by Mike Ashley
Those two days of outbound subterranean travel had taken us some eight leagues in a generally north-easterly direction into the roots of the Massif Central, and some three leagues downward from our original height above sea level. Latterly, our downward progress was increasing – and whenever we encountered an ambiguous branching of routes, we would find a stick figure as guide.
Jules enthused, “It seems as if we’re being invited to travel deeper – to the very centre of the Earth, just as in the novel I’m planning! I chose Iceland as an entry point because of volcanoes and empty lava tubes, but here there’s an opening in France itself.”
Pierre nodded. “Certainly this merits a serious expedition, with supplies sufficient for several weeks or months.”
“Might it be,” I ventured, “that the stick figures aren’t the work of our primitive ancestors – but that the truth is the reverse? Those guide-marks were made by explorers from within the Earth, venturing up to the surface?”
A tic afflicted Jules’ left eye. His voice became clipped. “I suppose next you’ll suggest that these venturesome troglodytes painted the bison and other beasts in the cave, from sheer astonishment, or as a warning of what lives on the surface!” He was a man who could veer quickly from witty bonhomie to irritability.
“Perhaps it’s wise,” I said, mildly yet stubbornly, “to entertain all possibilities.”
“Only within the bounds of scientific possibility, my dear lady! What would these denizens of the underworld feed upon? Sheep abducted from the surface?”
“What of the legends of fairy folk abducting people and taking them underground?”
“So you believe in fairies!”
“I only wish to keep an open mind.”
“One that a wind blows through because it is mostly empty.”
“That’s damn’d unfair,” said Pierre. “Hortense has a very full mind, uniquely her own.”
“Full of fancies perhaps. Reason plays no part in feminine lives.”
Diplomatically Deville asked Jules, “Have you read the work of Darwin, On the Origin of Species?”
“I only just bought the translation – I’m reading it at the moment.”
“A sub-species of Homo adapted to life underground seems unlikely . . .” Deville commenced lighting a pipe.
“Still,” said Pierre, “we’ll be well advised to take revolvers and a good supply of gun-cotton too. Personally I’m glad of your suggestion, Hortense.”
I smiled. “Let’s hope we don’t need to use the revolvers.”
Pierre gaped at me. “We ?”
Pierre led me aside.
“Taking you underground initially was an indulgence. Now we’re planning in terms of weeks or months. Stern stuff, men’s stuff.”
I whispered, “If I don’t go with you, I shall tell your wife everything! Including your opinion of her performance in bed. Then you’ll have no money for gun-cotton or anything else.”
He groaned. The noise was very similar to what I could evoke from him by other means. “My peach, this expedition of ours will be the talk of France – maybe the world! Journalists will seize upon your participation. Mathilde would be very stupid not to put two and two together.”
“Maybe the expedition will make us all rich, then you’ll have no further need of her!”
“Hmm,” he said and played with his moustache.
“I shall go underground,” I said, “a day before your official departure; so that no one will see me, and I’ll await the four of you. I want an adventure such as no woman has experienced before! If my adventure must remain a secret afterwards, so be it. At least I will know what I have achieved.”
“Verne won’t like this. If the temperature increases progressively the deeper we descend, a man can strip to the waist . . .”
Men could be so illogical. “If heat increases progressively, then you won’t be able to descend far or you’ll melt. Verne must grin and bear me, or there won’t be any expedition, so there! Fortunately Deville has a less nervous attitude towards women.”
“You can be very stubborn.” Nevertheless, Pierre’s eyes twinkled.
Not all of our time since Pompey’s demise had been spent at that village in the Dordogne. Pierre had affairs to attend to in Bordeaux, and he was obliged to spend some time with his wife even if Mathilde was accustomed to frequent adventurous absences on Pierre’s part. I refer to Pierre’s business affairs – our private affair could be conducted with perfect ease in Bordeaux where Pierre maintained me in a pretty apartment. Our jaunt to Montignac-sur-Vézères had been a special holiday outing because I love riding, and Pierre could hardly ride with me publicly in the city, or else tongues would wag. Anyway, by the tenth of September our expedition was fully provisioned and ready – and I made myself scarce, to spend a night underground all on my own half a league along our destined route, so that I shouldn’t feature in the official photographs of departure. I wasn’t in the least bit worried about the isolation nor the darkness. Next day I even conserved my chemicals until I saw the lamps of my fellow explorers approaching
Now I really must leap forward in time – back to where I began this narrative – skipping over many undoubtedly fascinating details of rocks and tunnels and shafts and galleries and caverns.
