in his hands that he was contemplating with the most profound admiration.
"What a book! What a book!" he kept exclaiming.
That outburst reminded me that Professor Lidenbrock was also, in his idle moments, a book fanatic. But an old volume had no value in his eyes unless it was impossible to find, or at the very least impossible to read.
"Well!" he said to me. "Don't you see it? It's a priceless treasure that I turned up this morning, poking around in the shop of Hevelius the Jew."
"Magnificent!" I answered, with a show of enthusiasm to order.
For really, what was all this fuss about? An old quarto whose spine and boards seemed to be made of coarse calfskin, a yellowish book with a faded bookmark dangling from it.
Meanwhile the professor's admiring exclamations went on without a pause.
"Look," he was saying, putting the questions and the answers to himself. "Isn't it beautiful? Yes, it's splendid! And what a binding! Does the book open easily? Yes, because it stays open at any page you like! But does it close properly? Yes, because the cover and the pages form a single unbroken whole, without gaping or coming apart anywhere. And this spine — not a single crack in it after seven hundred years! Ah, there's a binding that Bozerian, Closs, or Purgold would have been proud of!"
And as he talked, my uncle kept opening and closing the old book. The least I could do was to ask him about its contents, though they didn't interest me in the slightest.
"And what is the title of this marvelous volume?" I asked, with an eagerness far too enthusiastic not to be put on.
"This work!" my uncle replied, warming up. "This is the Heims-Kringla of Snorre Turleson, the famous Icelandic author of the twelfth century! It's the Chronicle of the Norwegian princes who reigned in Iceland."
"Really!" I cried, as best I could. "And no doubt it's a translation into German?"
"A translation!" the professor shot back sharply. "And what would I want with your translation? Who cares about your translation? This is the original work, in the Icelandic tongue — that magnificent language, rich and simple at the same time, which allows for the most varied grammatical combinations and countless modifications of words!"
"Like German," I ventured, rather pleased with myself.
"Yes," my uncle answered, shrugging his shoulders, "with the difference that Icelandic admits the three genders, like Greek, and declines proper nouns, like Latin!"
"Ah!" I said, my indifference a little shaken. "And are the letters of this book beautiful?"
"Letters! Who's talking about letters, you wretched Axel! Letters, indeed! Ah, so you take this for a printed book! But you ignoramus, it's a manuscript — and a runic manuscript!"
"Runic?"
"Yes! Are you going to ask me now to explain that word for you?"
"I'll be careful not to," I replied, with the tone of a man wounded in his self-respect.
But my uncle carried on more energetically than ever, and instructed me, against my will, in things I had no great wish to know.
"The runes," he went on, "were characters of writing once used in Iceland, and, according to tradition, they were invented by Odin himself! But look, then — admire them, you heathen — these letters that sprang from the imagination of a god!"
Well, for lack of any reply, I was on the point of prostrating myself — the sort of answer that ought to please gods and kings alike, since it has the advantage of never putting them on the spot — when an incident came to divert the course of the conversation.
It was the appearance of a grimy parchment that slipped out of the book and fell to the floor.
My uncle pounced on this scrap with an eagerness easy to understand. An old document, sealed away perhaps for time out of mind inside an old book, could not fail to be of the highest value in his eyes.
"What's this?" he cried.
And at the same moment he was carefully spreading out on his table a piece of parchment five inches long and three wide, across which ran, in horizontal lines, characters straight out of some book of spells.
Here is the exact facsimile. I am determined to make these strange signs known, for they led Professor Lidenbrock and his nephew to undertake the most extraordinary expedition of the nineteenth century:
ᛯ . ᛦ ᚳ ᛚ ᛚ ᚼ ᛅ ᚼ ᛦ ᛅ ᚢ ᛅ ᛚ ᚼ ᛅ ᛅ ᚴ ᛁ ᚦ ᛅ ᚼ ᛎ ᛏ ᚼ ᚼ ᛘ ᚠ ᚢ ᚳ ᛏ ᛅ ᛁ ᛅ ᚠ ᚳ ᛁ ᛅ ᚦ ᛦ ᚴ ᛅ ᚴ ᛏ , ᚼ ᛐ ᛘ ᚳ ᛐ ᛏ ᛦ ᛐ ᛏ ᛅᚼ ᚼᛐ ᚭ ᚦ ᛦ ᛦ ᚳ ᛅ ᛘ ᛏ ᚳ ᛐ ᛅᛁ ᚳ ᚢ ᛐ ᛅ ᚴ ᛏ ᛦ ᛦ ᛁ ᛚᚼᛐ ᛐᛏ ᚢ ᛐ ᛐ ᛦ . ᚳ ᚼ ᚴ ᛦ ᚴ ᛁ ᛅ ᛐ ᛐ ᚲ ᚼ ᚴ ᚴ ᚦ ᛦ ᛘ ᛁ ᛅ ᛅ ᚢ ᛏ ᚢ ᛚ ᚠ ᛦ ᛐ ᚳ ᛏ ᚢ ᚦ ᛏ , ᛁ ᛐ ᚴ ᚭ ᚼ ᛅ ᛁ ᚲ ᚭ ᚴᛅ ᚦ ᛁ ᛁᛦ
The professor studied this string of characters for a few moments; then he said, pushing his spectacles up onto his forehead:
"This is runic. These letters are absolutely identical to those in Snorre Turleson's manuscript! But... what on earth can it mean?"
Since runic struck me as an invention of scholars meant to mystify the poor world, I was not sorry to see that my uncle understood none of it. At least, that was how it seemed to me from the movement of his fingers, which were beginning to twitch alarmingly.
"And yet it's Old Icelandic!" he muttered between his teeth.
And Professor Lidenbrock surely ought to have known, for he passed for a real polyglot. Not that he spoke fluently the two thousand languages and four thousand dialects used across the face of the globe, but he knew his fair share of them.
He was on the verge, then, faced with this difficulty, of giving free rein to the full impetuosity of his temper, and I foresaw a violent scene — when two o'clock chimed on the little clock over the mantelpiece.
At once, good Martha opened the door of the study and announced:
"The soup is served."
"To the devil with the soup," cried my uncle, "and with the woman who made it, and with anyone who eats it!"
Martha fled. I flew after her, and, hardly knowing how, found myself seated in my usual place in the dining room.
I waited a few moments. The professor did not come. It was the first time, to my knowledge, that he had missed the solemn ritual of dinner. And what a dinner it was, too! Parsley soup, a ham omelette seasoned with sorrel and nutmeg, a loin of veal with stewed plums, and, for dessert, sugared shrimp — all of it washed down with a nice Moselle wine.
That was what an old sheet of paper was going to cost my uncle. As a devoted nephew, I felt it my duty to eat for him, and for myself as well — which I did in all good conscience.
"I have never seen anything like it!" said good Martha as she served. "Professor Lidenbrock not at the table!"
"It's beyond belief."
"It's a sign of some grave event to come!" the old servant went on, shaking her head.
In my opinion it was a sign of nothing at all — nothing except a frightful scene when my uncle found his dinner devoured.
I was down to my last shrimp when a thundering voice tore me from the delights of dessert. In a single bound I was out of the dining room and into the study.
"It's runic, obviously," said the professor, knitting his brows. "But there's a secret in it, and I'll dig it out, or else—"
A violent gesture finished the thought.
"Sit down there," he added, jabbing his fist toward the table, "and write."
In an instant I was ready.
"Now, I'm going to dictate to you the letter of our alphabet that corresponds to each of these Icelandic characters. We'll see what it gives us. But, by Saint Michael, mind you don't make a single mistake!"
The dictation began. I did my best; each letter was called out one after another, and together they formed the incomprehensible string of words below:
mm . r n l l s e s r e u e l s e e c J d e s g t s s m f u n t e i e f n i e d r k e k t , s a m n a t r a t e S S a o d r r n e m t n a e I n u a e c t r r i l S a A t u a a r . n s c r c i e a a b s c c d r m i e e u t u l f r a n t u d t , i a c o s e i b o K e d i i Y
When this labor was finished, my uncle snatched up the sheet I had just written on and studied it for a long while, closely.
"What on earth does it mean?" he kept repeating, mechanically.
On my honor, I couldn't have told him. And in any case he didn't ask me — he simply went on talking to himself:
"This is what we call a cryptogram," he said. "The meaning is hidden under letters deliberately scrambled; arrange them properly and they'd form an intelligible sentence. To think that this might hold the explanation, or the key, to some great discovery!"
For my part, I thought it held absolutely nothing at all — but I prudently kept my opinion to myself.
The professor then took up the book and the parchment and compared the two.
"These two scripts aren't in the same hand," he said. "The cryptogram is later than the book, and I can see the proof at once — it's irrefutable. Look: the very first letter is a double M, one you'd search for in vain in Turleson's book, because it wasn't added to the Icelandic alphabet until the fourteenth century. So there are at least two hundred years between the manuscript and this document."
That, I'll admit, struck me as reasonably logical.
"I'm therefore led to think," my uncle went on, "that one of the owners of this book must have traced these mysterious characters. But who the devil was that owner? Might he not have put his name somewhere in the manuscript?"
My uncle pushed his spectacles up onto his forehead, took a strong magnifying glass, and carefully went over the opening pages of the book. On the back of the second leaf — the one behind the half-title — he found a sort of smudge that looked to the eye like an ink blot. But looking closely, you could make out a few half-effaced characters. My uncle understood at once that this was the point of interest; he bore down on the smudge, and with the help of his big glass he finally recognized the following signs, runic characters that he read off without hesitation:
ᛐ ᛦ ᚳ ᛅ ᚼ ᛐ ᚴ ᚳ ᚢ ᚼ ᚼ ᛅ ᛯ
"Arne Saknussemm!" he cried, in a tone of triumph. "Why, that's a name — and an Icelandic name at that! The name of a scholar of the sixteenth century, a famous alchemist!"
I looked at my uncle with a certain admiration.
"These alchemists," he went on, "Avicenna, Bacon, Lull, Paracelsus — they were the true, the only scholars of their age. They made discoveries that we have every right to marvel at. Why shouldn't this Saknussemm have buried some astonishing invention beneath this incomprehensible cryptogram? It must be so. It is so."
The professor's imagination caught fire at the idea.
"No doubt," I ventured to reply, "but what interest could this scholar have had in hiding some marvelous discovery this way?"
"Why? Why? How should I know? Didn't Galileo do exactly that with Saturn? In any case, we'll soon see. I'll have the secret of this document, and I won't take food or sleep until I've guessed it."
"Oh," I thought.
"And neither will you, Axel," he added.
"The devil," I said to myself. "A good thing I ate enough for two!"
"And first of all," my uncle continued, "we have to find the language of this 'cipher.' That shouldn't be difficult."
At these words I looked up sharply. My uncle resumed his soliloquy:
"Nothing simpler. There are a hundred and thirty-two letters in this document, giving seventy-nine consonants against fifty-three vowels. Now, that's roughly the proportion in which the words of the southern languages are formed, whereas the tongues of the north are infinitely richer in consonants. So we're dealing with a language of the south."
The conclusions were quite sound.
"But which language is it?"
Here was where I expected my scholar to stumble — though in him, all the same, I was discovering a profound analyst.
"This Saknussemm," he went on, "was an educated man; and once he wasn't writing in his mother tongue, he'd naturally have chosen the language most current among the cultivated minds of the sixteenth century — I mean Latin. If I'm wrong, I can try Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, Hebrew. But the scholars of the sixteenth century generally wrote in Latin. So I have the right to say, a priori: this is Latin."
I jumped in my chair. My memories as a Latin student rose up in revolt against the notion that this string of grotesque words could belong to the sweet language of Virgil.
"Yes! Latin," my uncle went on, "but scrambled Latin."
"Fine and good," I thought. "If you unscramble that, uncle, you're a clever man."
"Let's examine it closely," he said, taking up the sheet I'd written on again. "Here's a series of a hundred and thirty-two letters presented in apparent disorder. There are words where the consonants stand alone, like the first, 'mrnlls'; others, on the contrary, where the vowels crowd together — the fifth, for instance, 'unteief,' or the second to last, 'oseibo.' Now, this arrangement clearly wasn't contrived; it's given mathematically by the unknown rule that governed the sequence of these letters. It seems certain to me that the original sentence was written out properly, then turned around according to some law we have to discover. Whoever held the key to this 'cipher' could read it fluently. But what is that key? Axel, have you got that key?"
To this question I said nothing — and for good reason. My eyes had come to rest on a charming portrait hanging on the wall, the portrait of Graüben. My uncle's ward was at that time in Altona, staying with a relative, and her absence made me very sad, for — I can confess it now — the pretty Virlander and the professor's nephew were in love with all the patience and all the calm of Germany; we had become engaged without my uncle's knowledge, he being too much of a geologist to understand such feelings. Graüben was a charming young woman, fair-haired, with blue eyes, of a somewhat grave temperament and a somewhat serious mind; but she loved me no less for that, and for my part I adored her, if indeed that verb exists in the Germanic tongue! The image of my little Virlander thus flung me, in an instant, out of the world of realities and into the world of daydreams, of memories.
I saw again the faithful companion of my labors and my pleasures. Every day she helped me arrange my uncle's precious stones; she labeled them with me. What a formidable mineralogist Miss Graüben was! She loved to get to the bottom of the thorny questions of science. How many sweet hours we had spent studying together, and how often I envied the lot of those insensible stones she handled with her charming hands.
Then, when the moment of recreation came, we would go out together; we'd take the leafy walks along the Alster and make our way in company to the old tarred mill that looks so fine at the end of the lake; along the way we'd talk, holding hands; I told her things that made her laugh her best; and so we'd come to the bank of the Elbe, and after saying good evening to the swans swimming among the big white water lilies, we'd come back to the quay by the steamboat.
I had gotten that far in my reverie when my uncle, banging his fist on the table, dragged me violently back to reality.
"Look here," he said, "the first idea that ought to come to mind for scrambling the letters of a sentence is, it seems to me, to write the words vertically instead of tracing them horizontally."
"Well, well," I thought.
"We have to see what that produces. Axel, throw some sentence or other onto this scrap of paper; but instead of setting the letters down one after another, place them in vertical columns, so as to group them in fives or sixes."
I understood what he was after, and immediately I wrote from top to bottom:
J m n e , b e e , t G e t' b m i r n a i a t a ! i e p e ü
"Good," said the professor, without having read it. "Now set these words out on a horizontal line."
I obeyed, and I got the following sentence:
Jmne,b ee,tGe t'bmirn aiata! iepeü
"Perfect!" cried my uncle, tearing the paper out of my hands. "There — that already has the look of the old document; the vowels are grouped together, and the consonants too, in the same disorder; there are even capitals in the middle of words, and commas, exactly as in Saknussemm's parchment!"
I couldn't help finding these remarks extremely ingenious.
"Now," my uncle went on, addressing himself directly to me, "to read the sentence you've just written, which I don't know, all I need do is take the first letter of each word in turn, then the second, then the third, and so on."
And my uncle, to his great astonishment — and above all to mine — read:
Je t'aime bien, ma petite Graüben!
"Eh!" went the professor.
Yes — without suspecting it, like a clumsy lover, I had traced that compromising sentence: I love you dearly, my little Graüben!
"Ah! so you love Graüben!" my uncle went on, in a thoroughly guardian-like tone.
"Yes... No... " I stammered.
"Ah! so you love Graüben," he repeated, mechanically. "Well then — let's apply my method to the document in question!"
My uncle, sunk back into his absorbing contemplation, had already forgotten my imprudent words. Imprudent, I say, because a scholar's head could never grasp the affairs of the heart. But, luckily, the great business of the document won out.
At the moment of making his crucial experiment, Professor Lidenbrock's eyes shot lightning through his spectacles; his fingers trembled as he took up the old parchment again; he was seriously moved. At last he coughed hard, and in a grave voice, calling out one after another the first letter, then the second of each word, he dictated to me the following series:
mmessunkaSenrA.icefdoK.segnittamurtn ecertserrette,rotaivsadua,ednecsedsadne lacartniiiluJsiratracSarbmutabiledmek meretarcsilucoYsleffenSnI
As I finished, I'll admit, I was worked up; these letters, named one by one, had presented no meaning at all to my mind; so I waited for the professor to let a sentence of magnificent Latinity roll pompously off his lips.
But — who could have foreseen it! A violent blow of his fist shook the table. The ink leaped, the pen jumped out of my hands.
"That's not it!" cried my uncle. "It doesn't make any sense!"
Then, crossing the study like a cannonball, plunging down the stairs like an avalanche, he hurled himself into König-strasse and fled away as fast as his legs would carry him.
"He's gone out?" cried Martha, hurrying up at the sound of the street door, which had slammed shut hard enough to shake the whole house.
"Yes," I answered, "gone right out!"
"But what about his dinner?" the old servant asked.
"He won't be having dinner!"
"And his supper?"
"He won't be having supper either!"
"What?" said Martha, clasping her hands.
"No, my good Martha. He won't be eating at all — and neither will anyone else in this house! My uncle Lidenbrock is putting us all on a starvation diet until he cracks an old scribble that is absolutely uncrackable!"
"Heaven help us! So we're all to starve to death, then!"
I didn't dare admit that, with a man as absolute as my uncle, starving was exactly the fate in store for us.
Seriously alarmed, the old servant went back to her kitchen, groaning.
Once I was alone, the thought came to me of going to tell Graüben all about it. But how could I leave the house? What if he called for me? What if he wanted to take up that word-puzzle again — the sort of riddle that would have stumped old Oedipus himself? And if I failed to answer his summons, what then?
The wisest course was to stay put. As it happened, a mineralogist from Besançon had just sent us a collection of siliceous geodes that needed sorting. So I set to work. I sorted, I labeled, I arranged in their display case all those hollow stones with the little crystals stirring inside them.
But the task didn't absorb me. The business of the old document kept nagging at me in the strangest way. My head was seething, and I felt seized by a vague uneasiness. I had a premonition of some imminent disaster.
Within an hour my geodes were neatly shelved. I let myself sink back into the big Utrecht-velvet armchair, arms dangling, head thrown back. I lit my long pipe with the curved stem, whose carved bowl showed a naiad lounging lazily; then I amused myself watching the charring creep along, turning my naiad little by little into a thoroughly blackened figure. Every so often I listened for a footstep on the stairs. But no. Where could my uncle be just now? I pictured him striding beneath the handsome trees along the Altona road, gesticulating, thwacking the wall with his cane, whipping the tall grass with a furious arm, beheading thistles, and rousting the solitary storks out of their peace and quiet.
Would he come home triumphant or defeated? Which would win out over the other — the secret, or the man? I asked myself these questions and, without thinking, picked up between my fingers the sheet of paper on which I had copied out that unintelligible string of letters. I kept repeating to myself:
"What on earth does it mean?"
I tried grouping the letters so as to form words. Impossible. Whether I joined them in twos, threes, fives, or sixes, it came to absolutely nothing intelligible. True, the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth letters made the English word "ice," and the eighty-fourth, eighty-fifth, and eighty-sixth spelled out "sir." And then, in the body of the document, on the second and third lines, I also spotted the Latin words "rota," "mutabile," "ira," "neo," "atra."
"The devil," I thought. "These last words would seem to prove my uncle right about the language of the document! And look — on the fourth line I can even make out the word 'luco,' which means 'sacred grove.' Yet on the third line you read 'tabiled,' with a perfectly Hebrew look to it, and on the last line the words 'mer,' 'arc,' 'mère,' which are pure French."
It was enough to drive you out of your mind! Four different languages in one absurd sentence! What possible connection could there be among the words ice, sir, anger, cruel, sacred grove, changing, mother, bow, and sea? The first and the last did fit together easily enough — no surprise that a document written in Iceland should mention a "sea of ice." But going from that to understanding the rest of the cryptogram was another matter entirely.
So there I was, wrestling with an unsolvable problem. My brain was overheating; my eyes were blinking at the sheet of paper; the hundred and thirty-two letters seemed to flutter around me like those silvery flecks that swim in the air about your head when the blood has rushed to it.
I was in the grip of a kind of hallucination. I was suffocating; I needed air. Absently, I fanned myself with the sheet of paper, and its back and front passed before my eyes one after another.
Imagine my surprise when, in one of those rapid flips — just as the back turned toward me — I thought I saw perfectly legible words appear, Latin words, among them "craterem" and "terrestre."
Suddenly a flash of light broke in my mind. Those few clues let me glimpse the truth; I had discovered the law of the cipher. To read this document, you didn't even need to read it through the reversed sheet! No. Just as it stood, just as it had been dictated to me, it could be spelled out fluently. All the professor's ingenious calculations came right; he had been correct about the arrangement of the letters, correct about the language of the document! It had come within a hair's breadth of letting him read this whole Latin sentence straight through — and that hair's breadth chance had just fallen into my lap!
You can imagine how shaken I was! My eyes clouded over; I couldn't use them. I had spread the sheet of paper flat on the table. A single glance was all it would take to make me master of the secret.
At last I managed to calm my agitation. I laid down the rule that I would walk twice around the room to settle my nerves, and then I came back and buried myself in the vast armchair.
"Let's read it," I cried, after laying in a full lungful of air.
I bent over the table; I set my finger on each letter in turn and, without stopping, without hesitating for an instant, I read the whole sentence aloud.
But what astonishment, what terror flooded through me! At first I sat as though struck by a sudden blow. What! The thing I had just learned had actually been done! A man had had the daring to venture down there! . . .
"No!" I cried, leaping to my feet. "No, no! My uncle must not know! It would be the last straw for him to learn of such a journey! He'd want a taste of it himself! Nothing could stop him! A geologist that determined — he'd go anyway, no matter what, in spite of everything! And he'd drag me along with him, and we'd never come back! Never! Never!"
I was in a state of excitement almost impossible to describe.
"No! No! It shall not be," I said forcefully. "And since I can keep such an idea from ever entering my tyrant's head, I will. Turning this document over and over, he might just stumble on the key by chance. Let's destroy it!"
There was still a bit of fire glowing in the hearth. I snatched up not only the sheet of paper but Saknussemm's parchment as well; with a feverish hand I was about to fling the whole lot onto the coals and wipe out this dangerous secret — when the study door opened. My uncle appeared.
I barely had time to lay the wretched document back on the table.
Professor Lidenbrock seemed deep in thought. The one idea that ruled him wouldn't give him a moment's peace; he had plainly turned the matter over, dissected it, brought every resource of his imagination to bear on it during his walk, and now he was coming back to try some fresh angle.
Sure enough, he dropped into his armchair, took up a pen, and began setting down formulas that looked like an algebra problem.
I followed his trembling hand with my eyes; I didn't miss a single one of his movements. Was some unhoped-for result about to burst out of nowhere? I was shaking — and with no reason to, since the true arrangement, the only one, had already been found, which made any other line of inquiry necessarily useless.
For three long hours my uncle worked without a word, without lifting his head, rubbing out, starting over, crossing through, beginning again a thousand times.
I knew perfectly well that if he managed to set the letters in every relative position they could possibly occupy, the sentence would come out. But I also knew that twenty letters alone can form two quintillion, four hundred and thirty-two quadrillion, nine hundred and two trillion, eight billion, one hundred and seventy-six million, six hundred and forty thousand combinations. Now, there were a hundred and thirty-two letters in the phrase, and those hundred and thirty-two letters yielded a number of different sentences made up of at least a hundred and thirty-three digits — a number all but impossible to count, one that escapes any real reckoning.
On the score of that heroic method of solving the problem, I felt safe.
Meanwhile the time slipped by; night came on; the noises in the street died down; my uncle, still bent over his task, saw nothing — not even good Martha easing the door open; he heard nothing — not even the voice of that worthy servant, asking:
"Will the Professor be having any supper tonight?"
And so Martha had to go away without an answer. As for me, after holding out for a while, I was overtaken by an unconquerable drowsiness, and I fell asleep on one end of the couch, while my uncle Lidenbrock went on calculating and crossing out.
When I woke the next morning, the tireless digger was still at work. His red eyes, his pallid complexion, his hair tangled under his feverish hand, his flushed cheekbones — all of it spoke plainly enough of his terrible struggle with the impossible, and of what mental exhaustion, what strain of the brain, the hours must have cost him.
Honestly, I felt sorry for him. In spite of the reproaches I thought I had every right to fling at him, a certain tenderness was creeping over me. The poor man was so utterly possessed by his idea that he forgot to fly into a rage; all his living forces were concentrated on a single point, and since they weren't escaping through their usual outlet, there was reason to fear that the pressure might make him burst at any moment.
I could loosen that iron vise clamped around his skull with a single gesture — a single word! And I did nothing.
And yet I had a good heart. Why did I stay silent at such a moment? For my uncle's own sake.
"No, no," I kept telling myself, "no, I won't speak! He'd want to go, I know him; nothing on earth could stop him. He has a volcanic imagination, and to do what other geologists have never done, he'd stake his life. I'll keep quiet; I'll hold on to this secret that chance has made me master of. To let it out would be to kill Professor Lidenbrock. Let him guess it, if he can; I don't want to reproach myself one day for having led him to his death."
That firmly settled, I folded my arms and waited. But I'd reckoned without an incident that turned up a few hours later.
When good Martha went to leave the house for the market, she found the door locked; the big key was gone from the lock.
Who had taken it out? My uncle, obviously, when he came home the night before after his headlong walk.
Was it on purpose? Was it an oversight? Did he mean to subject us to the pangs of hunger? That struck me as going a bit far. What! Martha and I, made the victims of a situation that was none of our business in the least? No doubt about it — and I remembered a precedent well suited to alarm us. A few years back, at the time my uncle was working on his great mineralogical classification, he went forty-eight hours without eating, and the whole household had to fall in with this scientific fast. For my own part, I came away with stomach cramps that were anything but amusing in a boy of a fairly ravenous nature.
Now it looked to me as though breakfast was going to fail us the way supper had the night before. Still, I resolved to be heroic and not to give in to the demands of hunger. Martha took it very seriously and was in despair, the good woman. As for me, the impossibility of leaving the house worried me more — and with good reason. You can well understand why.
My uncle went on working; his imagination was lost in the ideal world of combinations; he was living far from the earth, and truly beyond all earthly needs.
Around noon, hunger began to prod me in earnest. Martha, all innocence, had devoured the pantry's provisions the night before; there was nothing left in the house. And yet I held firm. I made a sort of point of honor of it.
Two o'clock struck. This was getting ridiculous — intolerable, even; my eyes were opening wider and wider. I began telling myself that I was exaggerating the importance of the document; that my uncle wouldn't put any stock in it; that he'd see nothing there but a hoax; that, at the very worst, we'd hold him back by force if he tried to attempt the adventure; and that, after all, he might discover the key to the "cipher" himself, and then I'd have gone hungry for nothing.
These arguments, which I'd have thrown out with indignation the day before, struck me now as excellent; I even found it perfectly absurd to have waited so long, and I made up my mind to tell him everything.
So I was casting about for an opening, one not too abrupt, when the professor stood up, put on his hat, and got ready to go out.
What — leave the house, and lock us in again! Never.
"Uncle!" I said.
He didn't seem to hear me.
"Uncle Lidenbrock!" I repeated, raising my voice.
"Eh?" he said, like a man startled awake.
"Well — that key?"
"What key? The door key?"
"No, no," I cried, "the key to the document!"
The professor looked at me over the top of his spectacles; he must have noticed something unusual in my face, because he seized me sharply by the arm and, unable to get a word out, questioned me with his eyes. And yet no question was ever put more plainly.
I nodded my head up and down.
He shook his with a kind of pity, as if he were dealing with a madman.
I made a more emphatic gesture.
His eyes flashed with a bright glare; his hand turned menacing.
That silent conversation, under those circumstances, would have gripped the most indifferent onlooker. And really I was reaching the point of not daring to speak, so afraid was I that my uncle would smother me in the first transports of his joy. But he grew so insistent that I had to answer.
"Yes, that key!... chance!..."
"What are you saying?" he cried, with an indescribable emotion.
"Here," I said, holding out to him the sheet of paper on which I'd written it, "read this."
"But this means nothing!" he answered, crumpling the sheet.
"Nothing, if you start reading from the beginning — but from the end..."
I hadn't finished my sentence before the professor let out a cry — better than a cry, a genuine roar! A revelation had just broken over his mind. He was transfigured.
"Ah! ingenious Saknussemm!" he cried. "So you'd written your sentence backwards to begin with!"
And swooping down on the sheet of paper, his eye blurred, his voice shaking, he read the whole document aloud, working up from the last letter to the first.
It ran in these terms:
In Sneffels Yoculis craterem kem delibat umbra Scartaris Julii intra calendas descende, audas viator, et terrestre centrum attinges. Kod feci. Arne Saknussemm.
Which, out of that wretched Latin, may be translated thus:
Descend into the crater of Sneffels Yocul, which the shadow of Scartaris caresses before the calends of July, bold traveler, and you will reach the center of the earth. I have done it. Arne Saknussemm.
At this reading my uncle leapt up as though he'd suddenly touched a Leyden jar. He was magnificent — all daring, all joy, all conviction. He paced back and forth; he took his head in both hands; he shoved the chairs about; he stacked up his books; he juggled — you'd hardly credit it — with his precious geodes; he threw a punch here, a slap there. At last his nerves settled, and, like a man drained by too great an expenditure of fluid, he sank back into his armchair.
"What time is it, then?" he asked after a few moments' silence.
"Three o'clock," I answered.
"Well now! My dinner went down fast. I'm starving. To the table. And then afterward..."
"Afterward?"
"You'll pack my trunk."
"What!" I cried.
"And your own!" answered the merciless professor, striding into the dining room.
At those words a shiver ran through my whole body. Still, I kept my composure. I even resolved to put on a brave face. Only scientific arguments could stop Professor Lidenbrock — and there were some, good ones, against the very possibility of such a journey. Go to the center of the earth! What madness! I saved my debating skills for the right moment and turned my attention to dinner.
No need to repeat my uncle's curses when he found the table cleared. It all got sorted out. Good Martha was set free again. She ran to the market and did so well that an hour later my hunger was satisfied and I was coming back to a sense of the situation.
During the meal my uncle was almost cheerful; a few of those harmless scholarly jokes escaped him — the kind that never do much damage. After dessert he signaled me to follow him into his study.
I obeyed. He sat down at one end of his worktable, and I at the other.
"Axel," he said in a rather gentle voice, "you're a very clever boy. You did me a fine service just now, when I was worn out and about to abandon that combination. Where might I have wandered off to? No one can say! I'll never forget it, my boy, and of the glory we're about to win, you'll have your share."
"Right," I thought. "He's in a good mood. Now's the moment to discuss this glory."
"Above all," my uncle went on, "I ask you for absolute secrecy — you understand me? I don't lack for envious rivals in the world of science, and plenty of them would love to undertake this journey, though they won't suspect a thing until we're safely home again."
"Do you really believe," I said, "that there are so many of these bold souls?"
"Of course! Who would hesitate to win such fame? If this document were known, an entire army of geologists would go charging off on the trail of Arne Saknussemm!"
"That's exactly what I'm not convinced of, Uncle, because nothing proves this document is genuine."
"What! And the book we found it in?"
"Fine! I'll grant that this Saknussemm wrote these lines. But does it follow that he actually made the journey? Couldn't this old parchment be nothing but a hoax?"
That last word was a bit reckless, and I almost regretted saying it. The professor knit his thick brow, and I feared I had wrecked the rest of the conversation. Luckily, no. My stern companion sketched something like a smile on his lips and replied:
"That's what we'll find out."
"Ah!" I said, a little vexed. "But allow me to run through the whole series of objections regarding this document."
"Speak, my boy, don't hold back. I give you complete freedom to express your opinion. You're no longer my nephew, but my colleague. So — go ahead."
"Well then, first I'll ask you: what are this Yocul, this Sneffels, this Scartaris — names I've never heard of?"
"Nothing simpler. As it happens, I received a while ago a map from my friend Peterman, of Leipzig; it couldn't have come at a better time. Take down the third atlas in the second bay of the big bookcase — series Z, plate 4."
I got up, and thanks to these precise directions I quickly found the atlas he wanted. My uncle opened it and said:
"Here's one of the best maps of Iceland — Handerson's — and I think it's going to give us the answer to all your difficulties."
I leaned over the map.
"See this island made up of volcanoes," said the professor, "and notice that they all bear the name Yocul. That word means 'glacier' in Icelandic, and at Iceland's high latitude most eruptions break out through the layers of ice. Hence the name Yocul applied to all the fire-belching mountains of the island."
"All right," I answered, "but what is the Sneffels?"
I was hoping this question would have no answer. I was mistaken. My uncle went on:
"Follow me along the western coast of Iceland. Do you see Reykjavik, its capital? Yes. Good. Now trace up the countless fjords of these sea-gnawed shores, and stop a little below the sixty-fifth degree of latitude. What do you see there?"
"A kind of peninsula, like a picked-clean bone, ending in an enormous kneecap."
"The comparison is apt, my boy. Now — do you notice anything on that kneecap?"
"Yes, a mountain that seems to have sprouted up out of the sea."
"Good! That's the Sneffels."
"The Sneffels?"
"The very one. A mountain five thousand feet high, one of the most remarkable on the island, and beyond doubt the most famous in the entire world — if its crater leads down to the center of the globe."
"But that's impossible!" I cried, shrugging my shoulders, revolted by such a notion.
"Impossible!" the professor answered sternly. "And why is that?"
"Because this crater is obviously blocked up by lava, by scorching rock, and so —"
"And what if it's an extinct crater?"
"Extinct?"
"Yes. The number of active volcanoes on the surface of the globe is currently only about three hundred; but there exist a far greater number of extinct ones. Now the Sneffels ranks among the latter, and in all of recorded history it has had only a single eruption — that of 1219. From that time on, its rumblings gradually died away, and it is no longer counted among the active volcanoes."
To these flat assertions I had absolutely nothing to reply, so I fell back on the other obscurities the document contained.
"What does this word Scartaris mean," I asked, "and what have the calends of July got to do with anything?"
My uncle took a few moments to think. I had one instant of hope — just one — for he soon answered me in these terms:
"What you call obscurity is, to me, clarity. It proves the ingenious care with which Saknussemm meant to pin down his discovery. The Sneffels is made up of several craters; it was therefore necessary to indicate which of them leads to the center of the globe. What did the learned Icelander do? He noticed that as the calends of July approach — that is, toward the last days of June — one of the mountain's peaks, the Scartaris, casts its shadow all the way to the mouth of the crater in question, and he set the fact down in his document. Could he have devised a more exact instruction? Once we've reached the summit of the Sneffels, will there be any hesitating over which road to take?"
Decidedly, my uncle had an answer for everything. I saw plainly that he was unassailable on the words of the old parchment. So I stopped pressing him on that score, and, since convincing him was the whole point, I moved on to the scientific objections — far graver ones, in my opinion.
"All right," I said. "I'm forced to admit it: Saknussemm's sentence is clear and leaves no room for doubt. I'll even grant that the document has an air of perfect authenticity. This scholar went down into the Sneffels; he saw the shadow of the Scartaris caress the rim of the crater before the calends of July; he even heard it told, in the legends of his day, that this crater led to the center of the earth. But as for reaching it himself — as for having made the journey and come back from it, if he ever set out — no, a hundred times no!"
"And the reason?" said my uncle in a singularly mocking tone.
"The reason is that every theory in science proves such a venture is impossible!"
"Every theory says so?" replied the professor, putting on a genial air. "Ah! The wicked theories! How they're going to get in our way, these poor theories!"
I saw that he was making fun of me, but I pressed on all the same.
"Yes! It is perfectly established that heat increases by about one degree for every seventy feet of depth below the surface of the globe. Now, assuming this proportion stays constant, and the earth's radius being fifteen hundred leagues, there exists at the center a temperature of two million degrees. The matter inside the earth is therefore in the state of an incandescent gas, for the metals, gold, platinum, the hardest rocks, cannot hold up against such heat. So I have every right to ask whether it's even possible to venture into such a place!"
"So, Axel, it's the heat that troubles you?"
"Naturally. If we got down to a depth of just ten leagues, we'd have reached the limit of the earth's crust, because already the temperature is above thirteen hundred degrees."
"And you're afraid of melting?"
"I'll leave the question for you to decide," I answered testily.
"Here's what I decide," replied Professor Lidenbrock, drawing himself up grandly. "It's that neither you nor anyone knows for certain what goes on inside the globe, seeing that we scarcely know one twelve-thousandth part of its radius; it's that science is eminently perfectible, and every theory is forever being demolished by a newer one. Wasn't it believed, right up until Fourier, that the temperature of the planetary spaces went on falling forever? And don't we know today that the greatest cold of the ethereal regions doesn't drop below forty or fifty degrees under zero? Why shouldn't it be the same with the internal heat? Why, at a certain depth, shouldn't it reach an impassable limit, instead of climbing to the melting point of the most stubborn minerals?"
Since my uncle had shifted the question onto the ground of hypotheses, I had nothing to answer.
"Well, I'll tell you that genuine scholars, Poisson among them, have proved that if a heat of two million degrees existed inside the globe, the incandescent gases given off by the molten matter would take on such elasticity that the earth's crust couldn't resist and would burst like the walls of a boiler under the strain of steam."
"That's Poisson's opinion, Uncle — that's all."
"Agreed, but it's also the opinion of other distinguished geologists that the interior of the globe is formed neither of gas, nor of water, nor of the heaviest stones we know — for in that case the earth would weigh half as much as it does."
"Oh! With figures you can prove anything you like!"
"And with facts, my boy — is it the same? Isn't it an established fact that the number of volcanoes has considerably decreased since the first days of the world? And if there is a central heat, can't we conclude that it's tending to weaken?"
"Uncle, if you're going to venture into the field of suppositions, I've nothing more to argue."
"And I have to say that my opinion is joined by the opinions of highly competent men. Do you remember a visit paid me by the famous English chemist Humphry Davy in 1825?"
"Not in the least, since I only came into the world nineteen years afterward."
"Well, Humphry Davy came to see me on his way through Hamburg. We discussed at length, among other questions, the hypothesis of the liquidity of the earth's inner core. We were both agreed that such liquidity couldn't exist, for a reason science has never found an answer to."
"And what reason is that?" I said, a little surprised.
"It's that this liquid mass would be subject, like the Ocean, to the moon's attraction, and consequently, twice a day there would be internal tides that, heaving up the earth's crust, would give rise to periodic earthquakes!"
"But it's nevertheless obvious that the surface of the globe underwent combustion, and one is allowed to suppose that the outer crust cooled first, while the heat took refuge at the center."
"Wrong," replied my uncle. "The earth was heated by the combustion of its surface, and in no other way. Its surface was composed of a great quantity of metals — potassium, sodium — which have the property of catching fire at the mere contact of air and water. These metals took fire when the atmospheric vapors came pouring down as rain onto the ground, and little by little, as the waters worked their way into the fissures of the earth's crust, they set off fresh blazes with explosions and eruptions. Hence the volcanoes so numerous in the first days of the world."
"But that's an ingenious hypothesis!" I cried, almost in spite of myself.
"And one that Humphry Davy made vivid to me, right here, by a very simple experiment. He made up a metallic ball, mainly of the metals I've just mentioned, which perfectly represented our globe. When a fine dew was let fall onto its surface, that surface swelled, oxidized, and formed a little mountain; a crater opened at its summit; the eruption took place and gave off, through the whole ball, a heat so great that it became impossible to hold it in the hand."
Truly, I was beginning to be shaken by the professor's arguments; and besides, he pressed them home with his usual passion and enthusiasm.
"You see, Axel," he added, "the state of the central core has raised various hypotheses among geologists; nothing is less proved than this business of an internal heat. In my view, it doesn't exist; it can't exist; and besides, we shall see for ourselves and, like Arne Saknussemm, we'll know what to make of this great question."
"Well then! Yes," I answered, feeling myself won over by his enthusiasm. "Yes, we shall see — if one can see anything down there at all."
"And why not? Can't we count on electrical phenomena to light our way, and even on the atmosphere itself, which its own pressure may render luminous as we near the center?"
