Journey to the Centre of the Earth

  ‘Calm down, Axel,’ he said. ‘You will get nothing out of that stolid servant. So listen to the proposal I want to put to you.’

  I folded my arms and looked my uncle straight in the face.

  ‘The lack of water,’ he said, ‘is the only obstacle in our way. In the eastern gallery, made of lava, schist, and coal, we haven’t found a single drop of moisture. We may be more fortunate if we follow the western tunnel.’

  I shook my head with an air of total incredulity.

  ‘Hear me out,’ the Professor went on, forcing his voice. ‘While you were lying here motionless, I went and examined the course of that gallery. It plunges straight into the bowels of the earth, and in a few hours it will bring us to the granite mass. There we are bound to find abundant springs. The nature of the rock makes that certain, and instinct joins with logic to support my conviction. Now this is the proposal I want to put to you. When Columbus asked his crews for three days more to reach land, those crews, sick and terrified though they were, granted his request – and he discovered the New World. I am the Columbus of these subterranean regions, and I am asking you for only one day more. If, after one day, I have not found the water we need, I swear to you that we will return to the surface.’

  In spite of my irritation I was touched by these words and by the effort it must have cost my uncle to make such a promise.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘do as you wish, and may God reward your superhuman energy. You have only a few hours left in which to tempt Fate. Let us be on our way!’

  22

  I Collapse

  The descent began again, this time by the new gallery. Hans went first as usual. We had not gone a hundred yards before the Professor, passing his lamp along the walls, cried:

  ‘These are primitive rocks! Now we are on the right track! Forward!’

  When in its early days the earth was slowly cooling down, the shrinking process produced dislocations, fissures, hollows, and chasms. The passage along which we were walking was a fissure of this sort, through which molten granite had once poured. Its countless windings formed an inextricable labyrinth through the primeval mass.

  The farther down we went, the more clearly the succession of beds forming the primitive terrane appeared. Geologists regard this primitive terrane as the foundation of the mineral crust of the earth, and they have established that it consists of three different layers, schist, gneiss, and mica schist, resting on that unshakeable rock called granite.

  Never had mineralogists found themselves in such wonderful conditions for studying nature in situ. What the boring-machine, an insensible clumsy machine, could not bring to the surface of the inner texture of the globe, we were going to be able to study with our own eyes and touch with our own hands.

  Through the beds of schist, which were tinged with splendid shades of green, there wound metallic threads of copper and manganese, with occasional traces of platinum and gold. My mind lingered for a while on these riches buried in the bowels of the earth, hidden for ever from the covetous eyes of mankind. These treasures had been buried so deep by the convulsions of primeval times that neither the pickaxe nor the mattock would ever be able to extract them from their tomb.

  The schists were followed by layers of gneiss, remarkable for the regularity and parallelism of its strata, and then by the mica schists, disposed in large flakes which attracted the eye by the sparkle of the white mica.

  The beams from our lamps, reflected by the tiny facets of the rocky mass, criss-crossed in all directions so that I felt as if I were walking through a hollow diamond inside which the rays were shattering against each other in countless coruscations.

  About six o’clock this festival of light abated to a noticeable extent and almost ceased. The walls took on a crystallized but sombre appearance; the mica combined with feldspar and quartz to form the rock of rocks, the hardest of all, which carries the weight of the four terranes without being crushed. We were immured in a huge prison of granite.

  It was now eight in the evening, and there was still no sign of water. I was suffering agonies of thirst. My uncle strode on, refusing to stop and listening for the murmur of some spring. But there was nothing to be heard.

  Finally my legs began to fail me. I bore my torments as best I could so as not to force my uncle to stop. That would have driven him to despair, for the day was drawing to a close – the last day that belonged to him.

  At last my strength gave out completely. I gave a cry and fell.

  ‘Help! I’m dying!’

  My uncle turned back. He gazed at me with his arms folded and then muttered: ‘It’s all over!’