Six weeks had passed and we had journeyed in a mainly east-northeasterly direction for some 200 leagues, which put us almost directly underneath the Bavarian city of Munich – at a depth, by our manometer of compressed air, of an incredible 25 leagues. We imagined the bustle of Germans up on the surface, so remote from us (as we thought!) that they might as well have been on the Moon.
All of us were still fully dressed. As we descended, contrary to scientific wisdom the temperature had risen only moderately, then stabilised. Personally I would have preferred Antoine to shed some garments – not, of course, so as to admire his musculature, but because his clothes had become smelly with sweat, he being of all of us the most burdened . . . by a silk rope-ladder a hundred metres long, mattocks, pickaxes, iron wedges and spikes, long knotted cords, meat extract and biscuits. To a greater or lesser degree all of us were burdened – myself included; I insisted on this! – but Antoine was more weighed down than the rest of us. At the end of every Saturday’s march he received payment for his labour. To his phlegmatic mind the money seemed the entire rationale for a journey which continued to amaze the rest of us, not least when we came . . .
. . . to an underground sea of vast expanse!
From the strand on which we stood the walls of an immense cavern stretched away to right and to left, into invisibility. Far ahead was a horizon of water – and we could see a long way because the very air seemed phosphorescently alive with light. Masses of cloud hid any view of a roof, those clouds stained kaleidoscopically (maybe I mean prismatically) by what must have been auroras at even higher altitude. Widening out to half a league, the shore of this ocean was richly vegetated by ferns the size of trees and by umbrella-crowned trees which I saw to be enormous fungi. No wonder the air was invigorating compared with the tunnels that had led here! Perhaps for this reason – coupled with the release from two months’ confinement in stygian natural corridors – I became headstrong, spurred by delight at the aerial denizens of this subterranean realm, namely butterflies rather than birds, butterflies of all sizes and hues, and dragonflies with huge wingspans such as must have flown in the forests of the Carboniferous Era and which still survived here hidden away beneath the earth.
Shedding my pack, I ran impulsively towards an enchanting yellow and purple lepidopterous creature half my own size that had alighted nearby upon the gritty loam, studded with pointy orange flowers such as I had never seen before, to suck at their sweetness. For a fanciful moment I almost took it for a fairy, and thought myself in fairyland.
“Come back, you stupid girl!” I heard Verne shout imperiously. “That may be poisonous! This isn’t a dress shop!”
The papillon fluttered away, more as if swimming than flying – the a
ir felt denser here than on the surface of the world. If it had been Pierre who called to me to observe caution, events might have transpired differently. However, it amused Pierre to give me my head. I was quite fed up with Verne’s little volcanic explosions, so I followed the object of my admiration somewhat farther. Oh Verne was such a bundle of contraries! He could be perfectly charming one moment then the next moment so facetious and curt, fairly snapping at any dissent from his own viewpoint. Maybe his impatience and nervous tension was a sign of genius, but his bilious attacks and facial twitches made him less than the perfect travel companion. Though his insomnia would have made him a good sentry, had there been anything to guard against in the dark tunnels hitherto!
As I came closer to the enchanting papillon amidst the floral undergrowth, of a sudden I heard Deville call out, “Look, look!” He was pointing to the sea, offshore.
Peering between some giant tree-ferns I espied two monstrous heads rearing up from the water, one with a long toothy snout like a crocodile’s –
“An ichthyosaurus!” I heard Deville shout –
— the other like a serpent –
“A plesiosaurus!”
