Journey to the Center of the Earth/III

31
I woke up the next day completely cured. I thought a bathe would do
me a lot of good, and so went and plunged for a few minutes in the waters
of this Mediterranean Sea. Such a name, surely, suited the sea better
than any other.
I returned and ate with a healthy appetite. Hans knew perfectly how
to cook our limited menu; and was equipped with fire and water, so could
vary our usual fare a little. With the pudding he served us cups of coffee,
and never had this delicious beverage tasted better.
‘Now,’ said my uncle, ‘it’s time for the tide, and we must not miss the
opportunity to study this phenomenon.’
‘What! A tide?’
‘Of course.’
‘Can the influence of the moon and the sun be felt down here then?’
‘Why not? Are not all bodies subject to the force of gravity? This mass
of water must therefore be subject to that universal law. So, despite the
atmospheric pressure on the surface, you will see it rise like the Atlantic
itself.’
During this time we were walking along the sand, and the waves were
creeping slowly up the shore.
‘Look, there’s the tide beginning,’ I cried.
‘Yes, Axel, and judging from the tidemark of foam, you can see that
the water rises about ten feet.’
‘That’s fantastic!’
‘No, it’s natural.’
‘Say what you like, Uncle, this all seems extraordinary to me, and I
can hardly believe my eyes. Who would ever have thought that there
could be a real ocean inside the Earth’s crust, with its own ebb and flow,
its own sea breezes and storms!’
‘And why not? Is there some physical reason to prevent it?’
‘Not that I can see, if we abandoned the theory of heat at the centre.’
‘So up to this point Davy’s theory appears to be confirmed?’
‘It looks like it, and if that is the case there is nothing to oppose the
existence of seas or lands inside the Earth.’
‘No doubt, but uninhabited.’
‘But why shouldn’t these waters shelter a few fish of some unknown
species?’
‘Well at any rate we haven’t found a single one so far.’
‘We could rig up some lines and see if a hook has the same success
here as in the sublunary oceans.’
‘We’ll try that, Axel, for we must unravel all the mysteries of these
new territories.’
‘But where are we, Uncle? For I haven’t yet asked you that question,
which the instruments must have answered for you.’
‘Horizontally, 880 miles from Iceland.’
‘As much as that?’
‘I think I am right to the nearest mile.’
‘And the compass is still pointing south-east?’
‘Yes, with a deviation to the west of 19° 42¢, just like on the surface.
As to its “dip” there is something very peculiar happening which I have
been observing most carefully.’
‘Which is?’
‘The needle, instead of dipping towards the Pole as it does in the
northern hemisphere, is pointing upwards instead.’
‘That means that the point of magnetic attraction lies somewhere between
the surface of the Earth and the place we have reached?’
‘Exactly, and it is quite probable that if we reached the polar regions,
near the seventieth parallel where Sir James Ross86 discovered the magnetic
pole, we would see the needle point stand straight up. Therefore this
mysterious centre of attraction is not located at any great depth.’
‘And that’s something that science has never even suspected.’
‘Science, my boy, is composed of errors, but errors that it is right to
make, for they lead step by step towards the truth.’
‘How far down are we?’
‘Eighty-seven miles.’
‘So,’ I said, examining the map, ‘the Scottish Highlands are above us,
and up there the snow-covered peaks of the Grampians are rising to prodigious
heights.’
‘Yes,’ replied the professor with a laugh, ‘it’s a bit heavy to hold up,
but the vault is solid; the great architect of the universe built it of good
firm stuff, and man would never have been able to give it such a span!
What are bridge arches and cathedral vaults next to this nave forty miles
in diameter, beneath which an ocean and its storms can behave as they
wish?’
‘Oh, I’m not afraid of the sky falling on my head. Now, Uncle, what
are your plans? Don’t you intend to go back to the surface of the Earth?’
‘Go back! What an idea. On the contrary, my intention is to continue
our journey, since everything has gone so well to date.’
‘But I can’t see how we are going to find our path underneath that liquid
plain.’
‘I have no intention of diving in head first. But if, properly speaking,
oceans are nothing but lakes, since they are surrounded by land, then all
the more reason for this inner sea to be surrounded by granite banks.’
86 Sir James Ross: 1800–62, British naval officer, explorer of the Arctic and
Antarctic; located the North Magnetic Pole in 1831.
‘There’s no doubt about it.’
‘Well then! I’m sure to find other exits on the opposite shore.’87
‘So how long would you guess this ocean to be?’
‘Eighty or a hundred miles.’
‘Ah,’ I said, thinking to myself that this estimate could well be inaccurate.
‘Consequently we have no time to lose, and will set sail tomorrow.’
I looked instinctively round for the ship which would carry us.
‘So,’ I said, ‘we’re going to embark. Good! And which ship are we to
travel on?’
‘No ship, but a good solid raft.’
‘A raft!’ I cried. ‘A raft is just as impossible to build as a ship, and I
can’t see. . . ’
‘You can’t see, Axel, but if you were listening you’d be able to hear!’
‘Hear?’
‘Yes, hammer blows, which would tell you that Hans is already at
work.’
‘Building a raft?’
‘Indeed.’
‘What! Has he already been chopping down trees?’
‘The trees were already down. Come along, and you will see him at it.’
Quarter of an hour’s walk later, I spotted Hans at work on the other
side of the promontory which enclosed the small natural harbour. After a
few more steps I was beside him. To my astonishment, a half-finished raft
lay on the sand; it was made from timbers of a distinctive wood, and a
great number of beams, knees, and frames were strewn over the ground.
There was enough material there to construct an entire fleet.
‘Uncle,’ I cried, ‘what wood is this?’
‘Pine, fir, birch, all sorts of northern conifers, petrified by the sea water.’
‘Is that possible?’
‘It is what is called surtarbrandur, or fossilised wood.’
‘In that case, like lignite, it must be as hard as stone, and unable to
float.’
‘Sometimes that is the case: some of the woods have become true anthracites;
but others, such as these, have only just begun to be transformed
into fossils. Watch this,’ added my uncle, throwing one of the precious
spars into the sea.
The piece of wood disappeared for a moment, then bobbed up again
to the surface of the water to float up and down following its movements.
‘Are you convinced?’ said my uncle.
‘Convinced that what I see is incredible!’
By the following evening, thanks to Hans’s skill, the raft was finished;
it was ten feet long by five feet wide; the beams of surtarbrandur, bound
together with stout ropes, formed a solid surface. Once it had been
87 opposite shore: Verne here quickly skips over the fact that there is little
logical reason to cross the sea.
launched, the improvised vessel floated serenely on the waters of the
Lidenbrock Sea.
32
On 13 August we woke up early. We were now going to inaugurate
this new sort of transport, fast and not too tiring.
A mast made of two pieces of wood fastened together, a yard made
from another, and a sail borrowed from our blankets made up the rigging
of our raft. There was no lack of rope. The whole thing was solid.
At six o’clock the professor gave the signal to embark. Our provisions,
luggage, instruments, and weapons, along with a good supply of fresh
water collected among the rocks, were already on board.
Hans had fitted a rudder which allowed him to steer the floating construction.
He took the helm. I unhitched the mooring line attaching us to
shore. The sail was trimmed, and we set off at a rate of knots.
As we were leaving the little harbour, my uncle, who was very attached
to his geographic nomenclature, decided to give it a name and
proposed mine, amongst others.
‘Well, I have another to suggest.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Gräuben’s. Port Gräuben will look very good on the map.’
‘Port Gräuben it is.’
And that was how the memory of my dear Virland girl became linked
to our adventurous expedition.
The wind was blowing from the north-east. We ran before the wind at a
good speed. The very dense atmospheric layers had great propulsive power
and acted on the sail like a powerful fan.
After an hour, my uncle had been able to estimate our speed relatively
precisely.
‘If we continue to advance at the present rate,’ he said, ‘we will cover
at least eighty miles every twenty-four hours, and it won’t be too long before
we reach the opposite shore.’
I did not reply, and made my way to the front of the raft. The northern
coastline was already disappearing behind the horizon. The two limbs
of the shore were spread wide apart, as if to assist our departure. An immense
ocean stretched before my eyes. Massive clouds scooted along,
casting their grey shadows on the surface; shadows which seemed to
weigh down upon that dismal water. The silvery rays of electric light, reflected
here and there by drops of spray, picked out glittering points in
the vessel’
s wake. We were soon out of sight of land, without any point of reference,
and had it not been for the frothy wake of the raft, I could have believed
that we were totally motionless.
At about midday, immense patches of algae appeared, floating on the
surface of the waves. I was aware of the extraordinarily prolific power of
these plants, which creep along the bottom of the sea at a depth of more
than twelve thousand feet, reproduce under pressures of four hundred
atmospheres, and often form masses large enough to impede the progress
of ships. But there can never, I believe, have existed algae as gigantic
as those of the Lidenbrock Sea.
Our raft swept along beside pieces of seaweed some three to four
thousand feet in length, immense snakes which stretched out far beyond
our horizon; it gave me great amusement to gaze along their infinite ribbon-
like lengths, thinking each moment that I had reached the end. Hour
after hour passed. If my astonishment increased, my patience was wellnigh
exhausted.
What natural force could have produced such plants? What must the
Earth have looked like during the first centuries of its formation when,
acted upon by heat and humidity, the vegetable kingdom was developing
solitarily on its surface?
Night came, but, as I had noticed the evening before, the luminosity
of the atmosphere did not reduce at all. It was a consistent phenomenon
whose permanence we could count on.
After supper, I stretched out at the foot of the mast, and soon, idly
dreaming, fell asleep.
Hans, motionless at the tiller, let the raft run. As the wind was aft, he
did not even have to steer it.
On leaving Port Gräuben, Professor Lidenbrock had given me the job
of keeping the ‘ship’s log’, with instructions to put down even the most
trivial observations, to note interesting phenomena, the direction of the
wind, our speed, the distance covered: in a word, every incident of our
fantastic voyage.
I will confine myself, therefore, to reproducing here those daily notes,
written, as it were, at the dictation of events, in order to give a more precise
account of our crossing.
Friday, 14 August. Steady breeze from the NW. Raft progressing with
extreme rapidity, going perfectly straight. Coast about eighty miles to
leeward. Nothing on the horizon. The intensity of the light never varies.
Weather fine; i.e. the clouds are very high, light, and fleecy, and floating
in an atmosphere resembling molten silver. Thermometer: 32°C.
At midday Hans ties a hook to the end of a line. He baits it with a
small piece of meat and casts it into the sea. He doesn’t catch anything
for two hours. Are there no fish in this sea? But yes, there is a tug on the
line. Hans draws it in, and then pulls out a fish, which is wriggling furiously.
‘A fish!’ cries my uncle.
‘A sturgeon!’ I shout in turn, ‘Definitely a small sturgeon!’
The professor is examining the animal carefully, and he does not
agree with me. This fish has a flattened, curved head, and the lower parts
of its body are covered with bony plates; its mouth is wholly without
teeth; quite well-developed pectoral fins are fitted to its tailless body. This
animal certainly belongs to the order in which naturalists classify the
sturgeon, but it differs from that fish in many quite basic details.
My uncle is not mistaken, after all. Following a short examination he
says:
‘This fish belongs to a family which has been extinct for centuries, and
of which only fossil traces remain, in the Devonian strata.’
‘What! Have we really captured alive an authentic inhabitant of the
primitive seas?’
‘We have,’ said the professor, continuing his observation, ‘and you
may notice that these fossil fish are distinct from any existing species. To
hold a living specimen of the order in one’s hand is a great joy for a naturalist.’
‘But what family does it belong to?’
‘To the order of ganoids, family of the Cephalaspis, genus. . . ’
‘Well?’
‘Genus Pterychtis, I would swear to it. But this fish displays a peculiarity,
which is apparently encountered in the fish of underground waters.’
‘Which one?’
‘It is blind.’
‘Amazing!’
‘Not only blind, but absolutely without organs of sight.’
I look. It really is true. This, however, may be an isolated instance. So
the hook is baited again and thrown back into the water. The ocean must
be well stocked with fish, for in two hours we take a large number of
Pterychtis, as well as fish belonging
to another extinct family—the Dipterides,88 though my uncle cannot
classify them exactly. All are eyeless. This unexpected catch fortunately
renews our stock of provisions.
It now seems very probable that this sea contains only fossil species—
in which both fish and reptiles alike are more perfect the longer ago they
were created.
Perhaps we are going to find some of those saurians which science
has succeeded in recreating from bits of bone or cartilage?
I take the telescope and examine the sea. It is deserted. Doubtless we
are still too near the coast.
I look up. Why should not some of the birds reconstructed by the immortal
Cuvier89 be flapping their wings in the heavy strata of the atmosphere?
The fish would provide quite sufficient food. I search the space
above, but the airs are as uninhabited as the shores.
Nevertheless, my imagination carries me away into the fantastic hypotheses
of palaeontology. I am in a waking dream. I fancy I can see on
the surface of the water those enormous Chersites, tortoises from before
the flood, as big as floating islands. Along the darkened shores are pass-
88 Dipterides: a genus of fish with only two fins.
89 Cuvier: Georges (1769–1832), French naturalist, founder of comparative
anatomy and of palaentology, researched on fossil bones, author notably of Discours
sur les révolutions du globe (1821).
ing the great mammals of the first days, the Leptotherium90 found in the
caverns of Brazil, the Merycotherium, all the way from the glacial regions
of Siberia. Further up, the pachydermatous lophiodon, that gigantic tapir,
is concealing itself behind the rocks, ready to do battle for its prey with
the anoplothere, a singular animal taking after the rhinoceros, the horse,
the hippopotamus, and the camel, as if the Creator, in too much of a
hurry in the first hours of the world, had put together several animals in
one. The giant mastodon, twisting and turning its trunk, uses its tusks to
break up the rocks on the shore, whereas the megatherium, buttressed
on its enormous legs, is excavating the earth for food, all the while awaking
the sonorous echoes of the granite with its roaring. Higher up, the
Protopithecus, the first monkey to appear on the face of the globe, is
clambering up the steep slopes. Still higher, the pterodactyl, with its
winged claws, glides on the compressed air like a huge bat. Above them
all, in the topmost layers, are immense birds, more powerful than the
cassowary, greater than the ostrich, spreading their vast wings, about to
hit their heads against the roof of the granite vault.
This whole fossil world revives in my imagination. I am going back to
the biblical ages of the Creation, long before man was born, when the incomplete
Earth was not yet ready for him.91 My dream then goes ahead
of the appearance of animate beings. The mammals disappear, then the
birds, then the reptiles of the Secondary Period, and finally the fish, the
crustaceans, the molluscs, and the articulates. The zoophytes of the Transition
Period themselves return to nothingness. The whole of the world’s
life is summed up in me, and mine is the only heart that beats in this depopulated
world! There are no longer seasons; no longer climates; the internal
heat of the globe is increasing unceasingly, cancelling out the effect
of the radiant orb. The vegetation is multiplying exaggeratedly. I pass like
a shadow amongst arborescent ferns, treading uncertainly on the iridescent
marls and rainbow-coloured sandstones underfoot; I lean against the
trunks of giant conifers; I lie down in the shade of sphenophylla, asterophyllites,
and lycopodia a hundred feet high.
The centuries are flowing past like days! I am working my way up the
series of earthly transformations. The plants disappear; the granitic rocks
lose their purity; the liquid state is about to replace the solid because of
the action of a greater heat; the waters are flowing over the surface of
the globe; they boil; they evaporate; the vapour is covering up the entire
90 Leptotherium: ‘Lepto’: ‘long and thin’, ‘therion’: ‘wild beast’; Mericotherium:
‘meri’: ‘part’; Lophiodon: large, horse-like fossil mammal from the Eocene
Period; Anoplothere: extinct pachydermous quadruped, discovered in
Montmartre and restored by Cuvier; the Creator. . . in one: an example of
Verne’s sacrilegious humour (which was cut from the standard American translation,
together with many other references to biblical Creation).
91 not yet ready for him: this is the clearest indication of Verne (and the mid-
19th century’s) last-ditch attempt to reconcile science and the literal truth of
Genesis: by admitting that the Earth existed long before man, but with each of
the six ‘days’ of Creation being in fact an ‘age’.
Earth, which stage by stage becomes nothing but a gaseous mass, heated
to red- and white-hot, as big as the sun and shining as bright!
In the centre of this nebula, one million four hundred thousand times
as big as the globe it will one day form, I am carried off into planetary
space! My body is being subtilised, subliming in turn and commingling like
an imponderable atom with these immense clouds, which inscribe their
fiery orbit on infinite space!