  The last thing I saw was a frightening gesture of rage before I closed my eyes.

  When I opened them again, I saw my two companions motionless and rolled up in their rugs. Were they asleep? For my part, I could not get a moment’s sleep. I was suffering too much, most of all at the thought that there was no remedy. My uncle’s last words – ‘It’s all over!’ – echoed in my ears, for in my present state of weakness there could be no hope of returning to the surface.

  We had nearly four miles of the earth’s crust above us, and this mass seemed to be bearing down with all its weight on my shoulders. I felt crushed, and I exhausted myself in violent attempts to turn over on my granite bed.

  A few hours went by. A profound silence, like that of the grave, reigned around us. No sound could reach us through these walls, the thinnest of which was five miles thick.

  Yet in the midst of my drowsiness I thought I heard a noise. It was growing dark in the tunnel and as I gazed hard it seemed to me that I could see the Icelander disappearing with the lamp in his hand.

  Why was he leaving us? Was he abandoning us to our fate? My uncle was asleep. I tried to give a shout, but my voice could not break through my parched lips. It was now completely dark and the last sounds had just died away in the distance.

  ‘Hans has abandoned us!’ I cried. ‘Hans! Hans!’

  I shouted these words within me: they went no farther. Yet after the first moment of panic, I felt ashamed of my suspicions of a man whose conduct so far had been above reproach. His departure could not be desertion, for instead of going up the gallery he was descending it. Treachery would have taken him up, not down. This reasoning allayed my fears to some extent, and I turned to other thoughts. Only some serious motive would have led that quiet man to forfeit his sleep. Was he on the track of some discovery? Had he, in the silence of the night, heard some murmur which my ears had failed to detect?

  23

  We Find Water

  For a whole hour my delirious brain passed in review all the reasons which might have roused the quiet huntsman to action. The most fantastic ideas got tangled up in my mind. I thought that I was going mad.

  But at last I heard the sound of footsteps in the depths of the abyss. Hans was coming up again. A flickering light began to glimmer on the walls, and then came round the nearest bend in the corridor. Hans appeared.

  He went up to my uncle, put his hand on his shoulder, and gently woke him. My uncle got up.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Vatten,’ replied the guide.

  It would seem that intense suffering can turn anybody into a polyglot. I did not know a single word of Danish, yet I instinctively understood the word our guide had uttered.

  ‘Water! Water!’ I cried, clapping my hands and gesticulating like a madman.

  ‘Water!’ repeated my uncle. ‘Hvar?’ he asked the Icelander.

  ‘Nedat,’ replied Hans.

  Where? Down below! I could understand everything. I seized the guide’s hands and squeezed them, while he gazed calmly at me.

  We got ready quickly and were soon making our way down a corridor with a slope of one in three. Half an hour later we had gone a mile and a quarter, and were two thousand feet farther down.

  At that moment I distinctly heard an unfamiliar sound travelling through the granite walls, a sort of dull rumbling, like distant thunder.
During this first half-hour of our walk, seeing no sign of the promised spring, my fears had been reawakened, but now my uncle explained the origin of the noise I could hear.

  ‘Hans was not mistaken,’ he said. ‘What you can hear is the roar of a torrent.’

  ‘A torrent?’ I exclaimed.

  ‘There’s no doubt about it. A subterranean river is flowing around us.’

  We hurried on, spurred on by hope. I no longer felt tired: this murmur of running water had already refreshed me. The torrent, which for some time had been over our heads, was now roaring and leaping along inside the left-hand wall. I kept passing my hand over the rock, hoping to find traces of moisture or damp, but in vain.

  Another half-hour went by, and another mile and a quarter was covered.

  It now became clear that the guide had gone no further during his absence. Guided by an instinct peculiar to mountaineers and water-diviners, he had as it were felt this torrent through the rock, but he had certainly not seen any of the precious liquid or quenched his thirst with it.

