Voyage to the Center of the Earth

by Jacques Collin de Plancy

  Meanwhile, we had already seen our sky again, and the moon that our eyes had forgotten for seven long years was lending us its soft light. Our fatigue was great, but our joy as even greater, on descending from the mountain, to be able to salute our native soil and the sky of our childhood. Each of us kissed the ground on touching it, and gave enthusiastic thanks to the Eternal. We perceived trees and plants before us, which did not, in verity, resemble the vegetables of the northern pole but it was a similar landscape; and the magnetic vapors of the southern pole presented, albeit slightly weaker, the same illuminating effects as the opening of the North Pole.

  We advanced toward the scattered trees that we could see some distance away; we soon found black fruits as large as common peaches, which tasted like medlars. A little further on, Tristan perceived a large nest in the middle of a bush, which he approached. A white bird, reminiscent of a Barbary duck, flew off at the sound of his approach, and our companion brought us ten large eggs. It was easy to procure a piece of iron and a stone. Edward struck the briquette, but we had a great deal of difficulty lighting the fire because we had no tinder. In the end, we made use of the Felinois’ belt, which was extremely delicate, and that succeeded. We heaped up branches of dry wood and made a good blaze; the eggs, cooked in the ashes, were found to be excellent.

  The fruits that we had eaten had not appeased our thirst, however. We went a little way into the fertile land, without losing sight of the mountain, and discovered a herb that had the taste of common sorrel. We each ate it copiously, and felt somewhat less thirsty.

  After that, as we had recovered our courage, Edward and I wanted to return to the mountain, because the Manseau had not appeared. But we had more than half a league to cover, and we did not have the strength to climb two hundred feet. It was necessary to return to our companions and drag ourselves to the foot of a tree in order to rest.

  We were so exhausted that the entire little troop went to sleep around the fire, and whether it was because the herb that refreshed us had a soporific effect or because fatigue caused us a long torpor, when we awoke the moon was in the same position in the sky as when we had gone to sleep, and we were dying of hunger again.

  But a surprise, the sweetest of all those that we might expect, came to enchant our awakening: the Manseau was asleep alongside us. Clairancy hastened to wake him up, to ask him how long he had been there and why he had not woken us up when he arrived.

  As soon as he opened his eyes he looked at all of us, embraced us one after another, and told us that the rapidity of our departure had frightened him, that he had hesitated for some time before deciding to follow us, and that finally the priests of Burma had made him leave the vaulted chamber by force; that he had detached himself from the mountain as best he could and that, surprised that we were no longer visible, he had come down to the ground, trembling that he might not be able to catch up with us; that he had found us all asleep by the fire, but so profoundly that it had been impossible to wake us; that he had then eaten a few fruits that we had left close at hand and let himself fall by our side, overcome by lassitude and the desire to sleep.

  We all had the greatest joy at being reunited; we got to our feet, and the same fruits as the day before provided our breakfast.

  After that, we drew away from the mountains of the austral pole, calculating fearfully that we had eight hundred leagues to travel in order to reach Tierra del Fuego and eleven hundred if we wanted to go to Van Diemen’s Land in New Holland. Apart from the fact that we were defenseless, in absolutely unknown territory, the greater part of our route would have to be by sea, and we had no means of embarking.

  That desolate idea was about to rob us of courage and cast us into despair, when Clairancy reminded us of all the prodigies of our voyage.

  “Would God, who has preserved us in the midst of so many perils, have brought us back so miraculously to our fatherland to let us perish within sight of port?”

  Those words rendered us a glimmer of hope, and we soon entered a dense forest, the trees of which mostly resembled black pine. We also found a few small pliant trees, which were more useful to us than the rest, because we could make bows from them. We frequently came across eggs like those of the day before, but we had not yet been able to catch one of the birds that laid them. Tristan killed one of them when he bow was ready, and we ate it for our second meal of the day.

  As the Felinois could not walk as fast as us, we were obliged to carry him on our shoulders, and took turns to bear the burden. He was a man of about forty, very meek, but very sad since he had seen that Burma’s paradise was a chimera.

  Our adventures, in the first ten days that followed our departure from the austral pole, would almost be a repetition of our journey to the North Pole if I described them exactly; I shall not weary the reader with them. I shall only say that the sky was constantly our guide, since we had no compass; that we encountered no ferocious beasts; that our nourishment consisted of various fruits, herbs, eggs, birds and a few wild animals the size of lambs, with hind feet much lower than those in front, and light or dark gray in color.

  From the third day on we also encountered springs from time to time, and streams that vanished underground after a course of two or three hundred paces. We spent the time of our sleep either in a cavity of a rock, in thick bushes or at the foot of a tree, with the precaution of taking turns to keep watch over our sleeping companions. We usually covered about ten leagues a day.

  On the eleventh day, we were obliged to interrupt our march because the poor Felinois, who had been ill since he had been living on our glove, was unable that day to support the shocks of the journey and the chill of the air.

