This could explain up to a certain point the existence of this ocean a hundred miles below the surface of the earth. This liquid mass, which, in my opinion, was bound to flow away gradually into the bowels of the earth, had obviously penetrated from the sea above through some fissure. Yet it had to be supposed that that fissure was now closed, for otherwise the whole of this cavern, or rather this huge reservoir, would have filled up in a fairly short time. Perhaps too this water, subjected to the action of the subterranean fires, had evaporated to some extent. This would account for the clouds over our heads and the development of that electricity which created storms in the interior of the earth.
This theory about the phenomena we had witnessed struck me as satisfactory, for however great the wonders of Nature may be, they can always be explained by physical laws.
We were therefore walking on a sort of sedimentary soil, deposited by the waters like all the terranes of that period on the surface of the globe. The Professor carefully examined every fissure in the rocks. Whenever he saw a hole it became a matter of importance for him to discover its depth.
We had followed the shores of the Lidenbrock Sea for a mile when the ground suddenly changed in appearance. It looked as if it had been shaken and convulsed by a violent upheaval of the lower strata. In a good many places hollows or hillocks bore witness to a massive dislocation of the rock. We were advancing with difficulty over these granite fragments, mingled with flint, quartz, and alluvial deposits, when we were suddenly confronted with a field, or rather a plain, covered with bones. It looked like a huge cemetery, containing the remains of twenty centuries of mankind. Great mounds of bones were piled up in row after row, stretching away to the horizon, where they disappeared into the mist. There, within perhaps three square miles, was accumulated the entire history of animal life, a history scarcely sketched out in the too-recent strata of the inhabited world.
A burning curiosity impelled us forward. Our feet noisily cracked and crushed fossils and bones of prehistoric animals whose rare and interesting remains are a subject of contention between the museums of our great cities. A thousand Cuviers working all their lives could not have constructed all the skeletons which lay in that magnificent ossuary.
I was stupefied. My uncle had raised his long arms towards the thick vault which served us as a sky. His gaping mouth, his eyes flashing behind his spectacles, his head nodding up and down, and indeed his whole attitude denoted utter astonishment. He was faced with a priceless collection of lepthotheria, mericotheria, lophiodia, anoplotheria, megatheria, mastodons, protopithecae, pterodactyls, and other antediluvian monsters, all heaped up there for his personal satisfaction. Imagine a fanatical bibliomaniac suddenly transported into the middle of the famous library of Alexandria which Omar burnt and which had suddenly been miraculously resurrected from its ashes: that was what my uncle was like.
But he displayed amazement of a very different sort a little later, when, running through all this organic dust, he seized a bare skull and cried out in a voice trembling with excitement:
‘Axel! Axel! A human head!’
‘A human head, Uncle?’ I replied, no less astonished.
‘Yes, my boy. Oh, Mr Milne-Edwards! Oh, Monsieur de Quatrefages! If only you could be standing where I, Otto Lidenbrock, am standing now!’
38
The Professor Gives a Lecture
To understand this evocation of two illustrious scientists by my uncle, it is necessary to know that an event of the highest importance from the palaeontological point of view had occurred a short time before our departure.
On 28 March 1863, some labourers working under the direction of Monsieur Boucher de Perthes, in the quarries of Moulin-Quignon, near Abbeville, in the Department of the Somme in France, found a human jaw-bone fourteen feet below the surface. It was the first fossil of this sort that had ever been brought to light. Near it were found some stone axes and carved flints, all coloured and clothed by the passage of time with a uniform patina.
This discovery caused a great stir, not only in France, but also in Britain and Germany. Several scientists of the Institut Français including Messrs Milne-Edwards and de Quatrefages, took the affair very much to heart, demonstrated the incontestable authenticity of the bone in question, and became the most ardent defence witnesses in what the English called the ‘trial of the jawbone’.
Those geologists in the United Kingdom who believed the jaw-bone to be genuine – Messrs Falconer, Busk, Carpenter, and others – were joined by German scientists, and among these the most eminent, the most ardent, and the most enthusiastic was my uncle Lidenbrock.
The authenticity of a human fossil of the Quaternary Period therefore seemed to be incontestably proved and recognized.
Admittedly this theory had had a fanatical opponent in Monsieur Élie de Beaumont. This leading authority maintained that the soil of Moulin-Quignon was not diluvial at all, but was of much more recent formation, and, agreeing on this point with Cuvier, he refused to admit that the human race could have been contemporary with the animals of the Quaternary Period. My uncle, together with the vast majority of geologists, had stood his ground, argued, and discussed, and Monsieur Élie de Beaumont had remained practically alone in his opinion.
We knew all these details of the affair, but we were unaware that, since our departure, further progress had been made in the matter. Other jaw-bones of an identical nature, though belonging to individuals of various types and different countries, were found in the loose grey soil of certain grottos in France, Switzerland, and Belgium, as well as weapons, utensils, tools, and bones of children, adolescents, adults and old people. The existence of Quaternary man was therefore becoming more certain every day.
