by Jules Verne
“Absolutely nothing, a bit of fatigue, that’s all.”
“But you seem very cheerful this morning, Uncle.”
“Delighted, my boy, delighted! We’ve arrived!”
“At the goal of our expedition?”
“No, but at the end of that unending ocean. Now we’ll travel by land again, and really go down into the bowels of the globe.”
“Uncle, allow me to ask you a question.”
“Of course, Axel.”
“How do we return?”
“Return? Ah! You think about returning before we’ve arrived.”
“No, I only want to know how we’ll do it.”
“In the simplest way in the world. Once we’ve reached the center of the globe, we’ll either find a new route to go back to the surface, or we’ll just return the way we came like ordinary folks. I’d like to think that it won’t be closed off behind us.”
“But then we’ll have to repair the raft.”
“Of course.”
“As for food supplies, do we have enough left to accomplish all these great things?”
“Yes, certainly. Hans is a skillful fellow, and I’m sure that he’s saved a large part of our cargo. Let’s go and make sure, at any rate.”
We left this grotto which was open to every wind. I cherished a hope that was a fear as well; it seemed impossible to me that the terrible wreckage of the raft would not have destroyed everything on board. I was wrong. When I arrived on the shore, I found Hans in the midst of a multitude of items, all arranged in order. My uncle shook hands with him in an expression of deep gratitude. This man, with a superhuman devotion that perhaps had no equal, had worked while we were sleeping and had saved the most precious items at the risk of his life.
It’s not that we had not suffered appreciable losses; our firearms, for instance; but we could do without them. Our stock of powder had remained intact after having almost blown us up during the tempest.
“Well,” exclaimed the professor, “since we have no guns we won’t have to bother hunting.”
“All right; but the instruments?”
“Here’s the manometer, the most useful of them all, for which I’d have exchanged all the others! With this I can calculate the depth so as to know when we’ve reached the center. Without it we risk going beyond it and re-emerging at the antipodes!”
This cheerfulness was ferocious.
“But the compass?” I asked.
“Here it is, on this rock, in perfect condition, as well as the thermometers and the chronometer. Ah! The hunter is an invaluable man!”
There was no denying it. As far as instruments, nothing was missing. As for tools and devices, I saw ladders, ropes, picks, pickaxes, etc. lying strewn about in the sand.
Still there was the question of food supplies to investigate.
“And the food?” I said.
The boxes that contained them were lined up on the gravel, perfectly preserved; for the most part the sea had spared them, and what with biscuits, salted meat, gin and dried fish, we still had a four-month food supply.
“Four months!” exclaimed the professor. “We have time to go and return, and with what’s left I’ll give a grand dinner for all my colleagues at the Johanneum!”
I should have been used to my uncle’s temperament for a long time, and yet he never ceased to amaze me.
“Now,” he said, “we’ll replenish our supply of fresh water with the rain that the storm has left in all these granite basins; that way we’ll have no reason to fear being overcome by thirst. As for the raft, I’ll recommend to Hans to do his best to repair it, although I don’t expect it’ll be of any further use to us!”
“How so?” I exclaimed.
“An idea of my own, my boy. I don’t think we’ll go out where we came in.”
I looked at the professor with a certain mistrust. I wondered whether he had not gone mad. And yet he would turn out to be right.
“Let’s go and have breakfast,” he resumed.
I followed him to an elevated promontory after he had given his instructions to the hunter. Dried meat, biscuits, and tea made us an excellent meal there, one of the best, I’ll admit, that I have ever had in my life. Hunger, fresh air, calm weather after the trouble, all contributed to give me an appetite.
During breakfast, I asked my uncle where we were now.
“That,” I said, “seems to me difficult to calculate.”
“Difficult to calculate exactly, yes,” he replied; “impossible, actually, since during these three days of tempest I’ve not been able to keep track of the speed or direction of the raft; but we can still make an approximate estimate.”