  Soon indeed it became clear that, if we went on, we should be getting farther away from the stream, the noise of which was becoming fainter.

  We turned back. Hans stopped at the exact spot where the torrent seemed closest to us. I sat near the wall, where I could hear the water rushing past me with extreme violence about two feet away. But a granite wall still separated us from it.

  Without thinking, without asking myself whether there might not be some way of obtaining this water, I gave way to a feeling of despair.

  Hans looked at me, and I thought I saw a smile appear on his lips.

  He stood up and took the lamp. I followed him. He went up to the wall while I watched him. He pressed his ear against the dry stone and moved it slowly to and fro, listening intently. I realized that he was trying to find the exact spot where the noise of the torrent was loudest. He found that spot three feet up from the floor.

  I was tremendously excited, though I scarcely dared to guess what the guide intended to do. But I understood and clasped my hands and hugged him when I saw him seize his pickaxe and attack the rock.

  ‘We are saved,’ I cried.

  ‘Yes,’ said my uncle, in a state of frantic excitement. ‘Hans is right! What a splendid fellow he is! We wouldn’t have thought of that!’

  He was right; this solution, simple though it was, would never have occurred to us. Admittedly nothing could be more dangerous than to take a pickaxe to this underpinning of the world. What if the wall caved in and crushed us? What if the torrent, bursting through the rock, carried us away? These dangers were very real, but at that moment no fears of rock-falls or floods could hold us back, and our thirst was so intense that we would have dug into the very bed of the ocean to allay it.

  Hans set about his task, which neither my uncle nor I could have performed: we should simply have struck splinters from the rock in our impatience. The guide, on the contrary, was calm and self-possessed, wearing the rock away with a succession of light blows and producing an opening six inches wide. I could hear the sound of the water growing, and I imagined I could already feel the refreshing liquid on my lips.

  Soon the pickaxe had penetrated two feet into the granite wall. Hans had been at work for over an hour and I was writhing about with impatience. My uncle wanted to join in himself; I had some difficulty in holding him back, and indeed he had just taken hold of his pickaxe when a sudden hissing was heard. A jet of water shot out of the hole and broke against the opposite wall.

  Hans, almost thrown off his balance by the shock, could not repress a cry of pain. I understood why when, plunging my hands into the jet, I in my turn gave a loud cry. The spring was scalding hot.

  ‘This water is boiling!’ I cried.

  ‘Well, it will cool down,’ replied my uncle.

  The corridor was filling with steam, while a stream was forming and running away down its subterranean windings. Soon we were able to take our first draught.

  What pleasure it gave us! What incomparable ecstasy! What was this water, and where did it come from? We did not care: it was water, and, although it was still warm, it brought back the life which had been on the point of departing. I drank without stopping, without so much as tasting.

  It was only after a minute’s bliss that I exclaimed:

  ‘Why there’s iron in it!’

  ‘Nothing better for the digestion,’ retorted my uncle. ‘It obviously has a high mineral content. This expedition of ours will be just as good for us as a stay at Spa or Toeplitz!’

  ‘Oh, how delicious it is!’

  ‘I should think so, six miles underground! It has an inky flavour which is not unpleasant. What a splendid source of strength Hans has found us here! I propose we should give his name to this health-giving stream.’

  ‘Agreed!’ I cried.

  And the name of ‘Hansbach’ was promptly bestowed on it.

  Hans did not give himself any airs as a result. After refreshing himself in moderation, he settled down in a corner in his usual quiet fashion.

  ‘Now,’ I said, ‘we mustn’t let this water run away.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked my uncle. ‘I imagine the spring is inexhaustible.’

  ‘All the same, let’s fill the water-bottle and the flasks, and then try to stop up the opening.’

  My advice was followed. With fragments of granite and pieces of tow, Hans tried to plug the hole he had made in the wall. This was anything but easy. He only succeeded in scalding his hands; the pressure was too great, and all his efforts were fruitless.