"Yes," I said, "yes! That's possible, after all."
"It's certain," my uncle answered triumphantly. "But silence, do you hear! Silence about all of this, and let no one so much as dream of discovering the center of the earth before we do."
And so that memorable session came to an end. The whole conversation had left me feverish. I stumbled out of my uncle's study half stunned, and there wasn't enough air in all the streets of Hamburg to bring me around, so I made for the banks of the Elbe, over by the steam ferry that links the town with the Harburg railway.
Was I really convinced by what I'd just heard? Hadn't I simply buckled under Professor Lidenbrock's sheer force of will? Was I actually supposed to take seriously his decision to go to the center of the earth? Had I just been listening to the crazed ravings of a lunatic, or the scientific deductions of a great genius? Where, in all of it, did the truth leave off and the delusion begin?
I drifted among a thousand contradictory ideas without being able to hold onto a single one.
And yet I remembered that I had been convinced, even as my enthusiasm began to cool. What I wanted was to leave that very instant, without giving myself time to think it over. Yes — right then and there, I'd have had the nerve to strap up my suitcase.
Still, I have to admit that an hour later the fever broke. My nerves unknotted, and from the deep chasms of the earth I climbed back up to its surface.
"It's absurd!" I cried. "There's no sense in it! It's not a serious thing to propose to any level-headed young man. None of it is real. I slept badly. I had a bad dream."
Meanwhile I'd followed the banks of the Elbe and rounded the town. Once past the harbor, I'd reached the Altona road. A hunch was guiding me — and a well-founded hunch, because soon I caught sight of my own little Graüben, striding briskly and bravely back toward Hamburg on those light, quick feet of hers.
"Graüben!" I called from a distance.
The girl stopped, a little flustered, I imagine, to hear herself hailed like that on the open road. In ten strides I was beside her.
"Axel!" she said, surprised. "Oh! You came out to meet me! Now that's very nice of you, sir."
But looking at me, Graüben couldn't mistake my anxious, shaken face.
"Whatever's the matter?" she said, holding out her hand.
"The matter, Graüben!" I burst out.
In two seconds and three sentences my pretty Virland girl was fully up to speed. For a few moments she said nothing. Was her heart pounding as hard as mine? I couldn't tell — but her hand didn't tremble in mine. We walked a hundred paces without a word.
"Axel!" she said at last.
"My dear Graüben?"
"That is going to be a wonderful journey."
I jumped at the words.
"Yes, Axel, and a journey worthy of a scholar's nephew. It's a fine thing for a man to make his name by some great undertaking!"
"What! Graüben, you're not going to talk me out of attempting an expedition like this?"
"No, dear Axel — and I'd gladly come along with you and your uncle, if a poor girl weren't bound to be a burden to you."
"Do you mean it?"
"I mean it."
Oh, women — girls — female hearts, forever past all understanding! When you're not the most timid creatures alive, you're the bravest! Reason has no hold on you at all. What! This child was egging me on to take part in the expedition! She wouldn't have been afraid to try the adventure herself. She was pushing me toward it — me, whom she loved, all the same!
I was thrown, and — why not admit it — ashamed.
"Graüben," I went on, "we'll see whether you still talk this way tomorrow."
"Tomorrow, dear Axel, I'll say exactly what I say today."
Hand in hand, but keeping a deep silence, Graüben and I walked on. I was worn out by the emotions of the day.
"After all," I thought, "the calends of July are still a long way off, and between now and then plenty could happen to cure my uncle of his mania for traveling underground."
Night had fallen by the time we reached the house on König-strasse. I expected to find the place quiet, my uncle in bed as usual, and good Martha giving the dining room its last flick of the feather duster for the evening.
But I'd reckoned without the professor's impatience. I found him shouting and dashing about in the middle of a squad of porters who were unloading crates of goods in the hallway. Our old servant didn't know which way to turn.
"Come on, Axel — hurry up, you wretched boy!" my uncle cried the instant he spotted me. "Your trunk isn't packed, my papers aren't in order, I can't find the key to my traveling bag, and my gaiters haven't come!"
I stood there thunderstruck. My voice failed me. My lips could barely form the words:
"So we're leaving?"
"Yes, you miserable boy, off gallivanting instead of being here where you belong!"
"We're leaving?" I repeated, my voice fainter still.
"Yes — the day after tomorrow, at first light."
I couldn't listen to another word, and I fled to my little room.
There was no room for doubt now: my uncle had spent the afternoon laying in a stock of the gear and supplies he'd need for the trip. The hallway was cluttered with knotted rope ladders, torches, water flasks, iron clamps, picks, iron-shod staffs, mattocks — enough to load down ten men at least.
I passed a dreadful night. The next morning I heard myself being called early. I was determined not to open my door. But how do you hold out against the sweet voice that spoke these words: "My dear Axel?"
I came out of my room. I thought that my haggard face, my pallor, my eyes red from the sleepless night, would be sure to work on Graüben and change her mind.
"Ah, my dear Axel," she said, "I see you're feeling better, and that the night has calmed you down."
"Calmed me down!" I cried.
I rushed to my mirror. Well — I looked less awful than I'd supposed. It was hard to believe.
"Axel," Graüben said, "I've had a long talk with my guardian. He's a bold scholar, a man of great courage, and you'll remember that his blood runs in your veins. He told me his plans, his hopes — why and how he expects to reach his goal. He'll get there, I have no doubt of it. Oh, dear Axel, how splendid it is to devote yourself to science like that! What glory awaits Professor Lidenbrock, and will reflect onto his companion! When you come home, Axel, you'll be a man, his equal — free to speak, free to act, free at last to —"
The girl broke off, blushing, and didn't finish. But her words were reviving me. Even so, I still didn't want to believe we were really going. I dragged Graüben off to the professor's study.
"Uncle," I said, "so it's truly settled that we're leaving?"
"What! You doubt it?"
"No," I said, so as not to cross him. "Only I'd like to ask what the hurry is."
"The time! Time flying past with a speed you can never get back!"
"But it's only the 26th of May, and up until the end of June —"
"What! Do you imagine, you ignorant boy, that it's so easy to get to Iceland? If you hadn't run off on me like a madman, I'd have taken you to the Copenhagen booking office, at Liffender and Co. There you'd have seen that there's only one sailing from Copenhagen to Reykjavik."
"And so?"
"And so — if we waited for the 22nd of June, we'd arrive too late to see the shadow of Scartaris caress the crater of the Sneffels. We have to reach Copenhagen as fast as we can and find some means of getting across. Go and pack your trunk!"
There wasn't a word to say in reply. I climbed back up to my room. Graüben followed. It was she who took charge of arranging the things I'd need in a small suitcase. She was no more upset than if it had been a matter of a day trip to Lübeck or Heligoland. Her little hands came and went without hurry; she chatted calmly; she gave me the most sensible reasons in favor of our expedition. She enchanted me — and I felt a great swell of anger against her. Now and then I wanted to lose my temper, but she took no notice and went methodically on with her quiet work.
At last the final strap of the suitcase was buckled. I went down to the ground floor.
All through that day the merchants of scientific instruments, weapons, and electrical apparatus had multiplied at our door. Good Martha was losing her mind over it.
"Has the master gone mad?" she asked me.
I nodded that he had.
"And he's taking you with him?"
Another nod.
"Where to?" she said.
I pointed a finger toward the center of the earth.
"To the cellar?" the old servant cried.
"No," I said finally, "lower!"
Evening came. I'd lost all sense of how much time had gone by.
"Until tomorrow morning," said my uncle. "We leave at six o'clock sharp."
At ten I dropped onto my bed like a dead weight.
During the night my terrors seized me again.
I spent it dreaming of chasms! I was in the grip of delirium. I felt myself clutched in the professor's powerful hand, dragged along, swallowed up, sucked under! I was plunging to the bottom of bottomless pits with that ever-quickening speed of bodies let fall through space. My life had become nothing but one endless drop.
I woke at five, wrecked with exhaustion and emotion. I went down to the dining room. My uncle was at the table, wolfing down his food. I looked at him with a feeling of horror. But Graüben was there. I said nothing. I couldn't eat.
At half past five a rumbling sounded in the street. A large carriage was arriving to carry us to the Altona railway. It was soon loaded down with my uncle's baggage.
"And your trunk?" he said to me.
"It's ready," I answered, going faint.
"Then hurry up and bring it down, or you'll make us miss the train!"
Fighting my fate struck me, just then, as impossible. I climbed back up to my room, and, letting my suitcase slide down the stairs, I flung myself after it.
At that moment my uncle was solemnly placing "the reins" of his household into Graüben's hands. My pretty Virland girl kept her usual calm. She embraced her guardian, but she couldn't hold back a tear as she brushed my cheek with her soft lips.
"Graüben!" I cried.
"Go, my dear Axel, go," she told me. "You're leaving your fiancée behind, but you'll find your wife waiting when you return."
I held Graüben tight in my arms and took my seat in the carriage. From the doorstep, Martha and the girl sent us a last farewell; then the two horses, spurred on by their driver's whistle, sprang off at a gallop down the Altona road.
Altona, really just a suburb of Hamburg, is the terminus of the Kiel railway, the one that would carry us down to the shore of the Belt. In less than twenty minutes we had crossed into Holstein.
At half past six the carriage pulled up in front of the station. My uncle's countless parcels, his bulky travel gear, were unloaded, carried, weighed, labeled, and loaded again into the baggage car, and by seven o'clock we were seated face to face in the same compartment. The whistle screamed, the locomotive lurched into motion. We were off.
Was I resigned to it? Not yet. Still, the cool morning air and the details of the countryside, swept endlessly past by the speed of the train, drew my mind away from my great worry.
As for the Professor's thoughts, they plainly ran ahead of this train, which crawled far too slowly for his impatience. We were alone in the car, and we said nothing. My uncle kept going through his pockets and his travel bag with meticulous care. I could see that he was missing none of the items needed to carry out his plans.
Among other things, one sheet of paper, carefully folded, bore the letterhead of the Danish chancery and the signature of Mr. Christiensen, the consul at Hamburg and a friend of the Professor's. That was to smooth our way in getting recommendations at Copenhagen for the governor of Iceland.
I also caught sight of the notorious document, buried away in the most secret pocket of his wallet. I cursed it from the bottom of my heart, and went back to studying the country. It was a broad stretch of uninteresting plains, monotonous, muddy, and fairly fertile: perfect country for laying down a railway, ideal for those dead-straight lines the railroad companies love so much.
But the monotony had no time to wear me out, for three hours after we set off the train stopped at Kiel, a stone's throw from the sea.
Since our baggage was booked all the way through to Copenhagen, we didn't have to deal with it. Even so, the Professor followed it with an anxious eye as it was carried down to the steamer. There it vanished into the hold.
In his haste, my uncle had timed the railway and boat connections so cleverly that we had a whole day to kill. The steamer Ellenora didn't sail until nightfall. Hence a nine-hour fever, during which the irascible traveler consigned to the devil the entire administration of boats and railways, and every government that tolerated such abuses. I had to chime in with him when he tackled the captain of the Ellenora about it. He wanted to force the man to fire up the boilers and leave that instant. The captain told him to go take a walk.
At Kiel, as anywhere, a day somehow has to pass. By dint of strolling along the green shores of the bay, at the head of which the little town sits; wandering the thick woods that make it look like a nest bundled in branches; admiring the villas, each with its own little cold-bath house; and, in short, by walking and grumbling, we finally reached ten o'clock at night.
The clouds of smoke from the Ellenora were unfurling into the sky; the deck trembled under the shuddering of the boiler; we were aboard and the proud owners of two berths stacked one above the other in the boat's single cabin.
At a quarter past ten the moorings were cast off, and the steamer ran swiftly out onto the dark waters of the Great Belt.
The night was black; there was a fine breeze and a heavy sea; a few lights along the coast showed in the gloom; later, I couldn't say when, a flashing lighthouse blazed out above the waves. That was all that stayed with me of that first crossing.
At seven in the morning we landed at Korsör, a little town on the western coast of Zealand. There we jumped straight from the boat into another railway that swept us across a country no less flat than the plains of Holstein.
That was three more hours of travel before reaching the capital of Denmark. My uncle hadn't shut his eyes all night. In his impatience, I honestly think he was pushing the car along with his feet.
At last he spotted an opening of sea.
"The Sound!" he cried.
Off to our left stood a vast building that looked like a hospital.
"That's a madhouse," said one of our fellow travelers.
"Good," I thought. "There's an establishment where we ought to end our days! And huge as it is, that hospital would still be too small to hold all of Professor Lidenbrock's madness!"
At last, at ten in the morning, we set foot in Copenhagen; the baggage was loaded onto a cart and driven with us to the Hôtel du Phoenix on Bred-Gade. It took half an hour, since the station is out beyond the edge of the city. Then my uncle, after a hasty wash, dragged me along at his heels. The hotel porter spoke German and English; but the Professor, being the polyglot he was, questioned him in good Danish, and it was in good Danish that the man told him where to find the Museum of Northern Antiquities.
The director of that remarkable place — where wonders are heaped up that would let you reconstruct the whole history of the country from its old stone weapons, its drinking cups, and its jewelry — was a scholar, a friend of the Hamburg consul: Professor Thomson.
My uncle carried a warm letter of introduction to him. As a rule, one scholar gives another a rather cold reception. But here it was quite the opposite. Mr. Thomson, an obliging man, gave a cordial welcome to Professor Lidenbrock, and even to his nephew. It hardly needs saying that our secret was kept from the excellent director of the Museum. We simply wanted to visit Iceland as disinterested amateurs.
Mr. Thomson placed himself entirely at our service, and we combed the docks in search of a ship about to sail.
I was hoping there would be no means of transport at all; but no such luck. A little Danish schooner, the Valkyrie, was to set sail on the second of June for Reykjavik. The captain, Mr. Bjarne, happened to be aboard; his future passenger, in his joy, wrung his hands nearly to breaking. The good man was a little startled by such a grip. To him, going to Iceland was the most ordinary thing in the world, since it was his trade. To my uncle it was sublime. The worthy captain took advantage of this enthusiasm to charge us double for passage on his vessel. But we weren't looking that closely at the price.
"Be aboard on Tuesday, at seven in the morning," said Mr. Bjarne, after pocketing a respectable number of species-dollars.
We then thanked Mr. Thomson for his kind help, and made our way back to the Hôtel du Phoenix.
"It's going well! Very well indeed," my uncle kept repeating. "What luck, finding a ship all ready to leave! Now let's have lunch, and then go see the town."
We went to Kongens-Nye-Torw, an irregular square where there's a guardpost with two harmless cannons trained on nothing, frightening no one. Close by, at number 5, was a French "restauration" run by a cook named Vincent; there we lunched well enough for the modest price of four marks apiece.
Then I took a childish pleasure in roaming the city; my uncle let himself be led about, though he saw nothing of it — not the unremarkable royal palace, nor the pretty seventeenth-century bridge that spans the canal in front of the Museum, nor Thorvaldsen's huge cenotaph, decorated with dreadful murals and holding inside it the works of that sculptor, nor, in a rather handsome park, the little candy-box château of Rosenborg, nor the admirable Renaissance building of the Exchange with its steeple made from the intertwined tails of four bronze dragons, nor the great mills on the ramparts, whose vast sails swelled like the canvas of a ship in the sea wind.
What delightful walks my pretty Virland girl and I would have taken, down toward the harbor where the two-deckers and the frigates slept peacefully under their red roofing, along the green banks of the strait, through those thick shady groves where the citadel hides itself, its cannons poking their blackish muzzles out between the branches of the elders and the willows!
But alas! She was far away, my poor Graüben, and could I even hope to see her again?
Still, if my uncle noticed none of these enchanting sights, he was struck hard by the sight of a certain steeple on the island of Amak, which forms the southwest quarter of Copenhagen.
I got the order to steer our steps that way; I climbed aboard a little steam launch that ran the canal service, and in a few moments it drew up at the Dock-Yard quay.
After crossing a few narrow streets where convicts, dressed in trousers half yellow and half gray, labored under the cudgels of the prison guards, we came to Vor-Frelsers-Kirk. There was nothing remarkable about the church itself. But here is why its rather tall steeple had caught the Professor's eye: starting from the platform, an exterior staircase wound around its spire, its spirals unspooling straight up into open sky.
"Let's go up," said my uncle.
"But — my vertigo?" I objected.
"All the more reason. You need to get used to it."
"Still —"
"Come on, I tell you. Let's not waste time." I had to obey. A keeper who lived across the street handed us a key, and the climb began.
My uncle went ahead of me at a brisk pace. I followed, not without terror, for my head spun with woeful ease. I had neither the steadiness of eagles nor the steel nerves that go with it.
As long as we were shut inside the inner spiral, all went well; but after a hundred and fifty steps the open air struck me in the face; we had reached the platform of the steeple. There the airy staircase began, guarded by a flimsy railing, its steps growing narrower and narrower, seeming to climb toward infinity.
"I'll never manage it!" I cried.
"Would you be a coward, by any chance? Climb!" the Professor answered pitilessly.
I had no choice but to follow him, clinging on for dear life. The open air made my head swim; I felt the steeple sway under the gusts; my legs gave way beneath me; soon I was crawling on my knees, then on my belly; I kept my eyes shut; I was seasick with sheer space.
At last, my uncle hauling me up by the collar, I reached the ball at the top.
"Look," he said. "Look, and look hard! You need lessons in the abyss!"
I had to open my eyes. I saw the houses flattened, as though crushed by a fall, in the middle of a fog of smoke. Over my head, ragged clouds went streaming by, and by a trick of the eye they seemed to hang motionless, while the steeple, the ball, and I were all being dragged along at a fantastic speed. Far off, on one side, stretched the green countryside; on the other, the sea glittered under a shaft of sunlight. The Sound unrolled toward the point of Elsinore, dotted with a few white sails, true gull's wings, and in the eastern haze the barely sketched coasts of Sweden rose and fell. All this immensity spun before my eyes.
Nevertheless I had to stand up, hold myself straight, and look. My first lesson in vertigo lasted an hour. When at last I was allowed to go back down and set my foot on the solid pavement of the streets, I ached in every limb.
"We'll start again tomorrow," said my professor.
And in fact, for five days, I went back to this dizzying exercise, and, like it or not, I made noticeable progress in the art of "lofty contemplation."
The day of departure arrived. The evening before, the obliging Mr. Thomson had brought us pressing letters of recommendation for Count Trampe, the governor of Iceland; for Mr. Pietursson, the bishop's coadjutor; and for Mr. Finsen, the mayor of Reykjavik. In return, my uncle gave him the warmest of handshakes.
On the 2nd, at six in the morning, our precious baggage was safely aboard the Valkyrie. The captain led us to some rather cramped cabins set beneath a sort of deckhouse.
"Have we got a good wind?" asked my uncle.
"Excellent," answered Captain Bjarne. "A south-easterly. We'll leave the Sund on a broad reach with every sail set."
A few moments later the schooner — under her foresail, her spanker, her topsail, and her topgallant — got under way and stood out into the strait under full canvas. An hour later the capital of Denmark seemed to sink into the distant waves, and the Valkyrie was skimming the coast of Elsinore. In the jittery state I was in, I half expected to see the ghost of Hamlet wandering along that legendary terrace.
"Sublime madman!" I said to him. "You'd surely approve of us! Maybe you'd even come along, down to the center of the globe, to find a solution to your eternal doubt!"
But nothing showed itself on the ancient walls. The castle, in any case, is far younger than the heroic prince of Denmark. Today it serves as a sumptuous lodge for the gatekeeper of that strait of the Sund, through which fifteen thousand ships of every nation pass each year.
The castle of Kronborg soon vanished into the mist, and so did the tower of Helsingborg, standing on the Swedish shore, and the schooner heeled gently under the breezes of the Cattegat.
The Valkyrie was a fine sailer, but with a sailing ship you can never be too sure of anything. She was carrying coal, household utensils, pottery, woolen clothing, and a cargo of wheat to Reykjavik; five crewmen, all Danes, were enough to handle her.
"How long will the crossing take?" my uncle asked the captain.
"About ten days," he replied, "if we don't run into too many north-west squalls off the Faroes."
"But, all the same, you're not liable to suffer any serious delays?"
"No, Professor Lidenbrock; rest easy, we'll get there."
Toward evening the schooner rounded Cape Skagen at the northern tip of Denmark, crossed the Skagerrak during the night, ranged along the far end of Norway off Cape Lindesnes, and stood out into the North Sea.
Two days later we sighted the coasts of Scotland at the level of Peterhead, and the Valkyrie steered for the Faroes, passing between the Orkneys and the Shetlands.
Soon our schooner was being battered by the waves of the Atlantic; she had to tack against the north wind, and it was no easy matter to reach the Faroes. On the 3rd, the captain made out Mygganes, the easternmost of those islands, and from that moment on he ran straight for Cape Portland, on the southern coast of Iceland.
The crossing offered no incident worth remarking on. I bore the trials of the sea well enough; my uncle, to his great annoyance — and to his still greater shame — never stopped being sick.
He was therefore unable to press Captain Bjarne with questions about the Sneffels, about means of communication, about the ease of transport; he had to put off his inquiries until he arrived, and spent the whole time stretched out in his cabin, whose bulkheads groaned under the great heaves of the ship's pitching. It has to be admitted that he rather deserved his fate.
On the 11th, we raised Cape Portland. The weather, clear just then, allowed us to make out the Myrdals Yocul, which towers over it. The cape consists of a big steep-sloped hill, planted all alone on the beach.
The Valkyrie kept a reasonable distance from the coast, working westward along it, in the midst of numerous schools of whales and sharks. Soon an immense rock appeared, pierced clean through, and the foaming sea drove furiously against it. The Westman islets seemed to rise out of the ocean, like a scattering of rocks sown across the liquid plain. From that point on, the schooner stood well out to round Cape Reykjanes at a safe distance — the cape that closes off the western angle of Iceland.
The sea, running very high, kept my uncle from coming up on deck to admire those jagged coasts battered by the south-westerly winds.
Forty-eight hours later, coming out of a storm that forced the schooner to run under bare poles, we raised to the east the beacon of Skagen point, whose dangerous rocks reach out a great distance beneath the waves. An Icelandic pilot came aboard, and three hours later the Valkyrie was dropping anchor off Reykjavik, in Faxa Bay.
The professor came out of his cabin at last, a little pale, a little the worse for wear, but as enthusiastic as ever, and with a look of satisfaction in his eyes.
The townspeople, singularly interested by the arrival of a ship in which everyone had a stake, were gathering on the quay.
My uncle was in a hurry to abandon his floating prison — not to say his floating hospital. But before leaving the deck of the schooner, he pulled me forward, and there, with his finger, he pointed out to me, at the northern part of the bay, a tall two-peaked mountain, a double cone crowned with everlasting snows.
"The Sneffels!" he cried. "The Sneffels!"
Then, with a gesture, he charged me to keep absolute silence, and went down into the boat that was waiting for him. I followed him, and soon we were setting foot on the soil of Iceland.
The first man to appear was a fine-looking fellow dressed in a general's uniform. He was, however, nothing but a plain magistrate, the governor of the island, Baron Trampe himself. The professor recognized the man he was dealing with. He handed the governor his letters from Copenhagen, and a short conversation followed in Danish, one to which I remained an utter stranger — for good reason. But out of this first exchange came one result: that Baron Trampe placed himself entirely at the disposal of Professor Lidenbrock.
My uncle received a most gracious welcome from the mayor, Mr. Finsen, no less military in his dress than the governor, but just as peaceable by temperament and by office.
As for the coadjutor, Mr. Pietursson, he was at that moment making an episcopal tour of the northern Bailiwick; we had to give up, for the time being, on being presented to him. But one charming man, whose help became very precious to us, was Mr. Fridriksson, professor of natural sciences at the Reykjavik school. This modest scholar spoke only Icelandic and Latin; he came to offer me his services in the language of Horace, and I felt that we were made to understand each other. He was, in fact, the only person I was able to converse with during my stay in Iceland.
Of the three rooms that made up his house, this excellent man put two at our disposal, and we were soon installed in them with our baggage, whose quantity rather astonished the inhabitants of Reykjavik.
"Well, Axel," said my uncle, "this is going nicely, and the hardest part is done."
"The hardest part?" I exclaimed. "How so?"
"Why, of course — all that's left is to go down!"
"If you put it that way, you're right; but after going down, I imagine we'll have to come back up?"
"Oh, that hardly worries me at all! Come now — there's no time to lose. I'm going to the library. There may be some manuscript of Saknussemm's there, and I'd be very glad to consult it."
"Then, in the meantime, I'll go and see the town. Won't you do the same?"
"Oh, that interests me only moderately. What's curious in this land of Iceland isn't above ground, but below."
I went out and wandered at random.
Getting lost in the two streets of Reykjavik would not have been an easy thing to do. So I wasn't obliged to ask my way — which, in the language of gestures, exposes you to a great many misunderstandings.
The town stretches out over fairly low, marshy ground, between two hills. An immense flow of lava covers it on one side and slopes down in gentle ramps toward the sea. On the other side spreads that vast Faxa Bay, bounded to the north by the enormous glacier of the Sneffels, and in which the Valkyrie was, at that moment, the only ship at anchor. Ordinarily the English and French fishery-guard vessels lie moored out in the offing, but they were then on duty along the eastern coasts of the island.
The longer of Reykjavik's two streets runs parallel to the shore; there live the merchants and traders, in wooden cabins built of red beams laid horizontally. The other street, situated farther to the west, runs toward a small lake, between the houses of the bishop and of the other figures who have nothing to do with trade. I had soon paced out these dreary, dismal thoroughfares; here and there I caught a glimpse of a scrap of faded turf, like an old wool carpet worn threadbare by use, or some semblance of a kitchen garden, whose sparse vegetables — potatoes, cabbages, and lettuces — would have sat comfortably on a Lilliputian table; a few sickly gillyflowers were also trying to put on a little air of sunshine.
Toward the middle of the non-commercial street, I came upon the public cemetery, enclosed by an earthen wall, and in which there was no shortage of room. Then, in a few strides, I reached the governor's house — a hovel compared with the town hall of Hamburg, a palace next to the huts of the Icelandic population.
Between the little lake and the town rose the church, built in the Protestant taste and constructed of calcined stones that the volcanoes themselves go to the trouble of extracting; in the great westerly winds, its roof of red tiles must obviously scatter through the air, to the considerable detriment of the faithful.
On a nearby rise, I caught sight of the National School, where — as I learned later from our host — they taught Hebrew, English, French, and Danish, four languages of which, to my shame, I did not know a single word. I would have been the last of the forty pupils that little college could boast, and unworthy to sleep alongside them in those two-compartment cupboards where more delicate souls would suffocate the very first night.
In three hours I had visited not only the town but its surroundings. The general aspect of it was singularly bleak. No trees, no vegetation, so to speak. Everywhere the sharp ridges of volcanic rock. The Icelanders' huts are made of earth and peat, with walls sloping inward; they look like roofs laid down on the ground. Only, these roofs are relatively fertile meadows. Thanks to the heat of the dwelling, the grass grows on them well enough, and it is carefully mown at haying time — otherwise the household animals would come and graze on these verdant homes.
During my excursion I met few inhabitants; coming back along the commercial street, I saw the greater part of the population busy drying, salting, and loading cod, the principal article of export. The men looked robust but heavy — a sort of blond Germans, with pensive eyes, who feel themselves a little set apart from the rest of humanity, poor exiles banished to this land of ice, whom nature really ought to have made into Eskimos, since she condemned them to live on the edge of the polar circle! I tried in vain to surprise a smile on their faces; they laughed sometimes, by a kind of involuntary contraction of the muscles, but they never smiled.
Their costume consisted of a coarse blouse of black wool, known throughout the Scandinavian countries by the name of "vadmel," a broad-brimmed hat, trousers with a red border, and a piece of leather folded into the shape of a shoe.
The women, with sad, resigned faces of a rather pleasant cast but without expression, were dressed in a bodice and skirt of dark "vadmel"; unmarried girls wore, over their hair braided into garlands, a little cap of brown knitting; married women wrapped their heads in a colored kerchief, topped with a crest of white linen.
After a good long walk, when I came back into Mr. Fridriksson's house, my uncle was already there in the company of his host.
Dinner was ready, and Professor Lidenbrock fell on it ravenously, for the forced fasting aboard ship had turned his stomach into a bottomless pit. The meal was more Danish than Icelandic, and unremarkable in itself; but our host, more Icelandic than Danish, reminded me of the heroes of ancient hospitality. It was plain to me that we were more at home in his house than he was himself.
The conversation ran in the native tongue, which my uncle laced with German and Mr. Fridriksson with Latin, so that I could follow it. It turned on scientific questions, as befits men of learning; but Professor Lidenbrock kept himself under the most extreme reserve, and with every sentence his eyes charged me to keep absolute silence about our plans.
First of all, Mr. Fridriksson inquired of my uncle how his research at the library had turned out.
"Your library!" my uncle exclaimed. "It's nothing but odd, unmatched volumes on nearly empty shelves."
"What!" replied Mr. Fridriksson. "We own eight thousand volumes, many of them precious and rare — works in the old Scandinavian tongue, and all the new titles that Copenhagen sends us every year."
"And where are these eight thousand volumes? As far as I could see—"
"Oh, Mr. Lidenbrock, they're out roaming the country! We have a taste for study on our old island of ice. There isn't a farmer, isn't a fisherman, who can't read and doesn't. We believe that books are meant to be worn out under the eyes of readers, not to molder behind an iron grille, far from curious gazes. And so these volumes pass from hand to hand — leafed through, read and reread — and often they don't come back to their shelf until a year or two have gone by."
"Meanwhile," my uncle answered with a touch of pique, "visiting scholars—"
"What do you expect! Foreigners have their own libraries at home, and above all our country folk must educate themselves. I tell you again, the love of study is in the Icelandic blood. Why, back in 1816 we founded a Literary Society that is thriving; foreign scholars are proud to belong to it; it publishes books for the education of our countrymen and does the country real service. If you'd care to be one of our corresponding members, Mr. Lidenbrock, you would give us the greatest pleasure."
My uncle, who already belonged to a hundred or so scientific societies, accepted with a good grace that touched Mr. Fridriksson.
"Now then," our host went on, "be so kind as to tell me which books you'd hoped to find in our library, and perhaps I can give you some word of them."
I glanced at my uncle. He hesitated to answer. This touched directly on his plans. Still, after a moment's thought, he made up his mind to speak.
"Mr. Fridriksson," he said, "I wanted to know whether, among your old works, you happened to have any by Arne Saknussemm?"
"Arne Saknussemm!" replied the professor from Reykjavik. "You mean that sixteenth-century scholar — the great naturalist, great alchemist, and great traveler all at once?"
"Precisely."
"One of the glories of Icelandic literature and science?"
"The very man."
"A figure illustrious above all others?"
"I grant you that."
"And whose daring matched his genius?"
"I see you know him well." My uncle was fairly swimming in joy to hear his hero spoken of this way. He devoured Mr. Fridriksson with his eyes.
"Well then," he demanded, "his works?"
"Ah! His works — we don't have them."
"What! Not in Iceland?"
"They exist neither in Iceland nor anywhere else."
"And why is that?"
"Because Arne Saknussemm was persecuted for heresy, and in 1573 his works were burned at Copenhagen by the hand of the executioner."
"Excellent! Perfect!" cried my uncle, to the great scandal of the professor of natural sciences.
"I beg your pardon?" said the latter.
"Yes! It all makes sense, it all links up, it's all clear — and I understand now why Saknussemm, blacklisted and forced to hide the discoveries of his genius, had to bury the secret in an incomprehensible cryptogram—"
"What secret?" asked Mr. Fridriksson sharply.
"A secret that... whose..." my uncle stammered.
"Might you have some particular document?" our host pressed.
"No. I was making a pure supposition."
"Very well," said Mr. Fridriksson, who had the kindness not to insist when he saw how flustered his companion had become. "I hope," he added, "that you won't leave our island without drawing on its mineralogical riches?"
"Certainly," my uncle answered. "But I arrive a little late — scholars have already passed this way, haven't they?"
"Yes, Mr. Lidenbrock. The labors of Messrs. Olafsen and Povelsen, carried out by order of the king; the studies of Troïl; the scientific mission of Messrs. Gaimard and Robert aboard the French corvette the Recherche;* and, more recently, the observations of the scholars aboard the frigate the Reine-Hortense — all have contributed powerfully to the survey of Iceland. But believe me, there is still work to be done."
(The Recherche was sent out in 1835 by Admiral Duperré to find some trace of a lost expedition — that of Monsieur de Blosseville and the Lilloise, of which no news was ever heard.)
"You think so?" asked my uncle, with a good-natured air, trying to dampen the flash in his eyes.
"Yes. So many mountains, glaciers, volcanoes to study, and so little known about them! Look — without going any farther, see that peak rising on the horizon. That's the Sneffels."
"Ah!" said my uncle. "The Sneffels."
"Yes, one of the most curious volcanoes there is, and one whose crater is rarely visited."
"Extinct?"
"Oh! Extinct these five hundred years."
"Well then," replied my uncle, who was frantically crossing his legs to keep from leaping into the air, "I have a mind to begin my geological studies with this Seffel... Fessel... how do you say it?"
"Sneffels," said the excellent Mr. Fridriksson.
This part of the conversation had taken place in Latin; I had understood every word, and I could barely keep a straight face watching my uncle rein in a satisfaction that was spilling out of him on every side. He put on a little air of innocence that looked exactly like the grimace of an old devil.
"Yes," he said, "your words decide me; we'll try to climb this Sneffels — perhaps even to study its crater!"
"I only regret," replied Mr. Fridriksson, "that my duties won't allow me to get away; I would have gone with you gladly, and to good purpose."
"Oh, no! Oh, no!" my uncle answered quickly. "We don't want to trouble anyone, Mr. Fridriksson; I thank you with all my heart. The presence of a scholar like yourself would have been most useful, but the duties of your profession..."
I like to think that our host, in the innocence of his Icelandic soul, never grasped my uncle's broad cunning.
"I entirely approve, Mr. Lidenbrock," he said, "of your beginning with that volcano; you'll gather a rich harvest of curious observations there. But tell me — how do you mean to reach the Sneffels peninsula?"
"By sea, crossing the bay. That's the quickest route."
"No doubt; but it's impossible to take."
"Why?"
"Because we don't have a single boat in Reykjavik."
"The devil!"
"You'll have to go overland, following the coast. It'll be longer, but more interesting."
"Good. I'll see about finding a guide."
"I have precisely the man to offer you."
"Someone dependable, intelligent?"
"Yes, a native of the peninsula. He's an eider-down hunter, very skilled, and you'll be pleased with him. He speaks Danish perfectly."
"And when can I see him?"
"Tomorrow, if that suits you."
"Why not today?"
"Because he doesn't arrive until tomorrow."
"Tomorrow it is, then," my uncle answered with a sigh.
This momentous conversation ended a few moments later with warm thanks from the German professor to the Icelandic one. Over the course of that dinner my uncle had learned some important things — among them the story of Saknussemm, the reason behind his mysterious document, the fact that our host would not be joining his expedition, and that as early as the next day a guide would be at his command.
That evening I took a short stroll along the shores of Reykjavik, then came back early to my bed of thick planks, where I slept a deep sleep.
When I woke, I heard my uncle talking away at great length in the next room. I got up at once and hurried to join him.
He was chatting in Danish with a tall man of powerful build. This big fellow had to be of uncommon strength. His eyes, set in a very large and rather guileless head, struck me as intelligent. They were a dreamy blue. Long hair, which would have passed for red even in England, fell over his athletic shoulders. The movements of this native were supple, but he stirred his arms very little, like a man who neither knew nor cared for the language of gestures. Everything about him revealed a temperament of perfect calm — not lazy, but tranquil. You sensed that he asked nothing of anyone, that he worked as it suited him, and that in this world his philosophy could be neither startled nor troubled.
I caught these shades of character from the way the Icelander listened to the passionate stream of words pouring out of his companion. He stood there with his arms crossed, motionless amid my uncle's flurry of gestures; to say no, his head turned from left to right; to say yes, it tipped forward, and so slightly that his long hair barely moved. It was economy of motion carried to the point of miserliness.
Certainly, to look at this man, I would never have guessed his profession was hunter; he would not scare off the game, that was for sure — but how on earth could he ever catch it?
It all became clear when Mr. Fridriksson explained that this placid figure was nothing more than an "eider hunter," the bird whose down makes up the island's greatest wealth. That down, in fact, is what we call eiderdown, and gathering it does not call for any great expenditure of motion.
In the first days of summer, the female eider — a kind of pretty duck — goes to build her nest among the rocks of the fjords (the name given to narrow gulfs in the Scandinavian countries) that fringe the whole coastline. Once the nest is built, she lines it with fine feathers plucked from her own breast. At once the hunter — or rather the merchant — arrives, takes the nest, and the female starts her work all over again. This goes on as long as she has any down left. When she has stripped herself bare, it is the male's turn to shed his feathers. Only, since his coarse, tough plumage has no commercial value, the hunter does not bother to rob him of his brood's bed. So the nest is finished; the female lays her eggs; the chicks hatch; and the next year the eiderdown harvest begins again.
Now, since the eider does not choose steep cliffs to build its nest, but rather easy, level rocks that slope down into the sea, the Icelandic hunter could ply his trade without much exertion. He was a farmer who had neither to sow nor to reap his crop, but only to gather it in.
This grave, phlegmatic, silent character was named Hans Bjelke; he came on Mr. Fridriksson's recommendation. He was our future guide.
His manners made a strange contrast with my uncle's.
Yet the two of them reached an understanding easily. Neither cared about the price — the one ready to accept whatever was offered, the other ready to give whatever was asked. Never was a bargain struck more easily.
By the terms of it, Hans agreed to lead us to the village of Stapi, on the southern coast of the Sneffels peninsula, at the very foot of the volcano. That meant about twenty-two miles overland, a journey of two days, in my uncle's opinion.
But when he learned that these were Danish miles of twenty-four thousand feet, he had to revise his figure and reckon, given the wretched state of the roads, on seven or eight days of marching.
Four horses were to be put at his disposal, two to carry him and me, the other two for our baggage. Hans, as was his habit, would go on foot. He knew this stretch of coast perfectly, and he promised to take us by the shortest route.
His engagement with my uncle did not end when we reached Stapi; he would stay in his service for the whole time our scientific excursions required, at a wage of three rixdales a week. Only, it was expressly agreed that this sum would be counted out to the guide every Saturday evening — a condition sine qua non of his employment.
Departure was fixed for the 16th of June. My uncle wanted to give the hunter an advance on the bargain, but he refused with a single word.
"Efter," he said.
"Afterward," the professor translated for my benefit.
The deal concluded, Hans withdrew all in one piece.
"A splendid fellow," cried my uncle, "but he little suspects the marvelous role the future has in store for him to play."
"So he's coming with us all the way to—"
"Yes, Axel, all the way to the center of the earth."
Forty-eight hours still remained; much to my regret, I had to spend them on our preparations. All our ingenuity went into arranging each item to the best advantage — the instruments in one group, the weapons in another, the tools in this bundle, the provisions in that. Four groups in all.
The instruments included:
1. A centigrade thermometer by Eigel, graduated up to a hundred and fifty degrees, which seemed to me either too much or not enough. Too much, if the surrounding heat should ever climb that high, in which case we would be cooked. Not enough, if it came to measuring the temperature of springs or any other matter in a state of fusion.
2. A compressed-air manometer, arranged to indicate pressures greater than that of the atmosphere at sea level. In fact, an ordinary barometer would not have been sufficient, since the atmospheric pressure was bound to increase in proportion to our descent below the surface of the earth.
