Journey to the Centre of the Earth

by Jules Verne

  These ideas, of course, occurred to me in a vague and obscure form. I had difficulty in putting them together during that dizzy rush which seemed like a vertical descent. Judging by the air which was whipping my face, we were moving faster than the fastest of express trains. It was impossible to light a torch under these conditions, and our last electric apparatus had been broken by the explosion.

  I was therefore extremely surprised to see a bright light suddenly appear near me. It lit up Hans’s calm face. The skilful guide had succeeded in lighting the lantern, and although its flame flickered so much that it nearly went out, it none the less shed a little light in the terrifying blackness.

  I had been right in thinking that the gallery was a wide one. The dim light did not enable us to see both sides at once. The water was falling at an angle steeper than that of the swiftest rapids in America. Its surface looked as if it were composed of a sheaf of liquid arrows shot with incredible force; I cannot think of a better comparison to convey the impression it made on me. The raft was occasionally caught by an eddy and spun round as it sped along. When it went near the walls of the gallery, I threw the light of the lantern on them, and I obtained some idea of our speed by seeing the way in which the projections of rock appeared as continuous ribbons, so that we seemed to be confined within a network of moving lines. I estimated that we must be travelling at something like eighty miles an hour.

  My uncle and I gazed about us with haggard eyes, clinging to the stump of the mast, which had snapped in two at the moment of the catastrophe. We kept our backs to the rush of air, to avoid being suffocated by the speed of a movement which no human power could check. Meanwhile the hours went by. There was no change in our situation, but I made a discovery which complicated matters.

  In trying to put a little order into our cargo, I found that most of the objects which we had taken on board had disappeared at the moment of the explosion, when the sea had struck us so violently. I wanted to know exactly what we had left, and with the lantern in my hand I began my examination. Of our instruments, only the compass and the chronometer remained. Our stock of ladders and ropes was reduced to a bit of cord tied round the stump of the mast. There was not a single pickaxe, not a single mattock, not a single hammer; and worst of all, we had only one day’s provisions left.

  I searched every crack and cranny in the raft, the tiniest corners formed by the beams and the joints of the planks. There was nothing. Our provisions consisted of nothing more than a piece of salt meat and a few biscuits.

  I stared stupidly at this minute stock, unwilling to understand. Yet what danger was I worrying about? Even if we had enough provisions for months or years, how could we get out of the abysses into which this irresistible torrent was sweeping us? Why should we be afraid of hunger when death was already threatening us in so many other forms? Would we have enough time to die of starvation?

  Yet by an inexplicable freak of the imagination I forgot the immediate peril to contemplate the dangers of the future, which appeared to me in all their horror. Besides, perhaps we might be able to escape from the fury of the torrent and return to the surface of the earth? How? I didn’t know. By what route? What did it matter? One chance in a thousand was still a chance, whereas death from starvation would leave us no hope at all.

  The thought occurred to me to tell my uncle everything, to show him the terrible straits to which we were reduced, to calculate exactly how much longer we had to live. But I had the courage to remain silent. I wanted to leave him cool and self-possessed.

  At that moment the light of the lantern grew fainter and then went out. The wick had burnt away, and we were plunged back into total darkness, which we had no hope of being able to dissipate. We still had a torch left, but we could not have kept it alight. So, like a child, I closed my eyes so as not to see all that darkness.

  After a fairly long interval our speed increased, as I noticed from the wind in my face. The descent became steeper, and I really believe that we were no longer gliding but falling. I had the impression of an almost vertical drop. My uncle and Hans held me firmly by the arms.

  Suddenly, after a lapse of time I could not measure, I felt a shock. The raft had not collided with a solid object, but its fall had suddenly been arrested. A waterspout, a huge liquid column, struck its surface and I felt as if I was suffocating, drowning.

  However, this sudden inundation did not last. A few seconds later I found myself gulping in fresh air again. My uncle and Hans were gripping my arms hard enough to break them, and the raft was still carrying all three of us.

  42

  Going Up

  I suppose it was then about ten o’clock at night. The first of my senses which came into play after this last experience was the sense of hearing. Almost immediately I heard – for it was a real act of hearing – I heard silence fall in the gallery, taking the place of the roar which had filled my ears for hours. Then these words of my uncle’s came to me like a murmur:

  ‘We are going up!’

  ‘What do you mean,’ I cried.

  ‘Yes, we are going up, we are going up!’

  I stretched out my arm and touched the wall, grazing my hand. We were rising, extremely fast.

  ‘The torch! The torch!’ cried the Professor.

  Hans managed to light it, not without difficulty, and the flame, rising in spite of our upward movement, gave enough light to illuminate the whole scene.

  ‘Just as I thought,’ said my uncle. ‘We are in a narrow shaft, about twenty feet across. The water has reached the bottom of the abyss and is now rising to find its own level, taking us with it.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘That I don’t know, but we must be ready for anything. We are rising at a speed which I estimate at twelve feet a second, or about eight miles an hour. At this rate we shall get a long way.’

  ‘Yes, provided that nothing stops us and this shaft has an outlet. But if it’s stopped up, if the air is gradually compressed by the pressure of this column of water, then we shall be crushed.’