“In fact, we made the last observation on the island with the geyser ...”
“On Axel Island, my boy. Don’t reject the honor of having given your name to the first island ever discovered in the interior of the earth.”
“All right. On Axel Island, we had covered two hundred and seventy leagues of ocean, and we were six hundred leagues away from Iceland.”
“Good! Let’s start from that point, then, and count four days of storm, during which our speed could not have been less than eighty leagues per twenty-four hours.”
“That’s right. So that would be three hundred leagues in addition.”
“Yes, and so the Lidenbrock Sea would be about six hundred leagues from shore to shore! Do you realize, Axel, that it competes in size with the Mediterranean?”
“Yes, especially if we’ve not crossed all of it!”
“Which is quite possible!”
“And curiously,” I added, “if our calculations are accurate, we now have the Mediterranean right above our heads.”
“Really!”
“Really, since we are nine hundred leagues away from Reykjavik!”
“That’s a nice long way, my boy; but whether we’re under the Mediterranean rather than under Turkey or the Atlantic, depends on whether our direction hasn’t changed.”
“No, the wind seemed steady; so I think this shore should be south-east of Port Graüben.”
“Well, it’s easy to make sure of that by consulting the compass. Let’s go and see what it says!”
The professor went toward the rock where Hans had put the instruments. He was cheerful, lively, he rubbed his hands, he posed! A real young man! I followed him, rather curious to know if I was not mistaken in my estimate.
When we reached the rock, my uncle took the compass, placed it horizontally and observed the needle, which after a few oscillations stopped in a fixed position due to the magnetic attraction.
My uncle looked, and rubbed his eyes, and looked again. Finally he turned to me, thunderstruck.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
He motioned to me to look at the instrument. An exclamation of surprise burst from me. The tip of the needle indicated north where we assumed the south to be! It pointed to the shore instead of the open sea!
I shook the compass, I examined it; it was in perfect condition. No matter in what position we placed the needle, it obstinately returned to this unexpected direction.
Therefore, there could be no doubt: during the storm, the wind had changed without our noticing, and had taken our raft back to the shore that my uncle thought he had left behind.
XXXVII
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO describe the succession of emotions that shook Professor Lidenbrock, amazement, incredulity, and finally rage. Never had I seen a man so disoriented at first, and then so furious. The exhaustion of our journey across the ocean, the dangers we had incurred, all that had to be started over again! We had gone backwards instead of forwards!
But my uncle quickly regained control of himself.
“Ah! Fate plays these tricks on me!” he exclaimed. “The elements conspire against me! Air, fire and water join their efforts to oppose my journey! Well then! They’ll find out what my will power is made of. I will not yield, I will not take a single step backwards, and we’ll see whether man or nature wins out!
”
Standing on the rock, enraged, threatening, Otto Lidenbrock seemed to challenge the gods like the fierce Ajax.bp But I thought it appropriate to intervene and restrain this irrational energy.
“Listen to me,” I said to him in a firm voice. “There’s a limit to ambition down here; we can’t struggle against the impossible. We’re ill-equipped for another sea voyage; one can’t travel five hundred leagues on a paltry assemblage of wood beams, with a blanket for a sail, a stick for a mast, and the winds unleashed against us. We cannot steer, we’re a plaything for the storms, and it’s madness to attempt this impossible crossing for a second time!”
I was able to unfold this series of irrefutable reasons for ten minutes without being interrupted, but only because of the inattention of the professor, who did not hear a word of my arguments.
“To the raft!” he shouted.
That was his reply. It was no use begging him or flying into a rage, I was up against a will harder than granite.
Hans was finishing up the repairs of the raft at that moment. One would have thought that this strange being guessed my uncle’s plans. He had reinforced the vessel with a few pieces of surturbrand. He had already hoisted a sail in whose folds the wind was playing.