3. A chronometer by Boissonnas the younger of Geneva, perfectly set to the meridian of Hamburg.
4. Two compasses, one for inclination and one for declination.
5. A night telescope.
6. Two Ruhmkorff apparatus, which by means of an electric current gave off a light that was very portable, safe, and compact. (Mr. Ruhmkorff's apparatus consists of a Bunsen battery, set going by means of potassium bichromate, which gives off no odor. An induction coil puts the electricity produced by the battery in communication with a lantern of a special design. Inside this lantern is a glass coil from which the air has been evacuated, leaving behind only a residue of carbonic acid gas or nitrogen. When the apparatus is working, this gas becomes luminous, producing a whitish, continuous light. The battery and the coil are placed in a leather bag that the traveler carries slung over one shoulder. The lantern, worn on the outside, gives more than enough light in the deepest darkness. It allows one to venture, without fear of any explosion, into the midst of the most inflammable gases, and it does not go out even in the heart of the deepest streams. Mr. Ruhmkorff is a learned and skillful physicist. His great discovery is his induction coil, which makes it possible to produce high-tension electricity. In 1864 he was awarded the five-yearly prize of 50,000 francs that France reserved for the most ingenious application of electricity.)
The weapons consisted of two Purdley More & Co. rifles and two Colt revolvers. Why weapons? We had neither savages nor wild beasts to fear, I supposed. But my uncle seemed to set as much store by his arsenal as by his instruments, especially by a good quantity of guncotton, impervious to damp, whose explosive force is far superior to that of ordinary powder.
The tools included two picks, two mattocks, a silk ladder, three iron-tipped staffs, a hatchet, a hammer, a dozen iron wedges and pitons, and long knotted ropes. That made no small bundle, for the ladder alone was three hundred feet long.
Finally, there were the provisions. The package was not large, but reassuring, for I knew that in concentrated meat and dry biscuit it held six months' worth of food. Juniper spirits made up the whole of the liquid portion, and there was no water at all — but we had flasks, and my uncle was counting on the springs to fill them. The objections I had raised about their quality, their temperature, and even their possible absence had gone nowhere.
To complete the exact inventory of our traveling articles, I will note a portable medicine chest containing blunt-bladed scissors, splints for fractures, a length of unbleached tape, bandages and compresses, adhesive plaster, a lancet-plate for bleeding — all of it terrifying; on top of that, a series of vials holding dextrin, medicinal alcohol, liquid lead acetate, ether, vinegar, and ammonia, every one of them a far from reassuring drug; and finally the materials needed for the Ruhmkorff apparatus.
My uncle had taken care not to forget the supply of tobacco, hunting powder, and tinder, nor a leather belt that he wore about his waist, holding a sufficient quantity of gold, silver, and paper money. Six pairs of good boots, made waterproof with a coating of tar and India rubber, were among the group of tools.
"Clothed, shod, and equipped like this, there's no reason we shouldn't go far," my uncle told me.
The whole day of the 14th was spent arranging these various objects. That evening we dined at Baron Trampe's, in the company of the mayor of Reykjavik and Doctor Hyaltalin, the country's great physician. Mr. Fridriksson was not among the guests; I learned later that the governor and he were at odds over a matter of administration and did not see each other. So I had no chance to understand a word of what was said during that semi-official dinner. I noticed only that my uncle talked the entire time.
The next day, the 15th, the preparations were finished. Our host gave the professor real pleasure by handing him a map of Iceland incomparably better than Henderson's — the map of Mr. Olaf Nikolas Olsen, drawn to a scale of 1/400,000 and published by the Icelandic Literary Society from the geodesic surveys of Mr. Scheel Frisac and the topographical survey of Mr. Bjorn Gumlaugsonn. It was a precious document for a mineralogist.
The last evening passed in intimate conversation with Mr. Fridriksson, for whom I felt a lively liking; then, after the talk, came a rather restless sleep — on my part, at least.
At five in the morning, the whinnying of four horses pawing the ground beneath my window woke me. I dressed in haste and went down into the street. There, Hans was finishing loading our baggage without, so to speak, stirring a muscle. And yet he worked with uncommon skill. My uncle made more noise than headway, and the guide seemed to pay very little attention to his instructions.
Everything was done by six o'clock. Mr. Fridriksson shook our hands. My uncle thanked him in Icelandic, and very warmly, for his kind hospitality. As for me, I sketched out some cordial farewell in my best Latin; then we climbed into the saddle, and with his last goodbye Mr. Fridriksson sent after me this line that Virgil might have written expressly for us, travelers uncertain of the road:
Et quacunque viam dederit fortuna sequamur.
We had set out under an overcast but settled sky. No tiring heat to dread, no disastrous rain. Perfect weather for tourists.
The sheer pleasure of riding on horseback across an unknown country made me easygoing about the start of the whole business. I gave myself up entirely to the holiday-maker's happiness, all appetite and freedom. I was beginning to make my peace with the expedition.
"Besides," I said to myself, "what am I really risking? A trip through the most curious country on earth! The climb up a truly remarkable mountain! At worst, a scramble down to the bottom of a dead crater! It's perfectly obvious that this Saknussemm did nothing more than that. As for the existence of some tunnel leading to the center of the globe — pure imagination! Pure impossibility! So whatever there is to enjoy in this expedition, let's take it, and no haggling!"
I had barely finished this line of reasoning when we left Reykjavik behind.
Hans marched at the head, at a quick, steady, tireless pace. The two horses loaded with our baggage followed him without needing to be led. My uncle and I came next, and, truly, we didn't cut too poor a figure on our little mounts — small beasts, but sturdy ones.
Iceland is one of the great islands of Europe. It measures fourteen hundred miles of surface and counts no more than sixty thousand inhabitants. Geographers have divided it into four quarters, and we had to cross, almost on the diagonal, the one that goes by the name of the Country of the Southwest Quarter — "Sudvestr Fjordùngr."
On leaving Reykjavik, Hans had immediately struck out along the seashore. We crossed meager pastures that were doing their level best to be green; the yellow was having more success. The rugged summits of the trachytic masses blurred into the eastern mists on the horizon; now and then a few patches of snow, concentrating the diffused light, blazed on the slopes of the far-off peaks; certain summits, thrusting up more boldly, pierced the gray clouds and reappeared above the drifting vapors, like reefs surfacing in the open sky.
Often these chains of barren rock ran out toward the sea and bit into the pasture; but there was always room enough left to get by. Our horses, moreover, picked out the passable spots by instinct, never slackening their pace. My uncle didn't even have the consolation of urging his mount along with voice or whip; he wasn't allowed to be impatient. And I couldn't help smiling to see him so tall on his little horse — with his long legs nearly grazing the ground, he looked like a six-legged centaur.
"Good beast! Good beast!" he kept saying. "You'll see, Axel, that no animal on earth outdoes the Icelandic horse for intelligence. Snow, storms, impassable trails, rocks, glaciers — nothing stops him. He's brave, he's frugal, he's sure-footed. Never a false step, never a shy. Let some river turn up, some fjord to cross — and one will, you'll see — and he'll throw himself into the water without a moment's hesitation, like an amphibian, and make the far bank! Only let's not rush him — let him do his work, and between the two of us we'll manage our ten leagues a day."
"We will, no doubt," I answered, "but what about the guide?"
"Oh, he doesn't worry me in the least. Men like that walk without even noticing it. This one stirs so little that he can't possibly tire. Anyway, if it comes to it, I'll give up my mount to him. I'll be seized with cramps soon enough if I don't get some exercise. The arms are doing fine, but I have to think of the legs."
Meanwhile we were pushing on at a good clip; the country was already all but deserted. Here and there a lone farm, some solitary boër — the Icelandic peasant's cottage, built of wood, of earth, of chunks of lava — appeared like a beggar at the edge of a sunken road. These tumbledown huts had the look of imploring charity from passersby, and one felt half-inclined to give them alms. In this country roads, and even footpaths, were utterly lacking, and the vegetation, slow as it was, made short work of erasing the tracks of the rare traveler.
And yet this part of the province, lying a stone's throw from its capital, ranked among the inhabited and cultivated portions of Iceland. What, then, must the more desolate regions be, beyond this desert? Half a mile covered, and we still hadn't met a single farmer at his cottage door, nor a wild shepherd grazing a flock less wild than himself — only a few cows and sheep left to fend for themselves. What, then, would the convulsed regions be like, the ones churned up by eruptions, born of volcanic explosions and subterranean upheavals?
We were fated to know them soon enough; but, consulting Olsen's map, I saw that they were avoided by following the winding fringe of the shore. In fact, the great plutonic upheaval has been concentrated mostly in the island's interior; there the horizontal layers of stacked rock — called trapps in the Scandinavian tongue — the trachytic bands, the eruptions of basalt, of tuff, and of every volcanic conglomerate, the flows of lava and molten porphyry, have made a land of unearthly horror. Little did I suspect then the spectacle awaiting us on the Sneffels peninsula, where these ravages of a fiery nature form a formidable chaos.
Two hours after leaving Reykjavik we reached the little town of Gufunes, called "Aoalkirkja," or Principal Church. It offered nothing remarkable. A few houses only. Barely enough to make a hamlet in Germany.
Hans halted there for half an hour; he shared our frugal breakfast, answered my uncle's questions about the nature of the road with yes and no, and when he was asked where he meant to spend the night, he said only:
"Gardär."
I consulted the map to find out what Gardär was. I saw a village of that name on the shores of the Hvalfjörd, four miles from Reykjavik. I showed it to my uncle.
"Only four miles!" he said. "Four miles out of twenty-two! What a pleasant little stroll."
He was about to make some remark to the guide, but Hans, without answering him, took his place at the head of the horses again and set off.
Three hours later, still treading the faded turf of the pastures, we had to skirt the Kollafjörd, a detour easier and shorter than a crossing of that gulf; and soon we were entering a "pingstaoer," a place of communal jurisdiction, named Ejulberg, whose bell tower would have struck noon — if Icelandic churches had been rich enough to own a clock. But they closely resemble their parishioners, who have no watches and manage very well without them.
There the horses were refreshed; then, taking a shoreline squeezed between a chain of hills and the sea, they carried us in a single stretch to the "aoalkirkja" of Brantar, and a mile farther on to Saurböer "annexia," an annexed church on the southern bank of the Hvalfjörd.
It was then four in the afternoon; we had covered four miles — a good eight leagues.
At that spot the fjord was at least half a mile wide; the waves broke noisily on the sharp rocks; the gulf widened out between walls of rock, a sort of sheer escarpment three thousand feet high, remarkable for its brown strata parted by beds of tuff in a reddish shade. Whatever the intelligence of our horses, I augured nothing good from the crossing of a genuine arm of the sea on the back of a four-legged animal.
"If they're intelligent," I said, "they won't so much as try to cross. In any case, I'll take it upon myself to be intelligent for them."
But my uncle wasn't willing to wait; he spurred hard for the shore. His mount came up to sniff the last ripple of the waves and stopped; my uncle, who had an instinct all his own, pressed it forward. A fresh refusal from the animal, which shook its head. Then came oaths and lashes of the whip — but the beast kicked out and began to unseat its rider; at last the little horse, buckling its hocks, slipped out from under the professor's legs and left him planted bolt upright on two stones of the shore, like the Colossus of Rhodes.
"Ah! Cursed animal!" cried the rider, suddenly turned into a pedestrian and as mortified as a cavalry officer demoted to the infantry.
"Farja," said the guide, touching him on the shoulder.
"What? A ferry?"
"Der," Hans answered, pointing to a boat.
"Yes," I exclaimed, "there's a ferry."
"You should have said so, then! Well — off we go!"
"Tidvatten," the guide went on.
"What's he saying?"
"He says tide," my uncle answered, translating the Danish word for me.
"No doubt we have to wait for the tide?"
"Förbida?" my uncle asked.
"Ja," Hans replied.
My uncle stamped his foot, while the horses made their way toward the ferry.
I understood perfectly the necessity of waiting for a certain moment of the tide to undertake the crossing of the fjord — the moment when the sea, having reached its greatest height, stands slack. Then the ebb and flow have no perceptible pull, and the ferry runs no risk of being swept off, either to the bottom of the gulf or clear out into the open ocean.
The favorable instant didn't come until six in the evening; my uncle, myself, the guide, two ferrymen, and the four horses took our places in a sort of flat, rather flimsy barge. Used as I was to the steam ferries of the Elbe, I found the boatmen's oars a sorry sort of machinery. It took more than an hour to cross the fjord; but in the end the passage came off without mishap.
Half an hour later we reached the "aoalkirkja" of Gardär.
By rights it should have been dark, but at the sixty-fifth parallel the daylight of the polar regions was no surprise to me. In Iceland, through the months of June and July, the sun never sets.
Even so, the temperature had dropped. I was cold, and above all I was hungry. Welcome, then, was the "böer" that opened its doors to take us in.
It was a peasant's house, but for hospitality it might have belonged to a king. The moment we arrived, the master came out to shake our hands, and without further ceremony he beckoned us to follow him.
To follow him, mind you — walking beside him would have been out of the question. A long, narrow, gloomy passage led into the dwelling, which was built of barely squared timbers, and gave access to each of the rooms. There were four of them: the kitchen, the weaving workshop, the "badstofa" or family bedroom, and — best of all — the room for strangers. My uncle, whose height had not been considered when the house was built, cracked his head three or four times against the beams jutting from the ceiling.
We were shown into our room, a sort of large hall with a floor of packed earth, lit by a single window whose panes were made of sheep membrane, none too transparent. The bedding consisted of dry fodder tossed into two wooden frames painted red and decorated with Icelandic proverbs. I hadn't expected such comfort — only, the whole house was steeped in a powerful smell of dried fish, pickled meat, and sour milk, which my nose found hard going.
Once we had set aside our traveling gear, our host's voice called out, inviting us into the kitchen — the only room where a fire was ever lit, even in the bitterest cold.
My uncle hurried to obey this friendly summons. I followed.
The kitchen chimney was of an ancient design: a single stone in the middle of the room for a hearth, and a hole in the roof through which the smoke escaped. This kitchen served as the dining room as well.
As we came in, our host — as if he hadn't already seen us — greeted us with the word "saellvertu," which means "be happy," and came to kiss us on the cheek.
After him his wife spoke the same words, with the same ceremony; then the two of them, laying their right hands over their hearts, bowed deeply.
I should mention right away that this Icelandic woman was the mother of nineteen children, all of them — big and small — swarming together in the coils of smoke that the hearth poured into the room. Every moment I would catch sight of a little blond head, faintly melancholy, emerging from the fog. You would have taken them for a garland of angels who hadn't been quite washed.
My uncle and I gave this "brood" a warm welcome, and soon there were three or four of the little scamps on our shoulders, as many on our knees, and the rest between our legs. The ones who could talk repeated "saellvertu" in every tone imaginable. The ones who couldn't talk only shrieked the louder.
This concert was interrupted by the announcement of the meal. Just then the hunter came back in, having seen to feeding the horses — that is, he had economically turned them loose across the fields. The poor beasts would have to make do with grazing the scant moss on the rocks and a few not-very-nourishing seaweeds, and the next morning they would be sure to come back on their own to take up the work of the day before.
"Saellvertu," said Hans as he came in.
Then, calmly, automatically, without one kiss being any more pronounced than the next, he embraced the host, the hostess, and their nineteen children.
The ceremony over, we sat down at table, twenty-four strong, and therefore quite literally one on top of another. The luckiest among us had only two little ones on their knees.
Still, silence fell over this small world when the soup arrived, and the natural taciturnity — natural even to Icelandic urchins — resumed its rule. Our host served us a lichen soup that was not at all unpleasant, then an enormous portion of dried fish swimming in butter that had been souring for twenty years and was therefore, by Icelandic notions of good eating, far preferable to fresh. Along with this there was "skyr," a kind of curdled milk, served with biscuit and sharpened with juniper-berry juice; and finally, for drink, whey mixed with water, which the locals call "blanda." Whether this singular fare was good or not, I was in no state to judge. I was hungry, and for dessert I swallowed to the last mouthful a thick buckwheat porridge.
The meal finished, the children vanished; the grown-ups gathered around the hearth, where peat, heather, cow dung, and dried fish bones were burning. Then, after this "warming up," the various groups withdrew to their respective rooms. The hostess offered, as custom demanded, to pull off our stockings and trousers for us; but at our most gracious refusal she did not insist, and I was able at last to burrow into my bed of fodder.
The next day, at five in the morning, we said our farewells to the Icelandic peasant. My uncle had a great deal of trouble getting him to accept fair payment, and Hans gave the signal to set off.
A hundred paces out from Gardär, the land began to change its look; the ground turned marshy and less kind to walking. On the right, the chain of mountains ran on without end, like an immense system of natural fortifications, and we followed along its outer slope. Often streams presented themselves that had to be forded, and crossed without soaking the baggage too badly.
The wilderness grew steadily emptier. Now and then, though, a human shadow seemed to flee off in the distance; and if a bend in the road brought us unexpectedly close to one of these specters, I felt a sudden revulsion at the sight of a swollen head, its skin glistening and hairless, and the repellent sores betrayed by the rents in a set of wretched rags.
The unhappy creature did not come toward us with its deformed hand outstretched; on the contrary, it fled — though not so fast that Hans failed to hail it with the usual "saellvertu."
"Spetelsk," he would say.
"A leper!" my uncle would repeat.
And that one word was enough to work its repulsive effect. This horrible affliction of leprosy is fairly common in Iceland; it is not contagious but hereditary, and for that reason marriage is forbidden to these poor wretches.
Such apparitions were not the sort to brighten a landscape that was growing profoundly bleak; the last tufts of grass were dying away beneath our feet. Not a tree, unless you counted a few clumps of dwarf birch, no better than scrub. Not an animal, apart from a few horses — the ones their master couldn't feed — wandering across the dismal plains. Sometimes a falcon would glide through the gray clouds and then wing off swiftly toward the southern lands; I let myself drift into the melancholy of this wild country, and my memories carried me back to my native home.
Soon we had to cross several small fjords of no importance, and at last a real gulf; the tide, slack just then, let us pass without waiting and reach the hamlet of Alftanes, a mile beyond.
That evening, after fording two rivers rich in trout and pike, the Alfa and the Heta, we were forced to spend the night in an abandoned hovel, fit to be haunted by every goblin of Scandinavian mythology. The genie of cold had certainly taken up residence there, and it plagued us all night long.
The following day brought no particular incident. Always the same marshy ground, the same monotony, the same dreary aspect. By evening we had covered half the distance we had to travel, and we slept at the "annexia" of Krösolbt.
On the 19th of June, for about a mile, a field of lava stretched beneath our feet; this formation of the ground is called "hraun" in the country. The lava, wrinkled at the surface, took the shapes of cables, sometimes drawn out, sometimes coiled on themselves; an immense flow came down from the neighboring mountains — volcanoes now extinct, though these ruins bore witness to their past violence. Here and there, however, a few wisps of steam from hot springs crept along the ground.
We had no time to study these phenomena; we had to keep moving. Before long the marshy ground reappeared under our mounts' feet, broken up by little lakes. Our course now lay to the west; we had rounded the great bay of Faxa, and the twin white peaks of the Sneffels rose into the clouds less than five miles off.
The horses marched well; the difficulties of the ground did not stop them. For my part, I was beginning to grow very tired; my uncle stayed as firm and upright as on the first day, and I couldn't help admiring him as much as I admired the hunter, who looked on this whole expedition as a simple stroll.
On Saturday, the 20th of June, at six in the evening, we reached Büdir, a small town on the seashore, and the guide claimed his agreed-upon pay. My uncle settled up with him. It was Hans's own family — his uncles and first cousins, in fact — who offered us their hospitality; we were well received, and if it had been up to me, without imposing too far on the kindness of these good people, I would gladly have recovered from the fatigues of the journey among them. But my uncle, who had nothing to recover from, saw things otherwise, and the next morning we had to climb back onto our good beasts.
The ground felt the nearness of the mountain, whose granite roots pushed up out of the earth like those of an old oak. We were skirting the volcano's immense base. The professor never took his eyes off it; he gestured, he seemed to challenge it and to say: "There stands the giant I am going to tame!" At last, after twenty-four hours' march, the horses stopped of their own accord at the door of the presbytery of Stapi.
Stapi is a village of maybe thirty huts, built straight onto the lava under sunlight bounced back at it by the volcano. It sits at the head of a small fjord walled in by a rampart of the strangest kind.
As everyone knows, basalt is a brown rock of igneous origin, and it takes on regular shapes whose arrangement can catch you off guard. Here nature works like a geometer, building the way a human being would, as if she had wielded the square, the compass, and the plumb line. Everywhere else she makes her art out of great masses flung down without order, cones barely sketched, half-finished pyramids, and the odd, wandering run of her lines; but here, meaning to set an example of regularity, and getting there ahead of the very first architects, she created an order so severe that neither the splendors of Babylon nor the wonders of Greece ever surpassed it.
I'd certainly heard of the Giant's Causeway in Ireland and of Fingal's Cave in one of the Hebrides, but I had never yet laid eyes on a structure built out of basalt.
At Stapi, though, the phenomenon rose up in all its beauty.
The wall of the fjord, like the whole coast of the peninsula, was made of a row of vertical columns, thirty feet high. These upright shafts, of a flawless proportion, held up an arch of horizontal columns whose overhang formed a half-vault above the sea. At certain intervals, under this natural canopy, the eye caught pointed, arched openings of admirable design, through which the waves of the open water came rushing in and breaking into foam. A few chunks of basalt, torn loose by the fury of the ocean, lay stretched out along the ground like the wreckage of some ancient temple — ruins forever young, over which the centuries pass without leaving a mark.
Such was the last stage of our overland journey. Hans had guided us here with real skill, and it steadied me a little to remember that he was still coming along with us.
As we reached the door of the rector's house — a plain, low cabin, no finer and no more comfortable than its neighbors — I saw a man shoeing a horse, hammer in hand and a leather apron slung around his waist.
"Saelvertu," the hunter said to him.
"God dag," the blacksmith answered in perfect Danish.
"Kyrkoherde," said Hans, turning to my uncle.
"The rector!" my uncle repeated. "It seems, Axel, that this good fellow is the rector."
Meanwhile the guide was filling the kyrkoherde in on our situation. The man set down his work, gave a sort of shout — the kind exchanged, no doubt, between horses and horse-traders — and at once a great shrew of a woman came out of the cabin. If she didn't stand a full six feet, she came very close.
I was afraid she might come offer the travelers the Icelandic kiss; but nothing of the sort happened, and she showed rather little grace, in fact, about letting us into her house.
The strangers' room struck me as the worst in the whole parsonage — narrow, filthy, and reeking. We had to make do with it; the rector clearly did not practice the hospitality of the ancients. Far from it. Before the day was out, I could see we were dealing with a blacksmith, a fisherman, a hunter, and a carpenter, and not at all with a minister of the Lord. It was a weekday, true enough. Perhaps he made up for it on Sundays.
I don't want to speak ill of these poor priests, who are, after all, in a wretched position: the Danish government pays them a ridiculous salary and lets them collect a quarter of their parish's tithe, which comes to no more than sixty marks a year — a paltry sum. Hence the need to work in order to live; but between fishing, hunting, and shoeing horses, a man ends up taking on the manners, the tone, and the ways of hunters, fishermen, and other fairly rough sorts. That very evening I noticed that our host did not count sobriety among his virtues.
My uncle quickly grasped what kind of man he was dealing with. Instead of a decent, dignified scholar, he had found a heavy, coarse peasant, and so he resolved to begin his great expedition as soon as possible and get away from this inhospitable parish. Heedless of his own fatigue, he decided to go spend a few days on the mountain.
The preparations for departure were therefore made the very day after we arrived at Stapi. Hans hired the services of three Icelanders to take the place of the horses in carrying the baggage; but once we reached the bottom of the crater, these locals were to turn back and leave us to ourselves. That point was firmly settled.
At this juncture, my uncle had to inform the hunter that his intention was to press the exploration of the volcano to its very limits.
Hans merely nodded. Going there or going anywhere, plunging into the bowels of his island or crossing its surface — he saw no difference. As for me, distracted until now by the incidents of the trip, I had rather forgotten what lay ahead; but now I felt the dread take hold of me again, worse than ever. What could I do? If I'd ever had a chance of resisting Professor Lidenbrock, it was back in Hamburg, not here at the foot of the Sneffels.
One idea in particular gnawed at me hard — a terrifying idea, enough to rattle nerves far steadier than mine.
"Let's see," I said to myself. "We're going to climb the Sneffels. Fine. We're going to visit its crater. Good. Others have done that and lived. But that's not all. If there turns out to be a passage leading down into the bowels of the earth, if that miserable Saknussemm told the truth, we're going to lose ourselves in the volcano's underground galleries. And what says the Sneffels is really extinct? Who's to prove an eruption isn't brewing? Just because the monster has slept since 1229, does it follow that it can't wake up? And if it wakes, what becomes of us?"
That was worth thinking over, and think it over I did. I couldn't sleep without dreaming of eruptions; and the part of a bit of slag seemed a pretty brutal one to play.
At last I couldn't stand it any longer. I resolved to lay the case before my uncle as tactfully as I could, in the form of a perfectly impossible hypothesis.
I went to find him. I told him my fears, and then I stepped back to let him blow up in peace.
"I was thinking about that," he answered simply.
What did those words mean? Was he actually going to listen to reason? Was he thinking of calling off his plans? That would be too good to be true.
After a few moments of silence, during which I didn't dare question him, he went on:
"I was thinking about it. Ever since we got to Stapi, I've been turning over the serious question you've just put to me, because we mustn't act rashly."
"No," I said with feeling.
"The Sneffels has been silent for six hundred years, but it can speak again. Now, eruptions are always preceded by phenomena that are perfectly well understood. So I've questioned the people of the country, I've studied the ground, and I can tell you this, Axel: there will be no eruption."
At this pronouncement I stood dumbfounded and couldn't say a word.
"You doubt what I say?" said my uncle. "Well, then — follow me."
I obeyed mechanically. Leaving the parsonage, the Professor took a direct path that led, through a gap in the basalt wall, away from the sea. Soon we were out in open country, if you can give that name to an immense heap of volcanic debris. The land looked as though it had been crushed under a rain of enormous stones — trap, basalt, granite, and every kind of pyroxene rock.
Here and there I saw fumaroles rising into the air; these white vapors, called reykir in Icelandic, came from the hot springs, and their violence was a sign of the ground's volcanic activity. To me this seemed to justify my fears. So I was knocked flat when my uncle said:
"You see all that smoke, Axel? Well, it proves we have nothing to fear from the volcano's fury!"
"You can't be serious!" I cried.
"Get this straight," the Professor went on. "As an eruption approaches, these fumaroles redouble their activity, only to vanish completely for the duration of the event — because the elastic fluids, no longer under the necessary pressure, take the road of the craters instead of escaping through the fissures in the globe. So if these vapors hold steady in their usual state, if their energy doesn't increase, and if you add to that observation that the wind and rain aren't giving way to a heavy, still air, then you can be sure there'll be no eruption anytime soon."
"But —"
"Enough. When science has spoken, one has only to hold one's tongue."
I came back to the parsonage with my ears drooping. My uncle had beaten me with scientific arguments. Still, I had one hope left — that once we reached the bottom of the crater, it would be impossible, for lack of any gallery, to go down any deeper, in spite of all the Saknussemms in the world.
I spent the next night in one long nightmare, in the heart of a volcano and deep in the earth; I felt myself hurled off into planetary space in the form of an erupted rock.
The next day, June 23rd, Hans was waiting for us with his companions, loaded down with the provisions, the tools, and the instruments. Two iron-tipped staffs, two rifles, and two cartridge belts were set aside for my uncle and me. Hans, a cautious man, had added a full water-skin to our baggage which, together with our flasks, guaranteed us water for eight days.
It was nine o'clock in the morning. The rector and his towering shrew were waiting in front of their door. No doubt they meant to bid us the host's final farewell to the traveler. But this farewell took the unexpected form of a formidable bill, on which they'd charged us for the very air of the parsonage — foul air, I dare say. This worthy couple was fleecing us like a Swiss innkeeper and putting a fine price on their overrated hospitality.
My uncle paid without haggling. A man setting out for the center of the earth wasn't going to quibble over a few rixdales.
That settled, Hans gave the signal to leave, and a few moments later we had left Stapi behind.
The Sneffels is five thousand feet high. With its double cone, it caps a band of trachyte that breaks away from the island's mountain system. From where we set out, you couldn't yet make out its two peaks against the gray backdrop of the sky. All I could see was an enormous cap of snow pulled low over the giant's brow.
We walked single file, the hunter leading the way, climbing narrow paths where two people couldn't have gone side by side. That made conversation just about impossible.
Beyond the basalt wall of the Stapi fjord, the ground was at first a grassy, fibrous peat, the residue of the ancient vegetation that once choked the marshes of the peninsula. There was enough of this fuel — still untouched — to heat the whole population of Iceland for a century. Measured from the bottom of some of the ravines, this vast peat bog stood as much as seventy feet high in places, and showed layer upon layer of charred debris, separated by thin sheets of pumice tuff.
True nephew of Professor Lidenbrock that I was, I studied the mineral curiosities laid out in this huge cabinet of natural history with real interest, in spite of my worries; and at the same time I ran back through the whole geological history of Iceland in my mind.
This strange island clearly rose up out of the depths of the sea in a relatively recent epoch. Maybe it's even still rising, by some movement too slow to feel. If that's the case, its origin can only be put down to the action of underground fires. And in that case, Humphry Davy's theory, Saknussemm's document, my uncle's whole grand claim — all of it went up in smoke. This idea led me to examine the nature of the ground closely, and I soon worked out the sequence of events that had governed the island's formation.
Iceland, entirely lacking any sedimentary terrain, is made up solely of volcanic tuff — that is, an agglomerate of stones and rocks with a porous texture. Before the volcanoes existed, it was a mass of trap rock, slowly heaved above the waves by the push of the central forces. The inner fires had not yet burst out into the open.
But later, a wide fissure opened diagonally across the island, from southwest to northwest, and through it the whole trachytic paste gradually flowed out. The thing happened without violence back then; the opening was enormous, and the molten matter, thrown up from the bowels of the globe, spread quietly out in vast sheets or in rounded, breast-shaped masses. This was the age of the feldspars, the syenites, and the porphyries.
But thanks to this outpouring, the thickness of the island grew considerably, and with it, its power to resist. You can imagine what a quantity of elastic fluids got stored up inside it once it offered no outlet at all, after the trachytic crust had cooled. So there came a moment when the mechanical force of these gases was such that they lifted the heavy shell and hollowed out tall chimneys for themselves. That's how the volcano was made, from the heaving-up of the crust — and then the crater, suddenly punched through at the volcano's summit.
Then the eruptive phenomena gave way to the volcanic ones. Through the newly formed openings came, first, the basaltic discharges, of which the plain we were crossing at that very moment offered the most marvelous specimens to our eyes. We were walking over these heavy, dark-gray rocks that the cooling had cast into prisms with hexagonal bases. Far off could be seen a great many flattened cones, each of which had once been a fire-vomiting mouth.
Then, once the basaltic eruption was spent, the volcano — its force swollen by that of the extinct craters — gave passage to the lavas and to those tuffs of ash and scoria whose long streams I could see scattered down its flanks like a rich head of hair.
Such was the sequence of events that put Iceland together; all of it came from the action of the inner fires, and to suppose that the internal mass did not remain in a permanent state of incandescent liquidity was madness. Madness above all to claim you could reach the center of the globe!
So I reassured myself about how our enterprise would turn out, even as I marched to the assault of the Sneffels.
The route grew harder and harder. The ground rose; splinters of rock shifted underfoot, and it took the most scrupulous attention to avoid a dangerous fall.
Hans went forward calmly, as though over level ground. Sometimes he vanished behind the big blocks and we lost sight of him for a moment; then a sharp whistle, escaping his lips, showed us the way to follow. Often, too, he stopped, gathered a few chips of rock, arranged them in a recognizable pattern, and so built up landmarks meant to mark the road back. A good precaution in itself — but one that later events would make useless.
Three exhausting hours of walking had brought us only to the base of the mountain. There, Hans signaled a halt, and a hasty meal was shared out among us all. My uncle ate his mouthfuls double to go faster. But this refueling stop was also a rest stop, so he had to wait on the good pleasure of the guide, who gave the signal to move on an hour later. The three Icelanders, as taciturn as their comrade the hunter, didn't say a single word and ate sparingly.
Now we began to climb the slopes of the Sneffels. Its snowy summit, by an optical illusion common in the mountains, looked very close to me — and yet, what long hours before we'd reach it! What exhaustion, above all! The stones, bound together by no cement of earth, by no grass, gave way under our feet and went tumbling down into the plain with the speed of an avalanche.
In certain spots, the flanks of the mountain made an angle with the horizon of at least thirty-six degrees; it was impossible to climb them straight on, and these stony steeps had to be worked around, not without difficulty. Then we lent one another a hand with our staffs.
I have to say that my uncle stayed as close to me as he could. He never let me out of his sight, and more than once his arm gave me a solid support. For his own part, he no doubt had an inborn sense of balance, because he never stumbled. The Icelanders, though loaded down, climbed with a mountaineer's agility.
Looking at the height of the Sneffels's peak, it seemed impossible to me that anyone could reach it from this side, unless the angle of the slopes eased off. Luckily, after an hour of hard labor and feats of strength, in the middle of the vast carpet of snow spread over the volcano's rump, a kind of staircase appeared out of nowhere and simplified our ascent. It was formed by one of those torrents of stone thrown out by the eruptions, whose Icelandic name is "stinâ." If this torrent hadn't been stopped in its fall by the lay of the mountain's flanks, it would have gone plunging into the sea and made new islands.
Just as it was, it served us well. The slopes were getting steeper, but these stone steps let us climb them easily — so quickly, in fact, that when I fell behind for a moment while my companions kept climbing, I already saw them shrunk by distance to a microscopic size.
By seven in the evening we had climbed the two thousand steps of the staircase, and we stood above a swelling of the mountain, a kind of shelf on which rested the cone proper of the crater.
The sea stretched out three thousand two hundred feet below us. We had passed the line of perpetual snow, which lies fairly low in Iceland because of the constant damp of the climate. The cold was fierce; the wind blew hard. I was worn out. The Professor saw clearly that my legs would carry me no further, and, in spite of his impatience, he decided to stop. So he signaled to the hunter, who shook his head and said:
"Ofvanför."
"It seems we have to go higher up," said my uncle.
Then he asked Hans the reason for his answer.
"Mistour," replied the guide.
"Ja, mistour," repeated one of the Icelanders in a frightened tone.
"What does that word mean?" I asked, uneasy.
"Look," said my uncle.
I turned my eyes toward the plain. An immense column of pulverized pumice, sand, and dust was rising, spinning like a waterspout; the wind was driving it against the flank of the Sneffels we clung to. This opaque curtain, spread in front of the sun, cast a great shadow over the mountain. If this whirlwind tipped our way, it would inevitably wrap us up in its swirls. The phenomenon — common enough when the wind blows off the glaciers — goes by the name "mistour" in the Icelandic tongue.
"Hastigt, hastigt!" cried our guide.
Without knowing any Danish, I understood we had to follow Hans as fast as we could. He began to circle the cone of the crater, but at a slant, to make the walking easier. Soon the whirlwind crashed down on the mountain, which shuddered under the blow; the stones caught in the eddies of the wind flew in a shower, as in an eruption. Luckily, we were on the opposite slope, sheltered from all danger. Without the guide's precaution, our bodies — shredded, ground to dust — would have come raining down far away, like the product of some unknown meteor.
Even so, Hans did not think it prudent to spend the night on the flanks of the cone. We continued our ascent in zigzags; the fifteen hundred feet that remained to climb took nearly five hours; the detours, the slants, and the countermarches measured at least three leagues. I was finished. I was going under, from cold and hunger. The air, a little thin now, wasn't enough for my lungs to work on.
At last, at eleven o'clock at night, in total darkness, the summit of the Sneffels was reached — and, before going to shelter inside the crater, I had time to catch sight of "the midnight sun" at the lowest point of its course, throwing its pale rays over the sleeping island at my feet.
Supper was wolfed down in a hurry, and our little troop bedded down as best it could. The mattress was hard, the shelter flimsy, the whole situation thoroughly miserable — five thousand feet above sea level. And yet my sleep that night was uncommonly peaceful, one of the best I'd had in a long while. I didn't even dream.
The next morning we woke half frozen in the sharp, biting air, under the rays of a glorious sun. I left my granite bed and went to drink in the magnificent scene unrolling before my eyes.
I was standing on the summit of one of Sneffels' two peaks — the southern one. From up there my gaze swept over the greater part of the island. That trick of perspective, common to all great heights, lifted up the coastlines while the central regions seemed to sink away. It was as though one of Helbesmer's relief maps lay spread out beneath my feet. I could see the deep valleys crisscrossing in every direction, the precipices sunk like wells, the lakes shrunk to ponds, the rivers dwindled to streams. On my right marched glaciers without number and peak upon peak, a few of them plumed with faint wisps of smoke. The undulations of those endless mountains, their sheets of snow seeming to make them foam, called to my mind the surface of a heaving sea. And when I turned toward the west, the ocean stretched out there in all its majesty, like a continuation of those rolling, fleece-white summits. Where the land ended and the waves began, my eye could scarcely tell.
I lost myself like that in the marvelous rapture the high peaks give — and this time without vertigo, for I was growing used at last to these sublime contemplations. My dazzled eyes bathed in the transparent flood of sunlight; I forgot who I was, where I was, and lived instead the life of the elves and sylphs, those imaginary creatures of Scandinavian myth. I drank myself drunk on the sheer delight of the heights, without a thought for the abysses into which my fate would soon be plunging me. But I was called back to the world by the arrival of the professor and Hans, who joined me on the summit of the peak.
My uncle turned toward the west and pointed to a faint vapor, a haze, a suggestion of land riding above the line of the waves.
"Greenland," he said.
"Greenland?" I cried.
"Yes — we're not thirty-five leagues from it, and during the thaws the polar bears drift all the way down to Iceland, carried along on the ice floes from the north. But no matter. We're standing on the summit of Sneffels. Here are its two peaks, one to the south, one to the north. Hans will tell us what the Icelanders call the one holding us up at this moment."
The question put to him, the hunter answered: "Scartaris."
My uncle shot me a triumphant look.
"To the crater!" he said.
The crater of Sneffels was an inverted cone, its mouth perhaps half a league across. Its depth I put at around two thousand feet. Imagine the state of a vessel like that when it filled up with thunder and flame. The bottom of the funnel couldn't have measured more than five hundred feet around, so that its fairly gentle slopes made it easy enough to reach the lower part. In spite of myself I kept comparing this crater to an enormous flared blunderbuss — and the comparison frightened me.
"To climb down into a blunderbuss," I thought, "when it's maybe loaded and might go off at the slightest jolt — that's the work of madmen."
But there was no backing out now. With an indifferent air, Hans took the lead again. I followed him without a word.
To make the descent easier, Hans traced long, drawn-out ellipses inside the cone. We had to walk through the volcanic rock, some of it so loosely lodged in its sockets that it broke free and went bounding all the way to the bottom of the pit. Each fall set off strange, ringing echoes.
Certain stretches of the cone were sheeted in interior glaciers. There Hans went forward only with extreme caution, sounding the ground with his iron-tipped staff to find the crevasses. At the more doubtful passages it became necessary to rope ourselves together with a long line, so that anyone whose foot suddenly went out from under him would be held up by his companions. Prudent enough, that solidarity — but it didn't rule out all danger.
Still, despite the difficulties of descending slopes the guide didn't know, the route was made without mishap, apart from one bundle of ropes that slipped from an Icelander's hands and took the shortest way straight to the bottom of the pit.
By noon we had arrived. I raised my head and saw the upper mouth of the cone, framing a scrap of sky of a strangely reduced circumference — but almost perfectly round. At a single point the peak of Scartaris broke the ring, thrusting up into the vast beyond.
At the bottom of the crater three chimneys opened up, the shafts through which, in the days of Sneffels' eruptions, the central furnace had driven out its lava and its vapors. Each of these chimneys was about a hundred feet across. They gaped there beneath our feet. I hadn't the courage to look down into them. Professor Lidenbrock, for his part, had made a quick study of how they lay; he was breathless, running from one to the next, gesturing and flinging out unintelligible words. Hans and his companions, seated on chunks of lava, watched him at it; they plainly took him for a lunatic.
