Journey to the Center of the Earth (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (29 page)

Here my uncle’s natural weakness re-emerged, that of being unable to pronounce difficult words in public.

“The text called
Gigan—”

He could go no further.

“Giganteo—”

Impossible! The unfortunate word would not come out!

They would have had a good laugh at the Johanneum!
“Gigantosteology”
the professor finally managed to say, between two swearwords.

Then he continued with renewed energy and spirits:

“Yes, gentlemen, I know all these things! I also know that Cuvier and Blumenbach have identified these bones as simple bones of mammoths and other animals of the Quaternary period. But in this case doubt would be an insult to science! The corpse is here! You can see it, touch it. It’s not a skeleton, it’s an intact body, preserved for a purely anthropological purpose!”

I took care not to contradict this assertion.

“If I could wash it in a solution of sulphuric acid,” pursued my uncle, “I would be able to remove all the bits of soil and the splendid shells that are embedded in it. But I do not have this precious solvent at hand. Yet, such as it is, the body will tell us its own story.”

Here the professor took the fossil corpse and handled it with the skill of a showman.

“You see,” he resumed, “that it’s not even six feet tall, and we are far removed from the alleged giants. As for the race to which it belongs, it is obviously Caucasian. It’s the white race, our own! The skull of this fossil is a regular oval, with no prominent cheekbones, no projecting jaws. It shows no sign of the prognathism that diminishes the facial angle.
^bx
Measure that angle, it’s nearly ninety degrees. But I’ll go even further in my deductions, and I dare say that this human specimen belongs to the Japhetic family, which extends from India to the boundaries of western Europe. Don’t smile, gentlemen.”

Nobody was smiling, but the professor was used to seeing faces spread in smiles during his learned lectures.

“Yes,” he pursued with new energy, “this is a fossil man, a contemporary of the mastodons whose bones fill this amphitheatre. But if you ask me how he came here, how the layers in which he was buried slid into this enormous cavern in the earth, I will not allow myself to answer. No doubt in the Quaternary period considerable upheavals still took place in the earth’s crust. The gradual cooling of the globe created cracks, fissures and faults, into which some of the upper soil probably fell. I want to make no assertions, but after all the man is here, surrounded by the work of his hands, by the hatchets and the flint arrow-heads that made the Stone Age possible, and unless he came here as a tourist and a pioneer of science like myself, I cannot doubt the authenticity of his ancient origin.”

The professor fell silent, and I broke into unanimous applause. In any case my uncle was right, and more learned men than his nephew would have had trouble arguing with him.

Another clue. This fossilized body was not the only one in the immense boneyard. We found other corpses at every step we took in this dust, and my uncle could choose the most wonderful of these specimens to convince the skeptics.

Indeed it was an amazing spectacle, these generations of men and animals commingled in this cemetery. But one serious question arose that we dared not answer. Had these beings slid down to the shore of the Lidenbrock Sea through an upheaval in the ground when they were already reduced to dust? Or did they rather dwell in this underground world, under this artificial sky, living and dying like the inhabitants of the earth? Until now, only sea monsters and fishes had appeared to us alive! Did some man of the abyss still wander on this desert strand?

FOR ANOTHER HALF HOUR our feet trod on these layers of bones. We pushed on, driven by a burning curiosity. What other marvels, what new treasures for science did this cavern hold? My eyes were prepared for any surprise, my imagination for any amazement.

The shore had long disappeared behind the hills of bones. The rash professor, unconcerned about losing his way, took me along. We advanced in silence, bathed in electric waves. Due to some phenomenon that I cannot explain, and due to its by then complete diffusion, the light illuminated all the sides of an object equally. Its source no longer resided at a particular point in space and cast no shadows. One could have believed that it was midday in the middle of the summer, in the equatorial regions under the vertical rays of the sun. All steam had disappeared.

The rocks, the distant mountains, a few indistinct clumps of distant forests came to look strange in this equal distribution of the light waves. We resembled Hoffmann’s fantastic character who has lost his shadow.
¹¹

After a mile’s walk the edge of an immense forest appeared, but no longer one of the mushroom forests near Port Graüben.

It was the vegetation of the Tertiary period in all its magnificence. Tall palm trees of species that have now disappeared, superb palmaceae, pines, yews, cypress, and thujas represented the conifer family, and were linked to each other through a network of inextricable lianas. A lush carpet of moss and hepaticas covered the soil. Some creeks murmured in the shade, which did not deserve the name since the trees cast no shadow. On their banks grew tree-ferns similar to those grown in hothouses on the inhabited earth. Only color was missing from all those trees, shrubs, and plants that were deprived of the life-giving heat of the sun. Everything blended together in a uniform brownish and faded-looking hue. The leaves showed no green, and even the flowers, which were so numerous in the Tertiary period in which they first originated, now had no color or scent and looked under the impact of the atmosphere as if they were made out of faded paper.

My uncle Lidenbrock ventured into this gigantic thicket. I followed him, not without a certain fear. Since nature had here provided plant food, why would there not also be fearsome mammals? In the large clearings left by fallen and decayed trees, I saw leguminous plants, acerineae, rubiceae and many other edible shrubs that are liked by ruminants of all periods. Then trees from vastly different regions on the surface of the globe appeared, blended and mixed in together: the oak grew next to the palm tree, the Australian eucalyptus leaned against the Norwegian fir, the Northern birch-tree interlaced its branches with those of the New Zealand kauri. It was enough to drive the most ingenious classifiers of terrestrial botany mad.