What a dream! Where is it taking me? My feverish hand jots down the
strange details. I have forgotten everything: the professor, the guide, the
raft. A hallucination has taken hold of my head. . .
‘What is the matter?’
My eyes, wide open, fix on my uncle without seeing.
‘Take care, Axel, you’re going to fall overboard!’
At the same time, I feel myself seized by Hans’s firm hand. Had it not
been for him, under the sway of my dream, I would have thrown myself
into the waves.
‘Is he going mad?’ cries the professor.
‘What is it?’ I say at last, coming to.
‘Are you ill?’
‘No; I had a hallucination for a moment, but it’s passed. Is all well on
board?’
‘Yes, a beautiful breeze, a splendid sea. We are flying along and
unless my calculations are out, we shall soon land.’
At these words, I rise and scan the horizon. But the line of water is
still indistinguishable from the line of clouds.
33
Saturday, 15 August. The sea retains its uniform monotony. No land in
sight. The horizon seems a very long way away.
My head is still dull from the violent effects of my dream.
My uncle, who has certainly not dreamed, is, however, in one of his
moods. He is scanning every point in space with his telescope and crossing
his arms disappointedly.
I notice that Professor Lidenbrock has a tendency to revert to his impatient
character of before, and I note this circumstance in my logbook. It
required my danger and sufferings to extract a spark of kindness from
him; but now that I am better, his nature has taken charge again. And
yet why get annoyed? Isn’t the journey proceeding under the most favourable
circumstances? Isn’t the raft rushing along?
‘You seem uneasy, Uncle?’ I say, seeing him often putting the telescope
to his eye.
‘Uneasy? No.’
‘Impatient then.’
‘With good reason!’
‘And yet we are advancing at a rate. . . ’
‘I do not care! It is not our speed that is too small, but the sea that is
too big!’
I remember then that the professor, before our departure, estimated
the length of this subterranean ocean to be about eighty miles. We have
already done at least three times that distance, but haven’t discovered
the slightest sign of the southern shores.
‘We are not going down,’ continued the professor. ‘All this is lost time.
I did not come so far for a boat-trip on a pond!’
He calls this voyage a boat-trip, and this ocean a pond!
‘But’, I argue, ‘since we have been following the route indicated by
Saknussemm. . . ’
‘That is the question. Have we been following the route? Did Saknussemm
ever encounter this great stretch of water? Did he cross it? Did
the rivulet we took as a guide lead us astray?’
‘In any case, we can’t regret coming this far. The spectacle is magnificent,
and. . . ’
‘Seeing is not the question. I set myself an objective and I mean to
attain it. So don’t talk to me about admiring!’
He doesn’t need to say it again; and I let the professor bite into his
lips with impatience. At six in the evening, Hans asks for his pay, and the
three rix-dollars are counted out to him.
Sunday, 16 August. Nothing new. Same weather. The wind has a
slight tendency to freshen. When I wake up, the first thing I do is observe
the intensity of the light. I live in fear that the electric phenomenon might
dim and then go out. Nothing of the sort happens. The shadow of the raft
is clearly outlined on the surface of the water.
This sea is truly infinite. It must be as wide as the Mediterranean—or
even the Atlantic. Why not?
My uncle tries sounding several times. He ties one of our heaviest
picks to the end of a rope, and allows it to run out for two hundred fathoms.
No bottom. We have great difficulty in pulling our sounding-line in
again.
When the pick has finally been dragged on board, Hans calls my attention
to some deep marks on its surface. The piece of iron looks as
though it has been firmly gripped between two hard objects.
I look at the hunter.
‘Tänder.’
I do not understand. I turn to my uncle, entirely absorbed in his reflections.
I have little wish to disturb him, and come back to the Icelander.
He opens and closes his mouth several times, and so conveys his
meaning to me.
‘Teeth!’ I cry with stupefaction, examining the iron bar more closely.
Yes, the indentations on the metal are the marks of teeth! The jaws they
adorn must have a prodigious strength! Is some monster of a lost species
tossing under the deep strata of the waters, hungrier than the dogfish
shark, more formidable than the whale? I am unable to detach my eyes
from the gnawed bar. Is my dream of last night about to become a reality?
These thoughts upset me all day, and my imagination scarcely calms
down in a sleep of a few hours.
Monday, 17 August. I have been trying to remember the particular instincts
of the antediluvian animals from the Secondary Period, which, following
on from the molluscs, the crustaceans, and the fish, emerged before
the mammals appeared on the globe. The reptiles then reigned supreme
upon the Earth. These hideous monsters held absolute sway over
the Jurassic seas.92 Nature endowed them with the most complete structures.
What gigantic organisms! What exceptional strength! The presentday
saurians, even the largest and most formidable crocodiles and alligators,
are but feeble reductions of their fathers of the first ages.93
I shudder at my own evocation 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, discovered in the clayey limestone that
the British call lias, have allowed us to reconstruct them anatomically, and
thus know about their colossal size.
In the Natural History Museum of Hamburg I have seen the skeleton
of one of these saurians measuring thirty feet from head to tail. Am I,
then—an inhabitant of the Earth—going to find myself face to face with
representatives of this antediluvian family? No, it is impossible. And yet
marks of powerful teeth are engraved on the iron bar! I notice that they
are conical like the crocodile’s.
My eyes stare with terror at the sea. I am afraid that one of these inhabitants
of the submarine caverns will suddenly emerge.
I imagine that Professor Lidenbrock shares my ideas, if not my fears,
for after an examination of the pick, he casts his eyes over the water.
What could have possessed him to sound the ocean? He has disturbed
some creature in its lair, and if we’re not attacked on the way. . .
I glance at our firearms, and check that they are in a state of readiness.
My uncle sees me doing this and nods approvingly. Already wide
disturbances on the surface of the water indicate a troubling of the greatest
depths. Danger is near. We must keep a lookout.
Tuesday, 18 August. Evening comes, or rather the hour when sleep
closes our eyelids, for there is no night on this ocean, and the implacable
light constantly tires our eyes, as if we were navigating in the sunlight of
the Arctic seas. Hans is at the helm. During his watch I fall asleep.
92 Seas of the Secondary Period which formed the terrains of which the Jura
Mountains are composed. [JV]
93 but feeble reductions of their fathers of the first ages: this remark follows
on from the idea that ‘fish and reptiles are more perfect the further back they
were created’ (ch. 32). The creationist view held that positive evolution was not
possible, only comparatively minor degradations or regressions: this may psychologically
be interpreted as consonant with a pre-Freudian inferiority complex
with respect to one’s forefathers.
Two hours later, I am awakened by an awful shock. The raft has been
lifted right out of the water with indescribable force, and thrown down
more than a hundred feet away.
‘Eh, what is it?’ cries my uncle. ‘Have we hit?’
Hans points at a massive blackish object, about a quarter of a mile
away, which is moving steadily up and down. I look, then cry:
‘But it’s a colossal porpoise!’
‘Yes, and over there is a sea lizard of a most unusual size.’
‘And further on a prodigious crocodile. Look at its huge jaws, and its
rows of aggressive teeth. Oh, it’s disappeared!’
‘A whale, a whale!’ shouts the professor, ‘I can see its enormous tail.
Look, it’s expelling air and water through its blowholes!’
Two liquid columns rise to a considerable height above the waves. We
remain surprised, stupefied, horrified at the sight of this herd of seamonsters.
They have supernatural dimensions—the smallest of them
could crush the raft with a single bite. Hans seizes the helm so as to run
before the wind and flee this danger zone. But he notices more enemies
on the other side, just as formidable: a tortoise about forty feet across,
and a serpent, about thirty, thrusting an enormous head above the waters.
Impossible to flee. These reptiles advance upon us; then move round
the raft with a speed that could not be equalled by trains flying at top
speed. They swim about it in concentric circles. I pick up my rifle. But
what effect could a bullet have on the scales covering the bodies of these
animals?
We remain speechless with horror. They are now coming at us, the
crocodile on one side, the sea-serpent on the other. The rest of the marine
herd have disappeared. I am about to fire. Hans stops me with a
sign. The two monsters pass within a hundred yards of the raft, then
make a rush at each other: their fury prevents them from seeing us.
The combat starts two hundred yards from the raft. We distinctly see
the two monsters seizing hold of each other.
But now the other animals also seem to be taking part in the struggle—
the porpoise, the whale, the lizard, and the tortoise. I catch sight of
them at every moment. I point them out to the Icelander. But he shakes
his head.
‘Tva,’ he says.
‘What, two? He claims there are only two animals. . . ’
‘He is right,’ says my uncle, whose telescope has not left his eye.
‘It’s incredible!’
‘No. The first of these monsters has the snout of a porpoise, the head
of a lizard, and the teeth of a crocodile: hence our mistake. It is the most
frightful of all the antediluvian reptiles: the ichthyosaurus.’94
‘And the other?’
94 ichthyosaurus: ‘ichthy’: ‘fish’; ‘saur’: ‘lizard’.
‘A serpent, concealed under the hard shell of a turtle, and a mortal
enemy of the first: the plesiosaurus!’95
Hans is quite right. Only two monsters are disturbing the surface of
the sea. I have before me two reptiles from the primitive oceans. I can
see the bloody eye of the ichthyosaurus, as big as a man’s head. Nature
has given it an extremely powerful optical apparatus, able to resist the
water pressure in the depths where it lives. It has been called the saurian
whale, for it is just as big and just as quick as that animal. This one is not
less than a hundred feet long, and I can get some idea of its girth when it
lifts its vertical tailfins out of the water. Its jaws are enormous and according
to the naturalists contain as many as 182 teeth.
The plesiosaurus, a serpent with a cylindrical trunk and a short tail,
has legs shaped into paddles. Its whole body is covered with a hard shell,
and its neck, as flexible as a swan’s, rises more than thirty feet above the
waves.
These animals attack one another with indescribable fury. They raise
mountains of water, which surge as far as the raft. Twenty times we are
on the point of capsizing. Hisses of a frightening volume reach our ears.
The two animals are tightly embraced. I cannot distinguish one from the
other. Everything is to be feared from the rage of the victor.
One hour, two hours pass. The struggle continues un-abated. The two
foes now approach the raft, now move away from it. We remain motionless,
ready to fire.
Suddenly the ichthyosaurus and plesiosaurus disappear, hollowing out
a veritable maelstrom in the open sea. Several minutes go by. Will this
combat finish in the ocean depths?
Suddenly, an enormous head surges out—the head of the great plesiosaurus.
The monster is mortally wounded. I can no longer see its
enormous shell. Only its long neck stands up, beats down, rises, bends
over again, lashes at the waters like a gigantic whip, writhes like a worm
cut in two. The water spurts out to a great distance. It blinds us. But soon
the reptile’s death-throes are nearly at their end, its movements diminish,
its contortions calm down, and finally the long section of snake stretches
out, an inert mass on the waters, now quiet again.
As for the ichthyosaurus, has it gone down to rest in its mighty underwater
cavern; or will it reappear on the surface of the sea?
34
Wednesday, 19 August. Fortunately the wind, blowing with force, has
allowed us to flee the scene of the struggle. Hans is still at the helm. My
uncle, drawn from his absorbing ideas by the incidents of the battle, now
retreats again into his impatient contemplation of the sea.
Our voyage becomes monotonous and uniform once more. But I have
no desire to see it change, if it is at the price of yesterday’s dangers.
95 plesiosaurus: ‘plesi’: ‘near’. The source of this scene is Figuier, pp. 143-
54, in turn derived from Cuvier.
Thursday, 20 August. Light wind, NNE, variable. Temperature high.
We are moving at a rate of eight knots.
At about twelve o’clock a very distant sound is heard. I make a note
here of the fact without being able to give an explanation for it. It is like a
continuous roar.
‘Far off’, says the professor, ‘is some rock or small island against
which the sea is breaking.’
Hans hoists himself to the top of the mast, but does not signal a reef.
The ocean is calm as far as the line of the horizon.
Three hours go by. The roaring seems to come from a distant cataract.
I mention this to my uncle, who shakes his head. I, however, am convinced
that I am right. Are we heading for some mighty waterfall which
will drop us into the abyss? This method of travel will probably please the
professor, as it approaches the vertical, but for my part. . .
In any case, not many leagues to windward there must be some very
noisy phenomenon, for now the sound of the roaring is extremely loud. Is
it coming from the sea or the sky?
I look up at the water vapour suspended in the atmosphere, and I try
to penetrate its depths.96 But the sky is serene. The clouds, carried up to
the very top of the vault, seem motionless, and are completely invisible in
the intense glare of the light. We must therefore look elsewhere for the
cause of the phenomenon.
I scrutinise the horizon, pure and free from all haze. Its appearance is
unchanged. But if this noise is coming from a waterfall, from a cataract, if
the ocean is being precipitated into a lower cavity, if these roars are being
produced by masses of falling waters, there would be a current, and its
increasing speed would show me the extent of the danger to which we are
exposed. I check the current. There isn’t one. An empty bottle we drop in
the water simply remains to leeward.
At about four o’clock Hans stands up, takes hold of the mast, and
climbs to the top. From there his eye scans the arc of the ocean’s circle
before the raft and stops at a particular point. His face expresses no astonishment,
but his eyes do not move.
‘He has seen something,’ says my uncle.
‘So it would seem.’
Hans climbs down, and stretches his arm out towards the south:
‘Der nere!’
‘Over there,’ says my uncle.
And seizing the telescope, he gazes with great attention for about a
minute, which to me appears an age.
‘Yes. Yes!’
‘What can you see?’
‘A tremendous column of water rising above the waves.’
96 its depths: the text from here until the words ‘Although I was certain I
was covering ground we hadn’t been over before. . .’ (ch. 39) was added in the
seventh edition (1867).
‘Another sea-monster?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Then let us head more to the west, for we know what to expect from
the dangers of meeting up with antediluvian creatures.’
‘Straight ahead,’ replies my uncle.
I turn towards Hans. He maintains course with an inflexible rigour.
Nevertheless, given the distance separating us from this creature,
which cannot be less than thirty miles, and given that the column of water
from its blowhole is clearly visible, its dimensions must be quite preternatural.
To flee is therefore the course suggested by basic common
sense. To run away would be to obey the most vulgar caution. But we are
not here to be prudent.
We accordingly press on. The nearer we get, the taller the column of
water becomes. What monster can fill itself with such volumes of water
and shoot it out so continuously?
At 8 p.m., we are not more than five miles away. A black, enormous,
mountainous body lies on the water like an island. Is it an illusion or is it
our fear? It seems not less than a mile long. What, then, is this cetaceous
monster which Cuvier and Blumenbach97 never dreamed of? It is motionless
as if asleep. The sea seems unable to shift it; it is the waves instead
that lap at its side. The water column, rising to a height of five hundred
feet, breaks into spray with a dull, sullen roar. We advance like lunatics
towards that mighty hulk which a hundred whales could not feed for a
single day.
I am terrified. I don’t want to go any further. I will cut the halyard if
need be! I mutiny openly against the professor: he makes no answer.
Suddenly Hans gets up and points at the menacing spot:
‘Holme.’
‘An island!’ cries my uncle.
‘An island?’ I reply, raising my shoulders.
‘Of course!’ exclaims my uncle, bursting into loud laughter.
‘But what about the water column?’
‘Geyser,’ says Hans.
‘Yes, obviously a geyser,’ responds my uncle, ‘like those in Iceland.’98
At first I cannot admit that I am so totally wrong. To have taken an island
for a sea-monster!99 But one must give in to the evidence, and finally
I have to accept my mistake. There is nothing here but a natural
phenomenon.
As we get nearer, the dimensions of the column become truly stupendous.
It is difficult to tell the difference between the island and an enor-
97 Blumenbach: Johann Friedrich (1752–1840), German zoologist and anthropologist,
pioneer in craniology.
98 A very famous spring that gushes up, situated at the foot of Mount Hekla.
[JV]
99 To have taken an island for a sea monster!: this section announces Vingt
mille lieues sous les mers, which begins with evidence of a supernatural-seeming
sea monster.
mous whale, with its head rising sixty feet above the swell. The geyser, a
word the Icelanders pronounce ‘gay-seer’ and which means ‘fury’,
emerges majestically at one end of the island. Dull detonations are heard
every now and then, and the enormous jet, subject to violent rages,
shakes off its plume of vapour and spurts up as far as the first stratum of
cloud. It is alone. Neither exhalations nor hot springs surround it, and the
whole volcanic power is concentrated in it. Rays of electric light come and
mix with this dazzling column, with each drop taking on all the colours of
the prism.