All at once my uncle let out a shout. I thought he'd lost his footing and gone tumbling into one of the three gulfs. But no. There he was, arms spread, legs planted apart, standing before a block of granite set at the center of the crater like an enormous pedestal made to hold a statue of Pluto. He had the look of a man dumbfounded — but the dumbfoundedness soon gave way to a wild, delirious joy.
"Axel! Axel!" he cried. "Come here! Come!"
I ran to him. Neither Hans nor the Icelanders stirred.
"Look," said the professor.
And, sharing his astonishment if not his joy, I read on the western face of the block, in runic characters half eaten away by time, this thousand-times-accursed name:
ᛐ ᛦ ᚳ ᛅ ᚼ ᛐ ᚴ ᚳ ᚢ ᚼ ᚼ ᛅ ᛯ
"Arne Saknussemm!" cried my uncle. "Will you doubt now?"
I made no answer, and I went back, dismayed, to my bench of lava. The proof of it crushed me.
How long I sat there sunk in my thoughts, I have no idea. All I know is that when I lifted my head I saw only my uncle and Hans at the bottom of the crater. The Icelanders had been dismissed, and were now heading back down the outer slopes of Sneffels to return to Stapi.
Hans slept peacefully at the foot of a rock, in a channel of hardened lava where he'd rigged himself a makeshift bed. My uncle prowled the bottom of the crater like a wild beast in a trapper's pit. I had neither the wish nor the strength to get up, and, following the guide's example, I let myself sink into an uneasy, aching doze, fancying I could hear noises or feel shudders running through the flanks of the mountain.
So passed that first night at the bottom of the crater.
The next day a gray, cloudy, heavy sky settled down over the summit of the cone. I didn't notice it so much from the gloom of the pit as from the fury that seized my uncle.
I understood the reason for it, and a last remnant of hope crept back into my heart. Here is why.
Of the three routes open beneath our feet, only one had been followed by Saknussemm. According to the Icelandic scholar, it was to be recognized by that peculiarity singled out in the cryptogram — that the shadow of Scartaris came to caress its edges during the last days of June.
You could, in fact, think of that sharp peak as the gnomon of a huge sundial, its shadow on one given day pointing out the road to the center of the globe.
Now, if the sun failed to appear — no shadow. And consequently, no signpost. It was the 25th of June. Let the sky stay overcast for six days, and we would have to put the observation off to another year.
I won't try to paint Professor Lidenbrock's helpless rage. The day dragged by, and no shadow came to stretch across the floor of the crater. Hans never budged from his place; he must nonetheless have wondered what we were waiting for — if he wondered anything at all! My uncle didn't address a single word to me. His eyes, forever turned toward the sky, lost themselves in its gray and misty tint.
On the 26th, still nothing; rain mixed with snow fell all day long. Hans built a hut out of pieces of lava. I took a certain pleasure in following with my eye the thousands of makeshift waterfalls streaming down the sides of the cone, each stone swelling their deafening murmur.
My uncle could no longer contain himself. It was enough to try a far more patient man, for this was truly to founder within sight of port.
But heaven never fails to mingle great joys with great sorrows, and it was holding in reserve for Professor Lidenbrock a satisfaction to match his maddening frustration.
The next day the sky was overcast once more. But on Sunday, the 28th of June, the antepenultimate day of the month, with the change of the moon came a change in the weather. The sun poured its rays in floods into the crater. Every hillock, every rock, every stone, every jutting edge took its share of that beneficent radiance and instantly cast its shadow on the ground. Among them all, Scartaris' shadow stood out like a keen blade and began to swing imperceptibly toward the blazing star.
My uncle turned with it.
At noon, in its shortest phase, it came to lick softly at the rim of the central chimney.
"There it is!" cried the professor. "There it is! To the center of the globe!" he added — in Danish.
I looked at Hans.
"Forüt!" said the guide calmly.
"Forward!" answered my uncle.
It was thirteen minutes past one in the afternoon.
The real journey now began.
Up to this point the labor had outweighed the difficulties; now the difficulties were about to be born in earnest beneath our feet.
I had not yet plunged my gaze into that bottomless well I was about to bury myself in. The moment had come. I could still either make my peace with the whole enterprise or refuse to attempt it. But I was ashamed to flinch in front of the hunter. Hans accepted the adventure so calmly, with such indifference, such perfect unconcern for any danger, that I blushed at the thought of being less brave than he was. Alone, I'd have launched into the whole grand series of arguments; but with the guide standing there, I held my tongue. One of my thoughts flew off to my pretty girl in Virland, and I stepped up to the central chimney.
I've already said that it measured a hundred feet across, or three hundred feet around. I leaned out over a rock that jutted from the edge, and I looked down; my hair stood on end. The feeling of the void took hold of my whole being. I felt my center of gravity shift inside me, and vertigo rose to my head like drunkenness. Nothing is more intoxicating than the pull of the abyss. I was about to fall. A hand caught me. Hans's. Decidedly, I had not taken enough lessons in chasms at the Frelsers-Kirk in Copenhagen.
Still, brief as my glance into the shaft had been, I'd made out how it was shaped. Its walls, nearly sheer, nonetheless offered plenty of jutting ledges that ought to make the descent easier; but if there was no shortage of staircase, there was no banister at all. A rope fixed at the mouth would have been enough to hold us up, but how were we to unfasten it once we'd reached its lower end?
My uncle used a very simple trick to get around the problem. He uncoiled a rope about as thick as a thumb and four hundred feet long; he let the first half run out, then wound it around a projecting block of lava and flung the other half down into the chimney. Each of us could then climb down, gripping both halves of the rope together in one hand so it couldn't slip loose; and once we'd descended two hundred feet, nothing would be easier than to haul it back down by letting go of one end and pulling on the other. Then we'd repeat the maneuver usque ad infinitum — over and over, without end.
"Now," said my uncle, once these preparations were finished, "let's see to the baggage. It'll be divided into three packs, and each of us will strap one onto his back — I mean only the fragile items."
The daring professor evidently did not count us in that last category.
"Hans," he went on, "will take charge of the tools and part of the provisions; you, Axel, of a second third of the provisions and the weapons; and I, of the rest of the provisions and the delicate instruments."
"But," I said, "what about the clothes, and this whole mass of ropes and ladders — who's going to carry those down?"
"They'll go down by themselves."
"How's that?" I asked, thoroughly astonished.
"You'll see."
My uncle liked bold methods, and used them without hesitation. At his order, Hans gathered all the non-fragile items into a single bundle, and this pack, firmly roped, was simply pitched into the gulf.
I heard the deep roar it made as it displaced the layers of air. My uncle, leaning over the abyss, followed the plunge of his baggage with a satisfied eye, and only straightened up once it was out of sight.
"Good," he said. "Now for us."
I ask any honest man whether it was possible to hear such words without a shudder!
The professor strapped the pack of instruments onto his back; Hans took the one with the tools, and I the one with the weapons. The descent began in the following order: Hans, my uncle, and me. It went on in deep silence, broken only by the fall of rock fragments tumbling into the abyss.
I let myself slide down, so to speak, gripping the double rope frantically in one hand while I braced myself with my iron-tipped staff in the other. A single idea dominated me: I was terrified the footing would give out under me. The rope struck me as far too flimsy to bear the weight of three people. I used it as little as I could, performing miracles of balance on the lava ledges, which my foot tried to grip like a hand.
Whenever one of these slippery footholds worked loose under Hans's step, he'd say in his calm voice:
"Gif akt!"
"Watch out!" my uncle would repeat.
After half an hour we had reached the surface of a rock firmly wedged into the wall of the chimney.
Hans pulled the rope by one of its ends; the other rose into the air; after clearing the rock above, it dropped back down, scraping loose bits of stone and lava — a kind of rain, or rather a very dangerous hail.
Leaning out over our narrow platform, I noticed that the bottom of the pit was still nowhere in sight.
The rope maneuver started up again, and half an hour later we had gained another two hundred feet of depth.
I doubt whether the most rabid geologist alive would have tried, during that descent, to study the nature of the ground around him. For my part, I hardly gave it a thought; whether the strata were Pliocene, Miocene, Eocene, Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, Permian, Carboniferous, Devonian, Silurian, or primitive, it worried me very little. But the professor, no doubt, was making his observations or taking his notes, because at one of the halts he said to me:
"The farther I go, the more confidence I feel; the arrangement of these volcanic strata bears out Davy's theory absolutely. We're deep in primordial ground, ground in which the chemical reaction of the metals took place as they caught fire on contact with air and water. I flatly reject the whole notion of a central heat; at any rate, we'll soon see."
Always the same conclusion. You'll understand that I didn't amuse myself by arguing. My silence was taken for agreement, and the descent resumed.
At the end of three hours, I still couldn't glimpse the bottom of the chimney. When I lifted my head, I could see its mouth noticeably shrinking; because of their slight inward slope, the walls were tending to close in on one another, and little by little the darkness deepened.
Yet still we kept going down; it seemed to me that the stones breaking loose from the walls were being swallowed up with a duller echo, as though they must soon be striking the bottom of the abyss.
Since I'd been careful to note our rope maneuvers exactly, I was able to work out precisely the depth we'd reached and the time that had passed.
By then we had repeated fourteen times a maneuver that took half an hour each. That came to seven hours, plus fourteen quarter-hour rests, or three and a half hours — ten and a half hours in all. We had set out at one o'clock; it must now be eleven.
As for the depth we'd reached, those fourteen maneuvers of a two-hundred-foot rope gave two thousand eight hundred feet.
At that moment Hans's voice made itself heard:
"Halt!" he said.
I stopped short just as I was about to knock my feet against my uncle's head.
"We're here," he said.
"Where?" I asked, letting myself slide down beside him.
"At the bottom of the vertical chimney."
"There's no other way out, then?"
"Yes — a sort of corridor I can just make out, slanting off to the right. We'll look at that tomorrow. Let's have supper first, and then we'll sleep."
The darkness was not yet complete. We opened the provision sack, ate, and bedded down as best we could on a mattress of stones and lava fragments.
And when, stretched out on my back, I opened my eyes, I saw a bright point at the far end of that tube three thousand feet long, which had turned into a gigantic telescope.
It was a star, stripped of all its twinkling, and which, by my calculations, must be Sigma of the Little Bear.
Then I fell into a deep sleep.
At eight in the morning a ray of daylight came to wake us. The thousand facets of lava on the walls caught it as it passed and scattered it like a shower of sparks.
The glow was strong enough to let us make out the things around us.
"Well, Axel, what do you say?" cried my uncle, rubbing his hands together. "Did you ever spend a quieter night in our house on the König-strasse? No rattle of carts, no shouting of hawkers, no bawling of boatmen!"
"No doubt we're very peaceful at the bottom of this well; but there's something frightening about the very stillness of it."
"Come now!" my uncle exclaimed. "If you're already scared, what will you be later on? We haven't gone so much as an inch into the bowels of the earth yet!"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that we've only reached the ground level of the island! This long vertical tube, the one that opens out at the crater of the Sneffels, stops at roughly the level of the sea."
"Are you certain of that?"
"Quite certain. Check the barometer and you'll see!"
And it was true: the mercury, after climbing little by little inside the instrument as we descended, had come to rest at twenty-nine inches.
"You see," the professor went on, "we still have only the pressure of a single atmosphere, and I can't wait for the moment when the manometer takes over from this barometer."
Indeed, the barometer would become useless to us the instant the weight of the air overtook the pressure it registered at ocean level.
"But," I said, "isn't there reason to fear that this ever-increasing pressure will become quite painful?"
"No. We'll descend slowly, and our lungs will grow used to breathing a more compressed atmosphere. Balloonists end up short of air as they rise into the upper layers; we, on the contrary, may end up with too much. But I prefer it that way. Let's not lose a moment. Where's the bundle that went down into the mountain ahead of us?"
I remembered then that we'd searched for it in vain the evening before. My uncle put the question to Hans, who, after a careful look with his hunter's eyes, answered:
"Der huppe!"
"Up there."
Sure enough, the bundle was snagged on a jut of rock a hundred feet or so above our heads. At once the nimble Icelander scrambled up like a cat, and in a few minutes the bundle rejoined us.
"Now," said my uncle, "let's have breakfast — but let's breakfast like men who may have a long march ahead of them."
The biscuit and dried meat we washed down with a few mouthfuls of water laced with juniper spirit.
Breakfast over, my uncle drew from his pocket a notebook meant for his observations. He took up his various instruments one after another and jotted down the following readings:
Monday, the 1st of July.
Chronometer: 8 h. 17 m. in the morning. Barometer: 29 in. 7 lines. Thermometer: 6°. Direction: E.-S.-E.
This last observation applied to the dark gallery and was given by the compass.
"Now, Axel," the professor cried in a voice full of enthusiasm, "we are truly going to plunge into the bowels of the globe. Here, then, is the very moment when our journey begins."
So saying, my uncle took in one hand the Ruhmkorff apparatus slung around his neck, and with the other he switched the electric current into the coil of the lantern; a fairly bright light drove back the darkness of the gallery.
Hans carried the second apparatus, and it too was set going. This ingenious use of electricity let us travel for a long while by an artificial daylight of our own, even in the midst of the most flammable gases.
"On our way!" said my uncle.
Each of us shouldered his pack again. Hans took charge of shoving ahead of him the bundle of ropes and clothing, and — with me the third in line — we entered the gallery.
Just as I was about to swallow myself up in that dark passage, I lifted my head and caught one last glimpse, through the shaft of the immense tube, of that Iceland sky "which I was never to see again."
The lava, at the last eruption of 1229, had forced itself a passage through this tunnel. It coated the inside with a thick, gleaming glaze, and the electric light bounced off it a hundred times brighter.
The whole difficulty of the route lay in not sliding too fast down a slope tilted at about forty-five degrees; luckily, certain worn spots and swellings in the rock served as steps, and we had only to climb down while letting our baggage run ahead of us on the end of a long rope.
But what became steps beneath our feet turned to stalactites on the other walls. The lava, porous in places, was studded with little rounded blisters; crystals of opaque quartz, set with clear drops of glass and hanging from the vault like chandeliers, seemed to light up as we passed. You'd have thought the genies of the abyss were illuminating their palace to receive their guests from the surface of the earth.
"It's magnificent!" I cried in spite of myself. "What a sight, Uncle! Do you see these shades of lava running from red-brown to brilliant yellow by the faintest gradations? And these crystals glowing at us like luminous globes?"
"Ah, now you're coming round, Axel!" my uncle answered. "Ah, so you find it splendid, my boy! You'll see plenty more, I hope. March! March!"
He'd have done better to say "slide," for we were letting ourselves go, effortlessly, down the tilting slopes. This was Virgil's facilis descensus Averni — the easy way down into the underworld. The compass, which I consulted often, pointed southeast with unshakable steadiness. This flow of lava swerved neither one way nor the other. It held to the straightness of a drawn line.
Yet the heat wasn't rising in any noticeable way; that bore out Davy's theories, and more than once I consulted the thermometer in astonishment. Two hours after starting out, it still read only 10° — an increase of just 4°. That gave me grounds to suppose our descent was more horizontal than vertical. As for knowing exactly what depth we'd reached, nothing was easier. The professor measured precisely the angles of deviation and slope of the route — but he kept the results of his calculations to himself.
Around eight in the evening he gave the signal to halt. Hans sat down at once; the lamps were hung from a shelf of lava. We were in a kind of cavern where the air was in no way lacking. On the contrary. Certain gusts reached us. What caused them? What disturbance in the atmosphere gave rise to them? It was a question I didn't try to settle just then; hunger and exhaustion had left me incapable of reasoning. Seven straight hours of descent aren't made without a great expenditure of strength. I was worn out. So the word halt was a pleasure to hear. Hans spread a few provisions on a block of lava, and each of us ate with appetite. One thing worried me, though: our reserve of water was half gone. My uncle counted on refilling it from underground springs, but so far there'd been absolutely none. I couldn't help drawing his attention to the subject.
"This absence of springs surprises you?" he said.
"It does — it even worries me. We've only got water enough for five days."
"Set your mind at ease, Axel. I promise you we'll find water, and more than we'll want."
"When?"
"When we've left this casing of lava behind. How do you expect springs to break out through walls like these?"
"But perhaps this flow runs on to great depths. It seems to me we haven't come very far yet, not vertically at least."
"What makes you suppose that?"
"Because if we were very deep inside the earth's crust, the heat would be stronger."
"According to your system," my uncle replied. "And what does the thermometer show?"
"Barely fifteen degrees — an increase of only nine degrees since we started."
"Well then, draw your conclusion."
"Here's my conclusion. According to the most exact observations, the rise in temperature inside the globe is one degree for every hundred feet. But certain local conditions can alter that figure. At Yakutsk in Siberia, for instance, it's been noted that the increase of one degree occurred every thirty-six feet — which obviously depends on the conductivity of the rocks. I'll add, too, that in the neighborhood of an extinct volcano, and through gneiss, it's been observed that the temperature rose by only one degree for every hundred and twenty-five feet. Let's take that last figure, then, which is the most favorable, and calculate."
"Calculate away, my boy."
"Nothing could be easier," I said, laying out the figures in my notebook. "Nine times a hundred and twenty-five feet gives eleven hundred and twenty-five feet of depth."
"Exactly right."
"Well then?"
"Well, according to my observations, we've reached ten thousand feet below sea level."
"Is that possible?"
"Yes — or figures are no longer figures!"
The professor's calculations were correct. We had already passed by six thousand feet the greatest depths ever reached by man, such as the mines of Kitz-Bahl in the Tyrol and those of Wüttemberg in Bohemia.
The temperature, which should have been eighty-one degrees at that spot, was barely fifteen. It gave one singularly much to think about.
The next morning, Tuesday the 30th of June, at six o'clock, we took up the descent again.
We were still following the lava gallery — a genuine natural ramp, gentle as those inclined slopes that still take the place of a staircase in old houses. So it went until seventeen minutes past noon, the precise instant when we caught up with Hans, who had just stopped.
"Ah!" cried my uncle. "We've reached the end of the chimney."
I looked around me. We were standing at the center of a crossroads, where two passages came to an end, both of them dark and narrow. Which one should we take? There was the difficulty.
Still, my uncle refused to appear to hesitate, either in front of me or in front of the guide. He pointed to the eastern tunnel, and before long all three of us were pushing into it.
In any case, any hesitation before that forking path would have dragged on forever, because there wasn't a single clue to settle the choice one way or the other. We had to leave it entirely to chance.
The slope of this new gallery was barely noticeable, and its cross-section wildly uneven. At times a succession of arches unrolled before our steps like the side aisles of a Gothic cathedral; medieval artists could have studied here every form of that religious architecture whose defining element is the pointed arch. A mile further on, our heads bent low beneath the flattened vaults of the Romanesque style, and thick pillars set into the rock mass sagged under the weight of the arches coming down on them. In certain places, all that gave way to low, cramped structures that looked like the work of beavers, and we crawled on our hands and knees through narrow burrows.
The heat held at a bearable level. In spite of myself I thought of how fierce it must once have been, when the lava vomited up by the Sneffels came pouring down this route that was so peaceful today. I pictured the torrents of fire smashing against the angles of the gallery, and the buildup of superheated vapors in that cramped space!
"Just so long," I thought, "as the old volcano doesn't take a late fancy to start up again!"
I said none of these reflections to my uncle. He wouldn't have understood them. His one and only thought was to press forward. He marched, he slid, he even tumbled downhill, with a conviction that, when all was said and done, you couldn't help but admire.
At six in the evening, after a not-too-tiring stroll, we had gained two leagues to the south, but barely a quarter of a mile in depth.
My uncle gave the signal to rest. We ate without much talk, and fell asleep without much thought.
Our arrangements for the night were very simple: a travel blanket to roll up in was the whole of our bedding. We had neither cold nor unwelcome visitors to fear. Travelers who plunge into the deserts of Africa, or into the heart of the New World's forests, are forced to keep watch over one another during the hours of sleep; but here, there was absolute solitude and complete safety. Savages or wild beasts — none of those dangerous breeds was anything to worry about.
We woke the next morning fresh and rested. We took up the road again. We were following a lava path as we had the day before. It was impossible to make out the nature of the ground it cut through. The tunnel, instead of sinking deeper into the bowels of the globe, was tending to become absolutely horizontal. I even thought I noticed it was climbing back up toward the surface of the earth. This became so obvious around ten in the morning — and, as a result, so tiring — that I was forced to slow our pace.
"Well, Axel?" the professor said impatiently.
"Well, I can't go on," I answered.
"What! After three hours' walk on such an easy road!"
"Easy, I won't argue — but tiring, that's for certain."
"How so, when all we have to do is go down!"
"Go up, if you don't mind!"
"Up!" said my uncle, shrugging.
"No question about it. For the last half hour the slopes have changed, and if we keep following them like this we'll certainly end up back on the soil of Iceland."
The professor shook his head like a man who has no intention of being convinced. I tried to pick the conversation back up. He didn't answer, and gave the signal to move on. I saw plainly enough that his silence was nothing but bottled-up bad temper.
Still, I had shouldered my burden again bravely, and I was keeping close behind Hans, with my uncle out in front. I was determined not to be left behind; my great worry was to never lose sight of my companions. I shuddered at the thought of getting lost in the depths of this labyrinth.
Besides, though the rising road was growing harder, I consoled myself with the thought that it was bringing me closer to the surface of the earth. That was a hope. Every step confirmed it.
At noon a change came over the walls of the gallery. I noticed it in the weakening of the electric light reflected off them. To the lava lining now succeeded bare living rock; the mass was made up of layers that were tilted, and often set vertically. We were smack in the middle of the transition era, smack in the Silurian period (so named because the ground from this period stretches widely across England, in the regions once inhabited by the Celtic tribe of the Silures).
"It's obvious!" I exclaimed. "The waters laid down these schists, these limestones and sandstones during the second era of the earth! We're turning our backs on the granite mass! We're like people from Hamburg taking the road to Hanover to get to Lübeck!"
I should have kept my observations to myself. But my geologist's temperament won out over prudence, and Uncle Lidenbrock heard my outbursts.
"What's the matter with you?" he said.
"Look!" I answered, pointing out to him the varied succession of sandstones, limestones, and the first signs of slate-bearing ground.
"Well?"
"Here we are, arrived at the very period when the first plants and the first animals appeared!"
"Ah! You think so?"
"But look, examine, observe!"
I forced the professor to play his lamp over the walls of the gallery. I expected some exclamation from him. Far from it — he didn't say a word, and went on his way.
Had he understood me or not? Was he unwilling to admit — out of the wounded pride of an uncle and a scholar — that he'd blundered in choosing the eastern tunnel? Or was he set on following this passage all the way to its end? It was clear that we had left the lava road, and that this path could not possibly lead to the furnace of the Sneffels.
Still, I asked myself whether I wasn't granting too much importance to this change in the terrain. Was I fooling myself? Were we really crossing these layers of rock stacked on top of the granite mass?
"If I'm right," I thought, "I ought to find some remnant of a primitive plant, and then I'll simply have to bow to the evidence. Let's have a look."
I hadn't gone a hundred steps before undeniable proof offered itself to my eyes. It had to be there — in the Silurian era, the seas held more than fifteen hundred species of plants and animals. My feet, used to the hard lava floor, suddenly trod on a dust made of the debris of plants and shells. On the walls you could plainly see the imprints of fucus and lycopods; Professor Lidenbrock could not possibly have been mistaken about them — but he shut his eyes, I imagine, and went on his way with a steady, unbroken step.
This was stubbornness pushed past every limit. I couldn't stand it any longer. I picked up a perfectly preserved shell, which had belonged to an animal roughly like the modern wood louse; then I caught up with my uncle and said:
"Look!"
"Well," he answered calmly, "that's the shell of a crustacean from the extinct order of trilobites. Nothing more."
"But don't you conclude from it—?"
"What you conclude yourself? Yes. Perfectly. We've left the layer of granite and the lava road behind. It's possible I made a mistake; but I won't be certain of my error until I've reached the end of this gallery."
"You're right to act this way, Uncle, and I'd back you completely — if we didn't have a more and more menacing danger to fear."
"And what's that?"
"The lack of water."
"Well then! We'll put ourselves on rations, Axel."
And so it came to rationing. Our supply couldn't last more than three days. That was the grim arithmetic I worked out at supper that evening. And, worst of all, we had little hope of striking a live spring in these strata of the transition period.
All the next day the gallery unrolled its endless arches ahead of us. We walked almost without a word. Hans's silence was catching.
The path didn't rise — not noticeably, anyway; at times it even seemed to tilt downward. But that faint slope was no comfort to the Professor, because the character of the rock never changed, and the transition period only asserted itself more strongly.
The electric light struck brilliant sparks from the shale, the limestone, and the old red sandstone of the walls; you might have thought yourself in a cutting driven through the heart of Devonshire — the county that gave its name to this kind of formation. Splendid samples of marble sheathed the walls: some an agate gray shot with whimsical white veins, others flesh-pink or yellow blotched with red, and further on those dark-toned griottes in which the limestone flares up in vivid shades.
Most of these marbles carried the imprints of primitive animals; but since the day before, creation had clearly taken a step forward. Instead of the rudimentary trilobites, I could now make out the remains of a more advanced order — among them ganoid fishes and those Sauropteris in which the paleontologist's eye has learned to recognize the first forms of the reptile. The Devonian seas were home to great numbers of such creatures, and they laid them down by the thousand on these newly formed rocks.
It was becoming plain that we were climbing back up the ladder of animal life — the ladder whose summit is man. But Professor Lidenbrock didn't seem to notice.
He was waiting on one of two things: either a vertical shaft to open under his feet and let him resume his descent, or an obstacle to bar his way altogether. But evening came and neither hope was answered.
On Friday, after a night in which I began to feel the first torments of thirst, our little band plunged once more into the windings of the gallery.
After ten hours of marching, I noticed that the glow of our lamps on the walls was fading strangely. The marble, the shale, the limestone, the sandstone were giving way to a dark, dull facing. At a point where the tunnel narrowed sharply, I leaned a hand against the wall.
When I took it away, it was completely black. I looked closer. We were in the middle of a coal seam.
"A coal mine!" I cried.
"A mine without miners," my uncle replied.
"Eh — who knows?"
"I know," the Professor answered curtly, "and I'm certain this gallery, cut through these beds of coal, was not made by the hand of man. But whether it's nature's work or not, I couldn't care less. It's supper time. Let's eat."
Hans put together a little food. I barely ate, and I drank the few drops of water that made up my ration. The guide's flask, half full — that was all that was left to slake the thirst of three men.
After the meal, my two companions stretched out on their blankets and found in sleep a cure for their exhaustion. As for me, I couldn't sleep, and I counted the hours until morning.
On Saturday, at six, we set off again. Twenty minutes later we reached a vast hollow; and now I could see for certain that no human hand could have dug out this seam — the vaults would have been shored up with timbering, whereas in truth they held together by a miracle of balance alone.
This sort of cavern measured a hundred feet across and a hundred and fifty high. The ground had been violently wrenched apart by some underground convulsion. The mass of earth, yielding to a mighty upward thrust, had split open, leaving this broad void — into which inhabitants of the surface were now venturing for the very first time.
The whole history of the coal age was written on those dark walls, and a geologist could easily trace its various phases. The beds of coal were separated by strata of compact sandstone or clay, and looked as if crushed flat under the weight of the layers above.
In that age of the world, which came before the secondary era, the earth clothed itself in immense vegetation, the product of two forces working together: a tropical heat and an unrelenting damp. An atmosphere of vapors wrapped the globe on every side, still hiding the sun's rays from it.
From this comes the conclusion that the high temperatures did not come from that new source; perhaps the sun itself was not yet ready to play its dazzling part. "Climates" did not yet exist, and a scorching heat spread over the whole surface of the globe, the same at the equator as at the poles. Where did it come from? From the interior of the globe.
Whatever Professor Lidenbrock's theories might say, a violent fire smoldered in the bowels of the spheroid; its action made itself felt right up to the outermost layers of the earth's crust. The plants, robbed of the sun's kindly influence, gave neither flowers nor scent, but their roots drew a fierce vitality from the burning soil of those first days.
There were few trees — only herbaceous plants, immense grasslands, ferns, lycopods, sigillaria, asterophyllites: strange families whose species numbered in the thousands back then.
And it is precisely to this exuberant vegetation that coal owes its origin. The elastic crust of the globe obeyed the movements of the liquid mass it covered. Hence fissures, hence countless subsidences; the plants, dragged down beneath the waters, little by little formed considerable heaps.
Then natural chemistry went to work: at the bottom of the seas, the masses of vegetation turned first to peat; then, under the influence of gases and the heat of fermentation, they underwent a complete mineralization.
And so were formed these immense beds of coal that the consumption of every people on earth, through long centuries yet to come, will never manage to exhaust.
These reflections came back to me as I studied the mineral wealth heaped up in this portion of the earth's mass. This coal, no doubt, will never be brought to light. Working such remote mines would demand sacrifices far too great. And what would be the point, in any case, when coal lies practically at the surface of the earth across so many regions? So there I saw these beds, untouched — and untouched they will still be when the last hour of the world strikes.
Meanwhile we kept walking, and I alone among my companions forgot the length of the road by losing myself in geological musings. The temperature stayed roughly what it had been during our passage through the lavas and shales. Only my sense of smell was troubled by a strong odor of protocarbureted hydrogen. I recognized at once, in this gallery, the presence of a notable quantity of that dangerous gas the miners call firedamp, whose explosions have so often caused appalling catastrophes.
Luckily we had the light of Ruhmkorff's ingenious apparatus. If, by ill fortune, we had explored this gallery carelessly with a torch in hand, a terrible blast would have ended the journey by wiping out the travelers.
This excursion through the coal seam lasted until evening. My uncle could barely contain the impatience the flatness of the road stirred in him. The darkness, always deep beyond twenty paces, made it impossible to judge the length of the gallery, and I was beginning to think it endless when suddenly, at six o'clock, a wall rose unexpectedly before us. To the right, to the left, above, below, there was no way through. We had reached the bottom of a dead end.
"Well — so much the better!" cried my uncle. "At least now I know where I stand. We're not on Saknussemm's road, and there's nothing to do but turn back. Let's take a night's rest, and within three days we'll have regained the point where the two galleries fork."
"Yes," I said, "if we have the strength for it!"
"And why wouldn't we?"
"Because by tomorrow the water will be gone completely."
"And will the courage be gone too?" said the Professor, fixing me with a stern eye.
I didn't dare answer him.
The next day we set out at dawn. We had to hurry. We were five days' march from the crossroads.
I won't dwell on the miseries of our retreat. My uncle bore them with the fury of a man who knows he isn't the stronger; Hans, with the resignation of his peaceable nature; and I — I admit it — complaining and despairing, unable to steel my heart against this run of bad luck.
Just as I'd foreseen, the water gave out entirely by the end of the first day's march. Our supply of liquid was reduced to gin; but that infernal stuff scorched the throat, and I couldn't even stand the sight of it. I found the heat suffocating. Fatigue had me paralyzed. More than once I nearly dropped where I stood. Then we'd halt, and my uncle or the Icelander would do their best to revive me. But I could already see that my uncle was reacting badly to the extreme exhaustion and the tortures of thirst.
At last, on Tuesday the 8th of July, dragging ourselves along on our knees and our hands, we reached the junction of the two galleries half dead. There I lay like a dead weight, stretched out on the lava floor. It was ten in the morning.
Hans and my uncle, propped against the wall, tried to nibble a few scraps of biscuit. Long groans escaped my swollen lips. I fell into a deep stupor.
After a while my uncle came over and lifted me in his arms.
"Poor child!" he murmured, with a note of real pity.
I was moved by those words, unused as I was to any tenderness from the fierce professor. I seized his trembling hands in mine. He let me, watching my face. His eyes were wet.
Then I saw him take the flask that hung at his side. To my astonishment, he raised it to my lips.
"Drink," he said.
Had I heard right? Had my uncle gone mad? I stared at him blankly. I wouldn't let myself understand.
"Drink," he said again.
And tipping up the flask, he emptied the whole of it between my lips.
Oh — boundless bliss! A mouthful of water came to wet my burning mouth, a single mouthful, but it was enough to call back the life that was leaking out of me.
I thanked my uncle with my hands pressed together.
"Yes," he said, "a mouthful of water — the last! Do you hear me? The last! I'd guarded it carefully at the bottom of my flask. Twenty times, a hundred times, I had to fight down the terrible urge to drink it. But no, Axel — I was saving it for you."
"Uncle!" I murmured, while great tears wet my eyes.
"Yes, poor child, I knew that when you reached this crossroads you'd fall half dead, and I kept my last drops of water to bring you back."
"Thank you! Thank you!" I cried.
Little as my thirst had been quenched, I had recovered some strength all the same. The muscles of my throat, clenched tight until then, were loosening; the burning in my lips had eased. I could speak.
"Look," I said, "there's only one thing we can do now. We're out of water — we have to turn back."
While I was saying this, my uncle avoided my eyes; he hung his head; his gaze slid away from mine.
"We have to turn back," I cried, "and take the road to the Sneffels again. God grant us the strength to climb back up to the top of the crater!"
"Turn back!" said my uncle, as though he were answering himself rather than me.
"Yes, turn back, and without losing a moment."
There was a long silence.
"So then, Axel," the professor went on in a strange tone, "these few drops of water haven't given you back your courage and your energy?"
"Courage!"
"I see you as beaten down as before, still speaking words of despair!"
What sort of man was I dealing with, and what schemes was that daring mind still hatching?
"You mean you won't —"
"Give up this expedition, at the very moment when everything says it can succeed? Never!"
"Then we have to resign ourselves to dying?"
"No, Axel, no! Go. I don't want your death. Let Hans go with you. Leave me alone!"
"Abandon you!"
"Leave me, I tell you! I began this journey; I'll see it through to the end, or I won't come back at all. Go, Axel, go!"
My uncle was speaking in a state of extreme agitation. His voice, tender for a moment, had turned hard and threatening again. He was battling the impossible with a grim energy. I didn't want to leave him at the bottom of this abyss, and yet, on the other hand, the instinct of self-preservation was urging me to flee from him.
The guide watched this scene with his usual indifference. And yet he understood what was passing between his two companions; our gestures made it plain enough which different way each of us was trying to drag the other. But Hans seemed to take little interest in a question on which his own life hung — ready to leave if the signal to go were given, ready to stay at the slightest wish of his master.
How I wished, at that moment, that I could make myself understood by him! My words, my groans, the ring of my voice would have overcome that cold nature. Those dangers the guide didn't seem to suspect, I would have made him grasp them, put his finger on them. Between the two of us we might have convinced the stubborn professor. If need be, we'd have forced him back up to the heights of the Sneffels!
I went over to Hans. I laid my hand on his; he didn't stir. I pointed him toward the road to the crater. He stayed motionless. My gasping face spoke all my suffering. The Icelander shook his head gently, and, calmly indicating my uncle:
"Master," he said.
"His master!" I cried. "You fool! No — he isn't the master of your life! We have to run! We have to drag him with us! Do you hear me? Do you understand?"
I had seized Hans by the arm. I wanted to force him to his feet. I struggled with him. My uncle stepped in.
"Calm down, Axel," he said. "You'll get nothing from that unshakable servant. So listen to what I have to propose."
I folded my arms, looking my uncle full in the face.
"The lack of water," he said, "is the only thing standing in the way of my plans. In this eastern gallery, made of lava, shale, and coal, we haven't met a single molecule of liquid. It's possible we'll have better luck following the western tunnel."
I shook my head with an air of deep disbelief.
"Hear me out," the professor went on, forcing his voice. "While you were lying there without moving, I went to scout the shape of that gallery. It drops straight down into the bowels of the globe, and in a few hours it'll bring us to the granite mass. There we're bound to find abundant springs. The nature of the rock demands it, and instinct agrees with logic in backing my conviction. Now here's what I have to propose. When Columbus asked his crews for three days to find new lands, his crews — sick, terrified — nonetheless granted his request, and he discovered the New World. I, the Columbus of these underground regions, ask you for just one more day. If, when that time is up, I haven't found the water we're missing, I swear to you, we'll go back up to the surface of the earth."
In spite of my irritation, I was moved by those words, and by the violence my uncle was doing himself to speak that way.
"All right!" I cried. "Let it be as you wish, and may God reward your superhuman energy. You've only a few hours left to try your luck. Let's go!"
The descent began again, this time down the new gallery. Hans walked in front, as was his habit. We hadn't gone a hundred paces when the professor, running his lamp along the walls, cried out:
"Here are the primitive formations! We're on the right road! On, on!
"When the earth cooled little by little in the first days of the world, the shrinking of its bulk racked the crust with dislocations, ruptures, contractions, fissures. The very corridor we're in is a crack of that kind, one that long ago streamed with eruptive granite; its thousand twists and turns form an inextricable labyrinth through the primordial rock."
As we descended, the succession of strata that make up the primitive terrain came into sharper and sharper focus. Geology regards this primitive terrain as the very base of the mineral crust, and it has established that it is composed of three distinct layers — the schists, the gneisses, the micaschists — all resting on that unshakable rock we call granite.
Now, never had mineralogists found themselves in such marvelous conditions for studying nature on the spot. What the drill, that dumb and brutal machine, could never bring up to the surface of the globe about its inner texture, we were about to study with our own eyes, touch with our own hands.
Through the tier of schists, colored in beautiful shades of green, wound metallic veins of copper, of manganese, with a few traces of platinum and gold. I thought of these riches buried in the bowels of the globe, riches that human greed will never enjoy! The upheavals of the first days interred these treasures at such depths that neither pickaxe nor mattock will ever tear them from their tomb.
To the schists succeeded the gneisses, of a layered structure, remarkable for the regularity and parallelism of their sheets; then the micaschists, laid out in great flakes that the eye picked out by the glittering of their white mica.
The light of our lamps, thrown back by the little facets of the rock mass, crossed its jets of fire at every angle, and I imagined myself traveling through a hollow diamond, in which the rays shattered into a thousand dazzling flashes.
Toward six in the evening, this festival of light noticeably dimmed, almost died out; the walls took on a crystalline tint, but a dark one; the mica blended more intimately with the feldspar and the quartz to form the rock above all rocks, the hardest of all stones, the one that bears the four tiers of the globe's terrain without being crushed by them. We were walled up in the immense prison of granite.
It was eight in the evening. Still no water. I was suffering horribly. My uncle marched on ahead. He wouldn't stop. He kept straining his ear to catch the murmur of some spring. But nothing.
Meanwhile my legs refused to carry me. I held out against my torments so as not to force my uncle to call a halt. For him it would have been a crushing blow, because the day was ending — the last day that belonged to him.
At last my strength gave out; I let out a cry and fell.
"Help me! I'm dying!"
My uncle came back for me. He looked at me, arms folded; then these muffled words came from his lips:
"It's all over!"
One last terrifying gesture of rage struck my eyes, and I closed them.
When I opened them again, I saw my two companions lying motionless, rolled up in their blankets. Were they asleep? For my part, I couldn't find a moment's sleep. I was suffering too much, and above all from the thought that my ailment had to be beyond any remedy. My uncle's last words kept echoing in my ears.
"It's all over!" — because in such a state of weakness, there could be no thought whatsoever of climbing back to the surface of the globe.
There was a league and a half of the earth's crust above us! It seemed to me that this whole mass was bearing down with all its weight on my shoulders. I felt crushed, and I wore myself out in violent efforts to turn over on my bed of granite.
A few hours went by. A deep silence reigned around us, the silence of a tomb. Nothing came through these walls, the thinnest of which measured five miles in thickness.
And yet, in the middle of my drowsing, I thought I heard a noise; the tunnel had gone dark. I looked more closely, and I seemed to see the Icelander disappearing, lamp in hand.
Why was he leaving? Was Hans abandoning us? My uncle was asleep. I wanted to shout. My voice could find no passage between my parched lips. The darkness had grown deep, and the last sounds had just died away.
