Journey to the Center of the Earth (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (6 page)

This, I admit, seemed pretty logical to me.

“I’m therefore led to believe,” continued my uncle, “that one of the owners of this book wrote these mysterious letters. But who the devil was that owner? Didn’t he put his name somewhere on the manuscript?”

My uncle raised his spectacles, took up a strong magnifying glass, and carefully examined the first pages of the book. On the back of the second one, the half-title page, he discovered a sort of stain which looked like an ink blot. But in looking at it very closely one could distinguish some half-erased letters. My uncle understood that this was the interesting part; so he focused on the stain, and with the help of his big magnifying glass, he ended up identifying the following symbols, Runic characters that he read without hesitation.

“Arne Saknussemm!” he exclaimed in a tone of triumph. “Now
that
is a name, and an Icelandic name at that, the name of a sixteenth-century scholar, a famous alchemist!”
³

I looked at my uncle with a certain admiration.

“Those alchemists,” he resumed, “Avicenna, Bacon, Lully, Paracelsus,
⁴
were the real and only scholars of their time. They made discoveries at which we may rightfully be astonished. Why wouldn’t this Saknussemm have hidden some surprising invention in this incomprehensible cryptogram? It must be so. It is so.”

The Professor’s imagination caught fire at this hypothesis.

“No doubt,” I ventured to reply, “but what interest would this scholar have had in hiding a marvelous discovery in this way?”

“Why? Why? How would I know? Didn’t Galileo do the same by Saturn?
^g
Besides, we’ll see. I’ll get at the secret of this document, and I’ll neither sleep nor eat until I’ve found it out.”

“Oh!” I thought.

“Nor you either, Axel,” he added.

“The devil!” I said to myself, “then it’s lucky that I’ve eaten dinner for two!”

“First of all,” said my uncle, “we must find out the language of this ‘cipher’; that can’t be too difficult.”

At these words I quickly raised my head. My uncle continued his soliloquy.

“Nothing’s easier. There are a hundred and thirty-two letters in this document, seventy-seven consonants and fifty-five vowels. Now the words of southern languages approximately match this distribution, whereas northern tongues are infinitely richer in consonants. Therefore this must be a southern language.”

These conclusions were very appropriate.

“But what language is it?”

I expected scholarship in response, but was confronted with in-depth analysis instead.

“This Saknussemm,” he went on, “was an educated man; now since he wasn’t writing in his own mother tongue, he would naturally select the language that was used by the cultivated minds of the sixteenth century, I mean Latin. If I’m mistaken, I can try Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, or Hebrew. But the scholars of the sixteenth century generally wrote in Latin. I’m therefore entitled to declare a priori: this is Latin.”

I jumped up from my chair. My memories of Latin rebelled against the assumption that this sequence of baroque words could belong to the sweet language of Virgil.

“Yes, it’s Latin,” my uncle continued, “but scrambled Latin.”

“Good luck!” I thought. “If you can unscramble this, my uncle, you’re a clever man.”

“Let’s examine it carefully,” he said, taking the sheet on which I had written. “Here is a series of one hundred and thirty-two letters in apparent disorder. There are words that consist only of consonants, like the first one,
mm. rnlls;
others where vowels predominate, as for instance the fifth one,
unteief,
or the next-to-last one,
oseibo.
Now, this arrangement was obviously not planned: it came about
mathematically
as a consequence of the unknown rule which determined the order of these letters. It seems certain to me that the original sentence was written normally, then scrambled according to a rule that we have to discover. Whoever has the key to this cipher can read it fluently. But what is that key? Axel, do you have this key?”

I said not a word in answer to this question, for a very good reason. My eyes had fallen on a charming picture on the wall, a portrait of Graüben. My uncle’s ward was at that time in Altona,
^h
staying with a relative, and her absence made me very sad because, I may confess it now, the pretty Virland girl and the professor’s nephew loved each other with entirely German patience and tranquility. We had become engaged unbeknownst to my uncle, who was too much of a geologist to understand such feelings. Graüben was a charming blue-eyed blonde, rather given to gravity and seriousness; but that did not prevent her from loving me sincerely. As for me, I adored her, if there is such a word in the German language! So the picture of my pretty Virland girl instantaneously shifted me out of the world of realities into that of imagination and memory.

I saw the faithful companion of my labors and my pleasures again. Every day she helped me put my uncle’s precious rocks in order; she labeled them with me. She was a very accomplished mineralogist, Miss Graüben! She could have taught a scholar a few things. She was fond of investigating abstruse scientific questions. What sweet hours had we spent studying together! and how much I envied the luck of those insensible stones that she handled with her charming hands!

Then, when our leisure hours came, we used to go out together, we walked along the shady avenues by the Alster, and went together up to the tar-covered old windmill that looks so handsome by the side of the lake; on the way, we chatted and held hands. I told her things that made her laugh heartily. And so we reached the banks of the Elbe,
ⁱ
and after having said goodnight to the swans that float among the big white water lilies, we returned to the quay on the steamer.

This is as far as I had gotten in my dream when my uncle brought me violently back to reality by banging his hand on the table.