‘Let’s go alongside,’ says the professor.
We have to take precautions, however, to avoid the water column,
which would sink the raft in an instant. Hans, steering skilfully, takes us
to the other end of the island.
I leap on to the rock. My uncle nimbly follows, while the hunter remains
at his post, like a man beyond such wonders.
We walk over granite mixed with siliceous tuff; the soil shivers under
our feet like the sides of boilers writhing with superheated steam: it feels
burning hot. We come in view of the little central hollow from which the
geyser rises. I plunge an overflow thermometer100 into the water bubbling
from the centre: it registers a temperature of 163°!
This water, therefore, comes from a burning source of heat. This is
singularly in contradiction with Professor Lidenbrock’s theories. I cannot
resist pointing it out.
‘Well,’ says he, ‘what does that prove against my theory?’
‘Nothing,’ I reply shortly, seeing that I am up against an implacable
stubbornness.
Nevertheless, I am forced to confess that we have been remarkably
fortunate up until now, and that, for a reason which still escapes me, our
journey is taking place in unusual conditions of temperature. But it appears
evident, nay certain, that sooner or later we shall arrive at one of
those regions where the central heat reaches its utmost limits and goes
far beyond the gradations on the thermometers.
We shall see. That is now the professor’s favourite phrase. Having
baptised the volcanic island with the name of his nephew, he gives the
signal to embark.
I stand still for a few minutes more, staring at the geyser. I notice
that the jet of water is irregular in its outbursts: it diminishes in intensity,
then regains new vigour, which I attribute to variations in the pressure of
the vapour built up in its reservoir.
At last we leave, avoiding the sheer rocks of the southern side. Hans
has taken advantage of this brief halt to reorganise the raft.
Before we put off, however, I make a few observations to calculate
the distance covered, and note them in my logbook. Since Port Gräuben,
100 an overflow thermometer: the first cousin of the escapement clock which
generates ‘Maître Zacharius’ (1854), with clear Freudian overtones.
we have covered 680 miles. We are now 1,550 miles from Iceland, and
underneath Britain.101
35
Friday, 21 August. The following day the magnificent geyser has disappeared.
The wind has freshened, and quickly takes us away from Axel
Island. The roaring sound gradually dies down.
The weather, if such a term may be used here, is about to change.
The atmosphere is gradually being loaded with water vapour, which carries
with it the electricity generated when the salt waters evaporate. The
clouds are lowering perceptibly and taking on a uniform olive hue; the
electric rays can scarcely pierce this opaque curtain which has fallen on a
stage where a stormy drama is going to be enacted.
I feel peculiarly influenced, like all creatures on Earth when a catastrophe
is about to happen. The cumuli,102 piled up in the south, present a
sinister appearance: they have the ‘pitiless’ look I have often noticed at
the beginning of a storm. The air is heavy, the sea calm.
In the distance, the clouds look like enormous bales of cotton, piled up
in picturesque confusion. They gradually swell up, and gain in size what
they lose in number: they are so heavy that they are unable to hoist
themselves from the horizon. But in the breath from the upper streams of
the air, they gradually melt together, become darker and soon present a
single layer of a formidable appearance; now and then a ball of misty
cloud, still lit up, collides with the grey carpet, and is soon swallowed up
by the impenetrable mass.
There can be no doubt that the entire atmosphere is saturated with
fluid; I am impregnated with it; my hair stands on end as if beside an
electric machine. It occurs to me that if one of my companions touched
me now, he would probably get a violent shock.
At 10 a.m., the symptoms of the storm become more pronounced; the
wind seems to soften in order to draw breath again, as if in preparation;
the cloud resembles a goatskin bottle inside which terrible storms are accumulating.
I do not want to accept the evidence of the sky’s menacing signs, and
yet I cannot stop myself saying:
‘It looks as though we are going to have some bad weather.’
The professor does not answer. He is in an atrocious mood at the sight
of the ocean stretching interminably before his eyes. At my words he
shrugs his shoulders.
‘We’re going to have a storm,’ I continue, pointing towards the horizon.
‘These clouds are lowering upon the sea, as if to crush it.’
A great silence. The wind falls. Nature lies as if dead, ceasing to
breathe. Upon the mast, where I can already see a slight St Elmo’s fire,
the sail hangs in loose, heavy folds. The raft is motionless in the midst of
that sticky sea, without swell. But since we are not moving, what is the
101 underneath Britain: in fact central France.
102 Clouds with round shapes. [JV]
point of maintaining the canvas, for it may be our downfall as soon as the
tempest hits us?
‘Let’s lower the sail, let’s bring down the mast! That would be the sensible
thing to do.’
‘No, for God’s sake,’ cries my uncle, ‘a hundred times, no. May the
wind take hold of us, may the storm sweep us away. Let me finally see
the rocks of some shore, even if the raft must break into smithereens on
them.’
These words are scarcely out of his mouth, than the appearance of the
southern horizon is transformed. The accumulated moisture resolves itself
into water, and the air, violently sucked in to fill the vacuum produced by
the condensation, becomes a raging storm. It comes from the most distant
corners of the cavern. The darkness increases. I can only just take a
few incomplete notes.
The raft rises, it leaps. My uncle is cast down. I drag myself over to
him. He is holding on to the end of a rope with all his might, apparently
gazing with pleasure at the spectacle of the unchained elements.
Hans does not move a muscle. His long hair, pushed down over his
motionless face by the tempest, gives him a strange appearance, for the
end of each hair is illuminated by a tiny, feather-like radiation. His frightening
mask is that of an antediluvian man, living at the time of the ichthyosaurus
and megatherium.
The mast still holds. The sail stretches like a bubble about to burst.
The raft hurtles on at a velocity that I cannot estimate, but is still slower
than the drops of water displaced beneath it, which the speed turns into
clean straight lines.
‘The sail, the sail!’ I cry, gesturing that it should be brought down.
‘No!’
‘Nej,’ says Hans, gently shaking his head.
By now, the rain forms a roaring cataract in front of this horizon towards
which we race like madmen. But before we reach it, the veil of
cloud is torn apart; the sea begins to boil; and the electricity, produced by
some great chemical action in the upper layers, is brought into play. Dazzling
streaks of lightning combine with fearful claps of thunder; flashes
without number criss-cross amongst the crashes. The mass of water vapour
becomes incandescent; the hailstones striking the metal of our tools
and firearms become luminous; each of the waves surging up resembles a
fire-breathing breast, in which seethes an internal radiance, with each
peak surmounted by plumes of flames.
My eyes are dazzled by the intensity of the light, my ears deafened by
the din of the thunder. I am forced to hold on to the mast, which bends
like a reed before the violence of the storm!
. . . . . . . . . . . .
[Here my travel notes became very incomplete. I have only found one
or two fleeting observations, jotted down automatically so to speak. But
even in their brevity, their incoherence, they are imprinted with the feelings
which governed me and thus, better than my memory, portray my
mood at the time.]
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Sunday, 23 August. Where are we? Being carried away with immeasurable
speed.
The night has been awful. The storm is not calming down. We are living
in the midst of an uproar, a constant detonation. Our ears are bleeding.
We are unable to exchange a single word.
The lightning never stops striking. I see the retrograde zigzags flashing
rapidly and then working their way back up to crash into the arch of
the granite roof. What if it collapsed? Other flashes of lightning fork or become
globes of fire and explode like bombshells. The general level of
noise does not seem to be increased by this; it has already gone beyond
the order of magnitude that the human ear can distinguish. If all the
powder magazines in the world were to explode at the same time, it
would not make any difference.
There is a constant production of light from the surface of the clouds;
their molecules incessantly give off electrical matter; the gaseous principles
of the air have been changed; innumerable columns of water leap up
into the air and then fall down foaming.
Where are we going? My uncle is still flat out at the front of the raft.
The heat increases even further. I look at the thermometer, it reads
?? [The figure is illegible.]
Monday, 24 August. Will this terrible storm ever end? Why should this
state of hyper-dense atmosphere, once it has been modified, not remain
as it is indefinitely?
We are broken with fatigue. Hans the same as ever. The raft heads
endlessly south-east. We have already done five hundred miles since Axel
Island.
At noon the tempest becomes a hurricane. We are forced to lash down
every item in the cargo. Each of us ties himself down as well. The waves
pass over our heads.
Impossible to say a single word to each other for the last three days.
We open our mouths, we move our lips; no audible sound is produced.
Even speaking directly into the ear does not work.
My uncle comes close. He pronounces some words. I think he says:
‘We are lost.’ I am not certain.
I make up my mind, and write a few words to him: ‘Let’s take in the
sail.’
He nods to indicate his consent.
His head has not had time to resume its original position, when a disc
of fire appears on the edge of the raft. The mast and sail are carried off in
a single movement, and I see them fly away to a tremendous height like
a pterodactyl, that fantastic bird of the earliest centuries.
We are frozen with terror. The ball is half white, half electric blue, of
the size of a ten-inch bombshell. It moves leisurely around, while turning
with an astonishing speed under the lash of the storm. It wanders about
here and there, it clambers on to one of the cross-beams of the raft,
jumps on the food bag, gives a little leap, then lightly touches our powder-
keg. Horror, we are about to explode. But no—the blinding disc
moves to one side, it goes up to Hans, who stares at it without blinking;
then to my uncle, who throws himself on his knees to avoid it; it comes
towards me, as I stand pale and shivering in the dazzling heat and light;
it pirouettes near my feet, which I try to pull back. I can’t.
A smell of nitrous gas fills the air; it penetrates our throats and lungs.
We choke on it.
Why can’t I move my foot? Is it riveted to the spot? Then I understand:
the arrival of the electric globe has magnetised all the iron on
board.103 The instruments, the tools, the firearms are crashing together
with a keen jangling noise; the nails in my boot are violently attracted to
a plate of iron encrusted in the wood. I can’t shift my foot.
At last, by a violent effort, I tear my foot away, just as the rotational
movements of the ball are about to seize hold of it and drag me away too,
if. . .
Oh what intense light! The globe bursts—we are being covered in torrents
of flames!
Then everything goes out. I just have time to see my uncle lying on
the floor, Hans still at the helm, ‘spitting fire’ under the influence of the
electricity; he is saturated with it.
Where will we end up, oh where?
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Tuesday, 25 August. I have just come out of a very long faint. The
storm is still continuing; the lightning breaks loose like a swarm of snakes
released into the air.
Are we still on the sea? Yes, being carried along with incalculable
speed. We have passed under Britain, under the Channel, under France,
possibly under the whole of Europe!104
. . . . . . . . . . . .
A new noise can be heard. Clearly the sea breaking on rocks. But
then. . .
. . . . . . . . . . . .
36
Here ends what I called the ‘ship’s log’, fortunately saved from the
shipwreck. I proceed with my narrative as before.
What happened when the raft hit the reefs on the shore, I cannot say.
I felt myself being thrown into the waves, and if I escaped death, if my
103 magnetized. . . board: Le Sphinx des glaces (1897), which culminates at
an immense magnetic centre near the North Pole, is foreshadowed in this scene.
104 passed. . . Europe: in ‘L’Éternel Adam’ (1910), this scene is paralleled
when the protagonists sail in search of land over the successive countries of a
flooded Europe.
body was not torn to pieces by the sharp rocks, it was because Hans’s
strong arm pulled me from the abyss.
The fearless Icelander carried me out of reach of the waves and on to
burning sand, where I found myself lying side by side with my uncle.
Then he returned to the rocks, against which the furious waves were
beating, in order to save a few stray pieces from the wreckage. I could
not speak; I was broken with fear and fatigue; it took me more than an
hour to recover.
The rain continued to fall, however, a positive deluge, but with that
very violence which heralds the end of the storm. Some piled-up rocks
gave us protection from the torrents from the heavens. Hans prepared
some food which I was unable to touch; exhausted by the three nights
keeping watch, I fell into a disturbed sleep.
Next day, the weather was magnificent. Sea and sky, as if by agreement,
had regained their serenity. Every trace of the storm had disappeared.
Cheerful words from the professor greeted me when I woke up.
His gaiety was terrible.
‘Well, my lad! Did you sleep soundly?’
Might one not have thought that we were in the old house in Königstrasse,
that I was quietly coming down for breakfast, and that my wedding
with poor Gräuben was to take place that very day?
Alas, if only the tempest had driven the raft eastwards, we would have
passed under Germany, under my beloved city of Hamburg, under that
street which contained all I loved in the world. At that point hardly a hundred
miles would have separated me from her. But a hundred vertical
miles of granite wall: in reality, more than 2,500 miles to cover!
All these unhappy ideas passed quickly through my mind before I answered
my uncle’s question.
‘What?’ he repeated. ‘Can you not say how you slept?’
‘Perfectly. But every bone in my body aches. I’ll be all right.’
‘I am sure you will be completely all right, a little tired, nothing more.’
‘You appear very gay this morning.’
‘Delighted, my boy, delighted! We have arrived.’
‘At the end of our expedition?’
‘No; at the edge of that sea which seemed endless. We will now resume
our journey by land, and really plunge into the vitals of the Earth.’
‘Uncle, can I ask you a question?’
‘Certainly, Axel.’
‘How are we going to get back?’
‘Get back? You are thinking about the return before we have even arrived!’
‘Not really: all I want to know is how will it be done?’
‘In the simplest way possible. Once we have reached the centre of our
spheroid, either we shall find a new path to climb up to the surface, or we
shall quite boringly turn round and go back the way we came. I do not
imagine that the route will close up behind us.’
‘Then we will have to think about repairing the raft.’
‘Obviously.’
‘But what about the food, have we got enough left to do all these
great things?’
‘Yes, certainly. Hans is a clever fellow, and I am sure he has saved
most of the cargo. But let’s go and see for ourselves.’
We left this grotto, open to all the winds. I had a hope that was also a
fear; it didn’t seem possible to me that anything of what the raft had
been carrying could have survived its terrible landing. I was wrong. When
I reached the shore, I found Hans in the middle of a large number of objects,
all laid out in order. My uncle wrung the hunter’s hands with deep
gratitude. This man, of a superhuman devotion, one that would perhaps
never be equalled, had worked while we slept, saving the most precious
articles at the risk of his life.
Nevertheless, we had experienced important losses: our firearms for
example—but after all we could manage without them. The supply of
powder had remained intact, after narrowly escaping being blown up in
the storm.
‘Well,’ said the professor, ‘as we have no guns, we will simply have to
give up hunting.’
‘Yes, but what about the instruments?’
‘Here is the manometer, the most useful of all, and for which I would
have given the rest. With it I can calculate the depth and know when we
have reached the centre. Without it, we might go too far and come out at
the antipodes!’
His good mood was ferocious.
‘But the compass?’
‘Here it is on this rock, safe and sound, as well as the chronometer
and thermometers. The hunter is a genius!’
One had to agree. Amongst the instruments, nothing was missing. As
for the tools and implements, I spotted ladders, cords, pickaxes, picks,
etc., scattered over the sand.
There was still the question of provisions to sort out.
‘And what about the food?’
‘Let us see about it.’
The boxes were lined up along the shore in a perfect state of preservation;
most of their contents were unharmed by the sea, and we could
thus still count on a total of four months’ supply of biscuits, salt meat,
gin, and dried fish.
‘Four months!’ cried the professor. ‘We have time to go there and
come back, and with what is left I plan to give a huge dinner to my colleagues
at the Johanneum!’
By this time I should have been used to my uncle’s character, and yet
this man still amazed me.
‘Now,’ said he, ‘we must renew our stock of fresh water, using the rain
that the storm has poured into the hollows in the granite. There is no
danger of suffering from thirst. As for the raft, I shall ask Hans to repair it
as best he can, although I do not believe we shall be requiring it again.’
‘Why not?’
‘Just one of my ideas, my boy. I do not believe we shall go out the
way we came in.’
I looked at my uncle with suspicion. I wondered whether he had gone
mad. And yet ‘little did he know how right he was’.
‘And now for breakfast,’ he concluded.
I followed him on to a high promontory, after he had given instructions
to the hunter. There, with dried meat, biscuits, and tea, we had an
excellent meal: one of the best in my life, I must say. Hunger, the open
air, the peace and quiet after the excitement, all combined to give me an
excellent appetite.
During breakfast, I asked my uncle if he knew where we now were.
‘It may be rather difficult to calculate,’ I added.