"Hans is abandoning us!" I cried. "Hans! Hans!"
These words — I cried them inside myself. They went no further. And yet, after that first instant of terror, I was ashamed of my suspicions against a man whose conduct had until now been nothing but blameless. His leaving could not be a flight. Instead of going back up the gallery, he was going down it. Evil designs would have drawn him upward, not down. This reasoning calmed me a little, and my thoughts turned another way. Hans, that placid man — only some serious motive could have torn him from his rest. Was he going, then, in search of something? Had he heard, during the silent night, some murmur whose whisper had not reached me?
For a whole hour my fevered brain churned through every reason that could have made our unflappable hunter act as he had. The most absurd ideas tangled themselves together in my head. I honestly thought I was going mad.
But at last a sound of footsteps came echoing up from the depths of the gulf. Hans was climbing back. A wavering light began to slide along the walls, then broke out through the mouth of the passage. Hans appeared.
He went over to my uncle, laid a hand on his shoulder, and gently woke him. My uncle sat up.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Vatten," the hunter answered.
You have to believe that under the spur of terrible suffering, every one of us becomes a linguist. I didn't know a single word of Danish, and yet I understood our guide's meaning by pure instinct.
"Water! Water!" I cried, clapping my hands and flailing about like a lunatic.
"Water!" my uncle repeated. "Hvar?" he asked the Icelander.
"Nedat," Hans replied.
Where? Down below! I understood every word. I had seized the hunter's hands and was squeezing them hard, while he looked back at me with perfect calm.
The preparations for departure were quickly made, and soon we were heading down a corridor that dropped two feet with every fathom.
An hour later, we had gone about a thousand fathoms and descended two thousand feet.
Just then we heard, quite distinctly, an unfamiliar sound running through the flanks of the granite wall — a kind of muffled roar, like distant thunder. Through that first half hour of walking, finding no sign of the promised spring, I felt the old anguish creeping back over me. But then my uncle explained where the noise was coming from.
"Hans wasn't mistaken," he said. "What you hear there is the roar of a torrent."
"A torrent?" I exclaimed.
"There's no doubt about it. An underground river is running all around us!"
We quickened our pace, keyed up with hope. I no longer felt my exhaustion. The sound of that murmuring water was already reviving me. The torrent, after running for a long time above our heads, was now coursing through the wall on our left, roaring and leaping. Again and again I ran my hand over the rock, hoping to find some trace of seepage or damp. But in vain.
Another half hour slipped by. Another half league was covered.
And now it became clear that the hunter, during his absence, could not have carried his search any farther than this. Guided by an instinct peculiar to mountain folk and to water-diviners, he had "felt" this torrent through the rock — but he certainly hadn't laid eyes on the precious liquid, and he hadn't drunk from it.
Soon it even became obvious that if we kept walking, we would be moving away from the torrent, whose murmur was steadily fading.
We turned back. Hans stopped at the exact spot where the torrent seemed to run closest.
I sat down against the wall, while the waters raced past just two feet from me with tremendous force. But a wall of granite still stood between us.
Without thinking, without asking myself whether some way of reaching that water might exist, I gave in to a first surge of despair.
Hans looked at me, and I thought I saw a smile flicker across his lips.
He rose and took the lamp. I followed him. He walked over to the wall. I watched what he did. He pressed his ear to the dry stone and slid it slowly along, listening with the greatest care. I realized he was searching for the precise point where the torrent could be heard most loudly. He found that point in the left-hand wall, three feet above the floor.
How stirred I was! I hardly dared guess what the hunter meant to do! But I couldn't help understanding it — and applauding it, and smothering him with grateful caresses — when I saw him take up his pick to attack the rock itself.
"Saved!" I cried. "Saved!"
"Yes," my uncle repeated, beside himself. "Hans is right! Ah, the brave fellow! We'd never have thought of that!"
I should think not! A trick like that, however simple, would never have crossed our minds. Nothing could be more dangerous than to drive a pickaxe into this framework of the globe. What if some collapse were to bury us? What if the torrent, forcing its way through the rock, were to come flooding in on us? These dangers were anything but imaginary — but just then no fear of cave-in or of drowning could stop us, and our thirst was so fierce that, to slake it, we would have dug at the very bed of the ocean.
Hans set to work at a task neither my uncle nor I could have managed. Our impatience would have run away with our hands, and the rock would have flown apart under our reckless blows. The guide, on the contrary, calm and steady, wore the stone away little by little with a series of small, repeated strokes, opening a gap half a foot wide. I could hear the sound of the torrent swelling, and I already imagined I could feel the blessed water splashing against my lips.
Soon the pick had sunk two feet into the granite wall. The work had been going on for more than an hour. I was writhing with impatience! My uncle wanted to resort to drastic measures. I had trouble holding him back, and he had already snatched up his pick when suddenly a hissing sound broke out. A jet of water shot from the wall and smashed against the rock face opposite.
Hans, half thrown down by the impact, couldn't hold back a cry of pain. I understood why when, plunging my own hands into the liquid jet, I let out a violent shout of my own: the spring was boiling hot.
"Water at a hundred degrees!" I cried.
"Well, it'll cool down," my uncle answered.
The corridor filled with steam, while a stream took shape and went off to lose itself in the winding passages underground. And soon after, we were scooping up our first mouthfuls of it.
Ah, what bliss! What incomparable delight! What was this water? Where did it come from? It hardly mattered. It was water — and though it was still hot, it brought back to the heart the life that had been about to slip away. I drank without stopping, without even tasting.
It was only after a full minute of pure pleasure that I exclaimed:
"Hey — but this is iron-rich water!"
"Excellent for the stomach," my uncle replied, "and highly mineralized! Here's a trip worth more than a cure at Spa or Toeplitz!"
"Ah, it's so good!"
"I should think so — water drawn from two leagues underground. It has a taste of ink about it that's not the least bit unpleasant. A splendid resource Hans has found us here! And so I propose we give his name to this life-saving stream."
"Agreed!" I cried.
And the name "Hansbach" was adopted then and there. Hans was no prouder for it. After refreshing himself in moderation, he settled into a corner with his usual composure.
"Now," I said, "we mustn't let this water go to waste."
"What's the point?" my uncle replied. "I suspect the spring is inexhaustible."
"Never mind that! Let's fill the skin and the flasks, then we'll try to plug the opening."
My advice was followed. Using chips of granite and some tow, Hans tried to stop up the hole he'd made in the wall. It was no easy matter. We scalded our hands without managing it; the pressure was too great, and our efforts came to nothing.
"It's obvious," I said, "that the upper reaches of this watercourse lie at a great height, judging by the force of the jet."
"No doubt about it," my uncle answered. "There must be a thousand atmospheres of pressure there, if this column of water is thirty-two thousand feet high. But an idea occurs to me."
"What's that?"
"Why are we so bent on plugging this opening?"
"Well — because..."
I would have been hard put to come up with a good reason.
"When our flasks are empty, are we sure of finding water to fill them again?"
"No, obviously not."
"Well then, let's let this water run. It'll flow downhill of its own accord, and it will guide the very people it refreshes along the way!"
"Now that's clever!" I cried. "And with this stream for a companion, there's no longer any reason we shouldn't succeed in what we've set out to do."
"Ah, so you're coming around, my boy," said the professor, laughing.
"I'm doing better than coming around — I'm already there."
"One moment! Let's begin by taking a few hours' rest."
I really had forgotten it was night. The chronometer took it upon itself to remind me. Soon each of us, sufficiently restored and refreshed, fell into a deep sleep.
By the next day we had already forgotten everything we'd suffered. My first surprise was that I was no longer thirsty, and I asked why. The little stream murmuring at my feet answered for me.
We ate breakfast and drank our fill of that excellent iron-rich water. I felt thoroughly revived and ready to go a long way. Why shouldn't a man as certain of himself as my uncle succeed, with a guide as resourceful as Hans and a nephew as "determined" as I was? Those were the fine ideas slipping into my brain! If anyone had suggested climbing back up to the summit of the Sneffels, I'd have refused with indignation.
Fortunately, it was only a question of going down.
"Let's go!" I cried, waking the old echoes of the globe with my enthusiasm.
We set off again on Thursday at eight in the morning. The granite corridor twisted through winding detours, threw out sudden elbow-bends, and had all the tangle of a labyrinth about it; but on the whole its main heading was still to the southeast. My uncle never stopped consulting his compass with the greatest care, keeping track of the distance we'd covered.
The gallery ran almost dead level, with two inches of drop per fathom, no more. The stream ran on unhurried, murmuring beneath our feet. I compared it to some friendly household spirit guiding us through the earth, and with my hand I stroked the warm naiad whose songs kept time with our steps. My good mood was happy to take a mythological turn.
As for my uncle, he cursed the flatness of the road — he, "the man of verticals." His path stretched on endlessly, and instead of sliding straight down the earth's radius, as he put it, he was going by way of the hypotenuse. But we had no choice, and as long as we were gaining on the center, however little, there was no cause to complain.
Besides, every now and then the slopes dropped away; the naiad went tumbling down with a roar, and we descended deeper along with her.
All told, that day and the next we covered a great deal of horizontal ground and relatively little vertical.
By the evening of Friday, July 10th, by our reckoning, we should have been thirty leagues southeast of Reykjavik and at a depth of two and a half leagues.
At that point a rather frightening well opened up beneath our feet. My uncle couldn't help clapping his hands as he calculated the steepness of its sides.
"This will take us a long way," he cried, "and easily too, because the jutting rocks make a real staircase!"
Hans arranged the ropes so as to prevent any accident. The descent began. I don't dare call it perilous, since I was already used to this sort of exercise.
This well was a narrow crack cut into the rock mass, one of the kind called a "fault"; the contraction of the earth's framework as it cooled had clearly produced it. If it had once served as a passage for the erupted matter vomited out by the Sneffels, I couldn't understand how none of that matter had left any trace. We were descending a sort of winding screw that you'd have sworn was made by human hands.
Every quarter of an hour we had to stop for a necessary rest, to give our legs back their spring. We'd sit down on some jutting ledge, legs dangling, and talk while we ate and quenched our thirst at the stream.
It goes without saying that in this fault the Hansbach had turned itself into a waterfall, at some cost to its volume; but it was more than enough to slake our thirst; besides, once the slopes grew gentler it was bound to settle back into its peaceful course. Just now it reminded me of my worthy uncle, his impatience and his tempers, whereas on the softened slopes it was all the calm of the Icelandic hunter.
On the 6th and 7th of July we followed the spirals of this fault, sinking another two leagues into the earth's crust, which put us nearly five leagues below sea level. But on the 8th, around noon, the fault took on a much gentler slope in the southeast direction, about forty-five degrees.
The way then became easy and perfectly monotonous. It could hardly have been otherwise. The journey couldn't be varied by any incidents of scenery.
At last, on Wednesday the 15th, we were seven leagues underground and about fifty leagues from the Sneffels. Though we were a little tired, our health was holding up reassuringly, and the travel medicine chest was still untouched.
My uncle kept hour-by-hour readings of the compass, the chronometer, the pressure gauge, and the thermometer — the very ones he later published in the scientific account of his voyage. So he could easily work out our position. When he told me we were fifty leagues away horizontally, I couldn't hold back an exclamation.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Nothing — only a thought struck me."
"What thought, my boy?"
"That if your calculations are right, we're no longer under Iceland."
"You think so?"
"That's easy enough to check."
I took my measurements with the dividers on the map.
"I wasn't mistaken," I said. "We've passed Cape Portland, and these fifty leagues to the southeast put us out under the open sea."
"Under the open sea," my uncle repeated, rubbing his hands.
"So," I cried, "the ocean stretches over our heads!"
"Bah! Axel, nothing could be more natural! Aren't there coal mines at Newcastle that run out under the waves?"
The professor might find the situation perfectly simple, but the thought of strolling around beneath a mass of water didn't stop nagging at me. And yet, whether it was the plains and mountains of Iceland hanging over our heads or the waters of the Atlantic, it made little difference in the end, so long as the granite framework held solid. Besides, I got used to the idea soon enough, for the corridor — now straight, now winding, as capricious in its slopes as in its turns, but always running southeast and always sinking deeper — carried us quickly to great depths.
Four days later, on the evening of Saturday, July 18th, we reached a kind of fairly large grotto; my uncle handed Hans his three rix-dollars for the week, and it was decided that the next day would be a day of rest.
So I woke on Sunday morning without the usual nagging worry of an immediate departure. And even though we were down in the deepest of abysses, that wasn't such an unpleasant feeling. Besides, we'd grown used to this troglodyte existence. I barely gave a thought to the sun, the stars, the moon, the trees, the houses, the towns — all those terrestrial luxuries that creatures under the sky have convinced themselves they can't live without. As fossils now, we snapped our fingers at those useless marvels.
The grotto formed a vast hall. Across its granite floor the faithful little stream ran quietly along. At such a distance from its source, its water had cooled to the surrounding temperature and could be drunk without any trouble.
After breakfast, the Professor decided to devote a few hours to putting his daily notes in order.
"First," he said, "I'm going to work out some figures, so I can fix our position exactly. When we get back, I want to be able to draw a map of our journey — a kind of vertical cross-section of the globe, giving the profile of the expedition."
"That would be fascinating, Uncle. But will your observations be accurate enough?"
"Yes. I've carefully recorded the angles and the gradients; I'm certain I haven't made a mistake. Let's see first where we are. Take the compass and tell me what direction it points."
I looked at the instrument, and after examining it closely, I answered:
"East-quarter-southeast."
"Good!" said the Professor, jotting down the observation and running through some quick calculations. "I conclude that we've come eighty-five leagues from our starting point."
"So we're traveling under the Atlantic?"
"Precisely."
"And at this very moment there might be a storm raging up there, ships being tossed on our heads by the waves and the gale?"
"That's possible."
"And whales beating their tails against the walls of our prison?"
"Don't worry, Axel — they won't manage to shake it. But let's get back to our calculations. We're to the southeast, eighty-five leagues from the base of the Sneffels, and from my earlier notes I estimate we've reached a depth of sixteen leagues."
"Sixteen leagues!" I cried.
"No doubt about it."
"But that's the absolute limit science sets for the thickness of the Earth's crust."
"I won't say otherwise."
"And here, following the law of rising temperature, there ought to be a heat of fifteen hundred degrees."
"Ought to be, my boy."
"And all this granite couldn't stay solid — it would be in full meltdown."
"As you can see, it isn't, and the facts, as usual, come along to give the theories the lie."
"I'm forced to admit it, but still, it amazes me."
"What does the thermometer read?"
"Twenty-seven and six-tenths degrees."
"So the scientists are off by fourteen hundred and seventy-four degrees and four-tenths. Which means the proportional increase of temperature is a mistake. Which means Humphry Davy wasn't wrong. Which means I was right to listen to him. What do you have to say to that?"
"Nothing."
To tell the truth, I'd have had plenty to say. I didn't accept Davy's theory in any way; I still held with the idea of central heat, even though I felt none of its effects. I honestly preferred to believe that this chimney of an extinct volcano, coated over by lava with a fireproof lining, simply wouldn't let the temperature spread through its walls.
But rather than stopping to hunt for new arguments, I just took the situation as it stood.
"Uncle," I went on, "I accept all your figures as accurate, but allow me to draw one strict conclusion from them."
"Go ahead, my boy, at your leisure."
"At the point where we are, at the latitude of Iceland, the Earth's radius is about fifteen hundred and eighty-three leagues, correct?"
"Fifteen hundred and eighty-three leagues and a third."
"Let's call it sixteen hundred leagues in round numbers. Out of a journey of sixteen hundred leagues, we've done twelve?"
"Just as you say."
"And that at the cost of eighty-five leagues traveled on the diagonal?"
"Precisely."
"In about twenty days?"
"In twenty days."
"Now, sixteen leagues make up one-hundredth of the Earth's radius. At this rate, then, it will take us two thousand days, or nearly five and a half years, to reach the bottom!"
The Professor didn't answer.
"Not to mention that if a vertical drop of sixteen leagues costs us a horizontal run of eighty, that comes to eight thousand leagues to the southeast, and we'll have come out through some point on the circumference long before we ever reach the center!"
"To the devil with your calculations!" my uncle snapped, with a flash of anger. "To the devil with your hypotheses! What are they even based on? Who says this passage doesn't go straight to our goal? Besides, I have a precedent on my side. What I'm doing here, another man has done, and where he succeeded, I'll succeed too."
"I hope so. But surely I'm allowed —"
"You're allowed to hold your tongue, Axel, whenever you feel like talking such nonsense."
I saw clearly that the terrible Professor was threatening to break out again from under the skin of the uncle, and I took the hint.
"Now then," he resumed, "check the pressure gauge. What does it show?"
"A considerable pressure."
"Good. You see that by descending slowly, gradually getting used to the density of this atmosphere, we suffer no ill effects at all."
"None — except a bit of pain in the ears."
"That's nothing, and you'll make that discomfort disappear by putting the outside air quickly in touch with the air held in your lungs."
"Absolutely," I answered, quite determined not to cross my uncle any further. "There's even a real pleasure in feeling oneself plunged into this denser air. Have you noticed how intensely sound carries through it?"
"No doubt; a deaf man would end up hearing perfectly down here."
"But surely this density will keep increasing?"
"Yes, according to a rather poorly defined law. It's true that the force of gravity will diminish as we go down. You know that it's at the very surface of the Earth that its pull is felt most strongly, and that at the center of the globe objects weigh nothing at all."
"I know that. But tell me — won't this air eventually take on the density of water?"
"No doubt, under a pressure of seven hundred and ten atmospheres."
"And lower down?"
"Lower down, that density will increase still more."
"Then how will we go down?"
"Well, we'll put stones in our pockets."
"My word, Uncle, you have an answer for everything."
I didn't dare venture any further into the field of hypotheses, for I'd have collided again with some impossibility that would have set the Professor off.
It was obvious, all the same, that air under a pressure that might reach thousands of atmospheres would eventually turn solid, and then — assuming our bodies had held up — we'd have to stop, in spite of every argument in the world.
But I didn't press the point. My uncle would only have countered again with his eternal Saknussemm, a worthless precedent — for even granting that the learned Icelander's journey had really happened, there was one very simple thing to say in reply:
In the sixteenth century, neither the barometer nor the pressure gauge had been invented; so how could Saknussemm ever have determined his arrival at the center of the globe?
But I kept that objection to myself and waited to see what would happen.
The rest of the day passed in calculations and conversation. I agreed with Professor Lidenbrock on everything, and I envied the perfect indifference of Hans, who, without hunting for effects and causes, went blindly wherever destiny led him.
I have to admit it: so far things had been going well, and it would have been poor manners to complain. If the average level of "difficulties" didn't rise, we couldn't fail to reach our goal. And what glory then! I had actually started reasoning like Lidenbrock. Seriously. Was it the strange world I was living in that did it? Perhaps.
For several days, steeper slopes — some of them frighteningly vertical — carried us deep into the interior mass. On certain days we gained a league and a half to two leagues toward the center. Perilous descents, during which Hans's skill and his marvelous coolness were a great help to us. That impassive Icelander devoted himself with an incomprehensible ease, and thanks to him we got past more than one bad stretch we'd never have cleared on our own.
His silence, for one thing, deepened by the day. I even think it was catching. Outward things have a real effect on the brain. Shut a man up between four walls and he ends up losing the power to connect ideas and words. How many prisoners in solitary confinement have turned dull-witted, if not outright mad, from letting their thinking faculties go unused.
During the two weeks that followed our last conversation, nothing happened worth recording. I find in my memory — and for good reason — only a single event of extreme gravity. It would have been hard for me to forget the smallest detail of it.
On the 7th of August, our steady descents had brought us to a depth of thirty leagues; which is to say there were thirty leagues of rock, ocean, continents, and cities over our heads. We must by then have been two hundred leagues from Iceland.
That day the tunnel followed a gently sloping floor.
I was walking ahead. My uncle carried one of the two Ruhmkorff lamps, and I the other. I was examining the layers of granite.
Suddenly, turning around, I realized I was alone.
"Fine," I thought, "I've walked too fast, or else Hans and my uncle stopped along the way. Come on, I'd better catch up with them. Luckily the path doesn't climb much."
I retraced my steps. I walked for a quarter of an hour. I looked. No one. I called out. No answer. My voice was lost among the cavernous echoes it suddenly woke.
I began to feel uneasy. A shiver ran through my whole body.
"A little calm," I said aloud. "I'm certain I'll find my companions. There aren't two routes! Now, I was ahead, so let's go back."
I climbed back up for half an hour. I listened for some call coming to me — in an atmosphere this dense, it might reach me from a long way off. An extraordinary silence reigned in the immense gallery.
I stopped. I couldn't believe I was really alone. I was willing to be led astray, but not lost. When you're only led astray, you find your way back.
"Come now," I repeated, "since there's only one route, and since they're following it, I'm bound to meet up with them. All I have to do is keep climbing back up. Unless, not seeing me, and forgetting that I was ahead of them, they took it into their heads to turn around and go back. Well! Even in that case, if I hurry, I'll catch them. It's obvious!"
I repeated those last words like a man who isn't convinced. What's more, to put together ideas this simple and gather them into the shape of an argument, I had to take a very long time.
Then a doubt seized me. Was I really the one in front? Certainly. Hans had been following me, ahead of my uncle. He'd even stopped for a few moments to strap his baggage more firmly on his shoulder. That detail was coming back to me now. It was at that very moment that I must have kept going.
"Besides," I thought, "I have a sure way of not getting lost, a thread to guide me through this labyrinth, and one that can't break — my faithful stream. All I have to do is walk back up its course, and I'll inevitably find the traces of my companions."
This reasoning revived me, and I resolved to set out again without wasting an instant.
How I blessed my uncle's foresight then, when he'd stopped the hunter from plugging the notch cut into the granite wall! So this good spring, after quenching our thirst along the way, was going to guide me through the windings of the Earth's crust.
Before starting back up, I thought a wash would do me some good.
So I bent down to plunge my forehead into the water of the Hansbach!
It was dry, rough granite I set my hands to! The stream no longer ran at my feet!
I cannot paint my despair. No word in any human language could capture what I felt. I had been buried alive, with the prospect of dying in the tortures of hunger and thirst.
Without thinking, I dragged my burning hands across the ground. How parched that rock felt to me!
But how had I lost the course of the stream? Because it was gone — utterly gone! I understood then the reason for that strange silence, back when I had listened one last time for some call from my companions to reach my ears. So it must have been that the moment my first step carried me onto that reckless path, I never noticed the stream had fallen silent. It was obvious now: at that instant a fork in the gallery had opened before me, while the Hansbach — obeying the whim of some other slope — had gone off with my companions toward depths unknown.
How was I to get back? There were no tracks. My foot left no print on that granite. I battered my brain trying to solve the unsolvable. My whole situation came down to a single word: lost!
Yes — lost, at a depth that seemed to me beyond all measure. Those thirty leagues of the earth's crust bore down on my shoulders with a horrifying weight. I felt myself being crushed.
I tried to turn my thoughts back to the things of the surface. I could barely manage it. Hamburg, the house on König-strasse, my poor Graüben — that whole world beneath which I was now lost — flashed in terror through my memory. In one vivid hallucination I lived over again the incidents of the journey: the crossing, Iceland, Mr. Fridriksson, the Sneffels! I told myself that if, in my position, I still clung to the faintest shadow of a hope, it would be a sign of madness — that it was better simply to despair.
For truly, what human power could carry me back to the surface of the globe and prise apart these enormous vaults that arched above my head? Who could set me back on the road home and reunite me with my companions?
"Oh, Uncle!" I cried, in a voice of pure despair.
It was the only word of reproach that came to my lips, for I understood how the poor man must be suffering as he, in his turn, went searching for me.
When I saw myself thus cut off from all human help, unable to attempt anything at all to save myself, I thought of the help of Heaven. Memories of my childhood came back to me — memories of my mother, whom I had known only in the days of a small child's kisses. I turned to prayer, however little right I had to be heard by the God I was appealing to so late, and I implored Him with all my heart.
This return toward Providence gave me back a little calm, and I was able to bring the whole force of my mind to bear on my situation.
I had three days' worth of food, and my flask was full. Even so, I could not stay alone any longer. But should I climb, or descend?
Climb, obviously! Always climb!
That way I was bound to arrive back at the point where I had left the spring — at that fatal fork. Once I had the stream under my feet again, I could always make my way back up to the summit of the Sneffels.
Why hadn't I thought of it sooner? Here, clearly, was a chance of salvation. The most urgent thing, then, was to find the course of the Hansbach again.
I stood, and, leaning on my iron-tipped staff, I started back up the gallery. The slope was fairly steep. I walked full of hope and without hesitation, like a man who has no choice of which road to take.
For half an hour, no obstacle stopped my steps. I tried to recognize my route by the shape of the tunnel, by the jut of certain rocks, by the arrangement of the crannies in the walls. But no particular sign struck me, and I soon realized that this gallery could not lead me back to the fork. It was a dead end. I ran up against an impenetrable wall, and I fell onto the rock.
What terror, what despair seized me then, I could not begin to say. I lay there, annihilated. My last hope had just shattered against that wall of granite.
Lost in this labyrinth, whose windings crossed and recrossed in every direction, I no longer had even an impossible escape to attempt. I would have to die the most dreadful of deaths! And — strange thing — the thought came to me that if my fossilized body were ever found one day, its discovery thirty leagues down in the bowels of the earth would raise grave scientific questions!
I tried to speak aloud, but only hoarse sounds passed between my parched lips. I was gasping for breath.
In the midst of this anguish, a new terror took hold of my mind. My lamp had been damaged in the fall. I had no way to repair it. Its light was going pale — it was about to fail me!
I watched the luminous current shrink within the coil of the instrument. A procession of moving shadows unrolled across the darkening walls. I no longer dared lower my eyelids, afraid of losing the least atom of that fleeting brightness. At every instant it seemed to me that it was about to die out, and that "the black" was closing in on me.
At last a final gleam trembled in the lamp. I followed it, I drank it in with my eyes, I concentrated on it all the power of my sight, as on the last sensation of light my eyes would ever be given to know — and then I was plunged into a vast and total darkness.
What a terrible cry escaped me! On the surface of the earth, in the depths of the blackest night, light never entirely surrenders its rights; it is diffuse, it is subtle, but however little of it remains, the retina of the eye ends by perceiving it. Here, nothing. The absolute shadow made of me a blind man in the fullest sense of the word.
Then my mind gave way. I got to my feet, arms thrown out before me, groping in the most agonizing way; I broke into a run, hurling my steps at random through that inextricable labyrinth, forever descending, racing through the earth's crust like some creature of the underground faults — calling, shouting, howling — soon bruised on the jutting rocks, falling and getting up again bloodied, trying to drink the blood that streamed over my face, and forever waiting for some unforeseen wall to offer my head an obstacle to smash itself against!
Where did that mad race take me? I shall never know. After several hours — no doubt at the very end of my strength — I fell like a lifeless mass along the wall, and I lost all sense of my own existence.
When I came back to life, my face was wet — but wet with tears. How long that stupor lasted, I couldn't say. I no longer had any way of measuring time. Never was there a solitude like mine, never an abandonment so complete.
The fall had cost me a great deal of blood. I could feel myself drenched in it! Oh, how I wished I were dead — and that the dying were still to be done! I wanted no more thoughts. I drove every idea away, and, beaten down by the pain, I rolled myself against the far wall.
Already I could feel the faint coming over me again, and with it the last, utter blotting-out, when a violent noise struck my ear. It was like a long roll of thunder, and I heard the waves of sound go losing themselves, little by little, in the distant depths of the abyss.
Where had that noise come from? From some phenomenon, no doubt, taking place deep in the mass of the earth — the explosion of a pocket of gas, or the collapse of some mighty stratum of the globe.
I listened again. I wanted to know whether the sound would come a second time. A quarter of an hour went by. Silence reigned in the gallery. I could no longer even hear the beating of my own heart.
Suddenly my ear, pressed by chance against the wall, seemed to catch vague, elusive, faraway words. I gave a start.
"It's a hallucination!" I thought.
But no. Listening harder, I really did hear a murmur of voices. What was being said I was too weak to make out — but people were talking. Of that I was certain.
For a moment I was afraid the words might be my own, thrown back by an echo. Perhaps I had cried out without knowing it? I clamped my lips shut and pressed my ear once more to the rock.
"Yes — yes, someone's speaking! Someone's speaking!"
Even by dragging myself a few feet farther along the wall, I heard more clearly. I managed to catch words — uncertain, strange, incomprehensible. They reached me like syllables spoken under the breath, murmured, so to speak. The word "förlorad" came again and again, in a tone of grief.
What did it mean? Who was saying it? My uncle or Hans, obviously. But if I could hear them, then they could hear me.
"Here!" I shouted with all my strength. "Over here!"
I listened; I strained into the dark for an answer, a cry, a sigh. Nothing came. A few minutes passed. A whole world of ideas had bloomed in my mind. I decided my weakened voice couldn't reach my companions.
"Because it is them," I repeated. "What other men would be buried thirty leagues underground?"
I set myself to listening again. Running my ear along the wall, I found one mathematical point where the voices seemed to reach their greatest strength. The word "förlorad" came back to me, then that roll of thunder that had roused me from my torpor.
"No," I said. "No. It isn't through the solid mass that these voices come. The wall is granite; it wouldn't let the loudest blast pass through it! This sound is arriving along the gallery itself. There must be some very particular trick of acoustics at work here!"
I listened once more, and this time — yes! this time I heard my own name thrown distinctly across the space!
It was my uncle who spoke it! He was talking with the guide, and the word "förlorad" was a Danish one!
Then I understood everything. To make myself heard, I had to speak precisely along this wall, which would carry my voice the way an iron wire carries electricity.
But there was no time to lose. If my companions moved a few steps away, the acoustic effect would be destroyed. So I went up close to the wall and pronounced these words as clearly as I could:
"Uncle Lidenbrock!"
I waited in the keenest anxiety. Sound does not travel at any tremendous speed. The density of the layers of air doesn't even increase its velocity; it only increases its loudness. A few seconds — centuries — went by, and at last these words reached my ear:
"Axel! Axel! Is that you?"
.............................
"Yes! Yes!" I answered.
.............................
"My poor boy, where are you?"
.............................
"Lost, in the deepest darkness!"
.............................
"But your lamp?"
.............................
"Out."
.............................
"And the stream?"
.............................
"Gone."
.............................
"Axel, my poor Axel, take heart!"
.............................
"Wait a little — I'm exhausted. I haven't the strength to answer. But keep talking to me!"
.............................
"Courage," my uncle went on. "Don't speak — listen. We searched for you, going up the gallery and down it. Impossible to find you. Oh, how I wept for you, my boy! At last, supposing you were still somewhere on the road along the Hansbach, we came back down here firing off our guns. Now, if our voices can meet — pure trick of acoustics! — our hands still can't touch! But don't despair, Axel. It's already something, to be able to hear each other!"
.............................
While he spoke I had been thinking. A certain hope, still faint, was creeping back into my heart. Above all, there was one thing I needed to know. So I brought my lips to the wall and said:
"Uncle?"
.............................
"My boy?" came the answer after a few moments.
.............................
"First we have to find out how far apart we are."
.............................
"That's easy enough."
.............................
"You have your chronometer?"
.............................
"Yes."
.............................
"Then take it. Say my name, and note the exact second you speak. I'll repeat it back the instant it reaches me, and you note the precise moment my answer comes to you."
.............................
"Good — and half the time between my call and your reply will give the time my voice takes to travel to you."
.............................
"That's it, Uncle."
.............................
"Are you ready?"
.............................
"Yes."
.............................
"Then pay attention — I'm going to say your name."
.............................
I pressed my ear to the wall, and the moment the word "Axel" reached me I answered at once, "Axel," and then I waited.
.............................
"Forty seconds," my uncle said. "Forty seconds passed between the two words; so the sound takes twenty seconds to climb up. Now, at one thousand and twenty feet a second, that comes to twenty thousand four hundred feet — a league and a half, and an eighth over."
.............................
"A league and a half!" I murmured.
.............................
"Well — that can be crossed, Axel!"
.............................
"But do I have to go up, or down?"
.............................
"Down — and here's why. We've reached a vast open space where a great many galleries come together. The one you followed can't help but bring you here, because it seems all these cracks, all these fractures of the globe, radiate out around the immense cavern we're sitting in. So get up, take to the road again; walk, crawl if you have to, slide down the steep slopes, and you'll find our arms waiting to catch you at the end of it. On your way, my boy — on your way!"
.............................
Those words breathed life back into me.
"Goodbye, Uncle!" I cried. "I'm off. Our voices won't be able to reach each other anymore, once I've left this spot. So — goodbye!"
.............................
"Until we meet, Axel! Until we meet!"
.............................
Those were the last words I heard. That astonishing conversation, carried through the solid mass of the earth, exchanged across more than a league of distance, ended on those words of hope. I said a prayer of thanks to God, for He had led me, among all these dark immensities, to perhaps the one single point where my companions' voices could reach me.
That very surprising acoustic effect was easily explained by ordinary physical laws alone: it came from the shape of the corridor and the conductivity of the rock. There are plenty of examples of this carrying of sounds that can't be heard at all in the spaces between. I remembered that the phenomenon had been observed in many places — among others, in the inner gallery of the dome of Saint Paul's in London, and above all among the curious caverns of Sicily, those latomias near Syracuse, the most marvelous of which is known as the Ear of Dionysius.
These memories came back to me, and I saw clearly that, since my uncle's voice reached me, no obstacle stood between us. By following the path of the sound, I was bound, logically, to arrive where he was — if my strength didn't betray me on the road.
So I got up. I dragged myself rather than walked. The slope was fairly steep; I let myself slide down it.
Soon the speed of my descent grew at a frightening rate, and threatened to turn into an outright fall. I no longer had the strength to stop myself.
All at once the ground gave way beneath my feet. I felt myself rolling, bouncing off the jagged edges of a vertical gallery — a true well. My head struck a sharp rock, and I lost consciousness.
When I came to, I was lying in a kind of half-darkness, stretched out on a pile of thick blankets. My uncle was keeping watch, scanning my face for some last flicker of life. At my first sigh he took my hand; at my first glance he let out a cry of joy.
"He's alive! He's alive!" he shouted.
"Yes," I answered in a weak voice.
"My boy," said my uncle, crushing me against his chest, "you're saved!"
I was deeply moved by the tone in which he said those words, and even more by the care that came with them. But it took an ordeal like this to wring such tenderness out of the Professor.
Just then Hans came in. He saw my hand in my uncle's, and I dare say his eyes shone with real contentment.
"God dag," he said.
"Good morning, Hans, good morning," I murmured. "And now, Uncle, tell me — where are we at this moment?"
"Tomorrow, Axel, tomorrow. Today you're still too weak. I've wrapped your head in compresses that mustn't be disturbed. So sleep, my boy, and tomorrow you'll know everything."
"But at least," I pressed, "what time is it, what day?"
"Eleven o'clock at night. It's Sunday, the 9th of August, and I won't allow you to question me any further before the 10th of this month."
The truth was, I was very weak indeed; my eyes closed against my will. I needed a night's rest, and so I let myself drift off on the thought that my time alone had lasted four long days.
The next morning, when I woke, I looked around me. My bed — made up of all our travel blankets — had been set up in a charming grotto adorned with magnificent stalagmites, its floor carpeted with fine sand. A half-light filled the place. No torch, no lamp had been lit, and yet certain inexplicable gleams came in from outside, filtering through a narrow opening in the grotto. I could also hear a vague, indistinct murmur, like the sound of waves breaking on a beach, and now and then the whistling of a breeze.
I wondered whether I was truly awake, whether I was still dreaming, whether my brain — cracked in my fall — wasn't picking up sounds that were purely imaginary. And yet neither my eyes nor my ears could be deceived to such a degree.
"That's a ray of daylight," I thought, "slipping in through that crack in the rock! That really is the murmur of waves! That really is the whistling of the breeze! Am I mistaken, or have we come back to the surface of the earth? Has my uncle given up his expedition, then — or has he actually brought it to a happy end?"
I was putting these unanswerable questions to myself when the Professor came in.
"Good morning, Axel!" he said cheerfully. "I'd wager you're feeling well!"
"I certainly am," I said, sitting up on the blankets.
"That's just as it should be, for you've slept peacefully. Hans and I took turns watching over you, and we've seen you get steadily better."
"It's true, I do feel my old self again — and to prove it, I'll do full justice to whatever breakfast you'll be good enough to serve me!"
"You shall eat, my boy: the fever has left you. Hans rubbed your wounds with some ointment or other that the Icelanders keep the secret of, and they've healed beautifully. He's a fine fellow, our hunter!"
As he talked, my uncle was preparing a little food, which I devoured despite his warnings. All the while I pelted him with questions, and he hurried to answer them.
That was how I learned that my providential fall had carried me right to the mouth of an almost vertical gallery. Since I'd come down in the middle of a torrent of stones — the smallest of which would have been enough to crush me — it followed that part of the rock face must have slid down with me. That terrifying vehicle had ferried me all the way into my uncle's arms, where I dropped, bloody and lifeless.
"Truly," he said to me, "it's astonishing you didn't kill yourself a thousand times over. But for God's sake, let's never be separated again — or we may risk never seeing each other more."
"Let's never be separated again!" So the journey wasn't over? I opened my eyes wide in amazement, which immediately drew this question:
"What's the matter, Axel?"
"I have something to ask you. You say I'm here safe and sound?"
"No doubt about it."
"All my limbs are in one piece?"
"Certainly."
"And my head?"
"Your head, apart from a few bruises, is sitting perfectly well on your shoulders."
"Well, then, I'm afraid my brain may be out of order."
"Out of order?"
"Yes. We haven't come back to the surface of the globe?"
"Certainly not!"
"Then I must be mad, because I see daylight, I hear the sound of the wind blowing and of the sea breaking!"
"Ah! Is that all?"
"Will you explain it to me?"
"I'll explain nothing, because it can't be explained; but you'll see, and you'll understand, that geology hasn't yet said its last word."
"Then let's go out!" I cried, springing up.
"No, Axel, no! The open air might do you harm."
"The open air?"
"Yes, the wind is fairly violent. I won't have you expose yourself like that."
"But I assure you I feel perfectly fine."
"A little patience, my boy. A relapse would put us in a difficult spot, and we've no time to lose, because the crossing may be a long one."
"The crossing?"
"Yes. Rest again today, and we'll set sail tomorrow."
"Set sail!"
That last word made me leap up.
What! Set sail! So we had a river, a lake, a sea at our disposal? Was some vessel riding at anchor in an inner harbor somewhere?
My curiosity was roused to the highest pitch. My uncle tried in vain to hold me back. When he saw that my impatience would do me more harm than satisfying it, he gave in.
I dressed quickly; and, by way of extra precaution, I wrapped myself in one of the blankets and stepped out of the grotto.
At first I saw nothing. My eyes, unused to the light, snapped shut. When I managed to open them again, I was left even more stunned than amazed.
"The sea!" I cried.
"Yes," my uncle answered, "the Lidenbrock Sea; and I like to think no navigator will ever dispute my honor of having discovered it, or my right to name it after myself!"
A vast sheet of water — the beginning of a lake or an ocean — stretched away beyond the limits of sight. The shore, broadly notched with inlets, offered the last rippling waves a fine golden sand, strewn with those little shells that once housed the very first living things of creation. The waves broke on it with that peculiar resonant murmur you hear in enclosed, immense spaces; a light spray flew up on the breath of a steady wind, and a few flecks of it reached my face. On that gently sloping beach, about a hundred fathoms back from the line of the waves, rose the buttresses of enormous rocks that climbed, widening as they went, to an immeasurable height. Some of them, tearing at the shoreline with their sharp ridges, formed capes and promontories gnawed by the teeth of the surf. Farther off, the eye followed their mass, clearly outlined against the misty depths of the horizon.