  We lavished all the cares on him that we could contrive in that bleak desert, but nothing could make him better and he died, after having stopped us for three days. The entire little troop gave him sincere regrets, not because he had taken away, by dying, our hope of taking an inhabitant of the subterranean globe to our homeland, but because we had become attached to him as our companion in misfortune and because we were six with him, as when we had quit Spitzbergen.

  We rendered him funeral honors, as he had requested of us—which is to say that we burned his body and his ashes were buried with his clothes. After that, reduced in number to five, and regretting simultaneously the Felinois, Manseau’s wife and our poor Williams, we resumed our march.

  It was the fourteenth day. Until then we had almost always found ourselves in the middle of a forest, but toward the end of the day we entered a mountainous country with scattered meadows and clumps of trees, and the cold which we had already begun to feel, became more rigorous from then on.

  On the eighteenth day, Edward killed an enormous bird on the slope of a small hill, which we mistook at a distance for an ostrich. When we picked it up we saw that it was twice as large as a guinea-fowl. Its plumage was extremely white and its form was more like that of a wild goose than any other inhabitant of the air. It nourished the little troop for two days; its flesh, although a trifle tough, tasted very good.

  The next day we perceived before us, a quarter of a league away, three large animals that frightened us. After having stopped momentarily, getting our bows ready, and perhaps counting too much on our arrows, which were only wood—very hard, to be sure, but incapable of killing an animal defended by a thick hide—we advanced, not without trembling internally.

  When we had covered half the distance that separated us, Clairancy thought he observed that our three animals were grazing. That particularity, which struck us all equally, was beginning to reassure us, when we saw the three monsters coming toward us. The Manseau, frightened, uttered cries of terror, which were repeated by all his poor companions. Our clamors appeared to frighten the three animals too, for they fled, and we did not see any more of them in the locality.

  Edward thought that they might be wild horses, and, indeed, they had something of that appearance. That day and the following days we lived on the animals with unequal legs, wh
ich we named giraffes, although they did not much resemble those animals and did not have the stature. That nourishment was becoming rarer by the day, however, and the cold was excessive.

  On the twenty-fourth day we perceived the gleam of light that announced the return of the sun. On the twenty-fifth day we killed two of the birds we had mistaken for ostriches, and it was decided that we would keep them for a few days, because we have to traverse terrain where it might be difficult to find anything to eat. On the twenty-seventh day we saw a part of the sun’s disk, and the following day we were able to salute it and contemplate it in its entirety for a quarter of an hour.

  On the thirtieth day, we found a little spring covered with a foot of ice. For three days the earth had only been covered by sparse moss and a few widely-scattered leafless bushes. The soil was no longer vegetal; it was arid ground, bristling with rocks covered with ice and snow.

  During the eight hours that followed we endured many difficulties and hitches, the afflicting description of which I do not have the courage to retrace, all the more so as it would only sadden the reader needlessly Our courage was raised by the success of our march, bearable thus far; henceforth, it became so difficult that we despaired at every step of ever reaching a conclusion. Our clothes, made of light fabric, were not made to protect us from rigors of cold like those we had been wearing when we left the cabin in Spitzbergen. The skin of the animals we had killed were an imperfect substitute, the flaps bound around us with the cords that we had brought from the pole, and from which we had aloes made fur hats. The frost had put all our hands in a dire state; we made gauntlets of a sort with the skin and feathers of our two birds.

  As we advanced further, the earth became more arid, and the air more cruel. During the days of which I speak, it was almost impossible for us to sleep. We rarely found any wood, and had difficulty finding caves to give us a little protection from the frost. We lived throughout that time on our two birds and two white animals the size of sheep, which we took for foxes.

  On the eighth day we perceived a profound cavity in a rock to our right. We directed our steps toward it, with the hope of getting a little rest. The good luck that took us there enabled us to find something else. The cavern was full of the white foxes, whose flesh was a little gamy but very nourishing. The Manseau and I guarded the entrance while our three companions threw themselves into the cavern and made a great carnage of the animals lodged therein. Some succeeded in escaping in spite of us, but after the work was done we counted the dead, which numbered thirteen. That abundance gave us a great deal of joy. We built a fire; one of the animals was cooked, and we all ate our fill, while the others were exposed to the frost in order to prevent them from rotting.

  Before setting out on the march again, the Manseau claimed that it would be sufficient for us to take five of the foxes and leave the other seven behind, but we were fortunately not of the same opinion. We were even careful to take away the pieces of cooked mat that remained from our dinner, and we set forth again.

  The sun was getting stronger, and showing itself for longer every day, but we were suffering so much from the cold that we did not have the strength to rejoice at the sight of it, and we would have preferred the moon of the pole, with its tolerable temperature.

  On the thirty-ninth day, we arrived on the coast of the southern glacial sea. We had expected to find it sooner, and not to travel so far on land. As far as we could calculate, we were at a latitude of about seventy degrees, and on the hundred and sixty-fifth degree of longitude. Thus, after such a long and frightful march, we found ourselves halted on a shore bristling with icy rocks, and by an immense sea covered with enormous moving icebergs.