Suddenly I stopped. With my hand I held my uncle back.

The diffuse light allowed us to perceive the most minute objects in the depth of the thicket. I thought I had seen ... No! really, with my own eyes, I did see vast shapes moving under the trees! Indeed, these were gigantic animals, a whole herd of mastodons, not fossil ones, but live ones, similar to those whose remains were found in the swamps of Ohio in 1801! I saw these large elephants whose trunks were writhing under the trees like a legion of snakes. I heard the noise of their long tusks whose ivory bore into the old tree trunks. The branches cracked, and the leaves, torn off in considerable quantities, were swept into the huge maws of these monsters.

So the dream in which I had seen all this prehistoric world of the Tertiary and Quaternary periods rise again finally became reality! And we were there, alone, in the bowels of the earth, at the mercy of its fierce inhabitants!

My uncle stared.

“Let’s go!” he said suddenly, gripping my arm. “Onward! Onward!”

“No!” I cried. “No! We have no weapons! What would we do in the midst of this herd of giant quadrupeds? Come, Uncle, come! No human can safely challenge the rage of these monsters.”

“No human being!” replied my uncle, lowering his voice. “You’re wrong, Axel. Look, look down there! It seems to me I see a living being! a being similar to ourselves! a man!”

I looked, shrugging my shoulders, and resolved to push skepticism to its furthest limits. But although I was reluctant, I had to yield to the evidence.

Indeed, less than a quarter of a mile away, leaning against the trunk of an enormous kauri, a human being, the Proteus of these underground regions, a new son of Neptune,
^by
watched over this countless herd of mastodons!

 

 

Yes!
Immanior ipse
! This was no longer the fossil being whose corpse we had raised up in the boneyard, this was a giant, able to control these monsters. He was more than twelve feet tall. His head, huge like a buffalo’s, disappeared in the underbrush of his unkempt hair. It seemed like a real mane similar to that of the elephant of the first ages. In his hand he wielded an enormous branch with ease, a crook worthy of this prehistoric shepherd.

We stood immobile, stunned. But we might be seen. We had to flee.

“Come, come!” I exclaimed, pulling my uncle away, who for the first time let it happen.

A quarter of an hour later we were out of sight of this formidable enemy.

And now that I think about it calmly, now that my spirit has found peace again, now that months have gone by since this strange and supernatural encounter, what to think, what to believe? No! It is impossible! Our senses were deceived, our eyes did not see what they saw! No human being exists in that subterranean world! No generation of men dwells in those lower caverns of the globe, unconcerned about the inhabitants of its surface, without contact with them! It is crazy, profoundly crazy!

I prefer to admit the existence of some animal whose structure resembles the human structure, some ape of the early geological ages, some protopithecus, some mesopithecus, like the one discovered by Mr. Lartet in the bone deposit of Sansan!
^ca
But in its size, this one exceeded all the measurements known in modern paleontology.

 

No matter! An ape, yes, an ape, no matter how unlikely! But a man, a living man, and with him a whole generation buried in the bowels of the earth! Never!

In the meantime, we had left the clear and luminous forest, speechless with amazement, overwhelmed by a stupefaction that bordered on mindlessness. We ran in spite of ourselves. It was a real flight, similar to those terrible impulses that one is subject to in certain night-mares. Instinctively we ran back to the Lidenbrock Sea, and I do not know in what vagaries my mind would have lost itself if it had not been for a concern that brought me back to practical matters.
^cb

Although I was certain that we were walking on soil where we had never set foot before, I often noticed rock formations whose shape reminded me of those at Port Graüben. This confirmed, in any case, the indications of the compass and our involuntary return to the north of the Lidenbrock Sea. Sometimes one could have mistaken one for the other. Brooks and waterfalls were tumbling everywhere from hundreds of projections in the rocks. I thought I recognized the layer of surturbrand, our faithful Hansbach and the cave in which I had come back to life. Then a few paces farther on, the arrangement of the cliffs, the appearance of a stream, the surprising outline of a rock threw me back in doubt.

I told my uncle about my indecision. Like myself, he hesitated. He could not find his way in this uniform scenery.

“Obviously,” I said to him, “we have not landed at our point of departure again, but the storm has carried us a little lower, and if we follow the shore we’ll find Port Graüben.”

“In that case,” replied my uncle, “it’s useless to continue this exploration, and the best is to return to our raft. But Axel, aren’t you mistaken?”

“It’s difficult to say for sure, Uncle, because all these rocks look alike. Yet I think I recognize the promontory at whose foot Hans built our vessel. We must be close to the little port, if indeed it isn’t right here,” I added, examining an inlet that I thought I recognized.

“No, Axel, we would at least find our own traces, and I see nothing...”

“But I do,” I exclaimed, rushing toward an object that glittered in the sand.

“What is it?”

“This,” I answered.

And I showed my uncle a rust-covered dagger which I had just picked up.

“Well!” he said, “did you bring this weapon with you?”

“Me? Not at all! But you ...”

“No, not that I know,” said the professor. “I’ve never had this object in my possession.”

“Well, this is strange!”

“No, Axel, it’s very simple. Icelanders often have weapons of this kind, and Hans, to whom this belongs, must have lost it...”

I shook my head. Hans had never had this dagger in his possession.

“So is this the weapon of some prehistoric warrior?” I exclaimed, “of a living man, of a contemporary of that gigantic shepherd’s? But no! This is not a tool of the Stone Age! Not even of the Bronze Age! This blade is made of steel...”