  ‘Axel,’ the Professor replied very calmly, ‘our situation is almost desperate, but there are a few chances of our escaping, and I am considering these. If we may die at any moment, we may also be saved at any moment. So let us be prepared to seize the slightest opportunity.’

  ‘But what shall we do now?’

  ‘Recruit our strength by eating.’

  At these words I gazed at my uncle with haggard eyes. What I had not wanted to confess had at last to be told.

  ‘Eating?’ I repeated.

  ‘Yes, straight away.’

  The Professor added a few words in Danish. Hans shook his head.

  ‘What!’ cried my uncle. ‘Are all our provisions gone?’

  ‘Yes, this is all the food we have left – one piece of salt meat for the three of us!’

  My uncle looked at me as if he did not want to understand.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘do you still think we can be saved?’

  My question went unanswered.

  An hour went by. I began to feel terribly hungry. My companions were suffering too, but none of us dared to touch the wretched remnant of our stock of food.

  Meanwhile we were still rising fast. Occasionally the air cut our breath short, as it does with aeronauts when they go up too quickly. But while they get colder the higher they go, we were beginning to feel a contrary effect. The temperature was rising at an alarming rate, and at that moment it must have been about 40° Centigrade.

  What could be the meaning of such a change? So far our experience had tended to confirm the theories of Davy and Lidenbrock; until now special conditions of nonconducting rocks, electricity, and magnetism had modified the laws of Nature, providing us with a moderate temperature, for the theory of a central fire remained in my opinion the only one that was sound and reasonable. Were we therefore coming to a terrain where the phenomena of central heat occurred in full force, and where the heat reduced the rocks to the state of molten liquid? I f
eared as much, and said to the Professor:

  ‘If we are neither drowned nor crushed, and if we don’t starve to death, we may still manage to be burnt alive.’

  He simply shrugged his shoulders and returned to his thoughts.

  Another hour went by, and apart from a slight rise in temperature nothing happened to change the situation. At last my uncle broke the silence.

  ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘we must take action.’

  ‘Take action?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. We must recruit our strength. If we try to prolong our existence by a few hours by husbanding this bit of food, we shall feel weak up to the very end.’

  ‘Oh, the end won’t be a long time coming!’

  ‘Perhaps not. But if a chance of saving our lives presents itself, and if it becomes necessary to take sudden action, where shall we find the required strength if we have allowed ourselves to be weakened by hunger?’

  ‘But once we have eaten this bit of meat, Uncle, what shall we have left?’

  ‘Nothing, Axel, nothing. But will it do you any more good to devour it with your eyes? You are reasoning like a man with no will-power or energy.’

  ‘Then haven’t you given up hope?’ I cried irritably.

  ‘No, certainly not,’ the Professor replied in a firm voice.

  ‘What! You still think there’s a chance of escape?’

  ‘Yes, I do. As long as this heart goes on beating, I can’t admit that any creature endowed with will-power should ever despair.’

  What splendid words! The man who could utter them in such circumstances was certainly of no common stamp.

  ‘Then what do you suggest we do?’

  ‘Eat the food that is left down to the last crumb and restore our failing strength. This may be our last meal, but at any rate we shall have become men again, instead of exhausted weaklings.’

  ‘Very well then, let us eat,’ I said.

  My uncle took the piece of meat and the few biscuits which had escaped destruction, divided them into three equal portions, and handed them out. This made about a pound of food for each of us. The Professor ate his ration greedily, with a sort of feverish excitement; I ate without pleasure, in spite of my hunger, and almost with distaste; while Hans ate quietly and slowly, silently chewing small mouthfuls and relishing them with the calm of a man whom anxiety about the future could never worry. By searching diligently he had found a flask half-full of gin; he offered it to us, and it succeeded in reviving my spirits slightly.

  ‘Forträfflig,’ said Hans, taking his turn with the flask.

  ‘Excellent,’ repeated my uncle.

  A little hope had returned to me. But our last meal was just over. It was five in the morning.

  Man is so constituted that his health is a purely negative state; once his hunger is satisfied, it is difficult for him to imagine the horrors of starvation; without feeling them, he cannot understand them. Consequently, after a long fast, a few mouthfuls of meat and biscuits banished the memory of our past privations.

  However, when the meal was over, each of us abandoned himself to his reflections. What were those of Hans, I wondered, that man of the far West endowed with the fatalistic resignation of the East?

  For my part, my thoughts were all memories, and these took me up to the surface of the globe which I ought never to have left. The house in the Königstrasse, poor Gräuben, and dear old Martha passed like visions before my eyes, and in the dismal rumblings which sounded through the rock I imagined I could hear the noise of the cities of the earth.

  As for my uncle, who never forgot his work, he was carefully examining the nature of the terrain, torch in hand, trying to discover where he was from observation of the strata. This calculation, or rather this estimate, could only be a rough approximation; but a scientist is always a scientist as long as he retains his composure, and Professor Lidenbrock certainly possessed this quality to an extraordinary degree.