And that was not all. Fresh remains exhumed from tertiary Pliocene terrane had enabled even bolder geologists to attribute a still greater age to the human race. It is true that these remains were not human bones, but just products of man’s handiwork, fossil tibias and femurs of animals scratched in regular patterns, carved, so to speak, and bearing traces of human activity.
Thus, at one bound, man leapt a long way up the ladder of time; he was shown to be a predecessor of the mastodon, a contemporary of the elephas meridionalis; he was seen to be 100,000 years old, since that was the age attributed by the most famous geologists to the Pliocene terrane.
Such was the state of palaeontological science at that time, and what we knew of it was sufficient to explain our behaviour in the presence of that ossuary of the Lidenbrock Sea. The reader will therefore understand my uncle’s joy and stupefaction, especially when, a few yards farther on, he found himself literally face to face with a specimen of Quaternary man.
It was an absolutely recognizable human body, perfectly preserved down the ages, though whether by some special soil, like that of the cemetery of Saint-Michel at Bordeaux, or by some other agency, I cannot say. At any rate this corpse, with its taut, parchment-like skin, its limbs still covered with flesh – at least as far as we could see – its perfect teeth, abundant hair, and fearfully long nails on fingers and toes, presented itself to our eyes as in life.
I stood speechless before this apparition from another age. My uncle, usually so talkative, so impetuously garrulous, was also silent. We lifted the body and stood it up against a rock. It looked at us out of its hollow eye-sockets. We tapped on its echoing chest.
After a brief silence my uncle became the Professor once more. Otto Lidenbrock, carried away by his temperament, forgot the circumstances of our journey, the place where we were, the cavern which contained us. No doubt he thought he was at the Johannaeum, lecturing to his pupils, for he assumed a magisterial air, and, addressing an imaginary audience, he said:
‘Gentlemen, I have the honour to introduce to you a man of the Quaternary Period. Eminent geologists have denied his existence, and others no less eminent have affirmed it. The St Thomases of palaeontology, if they were here, would touch him with their fingers, and would have no option but to recognize th
eir error. I am well aware that science has to be on its guard with discoveries of this kind. I know what capital Barnum and other charlatans of his ilk have made out of fossil men. I have heard all about Ajax’s knee-cap, about the body of Orestes supposed to have been found by the Spartans, and about the body of Asterius, ten cubits long, which is mentioned by Pausanias. I have read the reports on the skeleton found at Trapani in the fourteenth century, and identified at first as that of Polyphemus; and the story of the giant unearthed in the sixteenth century in the neighbourhood of Palermo. You know as well as I do, gentlemen, the analysis made near Lucerne in 1577, of those huge bones which the famous doctor Felix Plater declared to be those of a giant nineteen feet tall. I have read the treatises of Cassanion, and all the memoirs, pamphlets, papers, and rejoinders published on the subject of the skeleton of the King of the Cimbrians, Teutobochus, the invader of Gaul, which was dug out of a sandpit in the Dauphiné in 1613. In the eighteenth century I would have joined with Petrus Camper in contesting the existence of Scheuchzer’s primitive men. I have studied the work entitled Gigan …’
Here there reappeared my uncle’s natural infirmity, his inability to pronounce difficult words in public.
‘The work entitled Gigan …’ he repeated.
He could not get any farther.
‘Giganto …’
It was impossible. The wretched word would not come out. At the Johannaeum the audience would have roared with laughter.
‘Gigantosteology,’ Professor Lidenbrock finally managed to bring out, in between a couple of oaths.
Then, carrying on with renewed vigour, and getting steadily more animated:
‘Yes, gentlemen, I know all these things. I know too that Cuvier and Blumenbach have identified these bones as nothing more than the bones of the mammoth and other animals of the Quaternary Period. But here doubt itself would be an insult to science! The body stands before you! You can see it, touch it! It is not just a skeleton, but an entire body, preserved for a purely anthropological purpose.’
I thought fit not to contradict this assertion.
‘If I could wash it in a solution of sulphuric acid,’ my uncle went on, ‘I should be able to get rid of all the particles of earth and sparkling shells which are encrusted in it. But I have none of that precious solvent with me. Even so, such as it is, this body shall tell us its own story.’
Here the Professor seized the fossil skeleton and handled it with the dexterity of a fairground showman.
‘As you can see,’ he continued, ‘it is less than six feet tall, and we are a long way from the alleged race of giants. As for the race to which it belongs, it is incontestably Caucasian, the white race, our own. The skull of this fossil is a regular ovoid, without either prominent cheek bones or projecting jaws. It offers no sign of that prognathism which modifies the facial angle.* Measure that angle: it is nearly 90 degrees. But I will go even farther in my deductions and venture to say that this specimen of humanity belongs to the Japhetic race, which is to be found from the Indies to the Atlantic. Don’t smile, gentlemen.’