  The waves brought little wood to the coast, and it was only after laborious research that we were able to assemble seven long logs, of which we made a raft, employing half of our cords in that; but we dared not risk ourselves on such a frail skiff in the midst of the floating ice, whose floes collided noisily, and which the wind set incessantly in motion. We dragged our raft on to a large island of ice, which was attached to the land and appeared to be at least half a league long.

  We knew how to make a sail, but the event that was to follow got us out of difficulty for the moment, and we have always regarded it as a miracle of Heaven’s bounty.

  We had dragged our raft to the edge of the island of ice, and were getting ready to launch it into the sea and risk ourselves there, confiding ourselves entirely to Heaven, to which we addressed ardent prayers, when a great gust of wind departing from the coast caused the ice to crack, breaking the island of ice on which we found ourselves in several places and pushing it out into the open sea. Our raft and our dozen fixes were fortunately close at hand, with a few little heaps of moss that we had collected in order to light a fire.

  The floe on which we were situated was scarcely two hundred feet long; it was impelled with such force that it floated on the sea for five days, at various speeds, in accordance with the vigor of the wind. We were frightened at first by that adventure, but soon came to regard it as our salvation. Apart from the fact that it was less cold than on the coast, the floe was carrying us toward the sun, and we hoped to find an island not far away from New Holland.

  We had not dared to make a fire on the first day, but we did so on the second, on our raft, and the ice, melting a little around the flames offered us, to our great surprise and our greater joy, good fresh water.

  On the morning of the sixth day, which was the forty-fifth of our voyage, we saw land; but at the same time, the island of ice that carried us, apparently repelled by a coastal wind, began to draw away. We hastened to put our raft into the sea, and entrusted ourselves to it, bidding farewell to our beneficent ice-floe.

  We only had the wood of our bows for oars. It was with those feeble means that we toiled all day to reach the land, which was no more than two leagues away from us. We finally reached it, not without having despaired twenty times over of ever setting foot on it. It was a large island that has doubtless not yet been discovered, and was beginning to be animated by vegetation. The sun had become stronger, the days longer, and the climate milder.

  Clairancy told us that, according to his calculations, the land we had just reached was around the fifty-sixth degree of southern latitude and the hundred and forty-second degree of longitude. That calculation astonished us, because it supposed that we had covered an immense distance during the five days and nights that we had been floating on the ice. But we had not slept throughout that time and we were overwhelmed by fatigue. We hastened to light a fire; we cooked one of our foxes on it and abandoned ourselves to sleep at the foot of a small hill that the sun was warming with its rays.

  We had moored our raft. We went back to the coast to find it, but it was no longer there, and we perceived humans in the distance who seemed to us to be naked, drawing away along the coast with our poor vessel.

  That spectacle, which announced to us that the island was populated, rent our hearts, because it also took away from us the means of getting away from it promptly; but we soon thought that we would doubtless find primitive pirogues of which we would be able to take possession.

  An hour later, walking along the coast, we encountered oysters and mussels; it as so many years since we had eaten any that it was a feast for us.

  The island on which we found ourselves was quite large, since it took us four days to traverse it. We also knew that it was populated, but it was impossible for us to perceive any more inhabitants during those four days. On the fifth, advancing toward a little bay, we found seven pirogues there, as we had anticipated. They were made of tree trunks hollowed out by fire.

  Before taking possession of one we wanted to gather provisions. We still had one fox left, which we had cooked because it was beginning to spoil. On the island we had killed two black swans, a few pigeons and a water-fowl. We had also amassed a few cycad-fruits, which we had passed over the fire in order to take away the toxic quality that they had.

  We d
etached three pirogues and advanced out to sea; but we had scarcely made a quarter of a league outside the bay when four savages perceived us. They manned two of the pirogues that we had left and set off in pursuit of us. Fortunately, we reached the open sea quickly enough not to be overtaken.

  The wind was inconstant, sometimes pushing us violently and sometimes causing us to bob up and down without allowing us to advance. I shall not give details of the remainder of that voyage, which offered nothing very curious.

  After seven days of navigation, as dangerous as it was difficult, we came across a ship in the open sea. The sight caused us to utter loud cries of joy. We had the good fortune of being perceived. It was an English vessel, which was visiting the coasts of New Holland. The captain received us with the most touching humanity. He gave us all garments and admission to his table, and heard the narrative of our adventures with as much surprise as interest. He told us that the date, on which we encountered Europeans again, was the second of September 1814.

  We remained for a few days in Port Jackson, after which we gladly took passage for England.

  Postscript

  Several months have already passed since I returned to my homeland. I have sought all possible information to discover the fate of the unfortunate companions we left in Spitzbergen, but I have learned nothing that permits me to believe that they are alive. Undoubtedly, if they had reappeared on European soil, their return would have made enough noise for it to be easy to discover. I addressed myself particularly to the families of the majority of our poor friends; everywhere, they were mourned; I therefore have reason to believe that the unfortunates died in the Arctic deserts, and I still bless the Providence of the fortunate idea that, while conserving our lives, enabled us to discover an unknown world and brought us back beneath the adored sky of our fatherland.

  Notes