The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (9 page)

The dispassionate man of reason and fact, Professor Lidenbrock, has no doubt at all about what he will do. He and Axel are off to Iceland instantly, and down they go into Sneffells Yokul. This volcanic mount has two peaks and a crater containing three chimneys, the middle one of which is a hundred feet in diameter and leads into the unknown. In a passing moment that is a defused replay of the climax of
Captain Hatteras,
as they start downward Axel the Romantic is overcome by an attack of vertigo on the edge of the abyss and must be pulled back to safety.

Professor Lidenbrock, Axel and an Icelandic guide named Hans descend into the darkness armed with two of the recently invented Ruhmkorff coils, arc lamps which provide them with electric light. Like Verne’s steerable balloon
Victoria,
this was a transformation of contemporary science into super-science. With less than a wave of the hand from Verne, clumsy experimental lights are altered into reliable and efficient devices capable of continuing to work for as long as the party remains underground.

And it is no mere afternoon outing they are bound upon. The party spends weeks hiking through underground caverns where successive strata of perfectly preserved fossils serve to dramatize the latest ideas about prehistory, and to give us a clue that we have left the Village and entered the World Beyond the Hill.

What the party has found is not a Symmes Hole leading directly to an interior world with its own suns. In fact, they are nowhere near the center of the Earth, the destination promised in the book’s title. More plausibly, Verne says that they are in caverns eighty-eight miles below the surface of the Earth. Yet this is enough. We may not be in a Symmes Hole. We may never reach the center of the Earth. But this maze of underground caves and passages does lead to a transcendent realm, a place of inexhaustible mystery.

Native transcendence first appears when Axel becomes lost in the dark and breaks his arc light. In the attempt to rejoin his companions, he knocks himself unconscious. He awakens on the shores of a mysterious underground ocean. Everywhere there is light:

It was not the light of the sun with its dazzling shafts of brilliance and the splendours of its rays; nor was it the pale vague glow of the moon, which is just a cold reflection. No, the power of this light, its tremulous diffusion, its clear bright whiteness, its coolness, and its superiority as a source of illumination to moonlight, clearly indicated an electrical origin. It was like an aurora borealis, a continuous cosmic phenomenon, filling a cavern big enough to contain an ocean.
⁶¹

Imaginative Axel, dumbfounded by the immensity of this cavern with its mysterious illumination, wonders briefly if Symmes’s theory of an interior world with its own suns might not be true. But even if it isn’t—which we never find out, since the possibility of a Symmes Hole is thereafter dropped uninvestigated—these wonders in themselves are enough to tell us and Axel where we are. As Axel puts it:

I gazed at these marvels in silence, unable to find words to express my feelings. I felt as if I were on some distant planet, Uranus or Neptune, witnessing phenomena quite foreign to my “terrestrial” nature. New words were required for new sensations, and my imagination failed to supply them. I gazed, I thought, I admired, with a stupefaction not unmixed with fear.
⁶²

It is clear to Axel, at least, in his stupefaction and fear, that they are in an alien realm, even if he cannot articulate his perception. After this recognition by Axel, in the previously desolate underground region they have entered prehistoric living things begin to spring into existence, fossils taking on life. The travelers encounter ancient plants—tree-ferns and gigantic mushrooms. Then they build themselves a raft and set sail on the underground ocean, where extinct fishes and saurians swim.

As they travel this immense ocean, as great in extent as the Mediterranean, Axel falls into a “prehistoric daydream”
⁶³
which may be the most imaginative passage that Verne ever wrote. Back through time Axel passes, witnessing the earlier stages of life. The dream climaxes:

The whole of this fossil world came to life again in my imagination. I went back to the scriptural periods of creation, long before the birth of man, when the unfinished world was not yet ready for him. Then my dream took me even farther back into the ages before the appearance of living creatures. The mammals disappeared, then the birds, then the reptiles of the Secondary Period, and finally the fishes, crustaceans, molluscs, and articulated creatures. The zoophytes of the transitional period returned to nothingness in their turn. The whole of life was concentrated in me, and my heart was the only one beating in that depopulated world.