‘To calculate exactly, yes, even impossible, for I could keep no account
of the speed or direction of the raft during the three days of the
tempest. Still, we can estimate our approximate position.’
‘Well, our last observation was made at the island with the geyser.’
‘At Axel Island, my boy! Do not decline the honour of giving your
name to the first island discovered in the interior of the Earth.’
‘All right. At Axel Island, we had done more than 670 miles by sea and
were over 1,500 miles from Iceland.’
‘Fine. Let us start then from that point, and count four days of storm,
during which our speed cannot have been less than two hundred miles
every twenty-four hours.’
‘ffery probably. That would make as much as eight hundred miles extra.’
‘Yes, and the Lidenbrock Sea would then be about 1,500 miles across!
Do you realise, Axel, that it is about as big as the Mediterranean?’
‘Yes, especially if we have only crossed it and not gone its whole
length!’
‘Which is very likely.’
‘And what is strange,’ said I, ‘is that if our calculations are right, we
have over our heads at this very moment the Mediterranean itself.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Yes, for we are 2,300 miles from Reykjavik.’
‘A good stretch of road we have travelled, my boy. But whether we
are under the Mediterranean, Turkey, or the Atlantic can only be determined
if our direction has remained constant.’
‘The wind appears steady to me. My view is that this shore must be
south-east of Port Gräuben.’
‘Well, it is easy to check by consulting the compass. Let us therefore
go and check this compass!’
The professor headed for the rock on which Hans had placed the instruments.
My uncle was gay and light-hearted; he rubbed his hands, he
struck poses. A young man in truth! I followed him, rather curious to
know whether I was right in my estimation.
As soon as we had reached the rock, my uncle took the compass, laid
it flat and looked at the needle, which oscillated and then, under the
magnetic influence, stopped in a fixed position.
My uncle looked, rubbed his eyes, then looked again. Finally he turned
to me, flabbergasted.
‘But what’s the matter?’
He pointed to the instrument. I examined it and a loud cry of surprise
escaped from my lips. The needle marked north where we expected
south! It pointed at the shore rather than out to sea!
I shook the compass, then examined it again. It was in perfect condition.
Whatever position we made the needle take, it returned obstinately
to the same surprising direction.
There could be no doubt about it: during the tempest, there had been
a sudden change of wind, one we had not noticed, and which had brought
the raft back to the shores my uncle thought he had left behind for ever.
37
It would be altogether impossible for me to give any idea of the feelings
that shook the professor: amazement, incredulity, and finally rage.
Never in my life had I seen someone so crestfallen at first, and then so
furious. The fatigues of our crossing, the dangers we had passed through,
everything had to be started all over again. Instead of making progress,
we had gone backwards.
But my uncle was on top again very soon.
‘Fate plays me such tricks! The elements are conspiring against me.
Air, fire, and water are combining to stop me getting through. Well, they
are going to see what my will-power can do. I shall not yield, I shall not
retreat a tenth of an inch. We shall see who wins: man or Nature!’
Standing on a rock, irritated, threatening, Otto Lidenbrock, like wild
Ajax,105 seemed to be hurling defiance at the gods. I judged it sensible to
intervene and put some sort of check upon this mad eagerness.
‘Listen to me,’ I said in a firm voice. ‘There must be a limit to every
ambition in this world. One must not fight against the impossible. We are
ill-equipped for a sea voyage; one cannot cover 1,200 miles on a poor
construction of beams, with a blanket as a sail and a stick for a mast,
against the unleashed winds. Since we are unable to steer, we will become
the playthings of the storm, and it is to act like lunatics to attempt
this impossible crossing a second time.’
I was allowed to go through these irrefutable reasons for about ten
minutes without interruption. But this was only because of the professor’s
inattention: he did not hear a single word of my arguments.
‘To the raft!’ he cried.
Such was his response. In vain did I implore him, did I lose my temper:
I came up against a will harder than granite.
105 wild Ajax: in Greek mythology, a hero of the Trojan War, who defied the
gods and whom Poseidon caused to fall into the sea and drown.
Hans was just finishing his repairs to the raft. It was almost as if this
strange being had guessed my uncle’s projects. By means of a few pieces
of surtarbrandur, he had strengthened the vessel. A sail had already been
hoisted, and the wind was playing over its floating folds.
The professor said a few words to the guide, who immediately loaded
our luggage on board and prepared everything for departure. The atmosphere
was now pure, and the north-west wind held steady.
What could I do? Resist, one against two? Impossible. If only Hans
had supported me. But no, as far as I could see, the Icelander had set
aside all volition of his own and taken a vow of self-denial. I could get
nothing out of a servant so feudally subjugated to his master. All I could
do was not rock the boat.
I moved106 to take my usual place on the raft, but my uncle stopped
me with his hand.
‘We shall only start tomorrow.’
I made the gesture of a man resigned to everything.
‘I must not neglect a single factor. As fate has cast me upon this
stretch of shore, I shall not leave again until I have explored it.’
In order to understand his remark, I need to explain that, though we
had come back to the northern coastline, this was not at exactly the same
spot as our starting-point. Port Gräuben had to be to the west. Hence
nothing was more sensible than carefully reconnoitring the area around
our new landfall.
‘Let’s explore!’ I cried.
And we set off, leaving Hans to his activities. The area between the
high-water tidemark and the foot of the cliffs was very large. It would
take about half an hour to get to the rock wall. Our feet crushed innumerable
seashells of every shape and size, once the houses of animals of the
first ages. I also noticed enormous shells with a diameter of more than
fifteen feet. They once belonged to those gigantic glyptodonts107 of the
Pliocene Period, of which the modern tortoise is but a minute reduction.
In addition, the soil was covered with a large amount of stony jetsam, a
sort of shingle rounded by the waves, arranged in successive rows. I
came to the conclusion that in past ages the sea must have covered this
area. The waves had indeed left evident signs of their passage on the
scattered rocks, now lying beyond their reach.
This could to a certain extent explain the existence of such an ocean,
a hundred miles below the surface of the Earth. According to my theory,
this liquid mass must have been gradually lost into the bowels of the
Earth: it clearly came from the water of the oceans, reaching its destination
through some sort of fissure. Nevertheless, it had to be assumed that
106 I moved: (‘j’allai’), 1864 edition: ‘I was going to’ (‘j’allais’). The difference
of a single letter, phonologically minimal and without much significance for the
primary meaning, has nevertheless an important consequence on conceptions of
tense in the novel: in particular, it marks a distinction between action and intention,
between objective movement and internal reflection.
107 glyptodonts: extinct mammals in S. America, resembling giant armadillos.
this fissure was now blocked up, for, if not, the cavern, or rather the immense
reservoir, would have been completely filled in a relatively short
period. Perhaps some of the water had even had to contend with the subterranean
fires, and so was vaporised. Hence an explanation for the
clouds suspended above our heads and the emission of the electricity
which created the storms inside the Earth’s mass.
Such a theory of the phenomena we had witnessed struck me as satisfactory,
for however great the marvels of Nature, they can always be explained
with physical reasons.
We were thus walking over a kind of sedimentary soil formed by the
subsidence of the waters, like the very many formations of that period on
the surface of the globe. The professor carefully examined every crack in
the rocks. If an opening existed, it became vital for him to plumb its
depths.
We had been following the shores of the Lidenbrock Sea for about a
mile, when suddenly the ground changed appearance. It seemed to have
been upset, turned upside down by a violent upheaval of the lower strata.
In many places, hollows and hillocks bore witness to great dislocations of
the terrestrial mass.108
We were advancing with difficulty over the broken granite mixed with
flint, quartz, and alluvial deposits, when a field—more than a field, a plain
of bones, appeared before our eyes. It looked like an immense cemetery,
where the generations of two thousand years mingled their eternal dust.
Large bulges109 of remains stretched out in the layered distance. They
undulated away to the limits of the horizon and were lost in an out-offocus
mist. Within that area, of perhaps three square miles, was accumulated
the whole history of animal life, writ too small in the recent ground
of the inhabited world.
We were carried forward by an impetuous curiosity. With a dry sound
our feet crushed the remains of these prehistoric animals, whose rare and
valuable fragments are fought over by the museums of the great cities. A
thousand Cuviers would not have been enough to reconstruct the skeletons
of all the once living creatures which now rested in that magnificent
bone-graveyard.
I remained dumbfounded. My uncle had raised his long arms towards
the impenetrable vault which was our sky. His mouth was gaping tremendously,
his eyes were flaring behind the lenses of his glasses, his head
was moving up and down, to the left and right—his whole expression indicated
utter astonishment. He was presented with a priceless assortment
of Leptotheria, Merycotheria, lophiodons, anoplotheres, megatheria, mastodons,
Protopitheci, pterodactyls—of every monster from before the
Flood, all in a pile there just for his gratification. Imagine the famous library
in Alexandria that Omar burned, suddenly and miraculously reborn
108 great dislocations of the terrestrial mass: the text here bears witness to
its own irruption into the previous edition.
109 large bulges: Verne’s ‘extumescences’ is a medical term meaning ‘tumefactions’;
he is perhaps also making a pun (‘ex-tumescences’).
from its ashes; and transport a fanatical book-collector into it. That was
my uncle Professor Lidenbrock!
But his awe reached a climax when, racing across the organic dust, he
seized a bare skull and screamed in a trembling voice:
‘Axel, Axel! It’s a human head!’
‘A human head?’ I replied, just as dazed.
‘Yes, my boy. O Milne-Edwards,110 O Quatrefages. How I wish you
could see me here, Otto Lidenbrock!’
38
To explain this reference to the two distinguished scientists, it should
be recalled that a palaeontological event of great importance had taken
place some months before our departure.
On 28 March 1863, French workmen under the direction of M. Boucher
de Perthes111 had unearthed a human jawbone at a depth of fourteen feet
below the soil, in a quarry at Moulin-Quignon, near Abbeville (Somme). It
was the first fossil of the sort ever to see the light of day. Near it were
stone axes and worked flints, which time had covered with a uniform coloured
patina.
This discovery had a huge impact, not only in France but in Britain and
Germany. Many scholars from the Institut Français, including Messrs
Milne-Edwards and Quatrefages, took the affair very much to heart; demonstrated
the incontestable authenticity of the bones in question; and
hence became the most impassioned defence witnesses in the ‘trial of the
jawbone’, as it was called in Britain.
In addition to the United Kingdom geologists who considered the fact
as certain—Messrs Falconer,112 Busk, Carpenter, et al.—stood the German
scholars. Amongst the most eminent, the most enthusiastic, the most carried
away, was my uncle Lidenbrock.
The authenticity of a human fossil from the Quaternary Era seemed
therefore proved and approved beyond all shadow of a doubt.
110 Milne-Edwards: Henri (1800–85), French zoologist, worked especially on
molluscs and crustaceans; Quatrefages: Jean-Louis-Armand de Quatrefages de
Bréau (1810–92), French naturalist and anthropologist, opponent of Darwinism,
author of Histoire de l’homme (1867).
111 Boucher of Perthes: (1788–1868), discovered flint tools near Abbeville in
1837 and 1844; and argued from 1846 onwards that man had existed in prehistoric
times. Only following their first recognition in Britain in 1860 were his arguments
really debated in France, in 1865 (hence the extra chapters in 1867).
The theme of the undiscovered genius is an important one in Verne.
112 Falconer: Hugh (1808–65), British palaeontologist and botanist; Busk:
George (1807–86), British specialist in the fossil marine polyzoa, author of several
scientific works, including Description of the Remains of Three Extinct Species
of Elephant (1865); Carpenter: William Benjamin (1813–85), British physiologist
and author of A Popular Cyclopaedia of Natural Science (1841–4) and Zoology.
. . and Chief Forms of Fossil Remains (1857, reissued 1866); also an expert
on dredging the ocean depths; also author of The Unconscious Action of the
Brain (1866–71).
Such a view, it is true, was vigorously challenged by M. Élie de Beaumont.
113 This authoritative and respected scientist maintained that the
formation of Moulin-Quignon did not belong to the ‘diluvium’ but was
more recent. In agreement with Cuvier on this point, he contended that
the human race could not have existed at the same time as the animals of
the Quaternary Era. But my uncle Lidenbrock, in accordance with the
great majority of geologists, had held his ground, had argued and discussed—
and M. Élie de Beaumont had remained relatively isolated in his
view.
My uncle and I were familiar with the successive ins and outs of this
affair. But what we did not know was that, after we had left, it had undergone
further developments. Additional jawbones of the same sort, although
belonging to individuals of different types and different nations,
were discovered in the loose grey soil of certain large caves in France,
Switzerland, and Belgium—together with weapons, utensils, tools, and the
bones of children, adolescents, adults, and old people. The existence of
Quaternary man became therefore more and more certain with each
passing day.
And this was not all. New fragments excavated in Pliocene formations
from the Tertiary Period had enabled scientists with even livelier imaginations
to attribute a much greater age to the human race. These fragments,
it is true, were not human bones, but merely the products of his
industry: tibias and femurs of fossil animals, marked with regular
grooves, carved so to speak, bearing the signs of man’s handiwork.
Thus, in a single move, man had leaped many centuries up the ladder
of time. He now came before the mastodon; he became a contemporary
of the Elephas meridionalis;114 his exist-ence dated back a hundred thousand
years, since that was when the geologists said the Pliocene system
was formed!
The above elements constituted the state of palaeontological science
at that time, and what we knew of them was sufficient to explain our reaction
to this ossuary beside the Lidenbrock Sea. My uncle’s stupefaction
and joy are easy to understand, especially when, twenty yards further on,
he found himself in the presence of, or rather face to face with, an authentic
specimen of Quaternary man.
It was a perfectly recognisable human body. Had some particularity of
the soil, as in the Saint-Michel Cemetery in Bordeaux, preserved it unchanged
down through the centuries? It was difficult to say. But in any
case this body was before our eyes exactly as it had lived—complete with
stretched, parchment-like skin, limbs still fleshy and soft, apparently at
least, teeth still preserved, a considerable head of hair, and finger- and
toe-nails of a frightening length.
113 Élie de Beaumont: (1798–1874), French geologist, argued against the existence
of prehistoric man.
114 elephas meridionalis: (‘southern elephant’) lived in Eurasia in the Quarternary
Era.
I was dumbstruck at this apparition from another age. My uncle, usually
possessed of such a way with words, normally so eager to make
speeches about anything, fell silent as well. We propped the body up
against a rock. He looked at us from his hollow eye-sockets. We twanged
his sonorous chest.
After a few moments of silence, my uncle reverted to Herr Professor
Otto Lidenbrock, undoubtedly carried away by his personality and forgetting
the circumstances of the journey, our immediate surroundings, and
the tremendous cavern holding us. He must have thought he was lecturing
to his students at the Johanneum, for he adopted a professorial tone
and addressed an imaginary audience:
‘Gentlemen, I have the pleasure of introducing to you a man from the
Quaternary Era. Some eminent scholars have argued that he does not exist,
while others, no less eminent, have maintained that he does. The
doubting Thomases of palaeontology, if they were here, would be able to
touch his body with their hands, and thus be forced to admit their error. I
know full well that science must be constantly on its guard concerning
discoveries of this sort. I am not unaware of the exploitation of fossil men
by the Barnums115 and other charlatans of this world. I am not unacquainted
with the story of Ajax’s kneecap, with what was claimed to be
Orestes’ body116 as found by the Spartans, or with Asterius’ ten-cubitlong
body as described by Pausanias. I have read the reports on the
Trápani skeleton discovered in the fourteenth century, which people
wished to believe was Polyphemus’, as well as the accounts of the giant
dug up in the sixteenth century near Palermo. You are as aware as I, gentlemen,
of the analysis carried out at Lucerne in 1577 of the enormous
bones claimed by the illustrious doctor Félix Plater to belong to a giant
nineteen feet tall. I have devoured Cassanion’s treatises, and all the
monographs, pamphlets, presentations, and counter-presentations ever
published on the skeleton of Teutobochus, King of the Cimbrians, who invaded
Gaul and who was excavated from a sandpit in the Dauphiné in
1613.117 In the eighteenth century, I would have combated Peter
115 Barnums: Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810–91), famous American showman;
also prominent in Verne’s ‘Le Humbug’.
116 Oreste’s body: Oreste, mythological son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra;
Asterius: all of Verne’s information about giants, including the proper
names, is taken directly from Figuier, pp. 300-3. The Trápani giant is in turn
cited from Boccaccio (1313-75); Pausanias: Greek traveller, topographer, and
author (c. AD 100), his best-known work was translated as Pausanias; ou voyage
historique de la GrPce. Nouvelle édition augmentée du ‘Voyage autour du
monde’, par Scylax (1797).
