A vast sheet of water, the beginning of a lake or an ocean, stretched away out of sight. The deeply indented shore offered the waves a beach of fine golden sand, strewn with those little shells which were inhabited by the first living creatures. The waves broke on this shore with that sonorous murmur peculiar to huge enclosed spaces. A light foam was whipped up by a moderate wind, and some of the spray was blown into my face. From this gently sloping beach, about two hundred yards from the waves, a line of huge cliffs curved upwards to incredible heights. Some of them, crossing the beach with their sharp spurs, formed capes and promontories which had been eaten away by the teeth of the surf. Farther on, their massive outline could be seen clearly defined against the misty backcloth of the horizon.
It was a real sea, with the capricious contour of earthly shores, but utterly deserted and horribly wild in appearance.
If my eyes could range far out over this sea, it was because a very special kind of light revealed its every detail. It was not the light of the sun, with its dazzling shafts of brilliance and the splendour 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 electric origin. It was like an aurora borealis, a continuous cosmic phenomenon, filling a cavern big enough to contain an ocean.
The vault over my head, the sky if you like, seemed to be composed of huge clouds, shifting and changing vapours which, as a result of condensation, must at certain times fall in torrents of rain. But just then ‘the weather was fine’. The electric light was producing some astonishing effects on the higher clouds. Their lower spirals were in deep shadow, and often, between two separate strata, a ray of remarkable brightness would shine down at us. But it was nothing like sunlight, seeing that there was no warmth in it. The general effect was supremely melancholy and sad. Instead of a sky shining with stars, I could feel that above those clouds there was a granite vault which oppressed me with its weight, and that space, vast though it was, would not have been large enough for the orbit of the humblest of satellites.
Then I remembered the theory of an English captain, who compared the earth to a huge hollow sphere, inside which the air remained luminous as a result of its pressure, while two stars, Pluto and Proserpina, moved about on their mysterious orbits. Could he have been telling the truth?
We were indeed imprisoned inside a huge cavern. It was impossible to gauge its width, since the shore stretched away on either side as far as the eye could see, or its length, for our gaze was soon halted by a somewhat indefinite horizon. As for its height, it must have been several miles. The eye could not see where this ceiling rested on its granite buttresses, but there were clouds hanging in the atmosphere, at a height which I put at 12,000 feet, a greater altitude than that of the terrestrial clouds, and doubtless due to the great density of the air.
Obviously the word ‘cavern’ cannot give any idea of the vast dimensions of this huge space. But human words are totally inadequate for anyone who ventures into the abysses of the earth.
Besides I did not know what geological theory could explain the existence of such a huge excavation. Could the cooling of the earth have produced it? I knew of certain famous caves, from the descriptions of them given by travellers, but none of them had anything like the dimensions of this one.
If the grotto of Gauchara, in Colombia, had not given up the secret of its depth to Humboldt, who had explored it to a depth of 2,500 feet, it probably did not go much farther down. The huge Mammoth Cave in Kentucky was admittedly gigantic in its proportions, since its ceiling rose five hundred feet above the level of an unfathomable lake, and travellers had gone twenty-five miles along it without coming to the end. But what were these cavities compared with the one which I was now admiring, with its cloudy sky, its electric light, and a vast sea contained in its depths? My imagination felt powerless before such immensity.
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 such new sensations, and my imagination failed to supply them. I gazed, I thought, I admired, with a stupefaction not unmixed with fear.
The unexpected nature of this sight had brought back the flush of health to my cheeks: I was treating myself with astonishment and bringing about a cure by means of this novel therapeutic system; besides, the keen, dense air was reinvigorating me by supplying extra oxygen to my lungs.
It will be easily appreciated that, after an imprisonment of over forty days in a narrow gallery, it was sheer bliss to breathe this moist, salty air; so I had no reason to regret having left my dark grotto. My uncle, who was already familiar with these wonders, had ceased to marvel at them.
‘Do you feel strong enough to walk about a little?’ he asked me.
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘and I should like nothing better.’
‘Then take my arm, Axel, and let us follow the windings of the shore.’
I eagerly accepted, and we began to skirt this new ocean. On the left steep rocks, piled one upon another, formed a prodigiously impressive heap of titanic proportions. Down their sides flowed countless cascades, which fell in loud, limpid sheets of water. A few light clouds of steam, passing from one rock to another, indicated the presence of hot springs; and streams flowed gently towards the common basin, murmuring delightfully as they descended the slopes.
Among these streams I recognized our faithful companion, the Hansbach, which flowed quietly into the sea as if it had done nothing else since the beginning of the world.
‘We shall miss it in the future,’ I said with a sigh.
‘Nonsense!’ said the Professor. ‘What does it matter whether we have that stream or another with us?’
I thought this reply rather ungrateful.
But at that moment my attention was drawn by an unexpected sight. Five hundred yards away, at the end of a steep promontory, a tall, dense forest appeared. It consisted of trees of medium height, shaped like parasols, with sharp geometrical outlines; the wind seemed to have no effect on their foliage, and in the midst of the gusts they remained motionless like a group of petrified cedars.