Centuries passed by like days. I went back through the long series of terrestrial changes. The plants disappeared; the granite rocks softened; solid matter turned to liquid under the action of intense heat; water covered the surface of the globe, boiling and volatilizing; steam enveloped the earth, which gradually turned into a gaseous mass, white-hot, as big and bright as the sun.

In the centre of this nebula, which was fourteen hundred thousand times as large as the globe it would one day form, I was carried through infinite space. My body was volatilized in its turn and mingled like an imponderable atom with these vast vapours tracing their flaming orbits through infinity.
⁶⁴

Heavy stuff! Axel wakes from this vision of imaginative possibility—this “brief hallucination”
⁶⁵
as he calls it—by nearly throwing himself off the raft into the ocean under the dream’s influence, and being pulled back to safety from the infinite sea by Hans the Icelander.

Thus far the perception of transcendence has been limited to Axel. Where he discerns marvels, the unflappable Professor Lidenbrock sees only confirmations of the theories of science. When Axel cries, “That’s wonderful!”
⁶⁶
the professor overrules him with, “No, it’s perfectly natural.”
⁶⁷
It is only by the constant maintenance of this double vision that Verne is able to penetrate so deeply into the World Beyond the Hill without losing his head.

This is not to last, however. On the farther shore of the underground ocean, the party comes across a vast plain entirely covered with heaps of fossil bones. Among these, they find a perfectly preserved human skull, and then the mummified fossil of an ancient man. When they travel a little further, they encounter a Tertiary Period forest and a living herd of mastodons ripping away tree branches and eating them.

Here the unresolved conflict between Axel’s dreams and intimations of mystery and Lidenbrock’s plausible scientific explanations comes to a head. Axel is the first to come to the realization that dream and fact are one. He thinks:

“So that dream in which I had had a vision of the prehistoric world, of the Tertiary and Quaternary Periods, was finally coming true. And there we were, alone in the bowels of the earth, at the mercy of its fierce inhabitants!”
⁶⁸

But Professor Lidenbrock is not yet convinced. In spite of Axel’s protests, he wishes to have a closer look. Then, however, they see the shepherd of these mastodons. It is a shaggy human figure over twelve feet tall—twice the size of the fossil man they have found.

This is more than heavy stuff—it is freaky. In 1864, the existence of earlier forms of man, differing from present humankind, had not yet been conclusively demonstrated. To meet a prehistoric man, a giant, in this underground region is a strangeness that not even a Professor Lidenbrock can reduce to lecture-room rationality.

Axel flees in terror. And he pulls his uncle along behind him, “who for the first time in his life allowed himself to be persuaded.”
⁶⁹

The moment of integrated vision ends. From the safe vantage of retrospection, Axel-the-narrator interjects a denial of what we have just seen:

Now that I can think about it unemotionally, now that I am quite calm, now that months have gone by since that strange, extraordinary encounter, what am I to think, what am I to believe? Was it a man we saw? No, that is impossible! Our senses were deceived, our eyes did not see what we thought they saw. No human being could exist in that subterranean world; no generation of men could live in those deep caverns of the globe, caring nothing about the inhabitants of the surface and having no communication with them. The very idea is insane! . . . It must have been a monkey, however improbable that may seem. The idea that a man, a living man, and with him a whole generation, should be buried down there in the bowels of the earth is unacceptable.
⁷⁰

As though the thought of a twelve-foot monkey herding mastodons in an electrically lit underground wonderland would be any more inherently plausible. No, it is ultimately Verne himself for whom the shaggy man has been too much. It is Verne who finds his own imagination unacceptable and rejects it. Verne can no longer go on splitting his vote between Axel and Lidenbrock, mystery and plausibility, dream and fact. He is in a transcendent realm within the World Beyond the Hill and the strangeness of it is more than he can bear.

Immediately after refusing to confront this fearsome alien creature, the travelers find their path downward blocked. When they attempt to blast it open with guncotton, the earth splits apart and their raft is swept into the abyss by the waters of the ocean.