The professor said a few words to the guide, and immediately he put everything on board and arranged everything for our departure. The air was rather clear, and the north-west wind blew steadily.
What could I do? Stand alone against the two of them? Impossible. If only Hans had taken my side. But no! The Icelander seemed to have given up any will of his own and to have made a vow of self-denial. I could not get anything out of a servant so beholden to his master. I had to go along.
I was therefore about to take my usual place on the raft when my uncle stopped me with his hand.
“We won’t leave until tomorrow,” he said.
I made the gesture of a man who is resigned to anything.
“I must not neglect anything,” he resumed; “and since fate has driven me to this part of the coast, I won’t leave it until I’ve explored it.”
To understand this remark, one must know that we had come back to the north shore, but not to the exact point of our first departure. Port Graüben must have been further to the west. Therefore, nothing more reasonable than to explore carefully the surroundings of this new landing spot.
“Let’s go on discovery!” I said.
And leaving Hans to his activities, we started off together. The space between the water and the foot of the cliffs was considerable. It took us half an hour to get to the wall of rock. Our feet crushed innumerable shells of all shapes and sizes in which the animals of the earliest ages had lived. I also saw enormous turtle shells that were more than fifteen feet in diameter. They had belonged to those gigantic glyptodonts of the Pliocene period,bq of which the modern turtle is but a small reduction. The ground was in addition strewn with a lot of stone fragments, shingles of a sort that had been rounded by the waves and arranged in successive lines. This led me to the remark that at one time the sea must have covered this ground.
On the scattered rocks, now out of their reach, the waves had left manifest traces of their passage.
This might up to a point explain the existence of this ocean forty leagues beneath the surface of the globe. But in my opinion this liquid mass had to be gradually disappearing into the bowels of the earth, and it obviously had its origin in the waters of the ocean overhead, which had made their way here through some fissure. Yet it had to be conceded that this fissure was now stopped up, because this entire cavern, or better, this immense reservoir had filled up in a relatively short time. Maybe the water, struggling against the subterranean fire, had even partly evaporated. That would explain the clouds suspended over our heads and the discharge of the electricity that gave rise to tempests in the interior of the earth.
This theory of the phenomena we had witnessed seemed satisfactory to me; for however great the wonders of nature may be, they can always be explained by physical causes.
We were therefore walking on a kind of sedimentary terrain, deposited by water like all the soils of that period, of which there are so many across the globe. The professor examined every fissure in the rock carefully. Wherever an opening showed, it was important to him to probe its depth.br
We had walked along the shores of the Lidenbrock Sea for a mile when soil suddenly changed in appearance. It seemed turned upside down, convulsed by a violent upheaval of the lower strata. In many places depressions or elevations testified to a powerful displacement of the earth’s substance.
We were moving with difficulty across these cracks of granite mixed with flint, quartz, and alluvial deposits, when a field, more than a field, a plain of bones appeared before our eyes. One would have thought it was an immense graveyard, where the generations of twenty centuries mingled their eternal dust. Tall mounds of residue stretched away into the distance. They undulated to the limits of the horizon and vanished into a hazy mist. Here, in perhaps three square miles, the complete history of animal life was piled up, a history that has hardly yet been written in the too recent strata of the inhabited world.
But an impatient curiosity drove us on. With a dry noise, our feet crushed the remains of these prehistoric animals, fossils over whose rare and interesting residues the museums of great cities fight. A thousand Cuviers would not have been enough to reconstruct the skeletons of the organic beings lying in this magnificent boneyard.
I was stunned. My uncle had lifted his long arms to the massive vault that served us as sky. His mouth gaping wide, his eyes flashing behind the glass of his spectacles, his head moving up and down, from left to right, his whole posture indicated infinite amazement. He stood facing an invaluable collection of leptotheria, mericotheria, lophiodons, anoplotheria, megatheria, mastodons, protopithecae, pterodactyls, of all the prehistoric monsters, piled up for his personal satisfaction. Imagine an enthusiastic bibliophile suddenly transported to the famous library of Alexandria that was burned by Omar, and which by a miracle had been reborn from its ashes! That was my uncle, Professor Lidenbrock.