It was a real ocean, with the capricious contours of any earthly coastline — but deserted, and frighteningly wild in its aspect.
If my gaze could roam so far out over that sea, it was because a "special" light lit up its every detail. Not the light of the sun, with its dazzling shafts and the splendid outpouring of its rays; nor the pale, vague glow of the moon, which is only a reflection, without heat. No. The illuminating power of this light, its trembling diffusion, its clear, dry whiteness, the low level of its temperature, its brilliance in truth greater than the moon's — all of it plainly declared an origin that was purely electrical. It was like an aurora borealis, a continuous cosmic phenomenon, filling this cavern that was big enough to hold an ocean.
The vault hanging over my head — the sky, if you like — seemed made of great clouds, shifting, changing vapors that, by the effect of condensation, must on certain days dissolve into torrential rains. I would have thought that under so heavy a pressure of the atmosphere the water could not evaporate at all, and yet, by some physical reason that escaped me, there were broad banks of cloud spread out in the air. But for now "the weather was fine." The electric sheets produced astonishing plays of light on the very high clouds; sharp shadows sketched themselves in the coils beneath them, and often, between two parted layers, a ray would slide down to us with remarkable intensity. But it was not the sun, after all, since its light had no heat. The effect was sad, and supremely melancholy. Instead of a firmament shining with stars, I felt above those clouds a vault of granite crushing me with all its weight — and this space, immense as it was, would not have been enough for the promenade of even the least ambitious of satellites.
I remembered then the theory of an English captain who compared the earth to a vast hollow sphere, inside which the air stayed luminous under its own pressure, while two heavenly bodies, Pluto and Proserpine, traced their mysterious orbits within. Could he have been right?
We were truly imprisoned in an enormous hollow. Its width could not be judged, since the shore widened out until it was lost from view; nor its length, for the eye was soon stopped by a slightly hazy line of horizon. As for its height, it must have exceeded several leagues. Where did that vault rest on its granite buttresses? The eye could not make it out; but there was one cloud suspended in the atmosphere whose elevation had to be reckoned at two thousand fathoms — an altitude greater than that of earthly vapors, and due, no doubt, to the considerable density of the air.
The word "cavern" plainly does not convey what I mean, in trying to paint this immense space. But the words of human language cannot serve anyone who ventures into the abysses of the globe.
Nor did I know by what geological fact to explain the existence of such a hollow. Could the cooling of the globe have produced it? I knew well enough, from travelers' accounts, of certain famous caverns, but none of them came near such dimensions.
The grotto of Guácharo, in Colombia, visited by Monsieur de Humboldt, had not yielded up the secret of its depth to the scholar who explored it over a span of two thousand five hundred feet, though it probably did not extend much beyond that. The immense Mammoth Cave in Kentucky was of gigantic proportions, to be sure, since its vault rose five hundred feet above a fathomless lake, and travelers roamed through it for more than ten leagues without reaching the end. But what were these hollows next to the one I was gazing at now, with its sky of vapors, its electric radiations, and a vast sea shut up within its flanks? My imagination felt powerless before such immensity.
All these marvels I contemplated in silence. Words failed me to express what I felt. I seemed to be witnessing, on some distant planet — Uranus or Neptune — phenomena that my "earthly" nature had no notion of. New sensations demanded new words, and my imagination would not supply them. I looked, I thought, I marveled, with a stupefaction mingled with a certain measure of dread.
The sheer surprise of the spectacle had brought the colors of health back into my face; I was treating myself with astonishment, working my own cure by means of this new therapy — and besides, the liveliness of a very dense air revived me, supplying more oxygen to my lungs.
You will easily understand that after forty-seven days shut up in a narrow gallery, it was an infinite pleasure to breathe in that breeze, laden with damp, salty emanations.
And so I had no cause to regret leaving my dark grotto behind. My uncle, already used to these marvels, was no longer astonished.
"Do you feel strong enough to walk a little?" he asked me.
"Yes, certainly," I replied. "Nothing would please me more."
"Well then, take my arm, Axel, and let's follow the windings of the shore."
I accepted eagerly, and we began to skirt this new ocean. On the left, sheer rocks, clambered one atop another, formed a titanic heap of prodigious effect. Down their sides ran countless waterfalls, spilling in limpid, ringing sheets; a few light vapors, leaping from rock to rock, marked the place of hot springs, and streams flowed gently toward the common basin, seeking on the slopes any chance to murmur more pleasantly.
Among these streams I recognized our faithful traveling companion, the Hansbach, which came to lose itself quietly in the sea, as if it had never done anything else since the beginning of the world.
"We'll miss it from now on," I said with a sigh.
"Bah!" answered the professor. "This one or that one, what does it matter?"
I thought the reply a little ungrateful.
But just then my attention was caught by an unexpected sight. Five hundred paces off, at the turn of a high promontory, a forest rose before our eyes — tall, dense, thick. It was made of trees of middling size, shaped into regular parasols, with clean, geometric outlines; the currents of the air seemed to have no grip on their foliage, and in the midst of the gusts they stood as motionless as a grove of petrified cedars.
I quickened my pace. I could not put a name to these strange growths. Did they not belong to the two hundred thousand plant species known so far — and should they be given a special place in the flora of lake-dwelling vegetation? No. When we came under their shade, my surprise turned to pure admiration.
For I found myself in the presence of products of the earth, but cut to a gigantic pattern. My uncle named them at once.
"It's only a forest of mushrooms," he said.
And he was not mistaken. Imagine the size reached by these plants, so fond of warm, damp places. I knew that the Lycoperdon giganteum grows, according to Bulliard, to eight or nine feet in circumference; but here were white mushrooms, thirty to forty feet high, with caps of an equal diameter. There were thousands of them; the light could not pierce their thick shade, and a complete darkness reigned beneath those domes ranged side by side like the round roofs of an African city.
Still, I wanted to press farther in. A deadly cold came down from those fleshy vaults. For half an hour we wandered in that clammy gloom, and it was with a genuine sense of well-being that I found the seashore again.
But the vegetation of this underground land did not stop at those mushrooms. Farther on rose, in clusters, a great number of other trees with faded, colorless foliage. They were easy to recognize; they were the humble shrubs of the earth's surface, grown to phenomenal dimensions — club mosses a hundred feet tall, giant sigillarias, tree ferns as big as the firs of the high latitudes, lepidodendrons with cylindrical forking stems, tipped with long leaves and bristling with coarse hairs like monstrous succulents.
"Astounding, magnificent, splendid!" cried my uncle. "Here is the whole flora of the second epoch of the world, the age of transition. Here are these humble plants of our gardens that grew into trees in the earliest centuries of the globe! Look, Axel, marvel at it! No botanist ever sat down to such a feast!"
"You're right, Uncle. Providence seems to have wanted to preserve, in this immense greenhouse, these antediluvian plants that the shrewdness of scholars has reconstructed so happily."
"Well put, my boy — it is a greenhouse; but you would put it better still by adding that it is perhaps a menagerie too."
"A menagerie!"
"Yes, no doubt. Look at this dust we're treading underfoot, these bones scattered over the ground."
"Bones!" I cried. "Yes — bones of antediluvian animals!"
I had flung myself upon these age-old remains, made of an indestructible mineral substance (calcium phosphate). Without hesitation I put a name to these gigantic bones, which looked like the trunks of withered trees.
"Here is the lower jaw of the Mastodon," I said; "here are the molars of the Dinotherium; here is a thighbone that can only have belonged to the largest of these animals, the Megatherium. Yes, it really is a menagerie, for these bones were certainly not carried here by some cataclysm; the animals they belonged to lived on the shores of this underground sea, in the shade of these towering plants. Look, I can see whole skeletons. And yet..."
"And yet?" said my uncle.
"I don't understand how such quadrupeds came to be in this granite cavern."
"Why not?"
"Because animal life did not exist on earth until the secondary periods, when the sedimentary ground was formed by alluvial deposits and took the place of the incandescent rocks of the primitive age."
"Well, Axel, there is a very simple answer to your objection: this ground here is sedimentary ground."
"What! At such a depth below the surface of the earth?"
"No doubt — and the fact can be explained geologically. At a certain epoch, the earth was made only of an elastic crust, subject to alternating movements up and down, by the laws of attraction. It's likely that sinkings of the ground occurred, and that a part of the sedimentary terrain was dragged down to the bottom of chasms that suddenly opened."
"That must be it. But if antediluvian animals lived in these underground regions, who's to say that one of these monsters isn't still wandering somewhere among these dark forests or behind these steep rocks?"
At the thought, I searched the various points of the horizon, not without dread; but no living creature appeared on those deserted shores.
I was a little tired, so I went and sat down at the end of a promontory, at whose foot the waves broke with a crash. From there my gaze took in the whole bay, formed by an indentation of the coast. At the back of it, a little harbor lay sheltered among the pyramid-shaped rocks. Its calm waters slept out of the wind's reach. A brig and two or three schooners could have ridden easily at anchor there. I half expected to see some ship come sailing out under full canvas, standing out to sea on the southern breeze.
But the illusion faded quickly. We were indeed the only living creatures in this underground world. During certain lulls in the wind, a silence deeper than the silences of the desert came down over the barren rocks and weighed on the surface of the ocean. I tried then to pierce the distant mists, to tear apart that curtain thrown across the mysterious back of the horizon. What questions crowded onto my lips? Where did this sea end? Where did it lead? Would we ever be able to reach its opposite shores?
My uncle, for his part, had no doubt of it. As for me, I longed for it and dreaded it at the same time.
After an hour spent contemplating this wondrous spectacle, we took the way back along the beach to regain our grotto, and it was under the sway of the strangest thoughts that I fell into a deep sleep.
The next morning I woke up completely cured. I decided a swim would do me a world of good, and I went and plunged for a few minutes into the waters of this underground Mediterranean. That name, if any sea ever earned it, this one certainly did.
I came back to breakfast with a fine appetite. Hans knew how to cook our little menu; he had water and fire at his disposal, so he was able to add a bit of variety to our usual fare. For dessert he served us a few cups of coffee, and never did that delicious drink taste better to me than it did just then.
"Now," said my uncle, "it's the hour of the tide, and we mustn't miss the chance to study the phenomenon."
"The tide!" I exclaimed.
"Of course."
"You mean the pull of the moon and the sun reaches all the way down here?"
"Why not? Aren't all bodies subject, as a whole, to universal gravitation? So this mass of water can't escape the general law either. And so, in spite of the atmospheric pressure bearing down on its surface, you're going to watch it rise just like the Atlantic itself."
At that moment we were treading the sand of the shore, and the waves were creeping little by little up the beach.
"There it is — the tide beginning to come in!" I cried.
"Yes, Axel, and from these lines of foam you can see that the sea rises about ten feet."
"It's marvelous!"
"No — it's natural."
"Say what you like, all of this seems extraordinary to me, and I can hardly believe my own eyes. Who would ever have imagined, here inside the Earth's crust, a genuine ocean, with its ebb and flow, its breezes, its storms?"
"Why not? Is there any physical reason against it?"
"I can't see one — not once we've had to give up the theory of central heat."
"So, up to now, Davy's theory holds true?"
"Obviously, and from here on nothing contradicts the existence of seas or lands inside the globe."
"No doubt — but uninhabited ones."
"Well now, why shouldn't these waters give shelter to a few fish of some unknown species?"
"In any case, we haven't spotted a single one so far."
"All right, then we can rig up some lines and see whether the hook has as much luck down here as it does in the oceans up under the moon."
"We'll try it, Axel, because we have to get at every secret of these new regions."
"But where are we, Uncle? I haven't asked you that yet — surely your instruments have answered it."
"Horizontally, three hundred and fifty leagues from Iceland."
"As far as all that?"
"I'm certain I'm not off by five hundred fathoms."
"And the compass still points southeast?"
"Yes, with a westerly declination of nineteen degrees, forty-two minutes — exactly as on the surface. As for its dip, there's a curious thing I've observed with the greatest care."
"And what's that?"
"That the needle, instead of dipping toward the pole the way it does in the northern hemisphere, tilts up instead."
"So we have to conclude that the point of magnetic attraction lies somewhere between the surface of the globe and the spot we've reached?"
"Precisely. And it's likely that if we came out under the polar regions, near that seventieth degree where James Ross discovered the magnetic pole, we'd see the needle stand straight up. So this mysterious center of attraction isn't situated at any great depth."
"Indeed — and there's a fact science never suspected."
"Science, my boy, is made of errors — but errors that are good to make, because little by little they lead to the truth."
"And what depth are we at?"
"A depth of thirty-five leagues."
"So," I said, studying the map, "the mountainous part of Scotland is above us, and up there the Grampian peaks lift their snow-covered summits to a prodigious height."
"Yes," the professor answered, laughing. "It's a bit heavy to carry, but the vault is solid. The great architect of the universe built it out of good materials, and man could never have given it such a span. What are the arches of bridges and the vaultings of cathedrals next to this nave with a radius of three leagues, under which an ocean and its storms can spread out at their ease?"
"Oh, I'm not afraid the sky will fall on my head. Now, Uncle — what are your plans? Aren't you thinking of going back to the surface of the globe?"
"Go back! The very idea! On the contrary — we'll carry on with our journey, since everything has gone so well so far."
"Still, I don't see how we're going to push on beneath this liquid plain."
"I don't intend to throw myself into it headfirst. But if oceans, strictly speaking, are really only lakes, since they're ringed by land, then all the more so this inner sea must be hemmed in by the granite mass."
"There's no doubt about that."
"Well then — on the opposite shore, I'm certain to find new ways through."
"How long do you suppose this ocean is?"
"Thirty or forty leagues."
"Ah," I said, privately suspecting that the estimate might well be wide of the mark.
"So we've no time to lose, and tomorrow we put to sea."
Without meaning to, I looked around for the ship that was supposed to carry us.
"Ah," I said, "so we're setting sail. Fine! And on what vessel do we take passage?"
"It won't be on a vessel, my boy, but on a good, solid raft."
"A raft!" I exclaimed. "A raft is as impossible to build as a ship, and I don't really see..."
"You don't see, Axel — but if you listened, you might hear!"
"Hear?"
"Yes — a certain hammering that would tell you Hans is already at work."
"He's building a raft?"
"Yes."
"What! He's already brought down trees with his axe?"
"Oh, the trees were already felled. Come and you'll see him at it."
After a quarter of an hour's walk, on the far side of the promontory that formed our little natural harbor, I caught sight of Hans at work; a few more steps and I was beside him. To my great surprise, a half-finished raft lay stretched out on the sand. It was made of beams of a peculiar wood, and a great number of planks, ribs, and frames of every sort littered the ground. There was enough there to build a whole navy.
"Uncle," I cried, "what is this wood?"
"It's pine, fir, birch — every kind of northern conifer, turned to stone under the action of the sea water."
"Is that possible?"
"It's what they call surtarbrandur, or fossil wood."
"But then, like lignite, it must be as hard as stone — it won't float!"
"Sometimes that happens; there's wood of this kind that has turned into real anthracite. But others, like these, have only begun to undergo the fossil change. Look for yourself," my uncle added, tossing one of these precious bits of driftwood into the sea.
The piece of wood, after vanishing, came back to the surface of the waves and bobbed with their swell.
"Are you convinced?" said my uncle.
"Convinced above all that it's unbelievable!"
By the evening of the next day, thanks to the guide's skill, the raft was finished. It was ten feet long by five wide; the surtarbrandur beams, lashed together with strong ropes, made a solid surface, and once launched, this improvised craft floated calmly on the waters of the Lidenbrock Sea.
On August 13 we woke early. The day had come to try out a new mode of travel—fast and, best of all, hardly any work.
A mast made of two poles lashed together, a yard formed from a third, a sail borrowed from our blankets: that was the whole rig of the raft. There was no shortage of rope. The whole thing was solid.
At six o'clock the Professor gave the order to embark. The provisions, the baggage, the instruments, the weapons, and a good quantity of fresh water were all stowed in place.
Hans had rigged a rudder that let him steer his floating contraption. He took the tiller. I cast off the mooring line that held us to the shore; the sail was trimmed, and we pulled away from land in a hurry.
Just as we were leaving the little harbor, my uncle—who was attached to his geographical naming rights—wanted to give the place a name. Mine, among others.
"Actually," I said, "I've got another one to suggest."
"Which is?"
"Graüben's. Port Graüben—that'll look very well on the map."
"Port Graüben it is."
And that is how the memory of my dear girl from Virland came to be bound up with our fortunate expedition.
The breeze was blowing from the northeast; we ran before the wind at tremendous speed. The very dense layers of the atmosphere gave a considerable push and worked on the sail like a powerful fan.
After an hour, my uncle had been able to gauge our speed.
"If we keep going like this," he said, "we'll make at least thirty leagues in twenty-four hours, and it won't be long before we sight the opposite shores."
I didn't answer, and I went to take up a place at the front of the raft. Already the northern coast was sinking below the horizon; the two arms of the shoreline were opening wide, as if to speed us on our way. Before my eyes stretched an immense sea. Great clouds trailed their grayish shadows swiftly over its surface, shadows that seemed to weigh down upon the dismal water. The silvery rays of the electric light, reflected here and there by some stray droplet, kindled points of brightness along the sides of our craft. Soon all land was lost from view, every landmark vanished, and but for the foaming wake of the raft, I could have believed we hung in perfect stillness.
Toward noon, enormous seaweeds came undulating up to the surface of the waves. I knew the growing power of these plants, which creep along the sea bottom at depths of more than twelve thousand feet, reproduce under a pressure of nearly four hundred atmospheres, and often form beds vast enough to snag a ship's passage. But never, I think, was seaweed more gigantic than that of the Lidenbrock Sea.
Our raft skirted lengths of kelp three and four thousand feet long, immense serpents that unrolled beyond the reach of sight. I amused myself following their endless ribbons with my eyes, always expecting to reach the end of them, and for hours on end my patience was foiled—though never my astonishment.
What force of nature could produce such plants, and what must the earth have looked like in the first ages of its formation, when, under the action of heat and moisture, the plant kingdom developed all alone across its surface?
Evening came, and, just as I'd noticed the day before, the luminous state of the air did not dim in the least. It was a constant phenomenon whose duration one could count on.
After supper I stretched out at the foot of the mast, and it wasn't long before I fell asleep amid lazy daydreams.
Hans, motionless at the rudder, let the raft run—which, pushed along before the wind, didn't even need steering.
Since our departure from Port Graüben, Professor Lidenbrock had put me in charge of keeping the "ship's log," of noting the smallest observations, recording anything interesting, the direction of the wind, the speed we were making, the distance covered—in a word, every incident of this strange voyage.
So I'll limit myself here to reproducing these daily notes, written practically to the dictation of events, in order to give a more exact account of our crossing.
Friday, August 14.—Steady breeze from the NW. The raft runs fast and in a straight line. The coast lies thirty leagues to leeward. Nothing on the horizon. The intensity of the light doesn't vary. Fine weather—that is to say, the clouds are very high, thin, and bathed in a white atmosphere, like molten silver.
Thermometer: +32° centigrade.
At noon Hans baits a hook on the end of a line; he sets it with a small piece of meat and casts it into the sea. For two hours he catches nothing. So these waters are lifeless? No. There's a tug. Hans hauls in his line and brings up a fish that struggles vigorously.
"A fish!" cries my uncle.
"It's a sturgeon!" I cry in turn. "A small sturgeon!"
The Professor studies the animal closely and doesn't share my opinion. This fish has a flat, rounded head, and the forward part of its body is covered with bony plates; its mouth has no teeth; fairly well-developed pectoral fins are set on a body without any tail. The animal does belong to an order in which naturalists have classed the sturgeon, but it differs from it in some rather essential respects.
My uncle is not mistaken, for after a fairly short examination he says:
"This fish belongs to a family extinct for centuries, one whose fossil traces we find in the Devonian strata."
"What!" I say. "We've caught one of the inhabitants of the primitive seas alive?"
"Yes," the Professor answers, going on with his observations, "and you can see that these fossil fish have no identity with present-day species. To hold one of these creatures alive is a true joy for a naturalist."
"But what family does it belong to?"
"To the order of the Ganoids, family of the Cephalaspids, genus—"
"Well?"
"Genus Pterychtis, I'd swear to it. But this one shows a peculiarity said to occur in the fish of underground waters."
"Which is?"
"It's blind!"
"Blind!"
"Not only blind, but the organ of sight is missing from it entirely."
I look. Nothing could be truer. But it may be a special case. So the line is baited again and thrown back into the sea. This ocean is certainly rich in fish, for in two hours we take a great quantity of Pterychtis, along with fish belonging to a family equally extinct, the Dipterides, though my uncle can't identify their genus. All of them lack the organ of sight. This unexpected catch is a welcome resupply of our provisions.
So it seems settled: this sea holds only fossil species, in which the fish, like the reptiles, are all the more perfect the more ancient their creation.
Perhaps we'll come across some of those saurians that science has managed to reconstruct from a scrap of bone or cartilage.
I take up the telescope and examine the sea. It's deserted. No doubt we're still too close to the coast.
I look into the air. Why shouldn't some of those birds reconstructed by the immortal Cuvier be beating these heavy layers of atmosphere with their wings? The fish would supply them ample food. I scan the emptiness, but the skies are as uninhabited as the shores.
Even so, my imagination carries me off into the marvelous hypotheses of paleontology. I dream wide awake. I seem to see, on the surface of the waters, those enormous Chersites, those antediluvian turtles, like floating islets. Along the darkened beaches I seem to see the great mammals of the earliest days go by—the Leptotherium, found in the caves of Brazil, the Mericotherium, come from the frozen regions of Siberia. Farther off, the pachyderm Lophiodon, that gigantic tapir, hides behind the rocks, ready to fight for its prey with the Anoplotherium, a strange animal, part rhinoceros, part horse, part hippopotamus, part camel, as if the Creator, pressed for time in the world's first hours, had bundled several animals into one. The giant Mastodon swings its trunk and grinds the shore-rocks beneath its tusks, while the Megatherium, braced on its enormous paws, digs at the earth and wakes the echoes of the ringing granite with its roars. Higher up, the Protopithecus, the first ape to appear on the surface of the globe, climbs the steep summits. Higher still, the Pterodactyl, with its winged hand, glides like a great bat on the compressed air. Finally, in the topmost layers, immense birds, mightier than the cassowary, larger than the ostrich, spread their vast wings and go crashing headlong into the wall of the granite vault.
This whole fossil world is reborn in my imagination. I carry myself back to the biblical ages of creation, long before the birth of man, when the unfinished earth could not yet suffice for him. Then my dream outstrips the appearance of living beings. The mammals disappear, then the birds, then the reptiles of the secondary era, and finally the fish, the crustaceans, the mollusks, the articulates. The zoophytes of the transition period return to nothingness in their turn. All the life of the earth is summed up in me, and my heart is the only one beating in this depopulated world. There are no more seasons; there are no more climates; the globe's own heat rises without cease and neutralizes that of the radiant star. The vegetation runs wild; I pass like a shadow amid the arborescent ferns, treading with my uncertain step the iridescent marls and the mottled sandstones of the ground; I lean against the trunks of immense conifers; I lie down in the shade of Sphenophylls, of Asterophylls, of Lycopods a hundred feet high.
The centuries flow past like days; I climb back up the series of the earth's transformations; the plants vanish; the granite rocks lose their hardness; the liquid state is about to replace the solid under the action of a more intense heat; the waters run across the surface of the globe; they seethe, they volatilize; the vapors wrap the earth, which little by little becomes nothing more than a gaseous mass, heated to white heat, as big as the sun and as brilliant as it!
At the center of this nebula, fourteen hundred thousand times larger than the globe it will one day form, I am swept off into planetary space; my body grows tenuous, sublimes in its turn, and mingles like a weightless atom with these immense vapors that trace their flaming orbit through infinity!
What a dream! Where is it carrying me? My feverish hand throws its strange details down onto the paper.
I've forgotten everything—the Professor, the guide, the raft! A hallucination has seized my mind—
"What's the matter with you?" says my uncle.
My wide-open eyes fix on him without seeing him.
"Careful, Axel, you're about to fall into the sea!"
At the same moment I feel myself seized firmly by Hans's hand. Without him, in the grip of my dream, I would have hurled myself into the waves.
"Has he gone mad?" cries the Professor.
"What is it?" I say at last, coming back to myself.
"Are you ill?"
"No, I had a moment of hallucination, but it's passed. Everything all right otherwise?"
"Yes! Good breeze, fine sea! We're running fast, and if my reckoning hasn't misled me, we can't be long in making land."
At these words I get up, I search the horizon; but the line of the water still blends into the line of the clouds.
Saturday, August 15. The sea keeps up its monotonous sameness. No land in sight. The horizon looks impossibly far off.
My head is still heavy from the violence of my dream.
My uncle hasn't dreamed, but he's in a foul mood. He sweeps every quarter of the sky with his spyglass and folds his arms with a look of thwarted disgust.
I notice that Professor Lidenbrock is drifting back toward the impatient man he used to be, and I set the fact down in my journal. It took my near-death and my suffering to strike some spark of humanity out of him; but ever since I recovered, his nature has gotten the upper hand again. And yet — why fly into a temper? Isn't the voyage unfolding under the most favorable conditions imaginable? Isn't the raft skimming along with marvelous speed?
"You seem worried, Uncle," I said, watching him raise the glass to his eyes yet again.
"Worried? No."
"Impatient, then?"
"Anyone would be, with less cause than I have!"
"But we're moving fast —"
"What do I care? The speed isn't too slow — it's the sea that's too big!"
I remembered then that before we set out, the professor had reckoned this underground stretch of water at some thirty leagues across. Well, we'd already covered three times that distance, and the southern shores still hadn't come into view.
"We aren't descending!" the professor went on. "This is all wasted time, and, when you come down to it, I didn't travel this far to go boating on a pond!"
He calls this crossing a boating trip, and this sea a pond!
"But," I said, "since we've followed the route Saknussemm marked out —"
"That's exactly the question. Have we followed that route? Did Saknussemm ever come upon this expanse of water? Did he cross it? What if this stream we took for a guide has led us completely astray?"
"In any case, we can't regret having come this far. The sight is magnificent, and —"
"This isn't about sightseeing. I set myself a goal, and I mean to reach it! So don't talk to me about admiring the scenery!"
I took the hint and let the professor go on gnawing his lips with impatience. At six in the evening, Hans asked for his wages, and his three rix-dollars were counted out to him.
Sunday, August 16. Nothing new. Same weather. The wind shows a slight tendency to freshen. When I wake, my first concern is to check the strength of the light. I'm forever afraid that the electric phenomenon will dim and then go out. It doesn't: the shadow of the raft is sharply outlined on the surface of the waves.
Truly this sea is endless! It must be as wide as the Mediterranean, or even the Atlantic. Why not?
My uncle takes soundings several times over; he ties one of the heaviest picks to the end of a rope and pays out two hundred fathoms of it. No bottom. We have a hard time hauling our sounding line back up.
When the pick comes back aboard, Hans points out to me the marks deeply gouged into its surface. It's as though the piece of iron had been savagely clamped between two hard bodies.
I look at the hunter.
"Tänder!" he says.
I don't understand. I turn to my uncle, who is entirely lost in his own thoughts. I don't care to disturb him. I go back to the Icelander. He opens and closes his mouth several times, and makes me grasp his meaning.
"Teeth!" I say, dumbfounded, studying the iron bar more closely.
Yes! These really are the marks of teeth stamped into the metal! The jaws that carry them must have a prodigious power! Is it some monster of a lost species stirring beneath the deep layers of the water — more ravenous than the shark, more terrible than the whale? I can't tear my eyes from that half-gnawed bar. Is last night's dream about to become reality?
These thoughts churn in me all day long, and my imagination barely calms in a few hours of sleep.
Monday, August 17. I try to recall what I know of the peculiar instincts of those antediluvian animals of the Secondary period — the creatures that, coming after the mollusks, the crustaceans, and the fish, preceded the appearance of mammals on the globe. The world belonged then to the reptiles. These monsters reigned as absolute masters over the Jurassic seas (the seas of the Secondary period, which laid down the rock that makes up the mountains of the Jura). Nature had granted them the most complete organization. What a gigantic build! What a prodigious strength! Today's saurians — the alligators or crocodiles, the biggest and most fearsome of them — are only feeble scaled-down copies of their forefathers of the earliest ages!
I shudder at the picture I'm conjuring up of these monsters. No human eye has ever seen them alive. They appeared on the earth a thousand centuries before man, but their fossil bones, found again in that clayey limestone the English call the lias, have let us reconstruct them anatomically and know their colossal conformation.
I've seen at the Hamburg Museum the skeleton of one of these saurians that measured thirty feet in length. Am I really fated, I, a dweller on the surface of the earth, to find myself face to face with these representatives of an antediluvian family? No! It's impossible. And yet the mark of those powerful teeth is engraved on the iron bar, and from their imprint I can tell they're conical, like a crocodile's.
My eyes fix in terror on the sea; I dread seeing one of these inhabitants of the undersea caverns come lunging out.
I suppose Professor Lidenbrock shares my ideas, if not my fears, for after examining the pick, he sweeps his gaze across the ocean.
"Curse it," I say to myself, "this notion he took of sounding the depths! He's disturbed some sea creature in its lair, and if we aren't attacked along the way —!"
I glance at the weapons and make sure they're in good order. My uncle sees me do it and gives me an approving nod.
Already broad disturbances rippling across the surface of the waves betray the stirring of the deep layers below. The danger is near. We must keep watch.
Tuesday, August 18. Evening comes — or rather, the hour when sleep weighs down our eyelids, for this ocean has no night, and the relentless light stubbornly wears out our eyes, as though we were sailing under the sun of the arctic seas. Hans is at the tiller. During his watch I fall asleep.
Two hours later, a horrifying jolt wakes me. The raft has been heaved clear out of the water with indescribable force and flung a hundred feet away.
"What is it?" my uncle cried. "Have we run aground?"
Hans points his finger, some four hundred feet off, at a blackish mass that rises and sinks by turns. I look, and I cry out:
"It's a colossal porpoise!"
"Yes," my uncle replies, "and now there's a sea-lizard of uncommon size."
"And farther off, a monstrous crocodile! Look at its huge jaw and the rows of teeth it's armed with. Ah! It's gone under!"
"A whale! A whale!" the professor cries then. "I can see its enormous fins! Look at the air and water it's driving up through its blowholes!"
Sure enough, two columns of liquid rise to a considerable height above the sea. We stand there startled, stupefied, terrified, in the presence of this herd of sea-monsters. They're of supernatural dimensions, and the least of them would smash the raft with a single snap of its jaws. Hans tries to put the helm to the wind, to flee this dangerous company; but on the other side he spots more enemies no less fearsome: a turtle forty feet across, and a serpent thirty feet long that darts its enormous head above the waves.
Impossible to flee. These reptiles close in; they circle the raft with a speed that express trains at full throttle couldn't match; they trace concentric rings around us. I've taken up my carbine. But what effect can a bullet have on the scales that armor the bodies of these animals?
We're struck dumb with terror. Here they come, closing in! On one side the crocodile, on the other the serpent. The rest of the marine herd has vanished. I'm about to fire. Hans stops me with a gesture. The two monsters pass fifty fathoms from the raft, hurl themselves at each other, and their fury keeps them from even noticing us.
The battle is joined a hundred fathoms from the raft. We can see the two monsters distinctly, locked in combat.
But it seems to me now that the other animals are coming to take part in the fight — the porpoise, the whale, the lizard, the turtle; every moment I catch glimpses of them. I point them out to the Icelander. He shakes his head no.
"Tva," he says.
"What! Two! He's claiming that only two animals —"
"He's right," cries my uncle, whose spyglass hasn't left his eyes.
"How can that be!"
"Yes! The first of these monsters has the muzzle of a porpoise, the head of a lizard, the teeth of a crocodile — and that's what fooled us. It's the most fearsome of the antediluvian reptiles, the Ichthyosaurus!"
"And the other?"
"The other is a serpent hidden inside the shell of a turtle, the terrible enemy of the first — the Plesiosaurus!"
Hans was right. Only two monsters are churning up the surface of the sea like this, and I have before my eyes two reptiles of the primitive oceans. I can make out the bloodred eye of the Ichthyosaurus, as big as a man's head. Nature has endowed it with an optical apparatus of extreme power, capable of withstanding the pressure of the water layers in the depths where it lives. It's been rightly named the whale of the saurians, for it has both the speed and the size. This one measures no less than a hundred feet, and I can gauge its bulk when it raises the vertical fins of its tail above the waves. Its jaw is enormous, and according to the naturalists it holds no fewer than a hundred and eighty-two teeth.
The Plesiosaurus — a serpent with a cylindrical trunk and a short tail — has legs shaped like oars. Its body is entirely sheathed in a shell, and its neck, flexible as a swan's, rears thirty feet above the waves.
These animals attack each other with indescribable fury. They heave up liquid mountains that roll all the way to the raft. Twenty times we're on the verge of capsizing. Hissings of prodigious intensity ring out. The two beasts are coiled together. I can't tell one from the other! We have everything to fear from the rage of the victor.
An hour, two hours go by. The struggle goes on with the same ferocity. The combatants draw close to the raft, then move off again, by turns. We stay stock-still, ready to fire.
Suddenly the Ichthyosaurus and the Plesiosaurus vanish, carving out a genuine maelstrom in the water. Is the battle going to finish in the depths of the sea?
But all at once an enormous head shoots up out of the water — the head of the Plesiosaurus. The monster is wounded to death. I no longer see its immense shell. Only its long neck rears up, drops, rises again, curves, lashes the waves like a gigantic whip and writhes like a cut worm. The water sprays out to a considerable distance. It blinds us. But soon the reptile's death-throes near their end, its movements slacken, its contortions subside, and that long length of serpent stretches out like an inert mass on the calmed waters.
As for the Ichthyosaurus — has it gone back to its undersea cavern, or is it going to reappear on the surface of the sea?
Wednesday, August 19. Luckily the wind, blowing hard, let us flee the scene of the battle in a hurry. Hans is still at the tiller. My uncle, roused out of his all-consuming thoughts by the incidents of that fight, has sunk back into his impatient contemplation of the sea.
The voyage takes up its monotonous sameness again — and I have no desire to break it at the price of yesterday's dangers.
Thursday, August 20. A north-northeast breeze, fairly gusty. Warm temperature. We're making three and a half leagues an hour.
Around noon a very distant noise reaches us.
I set the fact down here without being able to explain it. It is a steady, low roar.
"Somewhere far off," says the professor, "there must be a rock, or some little island where the sea is breaking."
Hans hauls himself to the top of the mast, but sees no reef. The ocean is smooth all the way to the horizon.
Three hours pass. The roaring seems to come from a distant waterfall.
I point this out to my uncle, who shakes his head. And yet I'm convinced I'm not mistaken. Are we, then, racing toward some cataract that will fling us down into the abyss? This way of going deeper may well please the professor, since it comes near the vertical — but for me...
In any case, there must be some thunderous phenomenon a few leagues to windward, because now the roars carry to us with tremendous violence. Do they come from the sky, or from the ocean?
I turn my eyes toward the vapors hanging in the atmosphere, and try to plumb their depths. The sky is calm; the clouds, swept up to the very top of the vault, seem motionless and lose themselves in the intense blaze of the light. So the cause of this phenomenon must be sought elsewhere.
I question, then, the horizon, pure and clear of any haze. Its look hasn't changed. But if this noise comes from a fall, from a cataract; if this whole ocean is plunging into some lower basin; if these roars are made by a mass of falling water, then the current must be picking up, and its growing speed can give me the measure of the peril that threatens us. I check the current. It's nil. An empty bottle I throw into the sea stays where it is, to leeward.
Around four o'clock Hans rises, grips the mast, and climbs to its very top. From up there his gaze sweeps the arc the ocean describes before the raft and stops at a single point. His face shows no surprise, but his eyes have fixed and gone still.
"He's seen something," says my uncle.
"I think so."
Hans comes back down, then stretches his arm toward the south and says:
"Der nere!"
"Down there?" my uncle answers.
And snatching up his spyglass, he stares hard for a full minute — a minute that feels to me like a century.
"Yes, yes!" he cries.
"What do you see?"
"An enormous spout of water rising above the waves."
"Another sea animal?"
"Perhaps."
"Then let's steer farther west, because we know now what to expect from meeting these antediluvian monsters!"
"Let it run," my uncle answers.
I turn to Hans. Hans holds his tiller with unbending firmness.
And yet — if, at the distance separating us from this animal, which must be reckoned at twelve leagues at least, we can make out the column of water driven up by its blowholes, then it must be of supernatural size. To flee would be to obey the plainest, most ordinary prudence. But we didn't come here to be prudent.
So on we go. The nearer we draw, the taller the spout grows. What monster could fill itself with such a quantity of water and expel it endlessly like that?
By eight in the evening we are less than two leagues from it. Its blackish body, huge, monstrous, stretches across the sea like a little island. Is it an illusion? Is it terror? Its length seems to me to top a thousand fathoms! What cetacean can this be, foreseen by neither the Cuviers nor the Blumenbachs? It lies motionless, as though asleep; the sea seems unable to lift it, and it is the waves that ripple along its flanks. The column of water, hurled up to a height of five hundred feet, falls back with a deafening crash. Like madmen we race toward this mighty mass that a hundred whales couldn't feed for a single day.
Terror grips me. I won't go any farther! I'll cut the halyard of the sail if I have to! I turn mutinous against the professor, who doesn't answer me.
All at once Hans stands, and pointing his finger at the menacing spot:
"Holme!" he says.
"An island!" cries my uncle.
"An island!" I say in my turn, shrugging my shoulders.
"Obviously," the professor replies, letting out a great burst of laughter.
"But that column of water!"
"Geyser," says Hans — a famous jet of spouting water at the foot of Mount Hekla in Iceland.
"Why yes, of course, a geyser," my uncle shoots back, "a geyser just like the ones in Iceland!"
At first I don't want to have been so grossly wrong. To have taken a little island for a sea-monster! But the truth becomes plain, and in the end I have to own up to my mistake. There's nothing here but a natural phenomenon.
As we draw nearer, the dimensions of the liquid sheaf grow grandiose. The island is uncannily like some immense cetacean whose head rears ten fathoms above the waves. The geyser — a word the Icelanders pronounce "geysir," meaning "fury" — rises majestically at its far end. Muffled detonations burst out now and then, and the enormous jet, seized with more violent rages, shakes its plume of vapors as it leaps up to the first layer of clouds. It stands alone. No fumaroles, no hot springs surround it, and all the volcanic power is summed up in it. The rays of the electric light come to mingle with this dazzling spout, and every drop of it takes on all the colors of the prism.
"Let's put in," says the professor.
But we have to carefully avoid this waterspout, which would sink the raft in an instant. Hans, maneuvering skillfully, brings us to the far end of the island.
I leap onto the rock; my uncle follows nimbly, while the hunter stays at his post, like a man above such astonishments.
We walk on a granite mixed with siliceous tufa; the ground shivers under our feet like the walls of a boiler where overheated steam is writhing; it's scorching hot. We come in sight of a little central basin from which the geyser rises. I plunge an overflow thermometer into the water that comes gushing and boiling out, and it reads a heat of a hundred and sixty-three degrees.
So this water issues from a burning source. That contradicts the professor's theories rather sharply. I can't help remarking on it.
"Well," he retorts, "what does that prove against my doctrine?"
"Nothing," I say curtly, seeing that I've run up against an absolute stubbornness.
Still, I'm forced to admit that we've been singularly favored so far, and that, for some reason that escapes me, this journey is unfolding under unusual conditions of temperature; but it seems to me obvious, certain, that one day or another we'll reach those regions where the central heat climbs to the highest limits and passes beyond every gradation of the thermometers.
We'll soon see. That's the professor's phrase; and after christening this volcanic island with his nephew's name, he gives the signal to re-embark.
I stay a few more minutes, contemplating the geyser. I notice that its jet is irregular in its fits, that it sometimes slackens, then picks up again with fresh vigor, which I put down to the changing pressure of the vapors piling up in its reservoir.