The two monsters joined combat ferociously while the water foamed and sprayed, thrashed by oar-like flappers and tail-fins. Thank God that I hadn’t rushed to bathe but had been distracted by beauty – and now I was doubly distracted by the battle offshore. Thus it was that I paid no attention to my vicinity.
Abruptly I was seized from behind by the thighs and by the waist and dragged backwards, losing my balance, too surprised to cry out. As I sprawled, little men swarmed over me – muscular naked little men, four, five of them, all as pasty white as could be! In those first moments I feared an animalistic rape of me, for the exposed male genitals of the dwarfs all seemed disproportionately large compared with the bodies. The eyes, too, bulged – such big eyes! Breath panted from barrel chests. You might have expected that sweat reeked too, but actually the smell was floral. These persons must bathe regularly in streams that fed the underground ocean and brush themselves afterwards with squeezed flowers – only a madman would venture into water where monsters dwelt such as were battling. A hand clamped over my mouth. Hands gripped my clothing, and I was lifted. The dwarfs were beginning to bear me away – for what purpose? Sexual? Cannabilistic? Sacrificial? All the while my companions evidently noticed nothing, so locked must their attention have been upon the prehistoric sea monsters.
I struggled and I writhed, but those dwarfs were strong and persistent. Giant fungi and tree-ferns shifted above me as I was borne backward through undergrowth. My captors uttered guttural words to one another. The idea came to me that they might regard me as a goddess and were carrying me away to be worshipped, confined in some primitive cave-temple. They would bring me offerings of fish, and of course there would be a priest whom I would come to understand and to cultivate till he would be quite in my thrall and who would co-operate in my escape. After returning to the surface I would exhibit the dwarf priest in Paris and I would become rich and famous, not least because of the memoir I would write, maybe with some assistance from Verne – if he could bring himself to offer this and if I could bear to accept it and to work with him to our mutual advantage. Twenty-Five Leagues Under the Earth might be a good title.
Maybe the priest would try to copulate ceremonially with me in that temple, to promote the fertility of his tribe! My vivid imagination summoned up the scene of degradation to which I might be subjected, perhaps many times – then an image, too, of myself giving birth in primitive circumstances to a dwarf who would be a vile caricature of me. By now we were crossing some open ground, perhaps quarter of a league distant from the place of my abduction. I bit the hand clamped upon my mouth, and as it jerked away from my teeth I screamed.
Did I hear a distant echo of my cry, from the lips of my dearest Pierre, distraught at my mysterious disappearance? I think that was an echo of my own cry bouncing from the mighty wall of the vast cavern. A new hand gripped my mouth even more firmly than before – new, I reasoned, since I did not taste any blood upon the palm. My bite had been quite savage. I could be wild, as Pierre knew well. In actuality the dwarfs had not behaved savagely towards me, not as yet – no blow had struck me. It was I who had been the savage, perhaps with due reason, but nevertheless. And, truth to tell, it was myself who smelled animalistic rather than my naked abductors. I had of course brought an adequate supply of good perfume for the journey, reasoning that I would need to mask bodily odours, but those big squat noses of the dwarfs probably detected the imposture. Carried away by the dwarfs like some princess in a fairy tale, I was such a mixture of fear and fancy and reason and rage.
Then I heard a sharp bang – and abruptly my right leg dropped, my boot striking the ground. Jerked sideways, I glimpsed one of my captors sprawling, blood gushing from his stout neck. As the echo of that first bang rebounded, I heard another such – and my left leg became free. Another dwarf was collapsing, blood running from his back. I assumed that my Pierre had found me already and had used one of the Purdley More rifles to deadly effect and with great accuracy.
In panic the other dwarfs let go of me. With a spine-jarring jolt all of me was upon the ground. Three dwarfs were running for the cover of vegetation. A gun chattered unbelievably quickly and yet another dwarf fell before the remaining two reached cover and disappeared. What sort of weapon could fire so quickly? Surely not any rifle, nor even the Colt revolvers. Circumspectly I lay still, as though in a swoon, squinting.