117 Trápani and Palermo: in Sicily; Polyphemus: son of Poseidon (Greek god
of the sea and of earthquakes), and one of the Cyclopes; Félix Plater: Félix Platter
or Platerus (in Latin), The Elder and the Younger, German physiologists,
studied in Montpellier in 16th century; Cassanion: Jean Chassanion or Joannes
Cassanio, author of De gigantibus, eorúmque reliquijs, atque ijs, quF ante annos
aliquot nostra Ftate in Gallia repertEQ \O(e,,) sunt. . . , Basle, 1580; Cimbrians:
or Cimbri, German tribe originally from N. Jutland, but retreated northwards in
Camper’s affirmations regarding the existence of Scheuchzer’s pre-
Adamites! I have held in my hands the publication entitled Gi. . . ’
Here re-emerged my uncle’s inherent impediment of not being able to
pronounce complicated words in public.
‘The book entitled Gi-Gi-gans. . . ’
He couldn’t go any further.
‘Gi-gan-teo. . . ’
Impossible, the wretched word just would not come out! There would
have been much laughter at the Johanneum.
‘Gigantosteology,’ Professor Lidenbrock said, between two oaths.
Then, continuing all the better, and warming up:
‘Yes, gentlemen, I am aware of all these matters. I also know that Cuvier
and Blumenbach have identified the bones as simply those of mammoths
and other animals of the Quaternary Period. But to doubt in the
present case would be to insult science! The corpse is there! You can inspect
it, touch it. It is not a mere skeleton, it is an entire body, preserved
for exclusively anthropological purposes!’
I was careful not to contradict this assertion.
‘If I could wash it in a solution of sulphuric acid, I would remove all
the earth encrustations and splendid shells attached to it. But the precious
solvent is unavailable at present. However, as it stands, this body
will recount its own story.’
Here, the professor picked up the fossil corpse and adjusted it with all
the dexterity of a showman at a fair.
‘As you can see, it is less than six feet tall, and we are a long way
from the so-called giants. As for the race it belongs to, it is incontestably
Caucasian. It is of the white race, it is of our own race! The skull of this
fossil is oval-shaped and regular, without developed cheekbones, without
a projecting jaw. It presents no sign of prognathism modifying the facial
angle.118 119 Measure this angle, it is nearly ninety degrees. But I will proceed
further along the path of deductions, and I will venture to say that
this human specimen belongs to the Japhetic family, which extends from
3rd century, and thus probably introduced the use of the runic alphabet into
Norway and Sweden; Teutobochus: Figuier (pp. 262-3) reports that ‘Teutobocchus
Rex’ was in fact merely the bones of a giant mammal but was fraudulently
exhibited in ‘every town in France’. Peter Camper: (1722–89), Dutch anatomist,
author of works on mammalian anatomy; Scheuchzer: Johann Jacob, Swiss author
of selections from the Bible dealing with natural history, especially Homo
Diluvii Testis (1731) and Physique sacrée ou histoire naturelle de la Bible (1732),
describing fossil remains believed to be human ones from the Flood. The Gigantosteology
that Lidenbrock stutters over is by N. Habicot (1613).
118 The facial angle is formed by the intersection of two planes, one more or
less vertical and forming a tangent to the forehead and the incisor teeth, the
other horizontal, passing through the opening of the auditory passages and the
lower nasal cavity. One defines prognathism, in anthropological language, as this
projection of the jaw-bone modifying the facial angle. [JV]
119 the facial angle: in the racist theories current at the time, it was the facial
angle that helped determine the race.
the Indian subcontinent to the far limits of western Europe. Pray do not
smile, gentlemen!’
Nobody was smiling, but the professor was used to seeing faces
broadening during his scholarly perorations.
‘Yes,’ he continued with renewed vigour, ‘this is a fossil man, and a
contemporary of the mastodons whose bones fill this auditorium. But by
what route it arrived here, how the strata it was enclosed in slid down
into this enormous cavity of the globe, I am unable to tell you. Undoubtedly,
in the Quaternary Period, considerable upheavals in the Earth’s crust
still occurred. The lengthy cooling of the globe produced fissures, cracks,
and faults, into which part of the upper terrain must have dropped. I am
not committing myself, but, after all, this man is here, surrounded by the
handiwork he produced, his axes and worked flints which define the Stone
Age. Unless he came as a tourist, as a scientific pioneer, I cannot then
question the authenticity of his ancient origin.’
The professor stopped speaking, and I broke into unanimous applause.
My uncle was in fact right, and more learned people than his
nephew would have found it very difficult to argue with him.
Another clue. This fossilised body was not the only one in the enormous
ossuary. With each step we took in this dust, we came across other
bodies: my uncle was able to pick out the most wonderful specimens that
would have convinced the most sceptical.
It was indeed an amazing sight, that of generations of men and animals
mingling in this cemetery. But a puzzling mystery then arose, that
we were not yet able to solve. Had these creatures slid down to the
shores of the Lidenbrock Sea during some convulsion of the Earth, when
they were already dead? Or had they rather passed their lives down here,
in this underworld, under this unnatural sky, being born and dying here,
just like the inhabitants of the Earth? Until now, only monsters of the
deep and fish had appeared before us in living form. Was some man of
the abyss still wandering along these lonely shores?
39
For another half-hour we trampled over the layers of bones. We went
straight ahead, forced on by a burning curiosity. What other wonders did
this cavern hold, what treasures of science? My eyes expected every surprise,
my mind every astonishment.
The seashore had long since disappeared behind the hills of the bonegraveyard.
The foolhardy professor, heedless of losing the way, led us
further and further on. We walked in silence, bathed in the waves of electric
light. By a phenomenon I cannot explain, the light was uniformly diffused,
so that it lit up all the sides of objects equally. It no longer came
from any definite point in space, and consequently there was not the
slightest shadow. It was like being under the vertical rays of the midday
sun in midsummer in the midst of the equatorial regions. All mist had disappeared.
The rocks, the distant mountains, the blurry forms of a few faraway
forests, all took on a strange appearance under the even distribution
of the luminous fluid. We were like that fantastic character of Hoffmann’s
who lost his shadow.120
After about a mile, we saw the edge of an immense forest, but not
this time a grove of mushrooms like the one near Port Gräuben.
It displayed the vegetation of the Tertiary Period in all its splendour.
Great palm trees of species no longer in existence and superb palmaceae,
pines, yews, cypress, and thujas121 represented the coniferous family, all
joined together by an impenetrable network of creepers. The ground was
carpeted with a springy covering of moss and hepaticas. Streams murmured
under the shade—if this term can be used, for there was no
shadow. On the banks flourished tree ferns, like those of the hothouses of
the inhabited globe. Colours, however, were absent from all the trees,
shrubs, and plants, deprived as they were of the life-giving heat of the
sun. Everything was dissolved into a uniform hue, brownish and faded as
if past. The leaves were not their usual green, and the very flowers, so
numerous in the Tertiary Age when they first appeared, were at that time
without colour or perfume, as if made of a paper that had been yellowed
by the effect of the atmosphere.
My uncle ventured into this gigantic thicket. I followed, not without a
certain apprehension. Where nature had provided such vast stores of
vegetable foodstuffs, might fearful mammals not be encountered? In the
large clearings left by fallen trees, gnawed by time, I noticed leguminous
plants, acerinae, rubiaceae, and a thousand edible shrubs, much appreciated
by the ruminants of all periods. Then there appeared, all intermixed
and intertwined, trees from highly different countries on the surface of
the globe, the oak growing beside the palm tree, the Australian eucalyptus
leaning on the Norwegian fir, the northern birch mingling its branches
with the New Zealand kauri. It was enough to upset the sanity of the
most ingenious classifiers of terrestrial botany.
Suddenly I stopped short. I held my uncle back.
The uniform light made it possible to see the smallest objects in the
depths of the thicket. I thought I saw, no, I really did see, enormous
shapes wandering around under the trees! They were in fact gigantic
animals, a whole herd of mastodons, no longer fossil, but fully alive, and
resembling the ones whose remains were discovered in the bogs of Ohio
in 1801. I watched these great elephants with their trunks swarming
about below the trees like a host of serpents. I heard the sound of their
great tusks as the ivory tore at the bark of the ancient tree-trunks. The
120 Hoffmann’s. . . shadow: E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), German writer;
the character is Peter Schlemihl, referred to in New Year’s Eve as drawn from
The Shadowless Man; or the Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl (1814), by
Adalbert von Chamisso (1781-1838). But the essential idea here is undoubtedly
the traditional one that a person who loses his shadow is in the land of the dead.
121 cypress and thujas: the cypress traditionally represents mourning, and
the thuja is also known as the arbor vitae (‘tree of life’). The juxtaposition of opposites
is a favourite topos of Verne’s.
branches cracked, and the leaves, torn off in great clumps, disappeared
into the monsters’ massive maws.
So the dream where I had seen the rebirth of this complete world
from prehistoric times, combining the Tertiary and Quaternary Periods,
had finally become a reality! And we were there, alone in the bowels of
the Earth, at the mercy of its fierce inhabitants!
My uncle was gazing.
Suddenly he seized me by the arm, crying:
‘Come on! Forward, forward!’
‘No, no! We are unarmed! What could we do amongst these giant
quadrupeds? Come, Uncle, come! No human creature can brave the anger
of these monsters unscathed!’
‘No human creature?’ said my uncle, lowering his voice. ‘You are
wrong, Axel! Look, look over there! It seems to me that I can see a living
creature—a being like us—a man!’
I looked, shrugging my shoulders, determined to push incredulity to
its furthest limits. But struggle as I might, I had to give in to the evidence.
There, less than a quarter of a mile away, leaning against the trunk of
an enormous kauri tree, was a human being, a Proteus of these underground
realms, a new son of Neptune, shepherding that uncountable
drove of mastodons!122
Immanis pecoris custos, immanior ipse!123
‘Immanior ipse’ indeed! This was no longer the fossil creature whose
body we had propped up amongst the bones: this was a giant, able to
command these monsters. He was more than twelve feet tall. His head,
as big as a buffalo’s, was half-hidden in the brush of his wild locks—a real
mane, like that of the elephants of the first ages. He swung in his hand an
enormous bough, an appropriately primeval crook for this shepherd from
before the Flood.124
We remained motionless, in a daze. But we might be spotted. We had
to retreat.
‘Run for it!’ I shouted, dragging my uncle with me, who for the first
time in his life didn’t resist.
122 Proteus: a minor sea-god, herdsman of the flocks of the sea, had the
power to take on many shapes; Neptune: Roman god of the sea, part of the ritual
of his festival was the building of shady arbours (umbrae) made of boughs.
Verne is here hinting at a parallel evolutionary tree.
123 Immanis pecoris custos, immanior ipse!: ‘Guardian of a monstrous herd,
and more monstrous himself!’: Verne is borrowing this quotation from Victor
Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris (pt 4, ch. 3), which adapts Virgil (Bucolica, v. 44),
‘formosi pecoris custos formosior ipse’ (‘Guardian of a fine herd, finer still himself’).
124 bough. . . shepherd from before the Flood: cf. Books 11 and 12 of The
Odyssey, where Ulysses in Hades sees a giant pursuing wild animals with a club
in his hand.
A quarter of an hour later, we were out of sight of this redoubtable
foe.
And now, when I consider it calmly, now that peace has returned to
my mind, now that months have gone by since this strange, this supernatural,
encounter—what am I to think, what am I to believe? No, it’s just
not possible! Our senses must have been mistaken, our eyes can’t have
seen what they saw! No human creature lives in that underground world.
No race of men populates those deep caverns of the globe, oblivious of
the inhabitants of the surface, not communicating with them in any way!
It’s insane, deeply insane!
I would rather believe in the existence of some animal with a humanoid
structure, some ape from the first geological eras, some Protopithecus,
some Mesopithecus like the one discovered by M. Lartet in the
bone-laden bed of Sansan!125 But this one was far bigger than all the
measurements known to modern palaeontology. Never mind: however
unlikely, it was an ape! But a man, a living man, and with him a whole
generation entombed in the bowels of the Earth? Never!
Meanwhile we had left the clear, luminous forest, speechless with
shock, weighed down by a stupefaction that came close to brutishness.
We couldn’t help running. It was a real flight, like those terrifying automatisms
that one sometimes gets caught up in in nightmares. Instinctively
we made our way towards the Lidenbrock Sea. I do not know what
wild paths my mind would have taken me along, if a particular worry
hadn’t brought me back to more practical considerations.126
Although I was certain I was covering ground we hadn’t been over before,
I kept noticing groups of rocks whose shapes reminded me of Port
Gräuben. This in fact confirmed what the compass had indicated—that we
had unintentionally headed back to the north of the Lidenbrock Sea.
Sometimes it all seemed uncannily similar. Hundreds of streams and cascades
fell from the rocky outcrops. I imagined I was back near the layer
of surtarbrandur, near our faithful Hans-Bach and the grotto where I had
come back to life. Then, a few yards further on, the shape of the cliffs,
the appearance of a stream, the surprising outline of a rock made me
start doubting again.
I mentioned my hesitation to my uncle. He was wondering like me. He
was unable to find his way through this uniform vista.127
‘We obviously didn’t come back to the exact point we left from,’ I said.
‘But the storm must have brought us back to just below it, and by following
the coast, we’ll reach Port Gräuben again.’128
125 Lartet: Édouard-A.-I.-H. (1801–71), French archaeologist, one of the
founders of palaeontology. In 1864 he discovered an ivory blade depicting a
mammoth in the Dordogne area.
126 considerations: this is the end of the main section of new text added in
the 1867 edition.
127 I. . . vista.: 1864 edition: ‘The professor shared my hesitation; he was
unable to find his way in this uniform vista. I realized this from the occasional
words that he uttered.’
‘If that is true, then there seems no point in carrying on with this exploration,
and it is best to return to the raft. But are you absolutely sure,
Axel?’
‘It’s difficult to be definite, Uncle, for all the rocks look so similar. But
I think I remember the promontory where Hans built the raft. We must be
near the little harbour. And it may even be here,’ I added, examining a
creek I thought I recognised.129
‘But then we would at least have come across our own traces, and I
see nothing. . . ’
‘But I do!’ I cried, springing towards an object glimmering on the
sand.
‘What is it?’
‘There!’
I showed my uncle the rust-covered knife I had picked up.
‘Well, well!’ he said. ‘So you brought this weapon with you?’
‘No, I didn’t. But did you?’
‘Not that I know; I have never had this thing on me.’
‘It’s most peculiar.’130
‘It is quite simple. The Icelanders often carry weapons like this, and
Hans must be its owner, and have dropped it. . . ’131
I shook my head. Hans had never had this knife on him.
‘Is it then the weapon of some warrior from before the Flood,’ I exclaimed,
‘of a living human being, of a contemporary of that gigantic
shepherd? But it can’t be! It isn’t from the Stone Age! Not even the
Bronze Age! This blade is made of steel. . . ’
My uncle stopped me dead on this track where a new diversion was
leading me, saying in his cold tone:
‘Calm down, Axel, and use your head. This knife is from the sixteenth
century: it is an authentic dagger, like the ones that nobles used to carry
on their belts for giving the coup de grâce. It is of Spanish manufacture.
It belongs neither to me, nor to you, nor to the hunter, nor even to the
human beings that may live in these bowels of the Earth!’132
‘Do you mean. . . ?’
‘Look, this blade has not become so notched by sinking into people’s
throats; and it is covered in a layer of rust, more than a day thick, more
than a year, more than a century even.’
128 ‘But. . . again.’: 1864 edition: ‘But certainly, by working our way along
the coast, we’ll get near Port Gräuben again.’
129 ‘It’s. . . recognized.: this paragraph contains three very minor changes
from the 1864 edition.
130 most peculiar
131 ‘It. . . dropped it.. . .’: this paragraph was ascribed to Axel rather than
Lidenbrock in the 1864 edition; and has also undergone four minor textual
changes.
132 nor even. . . the Earth!’: these words were added in the 1867 edition.
From this point onwards, the two editions are identical, with the exception of one
punctuation mark changed in the sixth paragraph following.
The professor, as usual, was getting excited as his imagination ran
away with him.
‘Axel, we are on the path of a great discovery. This blade has been lying
on the sand for one, two, three hundred years, and it is scored because
it was used on the rocks of this subterranean sea!’