At last we set off, rounding the very steep rocks to the south. Hans has taken advantage of the halt to put the raft back in order.
But before shoving off I make a few observations to calculate the distance covered, and I note them in my journal. We have crossed two hundred and seventy leagues of sea since Port Graüben, and we are six hundred and twenty leagues from Iceland, under England.
Friday, August 21.—By morning the magnificent geyser had vanished. The wind had freshened and carried us swiftly away from Axel Islet. The bellowing died out little by little.
The weather, if I may put it that way, is about to change. The air is thickening with vapors, and those vapors carry with them the electricity generated by the evaporation of the saline waters. The clouds sink noticeably lower and take on a uniform olive tint; the electric rays can barely pierce this opaque curtain, dropped over the stage where the drama of the tempests is about to be played.
I feel strangely stirred, the way every creature on the surface is stirred at the approach of some cataclysm. The cumulus clouds—those great rounded masses—piled up in the south have a sinister look; they wear that "pitiless" aspect I have so often noticed at the start of a storm. The air is heavy, the sea is calm.
Far off, the clouds look like huge bales of cotton heaped up in picturesque disorder; slowly they swell, and what they gain in size they lose in number; their weight is such that they cannot tear themselves free of the horizon; but under the breath of the higher currents they gradually melt together, darken, and soon form a single layer of dreadful aspect. Now and then a wisp of vapor, still lit, bounces across that grayish carpet and is quickly lost in the opaque mass.
Clearly the atmosphere is saturated with electric fluid. I am steeped in it myself; my hair stands up on my head as it would near an electric machine. It seems to me that if my companions were to touch me at this moment, they would take a violent shock.
At ten in the morning the signs of the storm grow more decisive; the wind seems to slacken, as though only to catch its breath the better; the cloud is like an immense wineskin in which hurricanes are gathering.
I don't want to believe the sky's threats, and yet I can't stop myself from saying:
"Here's some foul weather brewing."
The Professor doesn't answer. He is in a murderous mood, watching the ocean stretch on without end before his eyes. He only shrugs at my words.
"We're in for a storm," I say, throwing out my hand toward the horizon. "Those clouds are sinking down onto the sea as though to crush it!"
Silence, all around. The wind falls still. Nature has the look of a corpse and breathes no more. On the mast, where I can already see a faint St. Elmo's fire beginning to glimmer, the slackened sail hangs in heavy folds. The raft lies motionless in the middle of a thick, unrippling sea. But if we're no longer moving, what good is it to keep this canvas up—the very thing that could send us to our doom at the first blow of the tempest?
"Let's haul it down," I say. "Let's strike the mast—that would be the prudent thing."
"No, by the devil!" my uncle cries. "A hundred times no! Let the wind seize us! Let the storm carry us off! But let me finally lay eyes on the rocks of a shore, even if our raft should smash itself to a thousand pieces against them!"
The words are barely out of his mouth when the southern horizon changes all at once. The gathered vapors dissolve into water, and the air—drawn violently in to fill the void left by the condensation—turns itself into a hurricane. It comes howling from the farthest recesses of the cavern. The darkness deepens. I can barely take a few broken notes.
The raft heaves up; it leaps. My uncle is flung from his feet. I crawl over to him. He has clamped himself hard to a length of cable and seems to be watching this spectacle of the unchained elements with something like pleasure.
Hans doesn't stir. His long hair, driven forward by the hurricane and thrown across his motionless face, gives him a strange look, for every strand of it is bristling with tiny luminous plumes. His terrifying mask is that of an antediluvian man, a contemporary of the Ichthyosaurs and the Megatheriums.
Still the mast holds. The sail stretches taut like a bubble about to burst. The raft races along at a speed I cannot begin to measure—yet slower even than the drops of water flung out beneath it, whose swiftness draws them into clean, straight lines.
"The sail! The sail!" I shout, gesturing to bring it down.
"No!" my uncle answers.
"Nej," says Hans, gently shaking his head.
But now the rain forms a roaring cataract across that horizon toward which we're rushing like madmen. Before it can reach us, though, the veil of cloud tears open, the sea boils up, and the electricity—produced by some vast chemical action working in the upper layers—is let loose. With the crashes of thunder mingle the flashing jets of the lightning; countless bolts cross and recross in the middle of the detonations; the mass of vapor turns incandescent; the hailstones that strike the metal of our tools and our weapons glow with light; the heaving waves seem so many fire-spitting hillocks, each with an inner fire smoldering beneath it, each crest plumed with a flame.
My eyes are dazzled by the sheer intensity of the light, my ears shattered by the crash of the thunder; I have to cling to the mast, which bends like a reed under the fury of the hurricane.......... ................................................................ ..............................
[Here my travel notes became very incomplete. All I have recovered are a few fleeting observations, jotted down almost mechanically. But in their very brevity, in their very obscurity, they are stamped with the emotion that mastered me, and better than my memory they give me the feeling of our situation.] .............................................................. ................................
Sunday, August 23.—Where are we? Swept along with an incomparable speed.
The night was appalling. The storm does not let up. We live in a world of noise, an unbroken detonation. Our ears bleed. Not a word can be exchanged.
The lightning never stops. I see zigzags that leap upward, then double back from below and go striking the granite vault. What if it should come crashing down! Other bolts fork, or take the shape of globes of fire that burst like bombs. The general roar doesn't seem to grow any louder for it; it has passed the limit of intensity the human ear can register, and if all the powder-magazines in the world were to blow up together, we could hear nothing more.
There is a continuous emission of light from the surface of the clouds; the electric matter pours ceaselessly out of their very molecules; plainly the gaseous elements of the air have been altered; innumerable columns of water shoot up into the atmosphere and fall back foaming.
Where are we going?... My uncle lies stretched out full length at the end of the raft.
The heat redoubles. I look at the thermometer; it reads... [The figure is blotted out.]
Monday, August 24.—Will this never end? Why shouldn't this dense state of the atmosphere, once altered, be permanent?
We are broken with exhaustion. Hans is as he always is. The raft runs steadily on toward the southeast. We have covered more than two hundred leagues since Axel Islet.
At noon the fury of the hurricane doubles. We have to lash down every piece of the cargo. Each of us ties himself fast as well. The waves break clean over our heads.
For three days it has been impossible to say a single word to one another. We open our mouths, we move our lips; no sound worth the name comes out. Even mouth to ear, we cannot make ourselves heard.
My uncle has come close to me. He mouthed a few words. I think he said: "We are lost." I am not sure of it.
I decide to write these words for him: "Let's haul down our sail."
He signs that he consents.
His head has not had time to nod back up before a disk of fire appears at the edge of the raft. Mast and sail are carried off all in one piece, and I saw them lifted to a prodigious height, like the Pterodactyl, that fantastic bird of the earliest ages.
We are frozen with terror. The ball—half white, half azure, the size of a ten-inch shell—drifts slowly along, spinning with astonishing speed under the lash of the hurricane. It comes here, there, climbs onto one of the raft's timbers, leaps onto the provision sack, drops lightly down again, bounds, grazes the powder-case. Horror! We're about to be blown up! No! The dazzling disk veers away; it approaches Hans, who stares at it without flinching; my uncle, who throws himself to his knees to dodge it; me, pale and shivering under the blaze of the light and the heat; it pirouettes near my foot, which I try to pull back. I can't manage it.
A smell of nitrous gas fills the air; it gets into my throat, into my lungs. We're choking.
Why can't I pull my foot back? Is it riveted to the raft? Ah—the fall of that electric globe has magnetized all the iron aboard; the instruments, the tools, the weapons rattle and knock together with a shrill clatter; the nails of my boot cling violently to a plate of iron set into the wood. I can't pull my foot free!
At last, with one violent effort, I tear it loose just as the ball was about to seize it in its spinning course and drag me off along with it, if—
Ah! What blinding light! The globe bursts! We are drenched in jets of flame!
Then everything goes dark. I had just time to see my uncle stretched out on the raft, and Hans still at his tiller, "spitting fire" under the electricity coursing through him!
Where are we going? Where are we going? .......................................................
Tuesday, August 25.—I am coming out of a long faint. The storm goes on; the lightning is loose like a brood of serpents let slip into the air.
Are we still on the sea? Yes—and swept along at an incalculable speed. We have passed beneath England, beneath the Channel, beneath France, beneath all of Europe, perhaps! .......................................................
A new sound makes itself heard! Plainly, the sea breaking on rocks!... But then... ....................................................... .......................................................
Here ends what I called "the ship's log," so luckily saved from the wreck. I pick up my story as before.
What happened when the raft smashed against the reefs of the coast, I couldn't say. I felt myself flung into the waves, and if I escaped death, if my body wasn't torn apart on the sharp rocks, it was only because Hans's powerful arm hauled me out of the abyss.
The brave Icelander carried me beyond the reach of the waves, onto a burning sand where I found myself lying side by side with my uncle.
Then he went back toward those rocks that the furious breakers were hammering, to salvage a few scraps of the wreck. I couldn't speak; I was shattered by emotion and exhaustion; it took me a full hour to come back to myself.
Meanwhile a torrential rain kept falling, but with that final redoubling that signals the end of a storm. A few slabs of rock, one heaped on another, gave us shelter against the downpour from the sky. Hans prepared some food I couldn't touch, and each of us, worn out by three sleepless nights, dropped into a wretched, painful sleep.
The next day the weather was magnificent. Sky and sea had calmed down by mutual agreement. Every trace of the tempest had vanished. It was the cheerful words of the professor that greeted me as I woke.
"Well, my boy," he cried, "did you sleep well?"
You'd have thought we were back in the house on König-strasse, that I was coming quietly downstairs to breakfast, and that my wedding to poor Graüben was to take place that very day.
Alas! If the storm had only thrown the raft a little to the east, we would have passed under Germany, under my dear city of Hamburg, under that street where everything I loved in the world still lived. Then barely forty leagues would have separated us! But forty vertical leagues of a granite wall — and in reality, more than a thousand leagues to cross!
All these painful reflections raced through my mind before I answered my uncle's question.
"Now then!" he repeated, "won't you tell me if you slept well?"
"Very well," I answered. "I'm still battered, but that's nothing."
"Nothing at all — a little fatigue, and that's the whole of it."
"But you seem in fine spirits this morning, Uncle."
"Delighted, my boy! Delighted! We've arrived!"
"At the end of our expedition?"
"No — but at the end of that sea that never seemed to end. Now we're going to go back to traveling overland, and truly plunge into the bowels of the globe."
"Uncle, allow me one question."
"I allow it, Axel."
"And the return trip?"
"The return! Ha! You're thinking about coming back when we haven't even gotten there?"
"No, I only want to ask how it will be done."
"In the simplest way in the world. Once we've reached the center of the spheroid, either we'll find a new road to climb back up to its surface, or we'll come home in the most ordinary fashion, by the road we already traveled. I like to think it won't close up behind us."
"Then we'll have to put the raft back in good order."
"Necessarily."
"But the provisions — is there enough left to accomplish all these grand things?"
"Yes, certainly. Hans is a clever fellow, and I'm sure he saved the greater part of the cargo. Let's go make sure, anyway."
We left that grotto, which was open to every breeze. I had a hope that was at the same time a fear; it seemed impossible to me that the terrible battering of the raft hadn't destroyed everything it carried. I was wrong. When I reached the shore, I saw Hans in the middle of a whole array of objects laid out in perfect order. My uncle wrung his hand with a keen feeling of gratitude. This man, whose devotion was superhuman — of a kind there may be no other example — had worked while we slept and saved the most precious of our belongings at the risk of his life.
Not that we hadn't suffered some serious losses — our weapons, for instance; but in the end, we could do without those. The stock of powder had stayed intact, after nearly blowing up during the storm.
"Well," cried the professor, "since the guns are gone, we'll simply have to do without hunting."
"Fine — but the instruments?"
"Here's the manometer, the most useful of them all, the one I'd have given up all the others for! With it I can calculate our depth and know when we've reached the center. Without it, we'd risk going too far and coming out at the antipodes!"
This cheer of his was ferocious.
"But the compass?" I asked.
"Here it is, on this rock, in perfect condition — along with the chronometer and the thermometers. Ah, the hunter is a precious man!"
I had to admit it: as far as instruments went, nothing was missing. As for the tools and the gear, I saw them scattered across the sand — ladders, ropes, pickaxes, mattocks, and the rest.
Still, there remained the question of food to settle.
"And the provisions?" I said.
"Let's have a look at the provisions," my uncle answered.
The crates that held them were lined up along the beach in a perfect state of preservation; the sea had spared most of them, and all in all — counting biscuit, salt meat, gin, and dried fish — we could still reckon on four months' worth of food.
"Four months!" cried the professor. "We have time to go and come back, and with whatever's left I mean to throw a grand dinner for all my colleagues at the Johannaeum!"
I should have grown used long ago to my uncle's temperament, and yet this man never stopped astonishing me.
"Now," he said, "we're going to refill our water supply with the rain the storm poured into all these granite basins; so we've no fear of being caught by thirst. As for the raft, I'm going to have Hans repair it as best he can, though I don't imagine it will be of any further use to us!"
"How so?" I exclaimed.
"An idea of mine, my boy! I don't believe we'll go out the way we came in."
I looked at the professor with a certain distrust; I wondered whether he hadn't gone mad. And yet "he little knew how right he was."
"Let's go have breakfast," he went on.
I followed him up to a high headland, after he'd given his instructions to the hunter. There, some dried meat, biscuit, and tea made an excellent meal — one of the best, I have to confess, that I've had in my life. Hunger, the open air, the calm after all that upheaval — everything worked together to give me an appetite.
During breakfast, I put to my uncle the question of where exactly we were at that moment.
"That," I said, "seems hard to calculate."
"To calculate exactly, yes," he answered; "it's even impossible, since during those three days of storm I couldn't keep any record of the raft's speed or direction. But we can still work out our position by dead reckoning."
"True — the last observation was taken at the geyser islet..."
"At Axel Islet, my boy. Don't turn down the honor of having christened with your own name the first island discovered at the center of the terrestrial mass."
"All right! From Axel Islet, we'd crossed about two hundred and seventy leagues of sea, and we were more than six hundred leagues from Iceland."
"Good! Then let's start from that point and count four days of storm, during which our speed can't have been less than eighty leagues per twenty-four hours."
"I believe it. That would be three hundred leagues to add on."
"Yes, and the Lidenbrock Sea would be roughly six hundred leagues from one shore to the other! Do you realize, Axel, that it could rival the Mediterranean in size?"
"Yes — especially if we've only crossed it at its width!"
"Which is entirely possible!"
"And, curiously enough," I added, "if our calculations are right, we now have that Mediterranean over our heads."
"Really!"
"Really, for we're nine hundred leagues from Reykjavik!"
"That's a fine stretch of road, my boy; but whether we're under the Mediterranean rather than under Turkey or under the Atlantic — that can only be affirmed if our course hasn't drifted."
"No, the wind seemed steady; so I think this shore must lie to the southeast of Port Graüben."
"Good — it's easy to make sure by consulting the compass. Let's go consult the compass!"
The professor headed for the rock on which Hans had set down the instruments. He was gay, brisk; he rubbed his hands, he struck poses! A regular young man! I followed him, curious enough to know whether I'd gone wrong in my reckoning.
Reaching the rock, my uncle took the compass, laid it flat, and watched the needle, which, after swinging back and forth, settled into a fixed position under the pull of the magnetic force.
My uncle looked, then rubbed his eyes and looked again. At last he turned toward me, dumbfounded.
"What's the matter?" I asked.
He signaled me to examine the instrument. A cry of surprise escaped me. The point of the needle marked north where we assumed south to be! It pointed toward the beach instead of showing the open sea!
I shook the compass, I examined it; it was in perfect working order. Whatever position I forced the needle into, it stubbornly took up that same unexpected direction.
So there was no longer any doubt: during the storm a shift of wind had occurred without our noticing it, and it had carried the raft back toward the very shores my uncle believed he was leaving behind him.
It would be impossible for me to paint the succession of feelings that shook Professor Lidenbrock—the stupefaction, the disbelief, and finally the rage. Never had I seen a man so thoroughly thrown at first, so infuriated after. The exhaustion of the crossing, the dangers we'd run, all of it to do over again! We had gone backward instead of forward!
But my uncle quickly got the upper hand of himself.
"So! Fate plays me tricks like this!" he cried. "The elements are conspiring against me! Air, fire, and water are joining forces to block my way! Well, then—they'll learn what my will can do. I will not give in, I will not fall back a single inch, and we shall see who wins out, man or nature!"
Standing on the rock, furious, menacing, Otto Lidenbrock looked like the ferocious Ajax defying the gods. But I judged it wise to step in and put some brake on this senseless zeal.
"Listen to me," I said in a firm tone. "There's a limit to every ambition here below. You mustn't fight against the impossible. We're badly equipped for a sea voyage. Five hundred leagues can't be made on a sorry heap of beams with a blanket for a sail, a stick in place of a mast, and against winds let loose. We can't steer, we're the plaything of every storm, and it's the act of madmen to attempt this impossible crossing a second time!"
I was able to unspool the whole series of these utterly irrefutable arguments for a good ten minutes without being interrupted—but that was solely due to the professor's inattention, for he didn't hear a word of my reasoning.
"To the raft!" he cried.
That was his answer. I did everything I could—begged, raged—and ran up against a will harder than granite.
Just then Hans was finishing his repairs to the raft. You'd have thought this strange creature could read my uncle's intentions. With a few pieces of surtarbrandur he had reinforced the craft. A sail already rose from it, and the wind played in its rippling folds.
The professor said a few words to the guide, and at once the man set to loading the baggage and getting everything ready for departure. The air was fairly clear, and the northwest wind held steady.
What could I do? Resist alone against two? Impossible. If only Hans would side with me. But no! It seemed the Icelander had set aside every personal will and taken a vow of self-denial. There was nothing to be got from a servant so utterly bound to his master. I had to march forward.
So I was about to take my accustomed place on the raft when my uncle stopped me with his hand.
"We won't set out until tomorrow," he said.
I made the gesture of a man resigned to anything.
"I must neglect nothing," he went on, "and since fate has driven me onto this stretch of coast, I won't leave it until I've explored it."
This remark will make sense once you know that we had come back to the northern shore, but not to the very spot of our first departure. Port Graüben had to lie farther to the west. Nothing more reasonable, then, than to examine carefully the surroundings of this new landing.
"Let's go exploring!" I said.
And, leaving Hans to his work, off we went. The space between the reach of the sea and the foot of the buttressing cliffs was very wide; you could walk half an hour before reaching the wall of rock. Our feet crushed countless shells of every shape and size, the homes of animals from the earliest ages. I also spotted enormous shells whose diameter often topped fifteen feet. They had belonged to those gigantic glyptodons of the Pliocene period, of which the modern turtle is only a small reduction. Beyond that, the ground was strewn with a great quantity of stony debris—a kind of pebble rounded by the surf and laid out in successive lines. I was thus led to the observation that the sea must once have occupied this space. On the scattered rocks, now beyond its reach, the waves had left plain traces of their passage.
This could explain, up to a point, the existence of this ocean forty leagues below the surface of the globe. But in my view this mass of water was bound to lose itself little by little in the bowels of the earth, and it clearly came from the waters of the Ocean, which had forced their way through some fissure. And yet one had to grant that this fissure was now plugged, for otherwise this whole cavern—or better, this immense reservoir—would have filled in a fairly short time. Perhaps this water, having had to struggle against subterranean fires, had partly turned to vapor. Hence the explanation of the clouds hanging over our heads and the release of that electricity which brewed storms inside the earth's mass.
This theory of the phenomena we had witnessed struck me as satisfactory; for however great the wonders of nature may be, they are always explicable by physical reasons.
So we were walking over a kind of sedimentary terrain formed by the waters, like all the terrain of that period, so widely spread across the surface of the globe. The professor examined every crevice of rock attentively. Let any opening at all exist, and it became important to him to sound its depth.
For a mile we had followed the shores of the Lidenbrock Sea when the ground suddenly changed its look. It seemed churned up, convulsed by a violent upheaval of the lower strata. In many a spot, sinkings and heavings bore witness to a powerful dislocation of the earth's mass.
We were advancing with difficulty over these fractures of granite, mixed with flint, quartz, and alluvial deposits, when a field—more than a field, a whole plain of bones—rose before our eyes. It looked like an immense cemetery, where the generations of twenty centuries mingled their eternal dust. High swells of debris rose in tiers into the distance. They rolled away to the limits of the horizon and lost themselves there in a melting haze. There, over perhaps three square miles, all the life of animal history lay heaped—the history barely written in the too-recent terrain of the inhabited world.
And yet an impatient curiosity swept us on. Our feet crushed with a dry crackle the remains of these prehistoric animals, fossils that the Museums of the great cities fight over for their rare and fascinating scraps. A thousand Cuviers would not have lived long enough to reconstruct the skeletons of the organic beings laid out in this magnificent ossuary.
I was dumbfounded. My uncle had raised his great arms toward the thick vault that served us for a sky. His mouth gaping wide, his eyes blazing behind the lenses of his glasses, his head bobbing up and down and side to side—his whole posture, in short, betrayed a boundless astonishment. He stood before a priceless collection of Leptotheriums, Mericotheriums, Mastodons, Protopithecuses, Pterodactyls, of every antediluvian monster piled up there for his personal satisfaction. Picture a passionate bibliomaniac suddenly carried into that famous library of Alexandria burned by Omar and by some miracle risen again from its ashes! Such was my uncle, Professor Lidenbrock.
But his wonder took an altogether different turn when, running across that volcanic dust, he seized a bare skull and cried out in a quivering voice:
"Axel! Axel! A human head!"
"A human head, Uncle?" I answered, no less stunned.
"Yes, my nephew! Ah, Monsieur Milne-Edwards! Ah, Monsieur de Quatrefages! Why aren't you here where I am—I, Otto Lidenbrock!"
To understand this speech my uncle delivered to those illustrious French scientists, you have to know that a fact of the highest importance in paleontology had come to light shortly before we left.
On March 28, 1863, laborers digging under the direction of Monsieur Boucher de Perthes in the quarries of Moulin-Quignon, near Abbeville in the department of the Somme, in France, found a human jawbone fourteen feet below the surface of the ground. It was the first fossil of its kind ever brought up into broad daylight. Beside it lay stone axes and worked flints, colored and coated by time with a uniform patina.
The noise this discovery made was enormous, not only in France but in England and Germany. Several scientists of the French Institute — among them Milne-Edwards and de Quatrefages — took the matter to heart, proved the unquestionable authenticity of the bone in question, and made themselves the most ardent champions of this "jawbone trial," as the English put it.
To the geologists of the United Kingdom who held the fact to be certain — Falconer, Busk, Carpenter, and others — were joined the scientists of Germany, and among them, in the front rank, the most fiery, the most enthusiastic, my uncle Lidenbrock.
The authenticity of a human fossil from the Quaternary epoch thus seemed incontestably proven and accepted.
This theory, it's true, had a fierce opponent in Monsieur Élie de Beaumont. That scientist, a man of such high authority, maintained that the ground at Moulin-Quignon did not belong to the "diluvium" but to a more recent layer, and — agreeing on this point with Cuvier — he refused to admit that the human species had been contemporary with the animals of the Quaternary epoch. My uncle Lidenbrock, in concert with the great majority of geologists, had held firm, argued, disputed, and Monsieur Élie de Beaumont had been left almost alone in his camp.
We knew all these details of the affair, but we had no idea that, since our departure, the question had made fresh progress. Other identical jawbones — though belonging to individuals of different types and different nations — had been found in the loose gray earth of certain caves, in France, in Switzerland, in Belgium, along with weapons, utensils, tools, the bones of children, of adolescents, of grown men, of old men. The existence of Quaternary man was thus affirming itself more strongly every day.
And that wasn't all. New remains dug out of the Tertiary Pliocene ground had allowed even bolder scientists to assign a great antiquity to the human race. These remains, it's true, were not human bones, but only objects of human industry — tibias, femurs of fossil animals, regularly grooved, carved, so to speak, and bearing the mark of human workmanship.
And so, at a single bound, man leaped up the ladder of the ages by a great many centuries; he came before the Mastodon; he became the contemporary of the Elephas meridionalis; he had a hundred thousand years of existence behind him, since that is the date the most renowned geologists assign to the formation of the Pliocene ground!
Such was the state of the science of paleontology at that time, and what we knew of it was enough to explain our behavior before this boneyard of the Lidenbrock Sea. So it will be easy to imagine my uncle's astonishment and his joy, especially when, twenty paces further on, he found himself in the presence of — you might even say face to face with — one of the specimens of Quaternary man.
It was an absolutely recognizable human body. Had some soil of a peculiar nature, like that of the Saint-Michel cemetery at Bordeaux, preserved it this way for centuries? I couldn't say. But there it was, a corpse with skin drawn tight and turned to parchment, limbs still supple — to the eye at least — teeth intact, hair abundant, the nails on its fingers and toes of a frightful length, showing itself to our eyes just as it had lived.
I stood mute before this apparition out of another age. My uncle, so talkative, so impetuously long-winded as a rule, fell silent too. We had lifted the body. We had propped it upright. It looked back at us with its hollow sockets. We felt its resonant chest.
After a few moments of silence, the uncle was overcome by the professor. Otto Lidenbrock, swept away by his temperament, forgot the circumstances of our journey, the place we were in, the immense cavern that held us. No doubt he thought himself back at the Johannaeum, lecturing to his students, for he adopted a professorial tone, and addressing an imaginary audience:
"Gentlemen," he said, "I have the honor of presenting to you a man of the Quaternary epoch. Great scientists have denied his existence; others, no less great, have affirmed it. The doubting Thomases of paleontology, if they were here, could touch him with a finger and would be forced to admit their error. I know very well that science must be on guard against discoveries of this kind! I'm well aware of the use that Barnum and other charlatans of the same stripe have made of fossil men. I know the story of the kneecap of Ajax, of the supposed body of Orestes recovered by the Spartans, and of the body of Asterius, ten cubits long, that Pausanias tells of. I have read the reports on the skeleton of Trapani discovered in the fourteenth century, in which some wished to recognize Polyphemus, and the story of the giant dug up during the sixteenth century in the neighborhood of Palermo. You know as well as I do, gentlemen, of the analysis carried out near Lucerne in 1577 of those great bones that the famous physician Félix Plater declared belonged to a giant nineteen feet tall! I have devoured the treatises of Cassanion, and all those memoirs, pamphlets, speeches, and counter-speeches published on the subject of the skeleton of Teutobochus, king of the Cimbri, invader of Gaul, exhumed from a sand-pit in Dauphiné in 1613! In the eighteenth century I would have fought alongside Pierre Campet against the existence of Scheuchzer's pre-Adamites! I have held in my hands the writing entitled Gigans—"
Here reappeared my uncle's natural infirmity, which in public kept him from pronouncing difficult words.
"The writing entitled Gigans—" he began again.
He could go no further.
"Giganteo—"
Impossible! The unlucky word refused to come out! There would have been fine laughter at the Johannaeum!
"Gigantosteology," the professor Lidenbrock finally managed, between two oaths.
Then, resuming with even greater vigor, and warming to his theme:
"Yes, gentlemen, I know all these things! I also know that Cuvier and Blumenbach recognized in these bones nothing but simple Mammoth bones and those of other animals of the Quaternary epoch. But here, the merest doubt would be an insult to science! The corpse is right here! You can see it, touch it! It is not a skeleton, it is an intact body, preserved for purely anthropological purposes!"
I was quite willing not to contradict this assertion.
"If I could wash it in a solution of sulfuric acid," my uncle went on, "I would make all the earthy parts vanish, along with these gleaming shells encrusted on it. But I lack that precious solvent. Even so, just as it is, this body will tell us its own story."
Here the professor took hold of the fossil corpse and handled it with the dexterity of a showman displaying curiosities.
"You see," he continued, "it is not six feet long, and we are a long way from the so-called giants. As for the race it belongs to, it is unquestionably Caucasian. It is the white race, our own! The skull of this fossil is regularly ovoid, with no development of the cheekbones, no projection of the jaw. It shows none of that prognathism which alters the facial angle. (The facial angle is formed by two planes — one more or less vertical, tangent to the forehead and the incisors, the other horizontal, passing through the opening of the ear canals and the base of the nasal spine; prognathism, in anthropological language, is that projection of the jaw which alters the angle.) Measure this angle: it is nearly ninety degrees. But I will go still further down the road of deduction, and I will dare to say that this human specimen belongs to the Japhetic family, spread from the Indies to the limits of western Europe. Do not smile, gentlemen!"
No one was smiling, but the professor was so used to seeing faces break into grins during his learned lectures!
"Yes," he went on with fresh animation, "this is a fossil man, contemporary with the Mastodons whose bones fill this amphitheater. But as for telling you by what route he arrived here, how the layers in which he was buried slid all the way down into this enormous cavity of the globe — that I will not permit myself to do. No doubt, in the Quaternary epoch, considerable upheavals were still at work in the earth's crust: the continual cooling of the globe produced cracks, fissures, faults, down which some part of the upper ground very likely slid. I make no pronouncement, but at the end of the day the man is here, surrounded by the works of his own hands, by these axes, these worked flints that make up the Stone Age; and unless he came here as I did, as a tourist, as a pioneer of science, I cannot doubt the authenticity of his ancient origin."
The professor fell silent, and I burst into unanimous applause. Besides, my uncle was right, and men more learned than his nephew would have been hard put to argue against him.
Another sign. This fossilized body was not the only one in the immense boneyard. Other bodies turned up at every step we took through that dust, and my uncle could choose the most marvelous of these specimens to convince the skeptics.
In truth, it was an astonishing spectacle — these generations of men and animals mingled together in that cemetery. But a grave question presented itself, one we did not dare to resolve. Had these living beings slid down toward the shores of the Lidenbrock Sea by some convulsion of the ground, at a time when they were already reduced to dust? Or rather, had they lived here, in this underground world, beneath this artificial sky, born and dying like the inhabitants of the earth above? Until now, only the sea monsters, only the fish, had appeared to us alive! Might some man of the abyss still be wandering across these deserted shores?
For another half hour our feet trod those beds of bones. We pressed on, driven by a burning curiosity. What other marvels did this cavern hold, what treasures for science? My eyes braced for every surprise, my imagination for every astonishment.
The shores of the sea had long since vanished behind the hills of the ossuary. The reckless professor, careless of losing his way, dragged me far into the distance. We advanced in silence, bathed in the electric waves. By some phenomenon I cannot explain—thanks to the light's diffusion, complete now in every direction—the glow fell evenly on every face of every object. Its source no longer sat at any fixed point in space, and it cast no shadow whatever. You would have thought yourself standing at high noon in high summer, in the heart of the equatorial regions, beneath the vertical rays of the sun. Every trace of vapor had disappeared. The rocks, the far-off mountains, a few confused masses of distant forest, took on a strange look under that equal wash of luminous fluid. We were like that fantastical figure of Hoffmann's who lost his shadow.
After a mile's march, the edge of an immense forest appeared—but no longer one of those mushroom woods that surrounded Port Graüben.
This was the vegetation of the Tertiary era in all its splendor. Great palms of species long extinct, magnificent palmacites, pines, yews, cypresses, arborvitae—these stood for the family of conifers, laced together by a net of tangled vines. A carpet of mosses and liverworts clothed the ground in softness. A few streams murmured beneath these shade trees—hardly worthy of the name, since they threw no shade. Along their banks grew tree ferns like those in the hot-houses of the inhabited world. Only, all these trees, shrubs, and plants lacked color, robbed of the sun's quickening warmth. Everything blurred into a single uniform tint, brownish and as though faded. The leaves had lost their green, and the flowers themselves—so numerous in that Tertiary age that first saw them born—colorless now and without scent, seemed cut from paper bleached by the action of the atmosphere.
My uncle Lidenbrock ventured in beneath these gigantic thickets. I followed him, not without a certain dread. Since nature had gone to the trouble of laying out a vegetable banquet here, why should the fearsome mammals not be feeding at it? In the broad clearings the fallen, time-gnawed trees had left open, I could make out legumes, maples, madder plants, and a thousand edible shrubs dear to the ruminants of every period. Then, mingled and jumbled together, rose the trees of regions utterly unlike one another on the surface of the globe—the oak growing beside the palm, the Australian eucalyptus leaning against the Norway fir, the northern birch tangling its branches with the branches of the New Zealand kauri. It was enough to confound the reason of the cleverest classifiers in earthly botany.
Suddenly I stopped. With one hand I held my uncle back.
The diffused light let me pick out the smallest objects deep in the thickets. I thought I had seen... no? Truly, with my own eyes, I was seeing immense shapes stirring beneath the trees! Yes—they were gigantic animals, a whole herd of Mastodons, no longer fossils but living, and just like those whose remains were found in 1801 in the marshes of Ohio! I saw those great elephants, their trunks writhing beneath the trees like a legion of serpents. I heard the sound of their long tusks, the ivory boring into the old trunks. Branches cracked, and leaves ripped away by the massive load vanished into the vast maws of these monsters.
So this dream, in which I had watched that whole world of prehistoric times be born again—the ages of the Tertiary and the Quaternary—was coming true at last! And there we stood, alone, in the bowels of the globe, at the mercy of its savage inhabitants!
My uncle stared.
"Come," he said all at once, seizing my arm, "forward, forward!"
"No!" I cried. "No! We have no weapons! What would we do in the middle of a herd of giant quadrupeds? Come away, uncle, come away! No human creature can defy the fury of these monsters and live."
"No human creature!" my uncle answered, dropping his voice. "You're wrong, Axel! Look—look, over there! I think I see a living being! A being like ourselves! A man!"
I looked, shrugging my shoulders, determined to push my disbelief to its very last limit. But whatever I wished, I had to yield to the evidence.
Indeed, less than a quarter of a mile off, leaning against the trunk of an enormous kauri, a human being—a Proteus of these underground lands, a new son of Neptune—was tending that countless herd of Mastodons!
Immanis pecoris custos, immanior ipse!
Yes! immanior ipse—the guardian of a monstrous herd, more monstrous still himself! This was no longer the fossil being whose corpse we had turned up in the ossuary; this was a giant capable of commanding these monsters. His height topped twelve feet. His head, big as a buffalo's, disappeared into the brush of an unkempt mane of hair. You would have called it a true mane, like that of the elephant of the earliest ages. In one hand he brandished an enormous branch—a fitting crook for this antediluvian shepherd.
We had stood frozen, dumbfounded. But we could be spotted. We had to run.
"Come, come!" I cried, dragging my uncle away—and for the first time he let himself be led!
A quarter of an hour later, we were out of sight of that fearsome enemy.
And now that I think it over calmly, now that peace has settled again in my mind, now that months have passed since that strange and supernatural encounter—what am I to think, what am I to believe? No! It is impossible! Our senses were deceived, our eyes did not see what they saw! No human creature exists in this subterranean world! No race of men dwells in these lower caverns of the globe, careless of the inhabitants of its surface, cut off from all contact with them! It is madness, deep madness!
I would sooner admit the existence of some animal whose structure comes close to the human—some ape of the earliest geological epochs, some Protopithecus, some Mesopithecus like the one M. Lartet discovered in the fossil bed of Sansan! But this one, in his sheer size, overran every measurement paleontology has ever recorded! No matter! An ape, yes, an ape, however improbable! But a man, a living man, and with him a whole race buried in the bowels of the earth—never!
Meanwhile we had left the bright, luminous forest, struck dumb with wonder, crushed under an amazement that bordered on stupor. We were running in spite of ourselves. It was a true flight, like those terrifying headlong rushes one suffers in certain nightmares. Instinctively we were making back toward the Lidenbrock Sea, and I don't know into what wild ramblings my mind might have wandered, had one practical worry not called me back to more useful observations.
Though I was certain I trod ground never before touched by our steps, I often noticed clusters of rocks whose shape recalled those of Port Graüben. Sometimes the likeness was uncanny. Streams and cascades fell by the hundred from the jutting rocks; I thought I saw again the bed of surtarbrandur—fossil wood—our faithful Hansbach, and the grotto where I had come back to life; then, a few steps on, the arrangement of the buttresses, the sudden appearance of a stream, the startling profile of a rock, would throw me back into doubt.
The professor shared my uncertainty; he could not get his bearings in this uniform panorama. I understood as much from a few words that escaped him.
"Clearly," I told him, "we haven't landed at our starting point, but surely, by following the shoreline round, we'll come back near Port Graüben."
"In that case," my uncle answered, "there's no use pushing this exploration any further, and the best thing is to go back to the raft. But are you sure you're not mistaken, Axel?"
"It's hard to say, since all these rocks look alike. Still, I think I recognize the headland at whose foot Hans built his craft. We must be near the little harbor—if this isn't the very spot," I added, studying an inlet I thought I knew.
"But no, Axel, we'd at least find our own tracks, and I see nothing—"
"But I see something!" I cried, springing toward an object glittering on the sand.
"What is it, then?"
"There!" I answered, and I showed my uncle a dagger I had just picked up.
"Well!" he said. "So you brought that weapon along with you?"
"I? Not at all—but you, I suppose?"
"Not that I know of; I have never had that object in my possession."
"And I still less, uncle."
"Now that is peculiar."
"But no, it's quite simple; the Icelanders often carry weapons of this kind, and Hans—to whom this one belongs—lost it on this beach..."
"Hans!" said my uncle, shaking his head.
Then he examined the weapon closely.
"Axel," he said to me gravely, "this dagger is a weapon of the sixteenth century, a true poniard, of the sort gentlemen wore at their belts to give the coup de grâce; it is of Spanish origin; it belongs neither to you, nor to me, nor to the hunter!"
"Do you dare to say—?"
"Look—it wasn't nicked like this from being driven into men's throats; its blade is covered with a coat of rust that dates back not a day, not a year, not a century!"
The professor was warming up, in his usual way, letting himself be carried off by his imagination.
"Axel," he went on, "we are on the trail of the great discovery! This blade has lain abandoned on the sand for one, two, three hundred years, and got these nicks on the rocks of this underground sea!"
"But it didn't come here on its own!" I cried. "It didn't twist itself out of shape! Someone came before us!"
"Yes—a man."
"And this man?"
"This man carved his name with this dagger! This man wanted, one more time, to mark the road to the center with his own hand! Let's search—search!"
And, prodigiously excited, off we went along the high wall, questioning the least crevice that might turn into a gallery.
We came at last to a place where the shore narrowed. The sea nearly bathed the foot of the buttresses, leaving a passage a fathom wide at most. Between two spurs of rock, we could make out the mouth of a dark tunnel.
There, on a slab of granite, two mysterious letters appeared, half eaten away—the two initials of the bold and fantastical traveler:
* ᛐ * ᚼ *
"A. S.!" cried my uncle. "Arne Saknussemm! Always Arne Saknussemm!"
Since the beginning of the journey I had lived through no end of astonishments; I might have believed myself safe from further surprises, past being amazed by anything. And yet, at the sight of those two letters carved there three hundred years ago, I stood in a stupor that bordered on idiocy. Not only was the learned alchemist's signature there to be read on the rock, but the very stylus that had traced it lay in my hands. Short of the most stubborn bad faith, I could no longer doubt the traveler's existence or the reality of his journey.
While these thoughts whirled through my head, Professor Lidenbrock gave himself over to a fit of praise for Arne Saknussemm that was frankly a touch operatic.
"Marvelous genius!" he cried. "You forgot nothing that might open the roads of the earth's crust to other mortals, and your fellow men can pick up the traces your feet left, three centuries ago, at the bottom of these dark passages! To other eyes than yours you reserved the sight of these wonders! Your name, carved stage by stage, leads the traveler bold enough to follow you straight to his goal, and at the very center of our planet he will find it inscribed once more in your own hand. Well then! I too will go and sign my name on this last page of granite! But from this moment on, let this cape—seen by you, beside this sea discovered by you—be forever called Cape Saknussemm!"
That is what I heard, or something close to it, and I felt myself seized by the enthusiasm those words breathed. An inner fire flared to life in my chest! I forgot everything—the dangers of the journey, the perils of the return. What another man had done, I meant to do as well, and nothing that was human seemed impossible to me!