For hour after hour they fall—and then they begin to rise again, carried upward on a magic cushion of boiling water and red-hot lava, an experience they find trying but not threatening. Axel once more loses consciousness. When he awakens, he is on the slopes of the newly erupted volcano Stromboli, near Sicily, safe and sound with his companions in the familiar world of everyday. Back in the Village again, and without a single burn to show for having been spewed out of a volcano.

The twelve-foot shaggy man has frightened Verne into retreating, as though it were Frankenstein’s monster returned, and he Victor Frankenstein. He has had to bail out of his story any way that he can, and hang the implausibility of the device. No matter that the volcanic fire that he could not face with Hatteras is given as the safe and easy means of return with Lidenbrock. In their relief to be home, Verne, Axel and the reader will all agree not to question this mystery.

But in spite of this abrupt ending, what Verne had accomplished in
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
was the beginning of a new step in the development of SF. Sleepwalking, splitting his awareness, pretending to himself all the while that he knew not what he was doing, Verne had penetrated into the World Beyond the Hill with the aid of super-science and found transcendence there. It is of no importance that Verne thereafter lost his head and ran away from what he had found. The entire history of SF, one step at a time, has been made by people who were out of their heads or beyond their depth.

What is of importance is that Verne had connected the World Beyond the Hill and the Village. The return passage from the realm of wonder into the world of known things at the end of
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
may have been mysterious; the journey outbound from the familiar into the unknown was a thoroughly plausible step-by-step slog. After this story, a roadway existed from the Nineteenth Century Village into the World Beyond the Hill.

Journey to the Centre of the Earth
was the most forthright penetration of the World Beyond the Hill that Verne ever made. It was the only one that took him into territory that was not merely unknown but completely imaginary, and therefore free to display any imaginative possibility that Verne might conceive of. In no other book by Verne was the subtle balance between the Romantic dreamer and the Victorian man of science maintained so successfully.

However, in further extraordinary voyages written during the 1860s, Verne did nerve himself sufficiently to return twice more to the World Beyond the Hill—in each case seeking undomesticated transcendence, but in each case avoiding a confrontation with it. In both stories he protected his characters from mystery by encasing them in tightly closed super-scientific exploratory vehicles and filling their heads with litanies of scientific fact to chant in self-defense.

The fourth extraordinary voyage was Verne’s attempt to improve on “Hans Pfaall,” which he had criticized so specifically for implausibility in his essay on Edgar Poe, finally published in 1864.
From the Earth to the Moon
(1865) was the most technically detailed SF story written to this point. In constructing it, Verne not only enlisted the aid of his cousin, a mathematician, but claimed to have consulted five hundred reference works.

In Verne’s story, the American Civil War is over and the artillerymen who make up the Baltimore Gun Club are restive. They decide to shoot a projectile from a giant cannon and strike the Moon. While their 900-foot-long gun is building, a French adventurer, Ardan, modeled on Verne’s friend Nadar, arrives and alters the thrust of the project. When the gun is fired, he wishes to be inside the cannonball. His enthusiasm is so compelling that eventually a party of three—Ardan and two scientists—decides to go on this one-way trip to the Moon.

Verne’s space-gun was no more realizable science than the hydrogen-heating furnace described in
Five Weeks in a Balloon.
Firing this giant cannon would instantly kill all within the projectile. So great would air resistance within the barrel be that the aluminum bullet would not even reach the mouth of the gun.
From the Earth to the Moon
is a convincing demonstration that plausibility in SF is far more a matter of effective arguments aimed at the state of knowledge of a particular audience than an absolute condition of accuracy to literal fact. Verne’s wealth of fact and figure, his calculations and arguments were all more than sufficient to establish the literary plausibility of his super-scientific space-cannon.

But the story is only half a story.
From the Earth to the Moon
ends abruptly with the firing of the cannon and the announcement from Cambridge Observatory that the projectile has not struck the Moon as it was aimed to, but rather has gone into orbit around it. How strange! How mysterious!