‘But it couldn’t have just arrived on its own. It couldn’t have got
twisted by itself! Somebody must have got here before us!’
‘Yes, a man.’
‘Who?’
‘The man who used this knife to engrave his name. His aim was once
more to mark the route to the centre with his own hand. Let’s see if we
can find it!’
We excitedly worked our way along the high cliffs, looking for the
smallest clefts that might turn into a gallery.
We eventually came to a place where the shore got narrower. The sea
came nearly to the foot of the cliffs, leaving us at most two yards to pass.
Between two projecting rocks loomed the entrance of a dark tunnel.
There, on a slab of granite, two mysterious letters were carved, half
worn away: the twin initials of the bold and fantastic traveller:
‘A. S.!’ cried my uncle. ‘Arne Saknussemm once again!’
40
Since the beginning of our journey I had been astonished many times;
I would have thought that I was immune to surprise and blasé at any new
wonder. Nevertheless, at the sight of the two letters engraved on this
spot three centuries previously, I felt an amazement which came close to
stupor. Not only could the signature of the learned alchemist be read
clearly on the rock, but I had in my hand the stylus with which he had
traced it. Unless I was completely dishonest with myself, I could no longer
doubt the existence of the traveller or the truth of his journey.
While these thoughts whirled through my brain, Professor Lidenbrock
was indulging in a slightly excessive praise of Arne Saknussemm:
‘O marvellous genius! You did everything to open up to other mortals
the way through the crust of the Earth, and now your comrades can follow
the traces your feet left in these dark underpasses three hundred
years ago! You intended these marvels to be contemplated by eyes other
than your own! Your name, engraved on the successive stages of the
route, leads the traveller bold enough to follow you straight to his goal,
and it will be found yet again at the very centre of our planet, once more
carved by your own hand! Well, I too intend to sign my name on this, the
last of the granite pages. But henceforth let this cape, first seen by you
on this sea first discovered by you, be known as Cape Saknussemm!’
This, or something like it, was what I heard, and I felt won over myself
by the enthusiasm conveyed in such words. An inner fire rekindled in
my breast. I forgot everything, even the dangers of the downward journey
and the perils of the return. What another had done I wished to do
too, and nothing that was human seemed impossible to me.
‘Forward, forward!’
I was already making my headlong way towards the dark gallery,
when I was stopped: the professor, the one who normally got carried
away, was recommending calm and patience.
‘Let’s first go and find Hans, and then bring the raft over here.’
I obeyed, not with any great pleasure; and slipped back between the
rocks on shore.
‘Have you thought, Uncle?’ I said as we walked. ‘We’ve been very
lucky so far, haven’t we?’
‘Oh, do you think so?’
‘Yes, even the storm helped put us on the right track again. Thank
God it happened! It brought us back to this coast—which wouldn’t have
happened if we’d had fine weather. Imagine for a moment that our prow
(in so far as a raft can be said to have a prow) had touched the southern
coastline of the Lidenbrock Sea, what would have become of us? We
wouldn’t have seen Saknussemm’s name, and we would now be washed
up on a shore that offered no way out!’
‘Yes, Axel, there is something providential in the fact that, sailing
southwards, we should have come north and returned to Cape Saknussemm.
Indeed it seems to me more than astonishing, and there is
something here that I can’t begin to explain.’
‘Well it doesn’t really matter. What counts is to make use of the facts,
not explain them!’
‘No doubt, my boy, but. . . ’
‘But now we are about to head north again, passing under the countries
of Northern Europe, under Sweden, even under Siberia for all I
know! We’re not going to plunge under the deserts of Africa or the breakers
of the ocean. That’s all I need to know!’
‘Yes, you are right. Everything is for the best, since we are going to
leave this horizontal sea which was taking us nowhere. Now we shall go
down, then further down, and then down again! Do you realise that we
have less than 3,900 miles left to cover?’
‘Bah, hardly worth mentioning! Off we go, come on!’
This insane conversation was still continuing as we joined up again
with the hunter. Everything was ready for leaving immediately. All the
packages were on board the raft. We embarked, hoisted the sail, and
Hans steered us along the coast towards Cape Saknussemm.
The wind direction was not very favourable for a kind of vessel unable
to tack against it. As a result, quite often we had to use the iron-tipped
staves to move forward. The rocks, lurking under the surface, often
forced us into long detours. Finally, after three hours’ navigation, at about
6 p.m., we reached a suitable spot for landing.
I sprang ashore, followed by my uncle and the Icelander. The crossing
had not calmed me down. I even suggested ‘burning our boats’ so as to
cut off all possibility of retreat. But my uncle disagreed. I found him singularly
half-hearted.
‘At least let’s set off without wasting a moment.’
‘Yes, my boy, but first we should have a look at this new gallery, to
decide whether we need to get the ladders ready.’
My uncle switched on his Ruhmkorff lamp. The raft, moored on the
shore, was left to its own devices. The mouth of the gallery was less than
twenty yards away, and our little expedition, with myself as leader,
headed for it without delay.
The opening, more or less round, was about five feet in diameter; the
dark tunnel was cut in the living rock, and had been carefully bored by
the eruptive substance that had passed through it; its floor was at the
same level as the ground, so that you could enter it without problem.
We were following an almost horizontal path when, after only about
twenty feet, our way forward was blocked by an enormous obstruction.
‘Blasted rock!’ I cried, seeing myself abruptly frustrated by an insuperable
obstacle.
In vain did we search to left and right, above and below: there was no
passage, no alternative path. I felt bitterly disappointed, and could not
accept that the barrier existed. I stooped down, and looked under the
massive block. Not even a crack. On top of it. The same granite barrier.
Hans shone the light from the lamp on every part of the wall-covering;
but it was perfectly continuous everywhere. Any hope of getting through
had to be given up.
I sat on the bare ground. My uncle was pacing up and down with great
strides.
‘But what about Saknussemm?’ I cried.
‘Yes, was he stopped by a stone door?’
‘No! This piece of rock must be there because of some earthquake or
other, or one of those magnetic phenomena that shake the Earth’s crust.
The passage must have been suddenly closed off. A good many years
passed between Saknussemm’s return and the fall of the rock. Isn’t it obvious
that this gallery was formerly the route the lava took, and that the
eruption flowed freely along it? Look, there are recent cracks running
along this granite ceiling. The roof is made of pieces swept along, of
enormous boulders, as if the hand of some giant had laboured to build it.
But one day, the vertical pressure became too strong, and this block, like
the keystone of a vault, fell to the ground and blocked off the whole passage.
This is a chance obstacle that Saknussemm didn’t meet, and if we
can’t beat it, we don’t deserve to get to the centre of the world!’
That was the way I spoke. The professor’s entire soul had passed into
me. The spirit of discovery was arousing me. I forgot about the past, I
didn’t care about the future. I had submerged myself in the bosom of that
spheroid, and nothing existed for me on its surface: not the towns or the
countryside, not Hamburg or Königstrasse, not even my poor Gräuben,
who must have thought that I was lost for ever in the bowels of the Earth!
‘Come on,’ said my uncle, ‘using the pickaxes and ice-picks, let’s force
our route, let’s knock down these walls!’
‘It’s too hard for the pickaxes.’
‘An ice-pick then.’
‘It’s too deep for an ice-pick.’
‘But. . . ’
‘Well then, the powder, an explosion! Let’s mine the obstacle and blow
it up!’
‘Blow it up?’
‘Yes, it’s only a bit of rock to break up!’
‘Hans, to work!’ shouted my uncle.
The Icelander went back to the raft, and soon returned with one of the
pickaxes, which he used to hollow out a cavity for the explosive. It was
not an easy task. He had to make a hole big enough to hold fifty pounds
of guncotton, whose explosive force is four times as great as gunpowder’s.
I was in an extreme state of excitement. While Hans worked, I devotedly
helped my uncle to prepare a long fuse made of damp gunpowder
wrapped in a canvas tube.
‘We’ll get through!’
‘We’ll get through,’ repeated my uncle.
At midnight, our work as miners was complete; the guncotton charge
was crammed into the hole in the rock, and the fuse unwound through
the gallery to the outside.
A spark was now enough to set off this imposing device.
‘Till tomorrow then,’ said the professor.
I had to resign myself to waiting for six long hours!
41
The following day, Thursday, 27 August, was an important one in our
underground journey. Every time that I think about it now, terror makes
my heart beat faster. From that moment on, our reason, our judgement,
our ingenuity were to have no influence at all on events: we were to become
the mere playthings of the Earth.
We were up by six. The time had come to use explosives to force a
way through the granite crust.
I requested the honour of lighting the fuse. Afterwards I would rejoin
my companions on the raft, which had not yet been unloaded; then we
would head out for the open sea, so as to reduce the danger from the explosion,
which could easily affect an area well beyond the outcrop. According
to our calculations, the fuse would burn for ten minutes before
setting off the powder chamber. So I had plenty of time to get back to the
raft. But it was not without a certain trepidation that I got ready to play
my part.
After a hurried breakfast, my uncle and the hunter went on board the
raft while I remained on shore. I was equipped with a lighted lantern for
setting off the fuse.
‘It’s time to go, Axel,’ said my uncle, ‘but do make sure you come
straight back afterwards.’
‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to hang around.’
I made straight for the mouth. I opened the lantern and picked up the
end of the fuse. The professor had his chronometer in his hand.
‘Ready?’ he shouted.
‘Ready.’
‘Well fire away, my lad!’
I pushed the fuse quickly into the flame and it spluttered into life as I
sprinted back to the shore.
‘Get on,’ said my uncle, ‘and we’ll head out.’
With a forceful shove, Hans pushed us off. The raft moved forty yards
out. It was a tense moment. The professor was watching the hand of the
chronometer.
‘Five more minutes. . . Four. . . Three. . . ’
My heart beat every half-second.
‘Two. . . One. . . Take that, O granite mountains!’
What happened next? I don’t think I actually heard the noise of the
explosion. But the shapes of the rocks suddenly changed before my eyes:
they swung away like curtains. I glimpsed an unfathomable void hollowed
out from the very shore. The sea, seized with dizziness, had become
nothing but one immense wave—on whose back the raft rose straight up.
The three of us were thrown down. Within a second, light had given
way to the most utter darkness. Then I felt the solid support disappearing,
not beneath my feet but under the raft itself. I thought for a moment
that it was sinking, but soon realised that it couldn’t be. I tried to speak
to my uncle; but the bellowing of the waters stopped him from hearing
me.
Despite the darkness, the noise, the surprise, and the excitement, I
soon understood what had happened.
On the other side of the blown-up outcrop was an abyss. The explosion
had set off a sort of earthquake in the already shattered ground, a
chasm had opened up, and the sea, transformed into a great river, had
carried us down into it.
I thought we were lost.
One hour, two hours—how could I tell?—went by in this way. We
linked arms, we held each other’s hands so as not to be thrown off the
raft. It jolted with great violence whenever it touched the side. Such collisions
were infrequent, however, and hence I deduced that the gallery was
getting considerably larger. There could be no doubt that this was Saknussemm’s
route; but instead of following it on our own, our carelessness
had brought down an entire sea with us.
It will be understood that these ideas crossed my mind in indistinct
and murky form. Any association of ideas was difficult during this dizzy
descent, more like free-fall. To tell from the air whipping past my face,
the speed must have been greater than the fastest trains. Lighting a torch
would have been impossible in such conditions, and our last electrical apparatus
had been broken at the time of the explosion.
I was therefore quite surprised suddenly to see a light beside me.
Hans’s calm face appeared. The adroit hunter had managed to light the
lantern and although the flame flickered and almost went out, it threw
some rays into the awful blackness.
As I thought, the gallery was a wide one, for the light was not strong
enough to reveal both walls at the same time. The slope of the water
bearing us on was greater than that of the most insurmountable rapids in
America. Its surface was as if made up of sheafs of liquid arrows let loose
with total power: I cannot describe what I felt with any more precise
comparison. When the raft got caught in eddies, it was swept on while
turning slowly round. When it went near the walls of the gallery, I shone
the lantern on them, and got some idea of our speed from seeing the projections
of the rocks as continuous lines, so that we were hemmed in by a
network of moving streaks. I estimated our speed to be as much as fiftyfive
miles an hour.
My uncle and I looked at each other with wild eyes, leaning back on
the stump of the mast, which had broken in half during the catastrophe.
We faced away from the air so as to avoid being suffocated by the speed
of a motion that no human power could influence.
But the hours went by. The basic situation remained the same, even if
an incident arose to complicate it. While trying to put our cargo in some
kind of order, I discovered that most of the possessions on board had disappeared
when the sea had attacked us so violently at the time of the explosion.
I wished to know the exact position of our resources, so began a
search while holding up the lantern. Of our instruments only the compass
and chronometer remained. The ladders and ropes consisted of a mere
end of a cable coiled around the stump of the mast. Not a single pickaxe,
not an ice-pick, not a hammer and, worse still, food for only one more
day!
I searched amongst the cracks in the raft, in the smallest gaps between
the beams and the joints. Nothing! Our provisions amounted to one
piece of dried meat and a few dried biscuits.
I looked at them blankly, not wanting to understand. And yet what
was the danger I was worrying about? Even had the victuals been enough
for months or years, how could we get back out of the chasm that this inexorable
river was carrying us into? What was the point of worrying about
hunger-pains, when death was possible in so many other ways? Would we
not have plenty of time to die of inanition?
Nevertheless, by a mysterious trick of the mind, I forgot about the
immediate danger; for those of the future appeared to me in all their horror.
In any case, perhaps we could escape the river’s fury and get back to
the globe’s surface. How, I did not know. Where, didn’t make any difference.
A chance in a thousand is still a chance, while death through starvation
left us no possibility of hope, not the least prospect.
I thought of telling my uncle everything, of showing him how few
things we had left, of calculating exactly how much time we still had to
live. But I had the strength to remain silent. I wanted him to retain all his
self-control.
At this moment the lantern slowly dimmed, and then went out altogether.
The wick had burned through, and total blackness ensued. There
was no point in trying to reduce this impenetrable inkiness. We still had
one torch left, but it wouldn’t have stayed alight. So, like a child, I closed
my eyes to shut out all the darkness.
After quite a long time, our speed got much faster, as I realised from
the battering of air on my face. The angle of the water got worse. We no
longer seemed to be sliding, but falling. I had the clear sensation of a
near-vertical drop. My uncle’s and Hans’s hands, clamped on my arms,
held firmly on to me.
After an indeterminate period, something like a sudden shock happened;
the raft hadn’t collided with a hard object, but it had abruptly
stopped falling. A waterspout, a huge liquid column, crashed down over
the raft. I was suffocating. I was drowning. . .
However, this flood did not last long. After a few seconds, I found myself
gulping air down again. My uncle and Hans were gripping my arms as
if to break them; and the raft was still bearing the three of us on.
42
It must have been about 10 p.m. The first of my senses to start working
after the last attack was that of hearing. Almost straightaway I
heard—and this was a definite event—I heard silence falling in the gallery,
replacing the roaring which had been filling my ears for so many hours.
Words from my uncle finally reached me like a murmur:
‘We’re going up!’
‘What do you mean?’ I shouted.
‘We’re climbing! We’re actually climbing!’
I stretched out my arm; I touched the wall; my hand got blood on it.
We were rising very fast.
‘The torch, the torch!’
Hans finally managed to light it and the flame, burning upwards despite
our movement, spread enough light to reveal the scene.
‘Exactly as I thought. We are in a narrow shaft, only thirty feet wide.
When the water reached the bottom of the chasm, it started coming back
up, taking us with it.’
‘Where to?’
‘I do not know, but we will have to be ready for any eventuality. I estimate
our speed to be thirteen feet per second, 780 feet per minute, or
more than fourteen miles per hour. At this rate, one can go places!’
‘Yes, if nothing stops us and if the shaft has a way out. But if it’s
blocked, if the air gets more and more compressed by the pressure from
the water column, we are about to be crushed to death!’
‘Axel,’ replied the professor very calmly. ‘The situation is virtually
hopeless, but there exists a possibility of salvation, and it is that possibility
which I am examining. If we may die at any moment, we may also at
any moment be saved. Let us accordingly be ready to seize the slightest
opportunity.’
‘But what can be done?’
‘Maintain our strength by eating.’
At these words I looked at my uncle distraught. I had not been able to
confess before, but now it had to be done:
‘Eating?’
‘Yes, without delay.’
The professor said a few words in Danish. Hans shook his head.