I quickened my step, anxious to put a name to these strange objects. Were they outside the 200,000 species of vegetables already known, and had they to be accorded a special place among the lacustrian flora? No; when we arrived under their shade, my surprise turned to admiration. I found myself, in fact, confronted with products of the earth, but on a gigantic scale. My uncle promptly called them by their name.
‘It’s just a forest of mushrooms,’ he said.
And he was right. It may be imagined how big these plants which love heat and moisture had grown. I knew that the Lycopodon giganteum, according to Bulliard, attains a circumference of eight or nine feet, but here there were white mushrooms thirty or forty feet high, with heads of an equal diameter. There were thousands of them; the light could not manage to penetrate between them, and complete darkness reigned between those domes, crowded together as closely as the round roofs of an African city.
Yet I wanted to go farther, though it was mortally cold under those fleshy vaults. For half an hour we wandered about those damp shadows, and it was with a genuine feeling of relief that I regained the sea-shore.
The vegetation of this subterranean region was not confined to mushrooms. Farther on a great many other trees with colourless foliage stood in groups. They were easy to recognize as the lowly shrubs of the earth, grown to phenomenal dimensions, lycopodiums a hundred feet high, giant sigillarias, tree-ferns as tall as the fir-trees in northern latitudes, and lepidodendrons with cylindrical forked stems, ending in long leaves and bristling with coarse hairs like monstrous cacti.
‘Astonishing, magnificent, splendid!’ cried my uncle. ‘Here we have the entire flora of th
e Secondary Period of the world, the transitional period. Here are our humble garden plants which were trees in the early ages of the globe! Look, Axel, and admire it all! Never has a botanist had such a feast for the eyes.’
‘You are right, Uncle. Providence seems to have wanted to preserve in this huge hot-house the antediluvian plants which scientists have so skilfully reconstructed.’
‘As you say, my boy, it is a hot-house, but you might add that it may be a menagerie too.’
‘A menagerie?’
‘Yes, a menagerie. Look at this dust we are walking on, these bones scattered on the ground.’
‘Bones?’ I exclaimed. ‘Why, yes, these are the bones of antediluvian animals!’
I fell on these primeval remains, composed of in destructible calcium phosphate, and unhesitatingly identified these gigantic bones, which looked like dried-up tree-trunks.
‘Here is the lower jaw of a mastodon,’ I said; ‘and there is a femur which can only have belonged to the biggest of all those monsters, the megatherium. Yes, it certainly is a menagerie, for these bones can’t have been brought here by a cataclysm. The animals they belonged to have lived on the shores of this subterranean sea, in the shade of these arborescent plants. Why, I can even see some whole skeletons. And yet …’
‘Yet what?’ asked my uncle.
‘I can’t understand the presence of such huge quadrupeds in this granite cavern.’
‘Why?’
‘Because animal life existed on earth only in the Secondary Period, when a sediment of soil had been deposited by the flood-waters and had taken the place of the incandescent rocks of the Primitive Period.’
‘Well, Axel, there is a very simple answer to your objection, and that is that this soil is alluvial.’
‘What! At this depth below the surface of the earth?’
‘Why, yes, and there is a geological explanation of the fact. At a certain period the earth consisted only of an elastic crust, which moved alternatively upwards or downwards according to the laws of attraction and gravitation. Probably subsidences of the crust occurred and some of the alluvial soil was carried to the bottom of the abysses which suddenly opened up.’
‘That must be it. But if antediluvian animals have lived in these subterranean regions, how do we know that some of those monsters are not still roaming about in these gloomy forests or behind these steep rocks?’
As this idea occurred to me, I examined, not without a certain alarm, the various points of the horizon, but no living creature could be seen on those deserted shores.
I was rather tired, so I went and sat down at the end of a promontory, at the foot of which the waves were breaking noisily. From there I could see the whole of the bay formed by an indentation of the coast. In its crook a little harbour had been formed by the pyramidal rocks, where still waters slept sheltered from the wind. A brig and two or three schooners could have anchored there with room to spare. I almost expected to see some ship emerge from it under full sail and take to the open sea with the southern breeze behind her.
But this illusion rapidly faded. We were indeed the only living creatures in this subterranean world. When the wind dropped, a silence deeper than that of the desert fell over the arid rocks and weighed on the surface of the ocean. Then I tried to penetrate the mists in the distance, and to tear away the curtain which hung across the mysterious horizon. A whole succession of questions rose to my lips. Where did the sea end? Where did it lead? Could we ever hope to reach its opposite shores?
My uncle, for his part, had no doubt that we could. As for myself, I was torn between hope and fear.
After spending an hour in the contemplation of this wonderful sight, we returned by way of the beach to the grotto, and it was under the influence of the strangest thoughts that I fell into a deep sleep.
31
The Raft
The next day I awoke completely cured. I thought that a bathe would do me good, so I went and immersed myself for a few minutes in the waters of this Mediterranean Sea – a name which it certainly deserved more than any other sea.