  I heard him murmuring geological terms which I understood, and in spite of myself I began to take an interest in this final piece of research.

  ‘Eruptive granite,’ he said. ‘We are still in the Primitive Period. But we are going up, we are going up! Who knows?’

  He had still not abandoned hope. With his hand he was feeling the perpendicular wall, and a few moments later he went on:

  ‘This is gneiss! And this is mica schist! Good! Soon we shall come to the terrane of the Transition Period, and then …’

  What did the Professor mean? Could he measure the thickness of the earth’s crust above us? Had he some means of making this calculation? No: he no longer had the manometer, and no calculation could take its place.

  Meanwhile the temperature was rising fast, and I felt bathed in a burning atmosphere like the heat given off by the furnace in the foundry when the molten metal is being poured into the moulds. Gradually Hans, my uncle, and I were obliged to take off our jackets and waistcoats, as the lightest covering became a source of discomfort, not to say pain.

  ‘Are we going up towards a furnace?’ I cried, at a moment when the temperature rose steeply.

  ‘No,’ replied my uncle. ‘That’s impossible, impossible!’

  ‘All the same,’ I said, feeling the side of the shaft, ‘this wall is burning hot.’

  Just as I said this, my hand touched the water and I hurriedly withdrew it.

  ‘The water is boiling!’ I cried.

  This time the Professor’s only answer was an angry gesture.

  Then an invincible terror took hold of me, and would not be shaken off. I felt that a catastrophe was approaching such as even the liveliest imagination could never have conceived. An idea, vague and uncertain at first, became a conviction in my mind. I thrust it away, but it stubbornly returned. I did not dare to put it into words, but a few involuntary observations confirmed me in my opinion. In the flickering light of the torch I noticed some convulsive movements in the layers of granite. A phenomenon was obviously going to take place in which electricity would play some part. And then there was this unbearable heat, this boiling water … I decided to consult the compass.

  It had gone mad!

  43

  Shot Out of a Volcano

  Yes, the compass had gone mad! The needle was swinging jerkily from one pole to the other, indicating every point of the compass in turn, and spinning around as if it were giddy.

  I was well aware that, according to generally accepted theories, the mineral crust of the globe is never in a state of complete rest; the changes produced by the decomposition of its constituent matter, the agitation caused by great liquid currents, and the action of magnetic forces all tend to disturb it, even though the creatures living on the surface may imagine that all is quiet down below. This phenomenon by itself would therefore not have alarmed me, or at least it would not have suggested to my mind the dreadful suspicion which occurred to it.

  But there were other facts, other circumstances of a special kind which I could no longer ignore. Loud explosions could be heard with increasing frequency; I could only compare them with the noise which would be made by a great number of waggons driven at full speed along a cobbled street. Before long this noise had become a continuous roll of thunder.

  Then the maddened compass, shaken by the electric phenomena, confirmed me in my opinion. The mineral crust was threatening to burst, the granite masses to join up, the fissure to close and the void to be filled while we poor atoms would be crushed in this formidable embrace.

  ‘Uncle, Uncle,’ I cried, ‘we are done for!’

  ‘What are you so frightened about now?’ he replied with astonishing calm. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘What’s the matter? Look at these shaking walls, this quivering rock, this torrid heat, this boiling water, these clouds of steam, this crazy needle – all the usual signs of an earthquake!’

  My uncle gently shook his head.

  ‘An earthquake?’ he said.

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘My boy, I think you are mistake
n.’

  ‘What! Don’t you recognize the symptoms?’

  ‘Of an earthquake? No. I am expecting something better than that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘An eruption, Axel.’

  ‘An eruption? You mean you think we are in the shaft of an active volcano?’

  ‘I do,’ said the Professor with a smile. ‘And I think it’s the best thing that could happen to us.’

  The best thing! Had my uncle gone out of his mind? What did he mean? And how could he be so calm and smiling?

  ‘What!’ I exclaimed. ‘We are caught in the midst of an eruption! Fate has flung us in the path of burning lava, molten rock, boiling water, and all sorts of eruptive matter! We are going to be thrown out, expelled, rejected, vomited, spat into the air, along with fragments of rock and a rain of ashes and cinders, in a whirlwind of flame! And you say that that is the best thing that could happen to us!’

  ‘Yes,’ replied the Professor, looking at me over the top of his spectacles. ‘Because it’s the only chance we have of returning to the surface of the earth.’

  I will say nothing of the countless ideas which then crossed each other in my mind. My uncle was right, absolutely right; and never had he struck me as bolder or more self-assured than at that moment when he was calmly working out the chances of being involved in an eruption.

  In the meantime we went on rising: the night went by in this continued ascent, with the din around us growing louder all the time. I was almost suffocated and thought my last hour was approaching; yet imagination is such a strange thing that I devoted myself to a really childish speculation. But I was the victim, not the master of my thoughts.

  It was obvious that we were being carried upwards by an eruptive thrust; under the raft there was boiling water, and under that a whole mass of lava, an agglomeration of rocks, which, when expelled from the crater, would be scattered in all directions. We were therefore in the chimney of a volcano; there was no room for doubt on that score.