‘What!’ shouted my uncle. ‘Has something happened to our food?’
‘Yes, this is what is left: one piece of dried meat for the three of us!’
My uncle looked at me as if trying to understand my words.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘do you still think we might be saved?’
My question received no answer. An hour passed. I began to feel a
violent hunger. My companions were suffering as well, but not one of us
dared touch the pathetic remains of the food.
We were still rising very fast. Sometimes the air stopped us breathing
properly, as it does with aeronauts who ascend too quickly. But while
aeronauts are subject to cold proportional to their height amongst the
layers of the atmosphere, we were undergoing the diametrically opposite
effect. The temperature was rising worryingly and had easily reached
40°C.
What did such a change mean? Until now Lidenbrock and Davy’s theory
had been confirmed by the evidence; until now special conditions of
refracting rocks, of electricity, or of magnetism had modified the general
laws of nature, making the heat stay moderate. Given that the theory of a
central fire remained in my view the only correct one, the only justifiable
one, were we going to return to an environment where this phenomenon
held true, where the heat completely melted the rocks? I was afraid so,
and said to the professor:
‘If we aren’t drowned or torn to pieces, if we don’t starve to death,
there’s still the chance we might be burned alive.’
He merely shrugged his shoulders and returned to his thoughts.
An hour passed without anything happening apart from a slight increase
in the temperature. At last my uncle said something.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘we must decide.’
‘Decide?’
‘Yes. We must keep up our strength. If we try to extend our lives for a
few more hours by eking out what is left of the food, then we will remain
weak until the end.’
‘Yes, till the end, which isn’t far off.’
‘Well then! Should a chance of salvation occur, should action become
necessary, where will we find the strength to act if we let ourselves be
weakened by inanition?’
‘But, Uncle, when we’ve eaten this piece of meat, what will we have
left?’
‘Nothing, Axel, nothing. But will devouring it with your eyes give you
any more nourishment? Your arguments are those of a man with no will,
a being without energy!’
‘Then you’ve still not given up?’ I shouted irritably.
‘No!’ he replied firmly.
‘What! You still think we have a chance of being saved?’
‘Yes, most certainly! And while his heart still beats, while his flesh still
moves, I cannot accept that a being endowed with will-power can give in
to despair.’
What words! The man who pronounced them in such circumstances
was clearly of no ordinary mettle.
‘But what do you suggest?’
‘We eat every last scrap of food and get our strength back. All right,
so this meal will be our last. But at least, instead of being exhausted, we
will be men again.’
‘Well what are we waiting for!’
My uncle took the piece of meat and the few biscuits that had survived
the shipwreck, divided them into three equal parts, and handed them out.
This produced about a pound of food each. The professor ate hungrily,
with a sort of feverish abandon; myself without pleasure despite my hunger,
almost with disgust; Hans quietly, moderately, soundlessly chewing
small mouthfuls, savouring them with the calm of a man the problems of
the future cannot worry. By looking everywhere, he had found half a flask
of gin; he passed it over, and this beneficial liquid revived me slightly.
‘Förtrafflig!’ said Hans, drinking in turn.
‘Excellent!’ replied my uncle.
I had found some hope again. But we had just finished our last meal.
It was five in the morning.
Man is made in such a way that his health has a purely negative effect;
once his need to eat has been satisfied, he finds it difficult to imagine
the horrors of hunger; to understand them he has to experience
them. Consequently, after a long period without food, a few mouthfuls of
meat and biscuit overcame our previous gloom.
Afterwards, each of us was lost in his thoughts. What was Hans
dreaming about, this man from the extreme West, but ruled by the fatalistic
resignation of the East? For my part all my thoughts were memories,
bringing me back to that surface of the globe which I should never have
left. The house in Königstrasse, my poor Gräuben, Martha the maid,
passed before my eyes like visions; and in the sad rumblings coming
through the rocks, I thought I could hear the towns of this Earth.
As for my uncle, always the professional, he was holding up the torch
and carefully studying the nature of the formations; he was trying to discover
where we were from the successive strata. This calculation, or
rather estimation, could at best be highly approximate; but a scholar remains
a scholar, at least when he manages to retain his self-control—and
Professor Lidenbrock certainly possessed this last quality to an extraordinary
degree.
I heard him murmuring words from the science of geology; I understood
them and could not help being interested in this final piece of work.
‘Eruptive granite,’ he was saying. ‘We’re still in the Primitive Period;
but we’re climbing, we’re climbing! Who knows?’
Who knows? He had not given up hope. He touched the walls and a
few moments later continued:
‘Gneiss, mica-schists. Good! We will soon be in the Transition Period,
and then. . . ’
What did the professor mean? Could he measure the thickness of the
Earth’s crust above our heads? Did he have a single justification for his
calculation? No; he had no manometer and no estimation could take its
place.
Meanwhile the temperature was increasing tremendously and I could
feel myself bathing in a burning atmosphere. I could only compare it to
the heat given off by the furnaces of a foundry when the metal is being
poured out. By degrees Hans, my uncle, and I had taken off our jackets
and waistcoats; the least garment caused us discomfort, even pain.
‘Are we moving towards a fiery furnace?’ I called out at a moment
when the heat was getting much worse.
‘No,’ replied my uncle, ‘it is not possible! It is not possible!’
‘All the same,’ I said testing the wall, ‘it feels burning hot!’
As I said these words, my hand touched the surface of the water but I
had to draw it back quickly.
‘The water is boiling!’ I exclaimed.
This time the professor replied only with an angry gesture.
An invincible terror then took hold of my mind and would not let go. I
felt that a catastrophe was soon going to happen, one that the most daring
of imaginations could not conceive. An idea that was at first vague
and doubtful slowly became a certainty in my mind. I rejected it, but it
came obstinately back, again and again.
I did not dare put it into words. But a number of involuntary observations
convinced me. In the flickering light from the torch, I noticed convulsions
in the granite strata; a phenomenon was clearly going to happen
in which electricity had a role; but this terrible heat, the boiling water. . .
I decided to look at the compass.
It had gone mad!
43
Yes, mad! The needle was jumping from one pole to the other with
sharp jerks, working its way through every point of the compass, spinning
as if completely dizzy.
I knew that, according to the generally accepted theories, the Earth’s
mineral crust is never in a complete state of rest. The changes caused by
the decomposition of internal substances, the vibrations produced by the
larger sea currents, and the actions of the magnetic forces all tend to
shake it around constantly, although the creatures living on the surface
have no idea that it is moving. This phenomenon on its own, therefore,
would not specially have frightened me—or at least would not normally
have produced a terrible suspicion.
But further phenomena, sending clues unlike any others, could no
longer be ignored. Explosions were occurring with an increasing and
alarming intensity. I could only compare them with the sound of dozens of
carts being driven hard over cobblestones. Their thundering was continuous.
The compass, shaken madly around by the electrical phenomena, also
helped me make up my mind. The mineral crust was threatening to break
up, the granite masses to come together, the chasm to be plugged, the
void to be filled in—and we, poor molecules, were going to be crushed in
the harrowing embrace that resulted!
‘Uncle, Uncle! We’ve had it!’
‘What is this new panic?’ he answered surprisingly calmly. ‘What is the
matter with you?’
‘The matter? Look at the walls moving, this rock which is falling apart,
this scorching heat, this boiling water, this thickening steam, this crazy
needle: all signs of an impending earthquake!’
My uncle gently shook his head:
‘An earthquake?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think, my boy, that you are mistaken.’
‘What? Don’t you realise that these symptoms. . . ’
‘. . . of an earthquake? No, I am expecting something better than
that!’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m hoping for an eruption, Axel.’
‘An eruption! We can’t possibly be in the vent of an active volcano,
can we?’
‘I think we are,’ said the professor, smiling. ‘It is the best thing that
could have happened to us.’
The best thing? Had my uncle gone quite mad? What did his words
mean? How could he be so calm and happy?
‘What?’ I cried. ‘We’re in the middle of an eruption! Fate has placed us
in the path of red-hot lava, fiery rocks, boiling water, of all the substances
that are thrown up in eruptions! We are to be expelled, thrown out, rejected,
regurgitated, spat out into the air, in a whirlwind of flame, along
with huge amounts of rock and showers of ash and scoria! And that’s the
best thing that could happen to us!’
‘Yes,’ said the professor, looking at me over the top of his glasses.
‘For it is the only chance we have of getting back to the surface of the
Earth!’
I will skip the myriad ideas that intersected in my brain in that single
moment. My uncle was right, absolutely right; and never had he seemed
more fearless or more self-assured than at this moment, when calmly
waiting, calculating the chances of an eruption.
Meanwhile we had continued rising; the night went by without any
change; only the noise all around became louder and louder. I was almost
suffocating, I thought my last hour had come—and yet, imagination being
such a strange thing, I gave in to truly childish thoughts. But I couldn’t
help my ideas: I had no control over them!
It was clear that we were being pushed upwards by the force of an
eruption; under the raft there was turbulent, boiling water, and under
that a whole sticky mass of lava, a huge conglomeration of rocks. When
they got to the top of the crater, they would be thrown out in all directions.
We were in the vent of a volcano. Of that there could be no doubt.
But this time, instead of the extinct Snaefells, we were dealing with a
volcano in full activity. I was wondering therefore what mountain it could
possibly be, and which part of the world we were going to be thrown out
on to.
Some northern region, of course. Before it had gone insane, the compass
had been consistently pointing in that direction. Since leaving Cape
Saknussemm, we had been swept due north for hundreds and hundreds
of miles. Were we underneath Iceland once more? Were we to be ejected
from the crater of Mount Hekla133 or one of the seven other volcanoes on
the island? Otherwise, within a radius of 1,200 miles and at that latitude,
I could only think of the little-known volcanoes on the north-west coast of
America. To the east, there was only one at less than 80°N: Esk, in Jan
Mayen, not far from Spitzbergen.134 On the other hand, there was no
general lack of craters, and they all had plenty of room to spew out a
whole army. I tried to guess which one would serve as our exit.
Towards morning our ascent became still faster. The heat was increasing
rather than decreasing as we approached the surface of the globe:
this had to be a local effect, due to the influence of some volcano. No
longer could there be any doubt at all as to our means of transport. An
enormous force, a pressure of several hundred atmospheres produced by
the steam built up in the Earth’s breast, was irresistibly thrusting up at
us. But how many terrible dangers would it expose us to?
Soon wild glowing lights shone on the walls of the vertical chimney,
which was now widening out. On either side I could see deep corridors,
like immense tunnels, sending forth thick steam and smoke, while
tongues of flame crackled and licked at the walls.
‘Look, Uncle!’
‘Yes, sulphur flames. Nothing could be more normal during an eruption.’
‘But what if they come and attack us?’
‘They won’t.’
‘And what if we suffocate?’
‘We shan’t. The shaft is getting wider. If necessary we can get off the
raft and take shelter in some fissure.’
‘But the water, the water! Rising all the time!’
133 Mount Hekla: near Mýrdals-joküll, S. Iceland; famous throughout the
Middle Ages as a gateway to Hell. Major eruption in 1104.
134 Esk, in Jan Mayen, not far from Spitzbergen: in fact several hundred
miles away. The volcano on this island, which is extinct, does not seem to be
called Esk (whereas there is an Esk in Alaska).
‘There is no water left, Axel, just a viscous lava-stream which is lifting
us up on its way to the mouth of the crater.’
It was true that the water had disappeared, replaced by relatively
dense eruptive matter, which was boiling, however. The temperature was
becoming unbearable. A thermometer would have indicated more than
70°. I was bathed in sweat. But for the speed of the climb, we would certainly
have been suffocated.
The professor did not pursue his suggestion of leaving the raft, which
was perhaps just as well. Those few beams, roughly joined together, gave
us a solid base, which we wouldn’t have had anywhere else.
Towards eight in the morning a new incident happened for the first
time. The upward movement stopped all of a sudden, with the raft remaining
absolutely motionless.
‘What’s happening?’ I asked, shaken by this abrupt halt as if the raft
had hit something.
‘An intermission.’
‘Is the eruption slowing down?’
‘I sincerely hope not.’
I stood up. I tried to look around. Perhaps the raft had caught against
a sticking-out rock and was momentarily holding back the flow of the
eruptive material. If so, it ought to be freed at once.
But this wasn’t the case. The column of ashes, scoria, rocks, and debris
had itself stopped rising.
‘Is the eruption stopping?’
‘Ah!’ said my uncle through clenched teeth. ‘So that’s what you are
worrying about, my boy. But don’t fret; this can only be a temporary lull;
it has already lasted five minutes, and in a short while we shall be heading
towards the mouth of the crater once again.’
While speaking, the professor consulted his chronometer; and he was
soon proved right in this prediction too. The raft was once more caught up
in a rapid, disorderly flux, which lasted for about two minutes—then
stopped again.
‘Good,’ said my uncle, noting the time. ‘It will re-start in ten minutes.’
‘Ten minutes?’
‘Yes. We are dealing with a volcano whose eruption is periodic. It lets
us breathe when it does.’
He was absolutely correct. At the allotted time we were shot upwards
again with great speed: we had to cling on to the beams or we would
have been thrown off the raft. Then the thrust stopped once more.
Since that time, I have often thought about this remarkable phenomenon,
but without being able to find a satisfactory explanation for it.
Nevertheless, it seems clear to me that we can’t have been in the principal
chimney of the volcano, but rather a side-passage, where there was
some sort of counter-effect.
How many times the process took place, I cannot say. All I can be certain
of is that, each time the movement was repeated, we were hurled
forward with increasing force, as if lifted by an actual projectile. During
the pauses, we suffocated; when we were moving, the burning air took
my breath away. For a moment I thought of the ecstasy of suddenly finding
myself in the polar regions, at a temperature of –30°. In my overstimulated
imagination I wandered over the snowy plains of the Arctic icecap,
and longed for the moment when I could roll on the frozen carpet of
the Pole! But gradually my head, confused by the repeated shocks, gave
up working altogether.
If it had not been for Hans’s arms, my skull would have been flung
against the granite wall on more than one occasion.
As a consequence I have no clear memory of what happened during
the next few hours. I have a confused memory of endless blasts, of Earth
movements, of a swirling motion which grabbed hold of the raft. Our vessel
rose and fell on the waves of lava, amidst a rain of ashes. It was besieged
by roaring flames. An eager gale, as if coming from some immense
ventilator, added to the subterranean fires. One last time, Hans’s face appeared
to me in the light from the blaze. My last thought was the horrifying
tragedy of the criminal fastened to the mouth of a cannon, at the
moment that the shot goes off and sends his arms and legs flying into the
air.
44
When I opened my eyes again, I felt the strong hand of the guide
clutching my belt. With the other he was holding on to my uncle. I was
not seriously injured, merely bruised and aching all over. I saw that I was
lying on the slope of a mountain, only a few feet away from a precipice
which I would have fallen into with the slightest movement. Hans had
clearly saved me from certain death while I was rolling down the flanks of
the crater.
‘Where are we?’ asked my uncle, who looked highly annoyed to be
back on Earth again.
The guide shrugged his shoulders as if to show he didn’t know.
‘In Iceland,’ I ventured.
‘Nej,’ answered Hans.
‘What does he mean, “no”?’ cried the professor.
‘He must be wrong,’ I said, getting up.
After the many surprises of the journey, another was waiting for us. I
expected to see a cone covered with eternal snows, in the midst of the
arid deserts of the north, under the pale rays of the polar heavens, beyond
the furthest latitudes. But, contrary to what I had expected, my uncle,
the Icelander, and I were stretched out halfway up a mountain baked
by the heat of the sun, which was scorching us with its rays.
I wasn’t prepared to believe my eyes; but the indisputable burning my
body was receiving brooked no reply. We had come out of the crater halfnaked,
and the radiant orb, of which we had asked nothing for two
months, was now bestowing on us floods of heat and light, was pouring
on to us waves of a splendid irradiation.
When my eyes had adjusted to this unaccustomed dazzle, I used them
to make up for the failure of my imagination. At the very least, I was determined
to be in Spitzbergen—I was not in the mood for giving up easily.
The professor found his voice first: ‘It certainly doesn’t look very much
like Iceland.’
‘Jan Mayen?’ I tried.
‘Hardly, my boy. This is not a northern volcano with granite peaks and
a crown of snow.’
‘And yet. . . ’
‘Just look, Axel, look!’