But it was a very different amazement when, running across this organic dust, he seized a bare skull and shouted with a trembling voice:
“Axel! Axel! a human head!”
“A human head!” I exclaimed, no less astonished.
“Yes, nephew. Ah! Mr. Milne-Edwards! Ah! Mr. de Quatrefages,bs I wish you were standing here where I, Otto Lidenbrock, am standing!”
The complete history of animal life was piled up.
XXXVIII
TO UNDERSTAND MY UNCLE’S invocation of these illustrious French scholars, one must know that an event of great importance for paleontology had occurred some time before our departure.
On March 28,1863, some excavators working under the direction of Mr. Boucher de Perthes, in the stone quarries of Moulin Quignon, near Abbeville, in the department of the Somme in France, found a human jawbone fourteen feet beneath the surface. It was the first fossil of its kind that had ever been unearthed. Nearby stone hatchets and flint arrow-heads were found, stained and coated with a uniform patina by the ages.8
The repercussions of this discovery were great, not in France alone, but in England and in Germany. Several scholars of the French Institute, among others Messrs. Milne-Edwards and de Quatrefages, took the affair very seriously, proved the irrefutable authenticity of the bone in question, and became the most ardent advocates in this ‘trial of the jawbone,’ as it was called in English.
Geologists of the United Kingdom who considered the fact as certain—Messrs. Falconer, Busk, Carpenter,9 and others—were soon joined by scholars from Germany, and among them, in the first rank, the most energetic, the most enthusiastic, was my uncle Lidenbrock.
The authenticity of a human fossil from the Quaternary epochbt therefore seemed to be irrefutably proven and admitted.
This theory, to be sure, encountered a most obstinate opponent in Mr. Élie de Beaumont.bu This sc
holar, a great authority, maintained that the soil of Moulin Quignon did not belong to the “diluvium” ‡ but to a more recent layer and, agreeing with Cuvier, he refused to admit that the human species had been contemporary with the animals of the Quaternary epoch. My uncle Lidenbrock, in agreement with the great majority of geologists, had stood his ground, disputed, and argued, until Mr. Élie de Beaumont had remained almost alone on his side.
We knew all the details of this affair, but we were not aware that since our departure the question had made further progress. Other identical jawbones, though they belonged to individuals of various types and different nations, were found in the loose grey soil of certain caves in France, Switzerland, and Belgium, along with weapons, utensils, tools, bones of children, adolescents, adults and old people. The existence of Quaternary man was therefore receiving more confirmation every day.
And that was not all. New remains exhumed from Tertiary Pliocene soil had allowed even bolder geologists to attribute an even greater age to the human race. These remains, to be sure, were not human bones, but products of his industry that carried the mark of human work, such as shin and thigh bones of fossil animals with regular grooves, sculpted as it were.
Thus, with one leap, man moved back on the time scale by many centuries. He preceded the mastodon; he was a contemporary of elephas meridionalis;bv he lived a hundred thousand years ago, since that is the date that the most famous geologists give for the formation of Pliocene soil.
Such, then, was the state of paleontological science, and what we knew of it was enough to explain our attitude toward this boneyard on the Lidenbrock Sea. It is therefore easy to understand my uncle’s amazement and joy when, twenty yards further on, he found himself in the presence of, one might say face to face with, a specimen of Quaternary man.
It was a perfectly recognizable human body. Had some special kind of soil, like that of the St. Michel cemetery in Bordeaux, preserved it like this over the centuries? I do not know. But this corpse, with its tight, parchment-like skin, its limbs still soft—at least on sight—intact teeth, abundant hair, frighteningly long finger and toe nails, presented itself to our eyes just as it was when it had been alive.