I came back with a good appetite for breakfast. Hans did the cooking; he had water and fire at his disposal, so that he was able to vary our usual diet somewhat. For dessert, he served us a few cups of coffee, and never did that beverage strike me as so delicious.
‘Now,’ said my uncle, ‘the tide is rising, and we must not miss the opportunity of studying this phenomenon.’
‘The tide?’ I exclaimed.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘You mean that the influence of the moon and sun can be felt down here?’
‘Why not? Aren’t all bodies subject throughout their mass to the power of universal attraction? And why should this mass of water escape the general law? So in spite of the great atmospheric pressure on its surface, you will see it rise like the Atlantic itself.’
At that moment we were walking on the sandy beach, and the waves were gradually moving up the shore.
‘You are right,’ I cried. ‘The tide is beginning to rise.’
‘Yes, Axel, and judging by the ridges of foam I estimate that the sea will rise about ten feet.’
‘That’s wonderful!’
‘No, it’s perfectly natural.’
‘You may say what you like, Uncle, but it all seems extraordinary to me, and I can scarcely believe my eyes. Who would ever have imagined that inside the earth’s crust there was a real ocean, with ebbing and flowing tides, winds and storms?’
‘Why not? Is there any scientific reason against it?’
‘None that I can see, provided we abandon the idea of central heat.’
‘Then so far Davy’s theory is confirmed?’
‘Clearly, and in that case there is no reason why there shouldn’t be other seas and continents in the interior of the globe.’
‘Quite – but uninhabited, of course.’
‘Oh? But why shouldn’t these waters contain fish of some unknown species?’
‘At any rate we haven’t seen any yet.’
‘Well, let’s make some lines and hooks, and see if they will have as much success down here as up above.’
‘We will try, Axel, for we must penetrate all the secrets of these newly discovered regions.’
‘But where are we, Uncle? That’s a question I haven’t asked you yet, and one to which your instruments must have given the answer.’
‘Horizontally, we are 875 miles from Iceland.’
‘As far as that?’
‘I am sure I am not more than a mile out.’
‘And the compass still shows our direction as south-east?’
‘Yes, with a deviation to the west of 19 degrees 45 minutes, just as on earth. As for its dip, a curious phenomenon is taking place which I have observed with the greatest attention.’
‘And what is that?’
‘The needle, instead of dipping towards the Pole, as it does in the northern hemisphere, is pointing upwards instead.’
‘Does that mean that the magnetic pole is somewhere between the surface of the earth and the point we have reached?’
‘Exactly, and no doubt if we were under the polar regions, near that seventieth parallel where James Ross discovered the magnetic pole, we should see the needle point straight up. Therefore that mysterious centre of attraction obviously isn’t situated at a very great depth.’
‘Evidently, and that is a fact which science has never suspected.’
‘Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.’
‘And how deep down are we?’
‘Eighty-eight miles.’
‘So,’ I said, examining the map, ‘the mountainous part of Scotland is above us, and the Grampians are raising their snow-covered peaks at an incredible height over our heads.’
‘Yes,’ replied the Professor with a laugh. ‘It’s rather a heavy weight to carry, but the ceiling is solid; the great architect of th
e universe has built it with the best materials, and certainly man could never have given it such an enormous span. What are the arches of bridges and the naves of cathedrals compared with this vault, with its radius of at least eight miles and room for an ocean and its storms underneath?’
‘Oh, I’m not afraid of the roof caving in. But now, Uncle, what are your plans? Aren’t you thinking of returning to the surface of the earth?’
‘Returning? Certainly not! On the contrary, we shall continue our journey, seeing that everything has gone so well so far.’
‘But I don’t see how we are going to get down below this liquid plain.’
‘Oh, I’ve no intention of diving into it head first. But if all oceans are properly speaking just lakes, since they are surrounded by land, that is all the more reason why this internal sea should be circumscribed by a mass of granite.’
‘Yes, I can see that.’
‘Well, on the opposite shore I feel sure we shall find fresh openings.’
‘How long do you suppose this sea to be?’
‘Between seventy and a hundred miles.’
‘Ah!’ I said, thinking to myself that this estimate could be hopelessly wrong.
‘So there’s no time to lose, and we must set sail tomorrow.’
I automatically looked around for the ship which was to carry us.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘so we must set sail, must we? All right! But what about a boat?’
‘It won’t be a boat, my boy, but a good solid raft.’
‘A raft?’ I cried. ‘But a raft is just as impossible to build as a boat, and I don’t see …’
‘You don’t see, Axel, but if you listened, you might hear.’
‘Hear?’
‘Yes, hear some hammering which would tell you that Hans is already at work.’
‘Building a raft?’
‘Yes.’
‘What! Has he already felled some trees?’
‘Oh, the trees were already down. Come along and you will see for yourself.’
After walking for a quarter of an hour, I caught sight of Hans at work on the other side of the promontory which formed the little natural harbour. A few more steps and I was at his side. To my surprise a half-finished raft was lying on the sand; it was made of beams of a special kind of wood, and the ground was literally strewn with planks, knees, and frames of all sorts. There was enough material there to build a whole fleet of rafts.