Above our heads, not more than five hundred feet away, was the crater
of the volcano. Every quarter of an hour there came flying from it a
tall column of flames mixed with pumice-stone, ashes, and lava, together
with a deafening explosion. I felt the whole mountain heave every time it
breathed, sending out, like a whale, fire and air through its enormous
blowholes. Below, on a steep slope, layers of eruptive material could be
seen stretching seven or eight hundred feet down, meaning that the volcano
couldn’t be more than two thousand feet high. Its base was hidden
by a real basket of green trees, amongst which I distinguished olive and
fig trees, plus vines laden with purple grapes.
It didn’t look much like the Arctic, I had to admit.
When one’s gaze passed beyond the ring of greenery, it soon went
astray on the waters of an exquisite sea or lake, which made this enchanted
land an island only a few miles wide. On the eastern side appeared
a little port, with a few houses grouped round it and boats of an
unusual type rocking on the gentle swell of the turquoise ripples. Beyond,
clusters of small islets rose from the liquid plain, in such great numbers
as to resemble a huge antheap. In the west, rounded shores appeared on
the distant horizon; on some lay blue mountains of harmonious contours,
on others, still further away, appeared measureless cones, above whose
high summits floated plumes of smoke. To the north, a broad expanse of
water sparkled in the sun’s rays, revealing here and there the top of a
mast or a convex sail swelling in the wind.
That such a panorama was totally unexpected made it infinitely more
wonderful and beautiful.
‘Where can we be, oh where?’ I murmured.
Hans shut his eyes in indifference, and my uncle stared uncomprehendingly.
‘Whatever this mountain is,’ he said at last, ‘it is rather hot. The explosions
are still continuing, and it would really not be worth coming out
of an eruption, only to have one’s head crushed by a falling rock. So let’s
go down and discover what we’re up against. Besides, I am dying of hunger
and thirst.’
The professor was certainly not a contemplative. For my part, I could
have stayed hours longer on that spot, forgetting all needs and fatigues—
but was obliged to follow my companions down.
The slopes of the volcano proved very steep; we slipped into veritable
quicksands of ashes, avoiding the lava-streams winding down the sides
like fiery serpents. While we worked our way down, I talked a great deal,
for my imagination was too full not to go off in words.
‘We’re in Asia, on the coast of India, in the Malay Archipelago, or in
the middle of the South Seas! We have gone right across the Earth, and
come out at the antipodes!’
‘And the compass?’ asked my uncle.
‘Oh, the compass,’ I said with embarrassment. ‘If we listened to what
it said, we would think we’d headed north all the time.’
‘So it lied?’
‘Lied? Not exactly.’
‘Then this is the North Pole?’
‘No, not actually the Pole, but. . . ’
There was something that was indeed difficult to explain. I no longer
knew what to think.
Meanwhile we were getting near the greenery which had looked so inviting.
I was tormented by thirst and hunger. Fortunately, after two
hours’ march, a beautiful countryside came into view, completely covered
with olive trees, pomegranates, and vines which seemed to belong to no
one in particular. Besides, in our beggarly state, we were not inclined to
be choosers. What ecstasy we felt pressing these delicious fruits to our
lips, and biting whole clusters off the purple vines! Not far off, amongst
the grass under the delicious shade of the trees, I found a spring of fresh
water. It was bliss to plunge our hands and faces into it.
While we were still enjoying a well-earned rest, a boy appeared between
two clumps of olives.
‘So!’ I cried. ‘An inhabitant of this blessed country!’
He was a poor little creature, very badly clothed, rather sickly, and
apparently much alarmed by our appearance. In-deed, half-naked as we
were, with our untidy beards, we must certainly have presented a bizarre
spectacle: unless this was a country of robbers, we were likely to frighten
the natives.
Just as the urchin was about to run away, Hans darted after him and
brought him back, ignoring the kicks and screams.
My uncle began by calming him down as well as he could, and then
enquired in good German:
‘What is the name of this mountain, my little friend?’
The child did not answer.
‘Good,’ said my uncle. ‘We are not in Germany.’
He then asked the same question in English.
Still no answer. I followed the proceedings with great interest.
‘Is he dumb?’ cried the professor, who—very proud of his multilingualism—
then tried the same question in French.
Continuing silence.
‘Let’s try Italian then. Dove noi siamo?’
‘Yes, where are we?’ I repeated, slightly impatiently.
The boy said nothing.
‘Humph! Will you answer!’ cried my uncle, who was getting annoyed
and shaking the urchin by the ears. ‘Come si noma questa isola?’
‘Stromboli,’135 answered the little shepherd-boy, escaping from Hans’s
grasp and running through the olive trees towards the plain.
We weren’t bothered about him! Stromboli! What an effect this unforeseen
name produced on my mind! We were in the middle of the Mediterranean,
surrounded by that Aeolian Archipelago136 of mythological
memory, in that ancient Strongyle where Aeolus held the winds and tempests
on a chain! And those rounded blue hills to the east were the mountains
of Calabria! And that volcano on the southern horizon was Etna, terrible
Etna itself!
‘Stromboli, Stromboli!’ I repeated.
My uncle accompanied me with words and gestures. We were like a
choir singing in unison.
O what a journey, what an amazing journey! We had gone in by one
volcano and out by another, and this other was nearly three thousand
miles from Snaefells, from the barren shores of Iceland and the outermost
limits of the world! The hazards of our expedition had brought us to the
heart of the most fortunate country on the globe! We had exchanged the
lands of eternal snows for those of infinite greenery; and the greyish fogs
of the freezing wastes above our heads had become the azure skies of
Sicily!
After a delightful meal of fruit and cool water, we set off again towards
the port of Stromboli. It did not seem advisable to say how we had arrived
on the island; with their superstitious mentality, the Italians would
certainly have thought us devils thrown up by the fires of Hell. We accordingly
resigned ourselves to being mere victims of shipwreck. It was less
glamorous, but safer.
On the way I heard my uncle murmuring:
‘But what about the compass: it did point north! What can the reason
be?’
‘Really,’ I said, with an air of great disdain. ‘It’s much simpler not to
have to explain it!’
‘What! A professor at the Johanneum would be disgraced if unable to
discover the reason for a phenomenon of the physical world!’
Thus speaking, my uncle, half-naked, with his leather purse around
his waist and settling his glasses on his nose, became once more the terrible
professor of mineralogy.
An hour after leaving the olive grove we arrived at the port of San
Vincenzo, where Hans asked for his thirteenth week’s wages. These were
duly given him, together with heartfelt handshakes.
135 Stromboli: the ‘Strombolian’ type of eruption involves moderate, intermittent
bursts of expanding gases.
136 Aeolian Archipelago: also known as the Eolie or Lipari Islands, off NE Sicily;
Strongyle: (‘cone’) Latin name for Stromboli; Aeolus: king of storms and
winds, inventor of sails.
At that moment, even if he did not share our very natural feelings, he
at least gave in to a most unusual display of emotion.
He touched our hands lightly with the tips of his fingers, and he
smiled.
45
We have now come to the end of a tale which many people, however
determined to be surprised at nothing, will refuse to believe. But I am
armed in advance against human scepticism.
The Stromboli fishermen received us with the kindness due to those
who have undergone shipwreck. They provided food and clothing. On 31
August, after a wait of forty-eight hours, we were conveyed by a little
speronara137 to Messina, where a few days’ rest helped us recover from
our fatigue.
On Friday, 4 September, we boarded the Volturne, one of the French
Imperial Postal Packet-Boats,138 and landed three days later in Marseilles,
our minds submerged in only one problem, that of the wretched compass.
This inexplicable fact continued to seriously bother me. On the evening of
9 September we arrived in Hamburg.
I will not attempt to describe Martha’s amazement and Gräuben’s joy
at our return.
‘Now that you’re a hero, Axel,’ said my dear fiancée, ‘you will never
need to leave me again.’
I looked at her. She was weeping and smiling at the same time.
I leave to the imagination whether Professor Lidenbrock’s homecoming
produced a sensation in Hamburg. Thanks to Martha’s indiscretions,
the news of his departure for the centre of the Earth had spread through
the whole world. People had refused to believe it, and when he returned,
they still refused.
However, the presence of Hans and a few items of news from Iceland
slowly modified public opinion.
Eventually my uncle became a great man, and myself the nephew of a
great man, already something to be. Hamburg gave a civic banquet in our
honour. There was a public meeting held at the Johanneum, where the
professor told the story of our expedition, omitting only the episodes involving
the compass. The same day, he deposited Saknussemm’s document
in the municipal archives, and expressed his deep regret that circumstances
stronger than his will had not allowed him to follow the footsteps
of the Icelandic explorer down to the very centre of the Earth. He
was modest in his glory, and it did his reputation a great deal of good.
So many honours made people jealous, of course. The professor received
his share of envy, and since his theories, based on facts that were
137 speronara: a small rowing-boat.
138 Volturne: French for Volturno, a river in S. Central Italy; site of a victory
by Garibaldi in 1860; ‘VoltuRNE’ is also an anagram of ‘Vern’; French Imperial
Postal Packet-Boats: one of the rare allusions in Verne’s works to contemporary
political events: Napoleon III had been Emperor since 1852.
certain, contradicted the scientific doctrines of fire in the centre, he engaged
in some remarkable debates with scientists of every country, both
in writing and in the flesh.
As for myself, I personally cannot accept the theory of the cooling of
the Earth. Despite what I have seen, I believe, and always will, in heat at
the centre. But I admit that circumstances which are still not properly explained
can sometimes modify this law under the effect of certain natural
phenomena.
At a moment when these questions were still being hotly discussed,
my uncle experienced a real sadness. In spite of his entreaties, Hans decided
to leave Hamburg; the man to whom we owed everything would not
let us repay our debt. He was suffering from homesickness for Iceland.
‘Farväl,’ he said one day, and with this simple goodbye, he left for
Reykjavik, where he arrived safely.
We were singularly attached to the excellent eider-hunter; although
absent, he will never be forgotten by those whose lives he saved, and I
will certainly see him one last time before I die.
As a conclusion, I should perhaps say that this Journey to the Centre
of the Earth created a sensation in the whole world. It was translated and
published in every language: the most important newspapers competed
for the main episodes, which were reviewed, discussed, attacked, and defended
with equal fervour in the camps of both believers and unbelievers.
Un-usually, my uncle enjoyed during his lifetime all the fame he had won,
and everyone, up to and including Mr Barnum himself, offered to ‘exhibit’
him in the entire United States, at an exceptional price.
But a worry, which might almost be called a torment, slipped into this
fame. A single fact remained unfathomable: that of the compass. Now for
a scientist an unexplained fact is mental torture. But Heaven intended my
uncle to be completely happy.
One day, while arranging a collection of minerals in his study, I noticed
the much-discussed compass, and began to examine it again.
It had been in its corner for six months, without suspecting the fuss it
was causing.
Suddenly I was flabbergasted! I shouted out. The professor came running.
‘What is it?’
‘The compass. . . ’
‘We-ell?’
‘The needle points south not north!’
‘What are you trying to say?’
‘See, the poles are reversed!’
‘Reversed?’
My uncle took a look, did a quick comparison, and then made the
whole house shake with a superb aerial leap.
What light shone in his mind and in mine!
‘So,’ he cried when he could speak again, ‘when we arrived at Cape
Saknussemm, the needle of this accursed compass showed south instead
of north?’
‘Obviously.’
‘Then our mistake is explained. But what could have caused this reversal
of the poles?’
‘Nothing simpler.’
‘Explain yourself clearly, my boy.’
‘During the storm on the Lidenbrock Sea, the fireball magnetised the
iron on the raft and so quite simply disorientated our compass!’
‘Oh!’ exclaimed the professor, then burst out laughing. ‘So it was all a
trick done by electricity?’
From that day onwards, my uncle was the happiest of scientists. I was
the happiest of men, for my pretty Virland girl, giving up her position as
ward, took on responsibilities in the house in Königstrasse as both wife
and niece. There is little need to add that her uncle was the illustrious
Professor Otto Lidenbrock, a corresponding member of every scientific,
geographical, and mineralogical society in the five continents.
The End
Appendix
Verne as seen by the Critics
1. ‘We have the good fortune to have to draw to our readers’ attention
a new and charming book by M. Jules Verne. The [sic] Journey to the
Centre of the Earth, like Five Weeks in a Ballon and The British at the
North Pole [original title of the first half of Captain Hatteras], combines
the most solid scientific qualities with the amusement and interest of a
drama and a tale. Young people and people of the world [‘les personnes
du monde’] will not find a more agreeable and excellent guide than M.
Verne to initiate them to geological discoveries and to the history, mysterious
and so little known, of the Earth’s massif on which we live.’ (Stahl
[pseudonym of Hetzel]: publicity announcement in the Magasin
d’éducation et de récréation).
2. ‘This fictional journey has all the colours and movement of reality;
and if the author had not taken the care to tell us himself, the illusion
would be almost too complete. M. Jules Verne is a true scientist, a delightful
story-teller and a writer of the greatest merit’ (Gustave Landol,
1864).
3. ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth is phantasmagoric; but the
reader is so caught up in Axel’s anguish. . . that the improbability of the
events takes on secondary importance.. . . Interior and exterior adventures
are so closely interwoven that it is not until Axel has completed his
final test that we emerge from the fiction and begin to wonder where the
truth of the matter was. . . One feels that the book was Verne’s escape.
. . into the world of dream, one that he was never to undertake
again on this scale’ (Jean Jules-Verne, 1973, trans. by Roger Greaves).
4. ‘Lidenbrock conveys a new vision of space. What distinguishes two
points now is how close or how far they are from the centre.. . . The corresponding
map is a half-line, where points situated at the same distance
are indistinguishable. This accounts for Lidenbrock’s behaviour, ‘the man
of the perpendiculars’, whose only wish is to ‘slide down the Earth’s radius’,
and for whom the worst torture is to have to navigate on that interior
sea that we find so magnificent’ (Dominique Lacaze, 1979).
5. ‘The particularity of the initiatory novel, when it is the work of a
great writer, is to be both realistic and symbolic. It is the adventure
novel, however, that best lends itself to this spiritual transformation, and
I have observed with astonishment that, while the great Romantic novels
have not been considered by the critics as initiatory works, those of Jules
Verne have. . . If Baudelaire is Poe’s brother, Verne is his half-brother’
(Léon Cellier, 1964).
6. ‘[Verne] recycles the literary ocean-depths: the Promethean challenge
of the terrestrial forces, the quest for the father. . . His scientists
and explorers are nature’s psychoanalysts. They unlock the ancient desires
of the sleeping elements. Electricity liberates the earthly powers.
And a scientific alchemy officiates at the perfect marriage between fire,
water, earth and air. The fantastic forms a bottomless pit. Verne gives
lessons in chasms.. . . More poetic than scientific, he leaves his dreams a
margin. His heroes don’t land on the moon or reach the centre of the
Earth. His conquerors of the impossible maintain that distance which allows
the mysteries to be seen but not touched. He doesn’t destroy our
myths’ (J. Cabau, 1974).
7. ‘The volcano participates doubly in Verne’s binary topology of
prominences and cavities: it is a hollow pyramid connecting the heavens
with the underground inferno; and it is a two-way sliproad onto the dual
carriageway of human traffic leading into and out of the Earth’s core. . .
The Vernian law of reciprocity requires that not only should man urgently
plumb the depths of the planet, but that the Earth’s core should equally
strain to escape from secrecy, burst through its fragile skin and so stand
revealed in the sight of men. . . The volcano is the entrance to an inverted
universe; and it preserves an imprint of that inversion, comprising
a portion of the subterranean world violently everted and solidified, the
abyss turned inside out by an explosion. Conversely, the outer world appears
to have slipped inwards. . . in the shape of a gigantic cavern,
equipped with its own Mediterranean and pseudo-firmament’ (Andrew
Martin, 1985).
8. ‘There are these sparks. Science and suspense.. . . Say Ruhmkorff
lamp, gutta percha, Snaefells or guncotton, and something happens. In
the nineteenth century, the scholar-travellers of the unknown left on a
quest for the Holy Grail’ (J.-F. Held).
9. ‘But if this detour, this journey belongs to the imaginary, there is
another, very real, trajectory: the thread of the tale. The novel becomes
itself through the journey. The two advance together. One can even argue
that the novel is the real aim: when he comes back, Axel publishes his
story. . . The book is both an imaginary Journey to the Centre of the
Earth and a real journey to the centre of the text’ (Daniel Compère,
1977).
Some of these quotations were first cited by Simone Vierne, Jules Verne
(Balland (Phares), 1986), to whom grateful acknowledgements are recorded
here.