“Let’s see,” he said, “the first idea that must come to mind to scramble the letters of a sentence is, I think, to write the words vertically instead of horizontally.”

“Indeed!” I thought.

“Now we must see what the result would be. Axel, write any sentence on this piece of paper, but instead of arranging the letters one after the other, place them successively into vertical columns, so as to group them together in five or six lines.”

I understood what he was after, and immediately I wrote from top to bottom:

“Good,” said the professor, without reading them. “Now write out those words in a horizontal line.”

I obeyed, and ended up with the following sentence:

 

IyrhiGe loy,trn oummta! vvuylü eecleb

 

“Perfect!” said my uncle, tearing the paper out of my hands. “This already resembles the ancient document: vowels and consonants are in the same disorder. There are even capitals in the middle of words, and commas too, just as in Saknussemm’s parchment.”

I couldn’t help but find these observations very ingenious.

“Now,” said my uncle, looking straight at me, “to read the sentence you’ve just written, and which I don’t know, all I have to do is take the first letter of each word, then the second, then the third, and so forth.”

And my uncle, to his great astonishment, and above all my own, read out:

“What!” said the professor.

Yes, without being aware of it, like a clumsy lover, I had written down this compromising sentence!

“Aha! you’re in love with Graüben?” he said in the tone of a guardian.

“Yes ... no ...” I stammered.

“Aha! You love Graüben,” he mechanically repeated. “Well, let’s apply the process to the document in question.”

My uncle, falling back into his all-absorbing contemplation, had already forgotten my careless words. I say merely “careless,” for the mind of the scholar could not understand these affairs of the heart. But fortunately, the business of the document won out.

At the moment of his major experiment, Professor Lidenbrock’s eyes flashed right through his spectacles. His fingers trembled as he took up the old parchment again. He was seriously moved. At last he coughed loudly, and with a grave voice, calling out the first, then the second letter of each word one after the other, he dictated me the following series:

When I came to the end, I must admit that I was excited; these letters, pronounced one by one, had conveyed no meaning to my mind. I expected, therefore, that the professor would let a magnificent Latin phrase roll majestically from his tongue.

But who could have foreseen it! A violent bang of the fist shook the table. The ink spilled and the pen dropped from my fingers.

“That’s not it!” my uncle shouted, “this makes no sense!”

Then, crossing the study like a cannonball, descending the staircase like an avalanche, he rushed into the Königstrasse and ran away at full speed.

“HE’S GONE?” EXCLAIMED MARTHA, running out of her kitchen at the noise of the violent slamming of doors.

“Yes,” I replied, “completely gone!”

“Well; and how about his lunch?” said the old servant.

“He won’t have any.”

“And his dinner?”

“He won’t have any.”

“What?” exclaimed Martha, with clasped hands.

“No, dear Martha, he won’t eat any more, and no one else in the house either! Uncle Lidenbrock is going to make us all fast until he succeeds in deciphering an old scrawl that is absolutely undecipherable!”

“Oh, my dear! must we then all die of hunger?”

I hardly dared to confess that, with so absolute a ruler as my uncle, that fate was inevitable.

The old servant, seriously alarmed, returned to the kitchen moaning.

When I was alone, I thought I would go and tell Graüben all about it. But how would I be able to escape from the house? The Professor might return at any moment. And suppose he called me? And suppose he tackled me again with this deciphering work, which not even old Oedipus could have solved! And if I did not answer his call, what would happen?

The wisest thing was to remain where I was. A mineralogist at Besançon had just sent us a collection of siliceous nodules, which I had to classify. So I set to work. I sorted, labeled, and arranged all these hollow rocks, in each of which grew little crystals, in their display case.

But this work did not absorb all my attention. The business of the old document kept working in my brain. My head throbbed with excitement, and I felt a vague uneasiness. I had a premonition of an incipient disaster.

In an hour my nodules were all arranged in good order. Then I dropped down into the old velvet armchair, my arms hanging down and my head thrown back. I lit my long crooked pipe, whose head was sculpted to look like an idly resting naiad; then I entertained myself by watching the carbonization that gradually turned my naiad into a real negress. Now and then I listened whether a well-known step sounded on the stairs. But no. Where could my uncle be at that moment? I imagined him running under the beautiful trees which line the road to Altona, gesticulating, hitting the wall with his cane, violently thrashing the grass, cutting the heads off the thistles, and disturbing the solitary storks in their rest.

Would he return in triumph or discouraged? Which would get the upper hand, he or the secret? I was asking myself these questions, and mechanically took between my fingers the sheet of paper with the incomprehensible succession of letters I had written down; and I repeated to myself:

“What does it mean?”

I tried to group the letters so as to form words. Quite impossible! When I put them together by twos, threes, fives or sixes, nothing came of it but nonsense. To be sure, the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth letters made the English word ‘ice’; the eighty-fourth, eighty-fifth and eighty-sixth made up the word ‘sir.’ In the midst of the document, in the third line, I noticed the Latin words “rota,” “mutabile,” “ira,” “nec,” “atra.”