  ‘It’s obvious,’ I said, ‘that the upper reaches of this watercourse are very high up, judging by the force of the jet.’

  ‘There’s no doubt about that,’ replied my uncle. ‘If this column of water is 32,000 feet high, its pressure is equal to that of a thousand atmospheres. But I’ve got an idea.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why should we be so anxious to stop up this opening?’

  ‘Because …’

  For the life of me I could not think of a reason.

  ‘When our flasks are empty, can we be sure of being able to refill them?’

  ‘No, it’s quite true that we can’t.’

  ‘Well then, let’s allow this water to run on! It will run downwards as a matter of course, and will guide us as well as refresh us on our way.’

  ‘What a splendid idea!’ I exclaimed. ‘And with this stream to help us, there’s no reason why our expedition shouldn’t be successful.’

  ‘Ah, so you’re coming round to my way of thinking, my boy!’ said the Professor, laughing.

  ‘I’m not just coming round – I’ve come!’

  ‘Wait a moment, though. Let’s begin by getting a few hours’ rest.’

  I had completely forgotten that it was night. The chronometer reminded me of that fact, and soon all three of us, adequately restored and refreshed, fell into a sound sleep.

  24

  Under the Sea

  The next day, we had already forgotten all our past sufferings. At first I was surprised at not feeling thirsty any more, and for a moment I wondered why this was. The murmuring stream running at my feet gave me the answer.

  We had breakfast and drank some of this excellent ferruginous water. I felt wonderfully cheered and resolved to go a long way. Why shouldn’t a man as determined as my uncle attain his object, when he was accompanied by a guide as industrious as Hans and a nephew as devoted as myself? Such were the splendid ideas which occurred to me. If anyone had suggested that I should return to the summit of Sneffels, I would have refused with the utmost indignation.

  Fortunately, all that we had to do was descend.

  ‘Let us start!’ I cried, awakening with my shout the oldest echoes in the world.

  We set off again at eight on Thursday morning. The winding granite tunnel had all sorts of unexpected bends and seemed as tortuous as a maze, but its general direction was consistently south-east. My uncle kept consulting his compass very
attentively, to keep account of the way we had come.

  The gallery was almost horizontal, with a slope of one in forty at the most. The murmuring stream ran gently at our feet; I thought of it as a sort of familiar spirit guiding us underground, and now and then I stroked the warm naiad whose singing accompanied our steps. Good humour has always taken a mythological form with me.

  As for my uncle, he kept inveighing against the horizontal nature of the path, as an enthusiast for verticals. Our route seemed to be stretching away into infinity, and instead of sliding down the terrestrial radius, as he put it, we were travelling along the hypotenuse. But we had no choice, and as long as we were approaching the centre, however gradually, we could not grumble. Besides, every now and then the slope became steeper, our naiad tumbled down it with a moan, and we went deeper with her.

  On the whole, however, that day and the next we made considerable progress horizontally but comparatively little vertically.

  In the evening of Friday, 10 July, according to our calculations, we were seventy-five miles south-west of Reykjavik and seven miles down.

  Then, all of a sudden, a frightening shaft opened at our feet. My uncle could not help clapping his hands for joy when he saw how steep it was.

  ‘Now we shall make progress,’ he cried, ‘and without much effort, because the projections of the rock make a regular staircase!’

  The ropes were fastened by Hans so as to guard against all possibility of accident, and the descent continued. I can scarcely describe it as perilous, for I was already familiar with this sort of operation.

  This shaft was a narrow crack in the granite mass, of the kind geologists call a ‘fault’, and it had obviously been caused by the contraction of the earth’s crust while it was cooling. If it had once been a passage for the eruptive matter thrown up by Sneffels, I could not understand why that matter had left no trace. We were descending a sort of spiral staircase which looked as if it had been made by the hand of man.