Three men, who were not my companions, ran towards me from out the undergrowth beyond. Two wore black uniforms, black boots, smooth steel helmets on their heads – and carried guns such as I never saw before. Imagine a black pistol stretched out almost to arm’s length. The third man, who was shorter and stocky, wore black leather trousers and a jacket with many pockets flying open to reveal a holstered pistol at his hip – he clutched a rifle equipped on top with what looked like a miniature telescope. A roughly trimmed dark beard jutted from his chin at the same angle as his nose. Abundant short hair curled rebelliously.
Since it seemed these strangers were intent on rescuing me, I sat up.
The strangers – six in total – proved to be Germans. Thanks to visits during my adolescence to an aunt of mine in Alsace-Lorraine I was fairly conversant with the German language. So as not to keep the reader in suspense I shall state right away that these six constituted an expedition similar to our own, into the hollow Earth. Their starting point had been from deep labyrinthine salt mines in Poland just outside of Cracow, rock salt resting upon the compact sandstone which breaks surface elsewhere as the peaks of the Carpathian Mountains. But here ends all similarity between our own and Ernst Schäfer’s expedition, as well as any anxiety that we had been preceded in our discoveries by Germans!
THEY HAD SET OUT IN THE YEAR 1943. Excuse me if I sound shrill: yes, eighty years after ourselves. Of course they were as astonished as I was by this incongruity, and disbelieved me at first.
“No,” said Schäfer, their bearded leader, whose crack shots had killed two of the dwarfs without even risking grazing me. “It must be that you are from a subterranean colony of French people who have been here for a very long time, and who have lost track of the years.” He surveyed my smart if rather soiled clothing, puzzled. “You were born down here, yes?” We were at their improvised camp, a recess in the cavern wall.
“Certainly not,” I said.
I was much more easily persuaded of the futurity of Schäfer and his men on account of the equipment and the guns they had with them, and the way they introduced themselves – with such titles!
The leader was SS Hauptsturmführer Ernst Schäfer, zoologist, geologist, and veteran of Tibetan exploration, who wore on his finger a death’s-head ring. Then there was Untersturmführer Karl Wienert, geographer and geophysicist. And Ernst Krause, cameraman. And Dr Josef Rimmer, geologist and diviner. Plus two tall blond soldiers – and porters – Schwabe and H
ahn, who belonged to something called the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler.
“The what?”
Schwabe clicked his heels. “We are the élite of the Waffen-SS who have the sacred duty to protect the Führer.”
“Would that be the leader . . . of Prussia?”
“Of Greater Germany, which rules all Europe!”
I bridled. “Including France?”
“Jawohl.”
And evidently including Poland . . .
“And he’s called Adolf Hitler?”
Of a sudden becoming an automaton, Schwabe angled his right arm high into the air, hand like a blade.
Schäfer finally conceded that I was telling the truth about my origin, and soon he became hectically enthusiastic in discussion with Wienert and Krause and Rimmer, the general drift of which I could follow . . .
Apparently the previous year (which I took to mean 1942) had seen an official expedition to some island in the Baltic led by a scientist called Fisher. Fisher believed that the world is hollow – but Fisher was sure that we all live on the inside concave surface of the Earth. So by projecting mysterious rays upwards, at the angle of Schwabe’s salute, it should be possible to spy on the activities of the British Navy hundreds of leagues distant. The experiment failed, as Schäfer had foreseen it would. Yes, the world is hollow, but obviously we live on the outside surface, and deep beneath our feet, as was now proven, was even more Lebensraum than in the conquered lands of the East, or alternatively vast spaces suitable for slave workers – Jews and Slavs could be deported here. But, Gentlemen, kindly imagine the military implications of being able to travel back to an earlier year! Something that lay underground between Poland and France evidently intermixed or linked the present with the past. Powerful localised magnetic fields perhaps. The contours of our respective journeys may have traced out some potent pattern akin to a Tibetan mandala. I had noticed a pennant resting against the rock, a jagged hooked cross in a circle its emblem. Maybe the symbol was Tibetan. Tibet seemed important to these Germans.