"Onward, onward!" I cried.
I was already flinging myself toward the dark gallery when the Professor stopped me, and he—the man of hot tempers—counseled me patience and a cool head.
"Let's go back to Hans first," he said, "and bring the raft to this spot."
I obeyed the order, though not without an effort, and slipped quickly among the rocks of the shore.
"You know, Uncle," I said as we walked, "that we've been remarkably well served by circumstances so far!"
"Ah! You think so, Axel?"
"No doubt about it—right down to the storm, which put us back on the right road. Bless the tempest! It carried us back to this coast that fair weather would have taken us away from! Suppose for a moment that our prow"—the prow of a raft!—"had touched the southern shores of the Lidenbrock Sea. What would have become of us? Saknussemm's name would never have appeared before our eyes, and we'd be stranded now on a beach with no way out."
"Yes, Axel, there's something providential in the fact that, sailing south, we should have come back precisely to the north and to Cape Saknussemm. I have to admit it's more than astonishing, and there's a fact here whose explanation escapes me entirely."
"Bah! What does it matter! You don't explain facts—you profit from them!"
"No doubt, my boy, but—"
"But now we're going to take up the road north again, pass beneath the northern lands of Europe—Sweden, Russia, Siberia, who knows!—instead of burrowing under the deserts of Africa or the waves of the ocean, and I don't want to know any more than that!"
"Yes, Axel, you're right, and all is for the best, since we're leaving behind this horizontal sea that could lead nowhere. We're going to descend, descend again, and keep descending! Do you realize that to reach the center of the globe there are only fifteen hundred leagues left to cross!"
"Bah!" I cried. "That's really not worth talking about! Let's go! Let's go!"
These mad speeches were still running on when we rejoined the hunter. Everything was ready for an immediate departure; not a single package remained unloaded. We took our places on the raft, and with the sail hoisted, Hans steered along the coast toward Cape Saknussemm.
The wind was not favorable to a craft that could not sail close to it. So in many places we had to push ahead with the iron-tipped poles. Often the rocks, stretching out just below the surface, forced us into long detours. At last, after three hours of sailing—that is, toward six in the evening—we reached a spot suitable for landing.
I leaped ashore, followed by my uncle and the Icelander. The crossing had not calmed me. On the contrary, I even proposed that we burn "our boats," so as to cut off any retreat. But my uncle opposed the idea. I found him singularly lukewarm.
"At least," I said, "let's set off without losing a moment."
"Yes, my boy; but first, let's examine this new gallery, so we know whether we need to get the ladders ready."
My uncle set his Ruhmkorff apparatus going; the raft, tied to the shore, was left to itself—besides, the mouth of the gallery was not twenty paces off, and our little party, with me at its head, made for it without delay.
The opening, roughly circular, was about five feet across. The dark tunnel had been cut through the living rock and carefully bored smooth by the eruptive matter it had once given passage to; its lower edge came flush with the ground, so that one could enter without the slightest difficulty.
We were following an almost level floor when, after six paces, our march was cut short by an enormous block set squarely across our path.
"Cursed rock!" I cried in a fury, seeing myself suddenly halted by an impassable obstacle.
Search as we might, right and left, high and low, there was no passage, no branching. I felt a keen disappointment, and I refused to accept that the obstacle was real. I bent down. I looked underneath the block. Not a crack. Above it. The same wall of granite. Hans played the lamp's light over every point of the surface; but it offered no break, no gap at all.
We had to give up all hope of getting through.
I had sat down on the ground; my uncle was pacing the corridor with great strides.
"But then Saknussemm?" I cried.
"Yes," said my uncle. "Was he too stopped by this door of stone?"
"No! No!" I shot back, quick and sharp. "This piece of rock, by some shock or other—or one of those magnetic phenomena that shake the earth's crust—suddenly closed this passage. Many years went by between Saknussemm's return and the fall of this block. Isn't it obvious that this gallery was once the road of the lavas, and that the eruptive matter flowed freely through it back then? Look—there are fresh fissures scoring this granite ceiling; it's made of pieces fitted together, of enormous stones, as if the hand of some giant had labored at this masonry. But one day the pressure grew too great, and this block, like a keystone that gives way, slid all the way to the floor, blocking every passage. Here's an accidental obstacle that Saknussemm never met, and if we don't bring it down, we're unworthy to reach the center of the world!"
That is how I was talking! The Professor's whole soul had passed into me. The genius of discovery inspired me. I forgot the past, I scorned the future. Nothing existed for me any longer on the surface of this spheroid into whose depths I had plunged—not the cities, not the countryside, not Hamburg, not König-strasse, not my poor Graüben, who must believe me lost forever in the bowels of the earth.
"Well then!" my uncle went on. "With pickaxe, with pick, let's cut our road and bring down these walls!"
"It's too hard for the pick," I cried.
"Then the pickaxe!"
"It's too long for the pickaxe!"
"But—!"
"Well then—powder! A mine! Let's mine it and blow up the obstacle!"
"Powder!"
"Yes! It's only a scrap of rock to break!"
"Hans, to work!" cried my uncle.
The Icelander went back to the raft and soon returned with a pick, which he used to hollow out a mine chamber. It was no small task. We had to drill a hole large enough to hold fifty pounds of guncotton, whose expansive force is four times greater than that of gunpowder.
I was in a prodigious state of overexcitement. While Hans worked, I helped my uncle busily prepare a long fuse made of wetted powder packed into a tube of cloth.
"We'll get through!" I kept saying.
"We'll get through," my uncle repeated.
By midnight our work as miners was entirely finished; the charge of guncotton lay buried in the chamber, and the fuse, unrolling along the gallery, came out into the open.
A single spark was now enough to set this formidable engine going.
"Until tomorrow," said the Professor.
I had to resign myself and wait yet another six long hours!
The next day, Thursday, August 27, was a famous date in that underground voyage. I can't call it to mind even now without dread setting my heart pounding all over again. From that moment on, our reason, our judgment, our ingenuity counted for nothing — we became the playthings of the forces of the earth.
By six we were up. The moment was near to blast our way with powder through the crust of granite.
I begged for the honor of lighting the fuse. Once it was lit, I was to rejoin my companions on the raft, which we had left fully loaded; then we would stand well off, to guard against the dangers of the explosion, whose effects might not stay confined inside the rock.
By our calculations the fuse would burn for about ten minutes before it carried the flame to the powder chamber. So I had time enough to get back to the raft.
I made ready to play my part, not without a certain nervous flutter.
After a hurried meal, my uncle and the hunter went aboard while I stayed on the shore. I was armed with a lit lantern, which would serve to set the fuse alight.
"Go, my boy," my uncle told me, "and come straight back to us."
"Don't worry, Uncle. I won't dawdle along the way."
At once I made for the mouth of the gallery, opened my lantern, and took hold of the end of the fuse.
The Professor stood with his chronometer in his hand.
"Are you ready?" he called to me.
"I'm ready."
"Then — fire, my boy!"
I plunged the fuse quickly into the flame, which sputtered at its touch, and, running the whole way, I came back to the shore.
"Aboard," said my uncle, "and let's shove off."
With one powerful shove, Hans sent us out to sea. The raft drew off some twenty fathoms.
It was a heart-stopping moment. The Professor followed the sweep of the chronometer's needle with his eye.
"Five minutes more," he said. "Four more. Three more."
My pulse was beating half-seconds.
"Two more. One!... Come crashing down, mountains of granite!"
What happened then? The noise of the detonation — I don't think I heard it. But the shape of the rocks changed all at once before my eyes; they parted like a curtain. I glimpsed a bottomless abyss opening up right there in the shore. The sea, seized with vertigo, became nothing but one enormous wave, and the raft rose straight up on its back.
All three of us were flung down. In less than a second, light gave way to the deepest darkness. Then I felt the solid support fail — not under my feet, but under the raft itself. I thought it was going straight down. It wasn't. I wanted to speak to my uncle, but the roar of the waters would have kept him from hearing me.
For all the darkness, the noise, the shock, the terror, I understood what had just happened.
Beyond the rock that had just blown apart, there was a chasm. The explosion had set off a kind of earthquake in that ground riddled with fissures; the gulf had opened, and the sea, turned to a torrent, was sweeping us down into it.
I felt myself lost.
An hour, two hours — how would I know! — passed like that. We pressed elbow to elbow, we held one another's hands to keep from being pitched off the raft; savage jolts came whenever it struck the wall. Still, these shocks were rare, from which I concluded that the gallery was widening considerably. This was Saknussemm's road, beyond a doubt — but instead of going down it alone, we had, through our own recklessness, dragged a whole sea along with us.
These thoughts, you'll understand, presented themselves to my mind in a vague, murky form. I could barely string them together during that dizzying rush, so like a fall. Judging by the wind that whipped my face, it must have outstripped the fastest trains. Lighting a torch under such conditions was impossible, and our last electric apparatus had been smashed at the moment of the explosion.
So I was greatly surprised to see a light suddenly shine near me. Hans's calm face was lit up. The deft hunter had managed to light the lantern, and though its flame flickered as if about to go out, it threw a few gleams into the frightful darkness.
The gallery was wide. I'd been right to judge it so. Our feeble light didn't let us make out both walls at once. The slope of the waters that carried us along outdid the most unclimbable rapids of America; their surface seemed made of a sheaf of liquid arrows loosed with tremendous force. I can't render my impression by any truer comparison. Caught now and then in eddies, the raft sometimes went spinning as it flew. When it neared the walls of the gallery, I cast the lantern's light on them, and I could gauge our speed by watching the jutting rocks change into continuous streaks, so that we were hemmed in by a web of moving lines. I reckoned our speed must have reached thirty leagues an hour.
My uncle and I looked around us with haggard eyes, propped against the stump of the mast, which had snapped clean off at the moment of the catastrophe. We turned our backs to the air so as not to be smothered by the speed of a motion no human power could check.
Meanwhile the hours slipped by. The situation didn't change, but one thing came to complicate it.
Trying to put a little order into the cargo, I saw that most of the things we'd stowed aboard had vanished at the moment of the explosion, when the sea assailed us so violently! I wanted to know exactly where we stood on our resources, and, lantern in hand, I began my search. Of our instruments, nothing was left but the compass and the chronometer. The ladders and ropes came down to a scrap of cable coiled around the stump of the mast. Not a pickaxe, not a mattock, not a hammer — and, an irreparable disaster, we hadn't a single day's food!
I set about ransacking the crannies of the raft, the least corners formed by the beams and the joints of the planking. Nothing! Our provisions came down to one piece of dried meat and a few biscuits.
I stared like an idiot! I refused to understand! And yet, what danger was I worrying over? Even if our provisions had been enough for months, for years, how were we to get out of the abysses into which this unstoppable torrent was dragging us? What good was it to dread the tortures of hunger, when death was already offering itself in so many other forms? Starve to death — would we even have the time?
Still, by some inexplicable quirk of the imagination, I forgot the immediate peril for the menaces of the future, which loomed before me in all their horror. Besides, perhaps we could escape the fury of the torrent and come back up to the surface of the globe. How? I had no idea. Where? What did it matter! One chance in a thousand is always a chance, whereas death by starvation left us no hope in any proportion, however small.
The thought came to me to tell my uncle everything, to show him how utterly destitute we were, and to make the exact reckoning of how much time we had left to live. But I had the courage to hold my tongue. I wanted to leave him all his composure.
At that moment, the lantern's light dimmed little by little and went out entirely. The wick had burned to the end. The darkness became absolute again. There was no longer any thought of driving off that impenetrable gloom. We still had one torch, but it could never have stayed lit. So, like a child, I shut my eyes to keep from seeing all that darkness.
After a fairly long stretch of time, the speed of our rush redoubled. I could tell by the beating of the air on my face. The slope of the waters was becoming extreme. I truly believe we were no longer sliding. We were falling. I had within me the sense of an almost vertical drop. My uncle's hand and Hans's, clamped on my arms, held me back with all their strength.
Suddenly, after an immeasurable time, I felt something like a shock; the raft hadn't struck any solid body, but it had abruptly stopped in its fall. A waterspout, an immense liquid column, crashed down on its surface. I was suffocated. I was drowning.
Yet this sudden flood didn't last. In a few seconds I found myself in open air, which I gulped down in great lungfuls. My uncle and Hans were gripping my arm hard enough to break it, and the raft still bore all three of us.
I suppose it must have been about ten o'clock at night. The first of my senses to work again after that last assault was hearing. Almost at once—for it truly was an act of hearing—I heard silence fall in the gallery, coming after those roars that had filled my ears for long hours. At last my uncle's words reached me like a murmur:
"We're going up!"
"What do you mean?" I cried.
"Yes, we're going up! We're going up!"
I stretched out my arm; I touched the wall; my hand came away bloody. We were rising at tremendous speed.
"The torch! The torch!" cried the professor.
Hans, not without difficulty, managed to light it, and although the flame bent downward against the upward rush, it threw enough light to show the whole scene.
"It's just as I thought," said my uncle. "We're in a narrow well, no more than four fathoms across. The water, having reached the bottom of the chasm, is finding its level again and carrying us up with it."
"Where to?"
"I don't know, but we have to be ready for anything. We're rising at a speed I'd put at two fathoms a second—that's a hundred and twenty fathoms a minute, or more than three and a half leagues an hour. At that rate, you cover ground."
"Yes—if nothing stops us, if this well has an outlet! But if it's plugged, if the air is squeezed tighter and tighter under the pressure of the column of water, if we're about to be crushed—"
"Axel," the professor answered with great calm, "our situation is almost hopeless, but there are a few chances of coming through, and those are the ones I'm weighing. If we may die at any moment, we may also be saved at any moment. So let's be ready to make the most of the slightest opening."
"But what do we do?"
"Rebuild our strength by eating."
At these words I stared at my uncle with a haggard eye. What I had not wanted to admit, I had to say at last:
"Eat?" I repeated.
"Yes, without delay."
The professor added a few words in Danish. Hans shook his head.
"What!" cried my uncle. "Our provisions are lost?"
"Yes—here's all the food that's left! One scrap of dried meat for the three of us!"
My uncle looked at me, refusing to understand my words.
"Well!" I said. "Do you still believe we can be saved?"
My question got no answer.
An hour went by. I was beginning to feel a violent hunger. My companions were suffering too, and not one of us dared touch that miserable remnant of food.
Meanwhile we kept rising fast; sometimes the air cut off our breath, the way it does for balloonists who climb too quickly. But whereas they feel a cold that grows sharper as they mount through the layers of the atmosphere, we were undergoing the exact opposite. The heat was building in an alarming way, and had surely reached forty degrees by now.
What did such a change mean? Until now the facts had borne out the theories of Davy and Lidenbrock; until now special conditions of refractory rock, of electricity, of magnetism had bent the general laws of nature, keeping the temperature around us moderate—for the theory of central fire remained, in my eyes, the only true one, the only one that could be explained. Were we now returning to a region where those forces played out in all their fury, where the heat melted rock to a state of complete fusion? I feared so, and I said to the professor:
"If we're not drowned or dashed to pieces, if we don't die of hunger, we still stand a chance of being burned alive."
He only shrugged and sank back into his thoughts.
An hour passed. And apart from a slight rise in the temperature, nothing changed the situation. At last my uncle broke the silence.
"Look," he said, "we have to make a decision."
"Make a decision?" I echoed.
"Yes. We must rebuild our strength. If we try to stretch our lives out a few more hours by rationing this last bit of food, we'll be weak right to the end."
"Yes—right to the end, which won't keep us waiting long."
"Well! Suppose a chance of rescue turns up, suppose a moment for action is called for—where will we find the strength to act, if we've let ourselves grow feeble with starvation?"
"Oh, uncle—once this scrap of meat is devoured, what will we have left?"
"Nothing, Axel, nothing; but will it feed you any better to eat it with your eyes? You're reasoning like a man without will, a creature without energy!"
"Then you don't despair?" I cried, exasperated.
"No!" the professor answered firmly.
"What! You still believe in some chance of rescue?"
"Yes! Absolutely, yes! And so long as a man's heart beats, so long as his flesh quivers, I won't allow that any creature endowed with will should give despair a place inside him."
What words! The man who spoke them under such circumstances was surely of no common temper.
"So," I said, "what do you intend to do?"
"Eat what's left of the food down to the last crumb, and rebuild our lost strength. This meal will be our last, so be it! But at least, instead of being spent, we'll have become men again."
"Well then—let's devour it!" I cried.
My uncle took the piece of meat and the few biscuits that had survived the wreck; he made three equal portions and handed them out. That came to about a pound of food apiece. The professor ate greedily, with a kind of feverish frenzy; I ate without pleasure, despite my hunger, and almost with disgust; Hans ate quietly, in moderation, chewing small mouthfuls without a sound and savoring them with the calm of a man whom no worry about the future could trouble. Rummaging carefully, he had found a flask half full of genever; he offered it to us, and that reviving liquor had the power to bring me back a little.
"Förträfflig!" said Hans, drinking in his turn.
"Excellent!" my uncle shot back.
I had recovered some hope. But our last meal was over. It was five o'clock in the morning by now.
Man is so made that his health is a purely negative thing; once the need to eat is satisfied, one can hardly picture the horrors of hunger; you have to feel them to understand them. And so, coming out of a long fast, a few mouthfuls of biscuit and meat triumphed over our past sufferings.
Still, after this meal, each of us drifted into his own thoughts. What was Hans thinking of—this man of the far West, ruled by the fatalist resignation of the Orientals? As for me, my thoughts were made of nothing but memories, and they carried me back to the surface of this globe I never should have left. The house on König-strasse, my poor Graüben, good Martha, passed before my eyes like visions, and in the dismal rumblings that ran through the rock mass I thought I caught the noise of the cities of the earth.
As for my uncle, "forever at his work," torch in hand, he was studying the nature of the ground with great attention; he was trying to make out where we stood by observing the layers stacked above one another. This calculation, or rather this rough estimate, could only be very approximate; but a scientist is always a scientist when he manages to keep his composure, and the professor Lidenbrock certainly possessed that quality to an uncommon degree.
I could hear him muttering words of geological science; I understood them, and in spite of myself I took an interest in this supreme study.
"Eruptive granite," he was saying; "we're still in the primordial epoch; but we're going up! We're going up! Who knows?"
Who knows? He still hoped. With his hand he felt the vertical wall, and a few moments later he went on:
"Here's the gneiss! Here are the mica schists! Good! Soon we'll reach the strata of the transition epoch, and then—"
What did the professor mean? Could he measure the thickness of the earth's crust hanging over our heads? Did he have any means of making that calculation? No. He had no manometer, and no rough guess could take its place.
Meanwhile the temperature was climbing steeply, and I felt myself steeped in a scorching atmosphere. I could only compare it to the heat thrown off by the furnaces of a foundry at pouring time. Little by little, Hans, my uncle, and I had had to shed our jackets and waistcoats; the slightest garment became a cause of discomfort, not to say suffering.
"Are we rising toward some blazing furnace?" I cried, at a moment when the heat redoubled.
"No," my uncle answered, "it's impossible! It's impossible!"
"And yet," I said, feeling the wall, "this wall is burning hot!"
Just as I spoke these words, my hand happened to brush the water, and I had to snatch it back as fast as I could.
"The water is boiling hot!" I cried.
The professor, this time, answered only with a gesture of anger.
Then an unconquerable terror seized my brain and never let go. I had the sense of an imminent catastrophe, one such as the boldest imagination could not have conceived. An idea, at first vague and uncertain, was hardening into a certainty in my mind. I pushed it away, but it came back stubbornly. I didn't dare put it into words. Yet a few involuntary observations settled my conviction; by the doubtful light of the torch I noticed wild, disordered movements in the granite layers; a phenomenon was clearly about to occur, one in which electricity played a part; and then this excessive heat, this boiling water!... I resolved to check the compass.
It had gone mad!
Yes, gone mad! The needle leaped from pole to pole in violent jerks, ran through every point on the dial, and spun as though it had been seized by vertigo.
I knew well enough that, according to the most widely accepted theories, the mineral crust of our globe is never in a state of absolute rest; the changes brought on by the decomposition of internal matter, the churning of the great liquid currents, the action of magnetism—all of these work ceaselessly to shake it, even when the creatures scattered across its surface never suspect the least tremor beneath them. So the phenomenon alone would not have frightened me especially—or at least it would not have planted a truly terrible idea in my mind.
But other facts, certain details sui generis, could not fool me for long. The detonations were multiplying with a terrifying intensity; I could compare them to nothing but the racket of a great many carts hauled at speed over paving stones. It was one continuous roll of thunder.
Then the frenzied compass, jolted by the electrical phenomena, confirmed my opinion: the mineral crust was threatening to break apart, the granite masses to close in on one another, the fissure to seal itself, the void to fill—and we, poor atoms, were about to be crushed in that formidable embrace.
"Uncle! Uncle!" I cried. "We're lost!"
"What's this new terror?" he answered me with startling calm. "What's the matter with you?"
"The matter! Look at these walls shaking, this rock coming apart, this scorching heat, this boiling water, these thickening vapors, this crazed needle—every last sign of an earthquake!"
My uncle shook his head gently.
"An earthquake?" he said.
"Yes!"
"My boy, I think you're mistaken!"
"What! You don't recognize the symptoms?"
"Of an earthquake? No! I'm expecting something better than that!"
"What do you mean?"
"An eruption, Axel."
"An eruption!" I said. "We're in the chimney of an active volcano!"
"I believe we are," said the professor, smiling, "and it's the happiest thing that could possibly happen to us!"
The happiest thing! Had my uncle gone mad? What did these words mean? Why the calm, the smile?
"What!" I cried. "We're caught in an eruption! Fate has thrown us into the path of molten lava, of blazing rock, of boiling water, of every kind of erupting matter! We're going to be driven up, expelled, flung out, vomited, hurled into the air along with chunks of rock and rains of ash and cinders, in a whirlwind of flame! And this is the happiest thing that could happen to us!"
"Yes," answered the professor, looking at me over the top of his glasses, "because it's the only chance we have of getting back to the surface of the earth!"
I'll pass quickly over the thousand thoughts that crossed one another in my brain. My uncle was right, absolutely right, and never had he struck me as more daring or more certain than at that moment, when he waited and calmly reckoned the odds of an eruption.
Meanwhile we kept rising; the night passed in that upward motion; the surrounding din redoubled; I was nearly suffocating, I thought I had reached my final hour, and yet—the imagination is such a strange thing—I gave myself over to a truly childish line of inquiry. But I was at the mercy of my thoughts, not their master!
It was clear that we were being thrust upward by an eruptive surge. Beneath the raft there were boiling waters, and beneath those waters a whole paste of lava, an aggregate of rocks that, at the summit of the crater, would scatter in every direction. So we were in the chimney of a volcano. No doubt about that.
But this time, instead of the Sneffels—an extinct volcano—we were dealing with one in full activity. So I asked myself what mountain this might be, and in what part of the world we were going to be spat out.
In the northern regions, of that there was no doubt. Before its fits of madness, the compass had never once wavered on that point. Ever since Cape Saknussemm, we had been carried due north for hundreds of leagues. So—had we come back beneath Iceland? Were we to be cast out through the crater of Hecla, or through those of the seven other fire-belching peaks of the island? Within a radius of 500 leagues to the west, along this parallel, I could see only the little-known volcanoes of the northwest coast of America. To the east there was but one below the eightieth degree of latitude: the Esk, on the island of Jan Mayen, not far from Spitzbergen! Craters there were plenty, to be sure, and spacious enough to vomit up a whole army! But which one would serve as our way out—that was what I kept trying to guess.
Toward morning, the upward motion quickened. If the heat grew instead of dropping as we neared the surface of the globe, it was because it was entirely local, the product of a volcanic influence. Our mode of travel could no longer leave any doubt in my mind: an enormous force, a force of several hundred atmospheres, produced by the vapors piled up in the bosom of the earth, was pushing us irresistibly upward. But to what countless dangers it exposed us!
Soon a tawny glare filtered into the vertical gallery, which was widening; I made out, to the right and left, deep corridors like immense tunnels, from which thick vapors escaped; tongues of flame licked and crackled along their walls.
"Look! Look, Uncle!" I cried.
"Well! Those are sulfurous flames. Nothing more natural in an eruption."
"But what if they wrap around us?"
"They won't wrap around us."
"But what if we suffocate?"
"We won't suffocate; the gallery is widening, and if we must, we'll abandon the raft and shelter in some crevice."
"And the water! The rising water?"
"There's no more water, Axel—only a kind of lava paste carrying us up with it, all the way to the mouth of the crater."
The column of liquid had indeed vanished, giving way to eruptive matter that was fairly dense, though still boiling. The temperature was becoming unbearable, and a thermometer held out in that atmosphere would have read more than seventy degrees! Sweat drenched me. Without the speed of our ascent, we would certainly have suffocated.
Still, the professor did not follow through on his idea of abandoning the raft, and he was right not to. Those few ill-joined beams offered us a solid surface, a foothold that we would have lacked anywhere else.
Around eight in the morning, a new incident occurred for the first time. The upward motion stopped short. The raft stayed absolutely still.
"What now?" I asked, jolted by that sudden halt as though by a blow.
"A pause," my uncle answered.
"Is the eruption dying down?"
"I certainly hope not."
I got to my feet. I tried to see around me. Perhaps the raft, caught on a jutting ledge of rock, was momentarily resisting the eruptive mass. In that case, we had to work it free as fast as we could.
But that was not it. The column of ash, cinders, and stony debris had itself stopped rising.
"Is the eruption going to stop?" I cried.
"Ah!" said my uncle through clenched teeth. "You're afraid of that, my boy; but don't worry, this moment of calm can't last long; it's already gone on five minutes, and before long we'll resume our climb toward the mouth of the crater."
As he spoke, the professor never stopped consulting his chronometer, and once again his forecasts proved right. Soon the raft was seized by a rapid, chaotic motion that lasted about two minutes, then stopped again.
"Good," said my uncle, checking the time. "In ten minutes it will start up again."
"Ten minutes?"
"Yes. We're dealing with a volcano whose eruption is intermittent. It lets us breathe along with it."
Nothing could have been truer. At the appointed minute, we were launched again with extreme speed; we had to cling to the beams to keep from being thrown off the raft. Then the surge stopped.
Since then, I've thought about this odd phenomenon without finding a satisfying explanation. Still, it seems clear to me that we did not occupy the volcano's main chimney, but rather a side conduit, where the effect made itself felt as a kind of recoil.
How many times this maneuver repeated itself, I couldn't say; all I can affirm is that with each renewal of the motion we were launched with growing force, as though carried off by an actual projectile. During the moments of pause, we suffocated; during the moments of propulsion, the scorching air cut off my breath. For an instant I dreamed of the bliss of finding myself suddenly in the hyperborean regions, in a cold thirty degrees below zero. My overexcited imagination wandered across the snowfields of the arctic lands, and I longed for the moment when I would roll myself over the icy carpets of the pole! Little by little, in any case, my head, battered by these repeated jolts, gave way. Without Hans's arms, more than once I would have cracked my skull against the granite wall.
I've kept, then, no clear memory of what happened during the hours that followed. I have a confused sense of continuous detonations, of the shaking of the rock mass, of a whirling motion that seized the raft. It rocked upon waves of lava, in the midst of a rain of ash. The roaring flames wrapped around it. A hurricane, as though driven from some immense fan, fed the underground fires. One last time, Hans's face appeared to me in a glow of flame, and after that I felt nothing but the grim horror of the condemned man lashed to the mouth of a cannon, at the instant the shot goes off and scatters his limbs through the air.
When I opened my eyes again, I felt the guide's powerful hand gripping me by the belt. With his other hand he was holding up my uncle. I wasn't badly hurt — just battered, aching all over. I found myself lying on the slope of a mountain, two steps from a chasm into which the slightest movement would have sent me plunging. Hans had saved me from death as I rolled down the flank of the crater.
"Where are we?" asked my uncle, who seemed thoroughly annoyed at being back on the surface of the earth.
The hunter shrugged his shoulders to signal that he had no idea.
"In Iceland?" I said.
"Nej," Hans answered.
"What! No!" cried the professor.
"Hans is mistaken," I said, pushing myself up.
After the countless surprises of this journey, one more astonishment was still in store for us. I had expected to see a cone capped with eternal snow, standing among the barren deserts of the northern regions, under the pale rays of a polar sky, beyond the highest latitudes — and instead of all that, my uncle, the Icelander, and I lay halfway down the flank of a mountain scorched by the blaze of a sun that was devouring us with its fire.
I refused to believe my own eyes; but the genuine roasting my body was undergoing left no room for doubt. We had come out of the crater half naked, and the radiant star — the one we hadn't asked a thing of for two months — was now lavishing light and heat on us, pouring down a splendid flood of brightness.
Once my eyes had grown used to a glare they'd forgotten, I put them to work correcting the errors of my imagination. At the very least I wanted to be in Spitzbergen, and I wasn't in the mood to give up the idea easily.
The professor was the first to speak.
"Well," he said, "this certainly doesn't look like Iceland."
"But the island of Jan Mayen?" I offered.
"Not that either, my boy. This is no northern volcano, with its granite hills and its snowcap."
"And yet—"
"Look, Axel — look!"
Above our heads, five hundred feet up at most, the crater of a volcano was opening, and every fifteen minutes, with a tremendous detonation, it flung out a tall column of flame mixed with pumice, ash, and lava. I could feel the convulsions of the mountain as it breathed like a whale, blowing out fire and air through its enormous vents every so often. Below us, down a fairly steep slope, sheets of erupted matter spread to a depth of seven or eight hundred feet, which gave the volcano a height of no more than a hundred fathoms. Its base vanished into a veritable basket of green trees, among which I could make out olives, figs, and vines heavy with crimson clusters of grapes.
This, plainly, was not the face of the Arctic.
When the eye cleared that ring of greenery, it quickly lost itself in the waters of a magnificent sea — or a lake — that made this enchanted land an island barely a few leagues across. To the east lay a little harbor fronted by a handful of houses, where ships of an odd design rocked on the blue swell. Beyond it, clusters of islets rose from the watery plain, so many of them that they looked like a vast anthill. To the west, distant coasts curved along the horizon; along some of them blue mountains traced their harmonious shapes, and along others, farther off, rose a prodigiously tall cone with a plume of smoke stirring at its summit. To the north an immense sheet of water glittered under the sun's rays, letting the tip of a mast or the curve of a wind-swollen sail show here and there.
The sheer unexpectedness of such a sight multiplied its marvelous beauty a hundredfold.
"Where are we? Where are we?" I kept repeating under my breath.
Hans closed his eyes with indifference, and my uncle looked on without understanding.
"Whatever this mountain is," he said at last, "it's a little warm here. The explosions aren't letting up, and it would really be a shame to have survived an eruption only to catch a chunk of rock on the head. Let's go down, and then we'll know where we stand. Besides, I'm dying of hunger and thirst."
Decidedly, the professor was no contemplative soul. For my part, forgetting hunger and exhaustion, I could have stayed in that spot for hours more — but I had to follow my companions.
The volcano's slopes were very steep. We slid down through real quagmires of ash, dodging the streams of lava that stretched out like serpents of fire. As we went, I chattered away at full speed, for my imagination was too full not to spill over into words.
"We're in Asia," I exclaimed, "on the coasts of India, in the Malay islands, in the heart of Oceania! We've crossed half the globe to end up at the antipodes of Europe!"
"But the compass?" my uncle replied.
"Yes! The compass!" I said, embarrassed. "According to it, we always traveled north."
"So it lied?"
"Oh — lied!"
"Unless this is the North Pole!"
"The Pole! No — but..."
Here was an inexplicable fact. I didn't know what to make of it.
Meanwhile we were drawing nearer to that greenery, which was a pleasure to behold. Hunger tormented me, and thirst too. Fortunately, after two hours of walking, a lovely stretch of countryside opened before us, entirely covered with olive trees, pomegranates, and vines that looked as though they belonged to everyone. In our destitution, at any rate, we weren't the sort of people to look too closely at ownership. What a joy it was to crush that delicious fruit against our lips and to bite into whole handfuls of those crimson grapes! Not far off, in the grass, in the delectable shade of the trees, I discovered a spring of cool water, into which we plunged our faces and our hands with pure delight.
While each of us was surrendering to all the sweetness of rest, a child appeared between two clumps of olive trees.
"Ah!" I cried. "An inhabitant of this happy land!"
He was a sort of small pauper, very wretchedly dressed and rather sickly, and our appearance seemed to frighten him badly. And no wonder — half naked, with our wild, unkempt beards, we looked frightful, and unless this happened to be a country of thieves, we were the sort to terrify its people.
Just as the boy was about to bolt, Hans ran after him and brought him back, despite his cries and kicks.
My uncle began by reassuring him as best he could, and said to him in good German:
"What is the name of this mountain, my little friend?"
The child didn't answer.
"Good," said my uncle. "We're not in Germany, then."
And he put the same question in English.
The child still didn't answer. I was thoroughly puzzled.
"Is he mute, then?" cried the professor, who, very proud of his gift for languages, tried the same question again in French.
The child kept the same silence.
"Then let's try Italian," my uncle went on, and he said in that tongue:
"Dove noi siamo?"
"Yes! Where are we?" I repeated impatiently.
The child said nothing.
"Ah, now — will you speak?" cried my uncle, whom anger was beginning to overtake, and he shook the boy by the ears. "Come si noma questa isola?"
"Stromboli," answered the little shepherd, who slipped out of Hans's hands and made off across the plain through the olive trees.
We hardly gave him another thought! Stromboli! What an effect that unexpected name had on my imagination! We were in the middle of the Mediterranean, in the heart of the Aeolian archipelago of mythological memory, in the ancient Strongyle where Aeolus kept the winds and the storms chained. And those blue mountains curving away to the east — they were the mountains of Calabria! And that volcano rising on the southern horizon — it was Etna, fierce Etna itself!
"Stromboli! Stromboli!" I kept repeating.
My uncle joined in with gestures and words of his own. We looked as though we were singing in a chorus!
Ah, what a journey! What a marvelous journey! We had gone in by one volcano and come out by another — and that other one stood more than twelve hundred leagues from Sneffels, from that barren land of Iceland flung out at the very edge of the world! The chances of this expedition had carried us into the midst of the most harmonious lands on earth! We had left the region of eternal snows for one of endless green, and traded the gray fog of the frozen zones over our heads for the blue sky of Sicily!
After a delicious meal of fruit and cool water, we set off again to reach the port of Stromboli. It didn't seem wise to explain how we had come to the island: the superstitious mind of the Italians would not have failed to see us as demons vomited up from the depths of hell, so we had to resign ourselves to passing for humble castaways. Less glorious, perhaps, but safer.
As we walked, I heard my uncle muttering:
"But the compass! The compass, that pointed north! How can I explain it?"
"Honestly," I said with a great air of disdain, "don't explain it — that's easier!"
"Come now! A professor at the Johannaeum who couldn't find the reason for a cosmic phenomenon — that would be a disgrace!"
And as he spoke, my uncle — half naked, his leather purse slung around his waist, his spectacles perched on his nose — became once again the terrible professor of mineralogy.
An hour after leaving the olive wood, we arrived at the port of San Vicenzo, where Hans claimed the wages of his thirteenth week of service, which were counted out to him with warm handshakes.
At that moment, though he didn't share our very natural emotion, he did at least give himself over to an extraordinary display of feeling.
With the tips of his fingers he pressed our two hands lightly, and broke into a smile.
Here is the conclusion of a story that even the people most accustomed to being astonished by nothing will refuse to believe. But I have armored myself in advance against human incredulity.
We were received by the fishermen of Stromboli with all the consideration owed to castaways. They gave us clothes and food. After forty-eight hours' wait, on August 31, a little speronare carried us to Messina, where a few days' rest cured us of all our exhaustion.
On Friday, September 4, we boarded the Volturne, one of the mail-packets of the Imperial French steamship line, and three days later we set foot in Marseille, with only one thing left nagging at our minds: that cursed compass. This inexplicable business went on troubling me quite seriously. On the evening of September 9, we arrived in Hamburg.
What Martha's astonishment was, what Graüben's joy was, I give up trying to describe.
"Now that you're a hero," my dear fiancée said to me, "you'll never have to leave me again, Axel!"
I looked at her. She was crying and smiling at the same time.
I leave you to imagine the sensation Professor Lidenbrock's return made in Hamburg. Thanks to Martha's indiscretions, the news of his departure for the center of the earth had spread all over the world. Nobody had been willing to believe it — and, seeing him again, nobody believed it any more than before.
Still, the presence of Hans, and various reports arriving from Iceland, gradually changed public opinion.
And so my uncle became a great man, and I the nephew of a great man, which is already something. Hamburg threw a celebration in our honor. A public session was held at the Johannaeum, where the Professor recounted his expedition and left out only the facts concerning the compass. That same day he deposited Saknussemm's document in the city archives, and he expressed his keen regret that circumstances stronger than his own will had not allowed him to follow the Icelandic traveler's trail all the way to the center of the earth. He was modest in his glory, and his reputation grew all the greater for it.
So much honor was bound to stir up envy against him. It did — and since his theories, backed by hard facts, contradicted the accepted scientific systems on the question of the central fire, he waged remarkable debates by pen and by word with the learned men of every country.
For my own part, I cannot accept his cooling theory: in spite of everything I saw, I believe, and I always will believe, in central heat; but I admit that certain circumstances, still poorly defined, may modify that law under the action of natural phenomena.
At the very moment these questions were at their most heated, my uncle suffered a real grief. Hans, despite our pleading, had left Hamburg; the man to whom we owed everything refused to let us pay him our debt. He had been seized by homesickness for Iceland.
"Färval," he said one day — and with that single word of farewell, he set out for Reykjavik, where he arrived safely.
We were singularly attached to our brave eider-hunter; his absence will never make him forgotten by those whose lives he saved, and I will certainly not die without having seen him one last time.
To conclude, I must add that this Voyage to the Center of the Earth caused an enormous sensation in the world. It was printed and translated into every language; the most respected newspapers fought over its principal episodes, which were commented on, disputed, attacked, and defended with equal conviction in the camp of the believers and in that of the skeptics. A rare thing! — my uncle enjoyed, in his own lifetime, all the glory he had won, and there was even a certain Mr. Barnum who offered to "exhibit" him at a very high price throughout the United States.
But one annoyance — let us call it, rather, a torment — crept in among all this glory. One fact remained inexplicable: the business of the compass. Now, for a scientist, an unexplained phenomenon like that becomes an agony of the intellect. Well! Heaven had it in store for my uncle to be completely happy after all.
One day, while I was arranging a collection of minerals in his study, I caught sight of that famous compass and began to examine it.
For six months it had been sitting there in its corner, never suspecting the trouble it was causing.
All at once — what astonishment seized me! I let out a cry. The Professor came running.
"What is it?" he demanded.
"This compass!..."
"Well?"
"Its needle points south instead of north!"
"What are you saying?"
"Look! Its poles are switched."
"Switched!"
My uncle looked, compared, and made the whole house shake with one magnificent leap.
What a flash of light lit up his mind and mine at the very same instant!
"So then," he cried, the moment he found his voice again, "ever since our arrival at Cape Saknussemm, the needle of this blasted compass has been pointing south instead of north?"
"Obviously."
"Then our mistake explains itself. But what phenomenon could have produced this reversal of the poles?"
"Nothing could be simpler."
"Explain yourself, my boy."
"During the storm on the Lidenbrock Sea, that ball of fire, the one that magnetized all the iron on the raft, quite simply threw our compass out of true!"
"Ah!" cried the Professor, bursting out laughing, "so it was a trick of the electricity, was it?"
From that day on, my uncle was the happiest of scientists, and I the happiest of men — for my pretty Virland girl, giving up her position as ward, took her place in the house on König-strasse in the double capacity of niece and wife. Needless to add, her uncle was the illustrious Professor Otto Lidenbrock, corresponding member of every scientific, geographical, and mineralogical society in the five parts of the world.