Nobody was smiling, but the Professor was so used to seeing faces light up with amusement during his learned dissertations that he said this out of force of habit.
‘Yes,’ he went on with fresh animation, ‘this is a fossil man, a contemporary of the mastodons whose bones fill this amphitheatre. But if you ask me how he got here, how those strata in which he was buried slipped down as far as this huge cavity in the globe, I will not presume to answer your question. No doubt in the Quaternary Period considerable disturbances were still occurring in the crust of the earth, and the prolonged cooling of the earth produced chasms, fissures, and faults, into which portions of the upper terrane probably fell. I refuse to commit myself, but after all, there is the man, surrounded by his own handiwork, those axes and carved flints which are characteristic of the Stone Age. And unless he came here like myself as a mere tourist, a pioneer of science, I have no reason to cast doubt on the authenticity of his remote origin.’
The Professor fell silent, and I broke into loud and unanimous applause. For my uncle was quite right, and more learned men than his nephew would have been hard put to it to refute his statements.
Further evidence in support of what he had said came with the discovery that this fossilized body was not the only one in that huge ossuary. We came across more bodies with every step we took through the dust, and my uncle was at liberty to choose the finest of these specimens in order to convince the sceptics.
It was indeed an astonishing sight, that spectacle of generations of men and animals mingled together in a common cemetery. But then a serious question occurred to us, to which we did not dare to give an answer. Had these creatures slipped through a fissure in the earth to the shores of the Lidenbrock Sea when they were already dead? Or had they lived here, in this subterranean world, under this false sky, being born and dying like the inhabitants of the upper earth? So far only sea monsters and fishes had appeared to us alive. Might not some human being, some native of the abyss, still be roaming these desolate shores?
39
Man Alive
For another half-hour we walked over these layers of bones, impelled by our burning curiosity. What other marvels did this cavern contain? What new treasures might we discover to offer up to science? My eyes were prepared to be surprised, my imagination to be astonished.
The sea shore had long since disappeared behind the hills of the ossuary. The rash Professor, heedless of the risk of losing our way, led me farther and farther. We pressed on in silence, bathed in the waves of electric light. By some phenomenon which I cannot explain, and thanks to its complete diffusion, this light shone uniformly on all the sides of every object. As it did not come from any one spot in space, it produced no shadows. You might have thought yourself in the tropics, at midday in the height of summer, under the vertical rays of the sun. There was no vapour to be seen. The rocks, the distant mountains, a few patches of forest a long way off, presented a peculiar appearance under the even distribution of the light. We resembled that fantastic character in Hoffmann’s tale who had lost his shadow.
After walking a mile we reached the edge of a huge forest, but this time not one of those forests of mushrooms which we had seen near Port Gräuben.
Here we had the vegetation of the Tertiary Period in all its splendour. Tall palms, of species which have now disappeared, splendid palmacites, pines, yews, cypress trees, and thuyas represented the conifer family and were linked together by a network of inextricable creepers. A carpet of moss and hepaticas covered the ground. A few streams murmured in what would have been the shade of the trees if they had cast any shadows, and on the banks grew tree-ferns similar to those which are cultivated in our hothouses. The only difference was that there was no colour in all these trees, shrubs, and plants, deprived as they were of the vivifying heat of the sun. Everything merged together in one uniform hue, brownish and faded-looking. The leaves had no green, and the very flowers, though abundant enough in that Tertiary Period which saw their birth, had neither colour nor perfume, and looked as if they were made of a paper bleached by the atmosphere.
My uncle plunged boldly into this gigantic thicket, and I followed him, though not without a certain apprehension. Since Nature had provided ample stocks of vegetable food, might we not meet some fearful mammals? In the broad clearings left by the trees which time had felled and eaten away, I could see leguminous plants, acerineae, rubiaceae, and countless edible shrubs, dear to the ruminant animals of every period. Then, mixed up and tangled together, I saw trees from very different countries on the surface of the globe, the oak growing near to the palm, the Australian eucalyptus leaning against the Norwegian fir, the northern birch tree mingling its branches with those of the Dutch kauris. It was enough to drive to distraction the most ingenious classifiers of terrestrial botany.
Suddenly I stopped short, holding my uncle back.
The diffused light made it possible to make out the s
mallest objects in the depths of the thickets. I thought I had seen – no, I did see, with my own eyes – some huge shapes moving about beneath the trees. Sure enough, it was a whole herd of gigantic animals, of mastodons, not fossils this time but living creatures, and resembling those whose bones were found in the marshes of Ohio in 1801. I saw those huge elephants whose trunks were twisting about under the trees like a legion of serpents. I heard the noise of their long tusks whose ivory was tearing at the old trunks. The branches were cracking and the leaves, torn away in huge masses, were disappearing into the cavernous maws of the monsters.
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!
My uncle looked and looked again.
‘Come along!’ he said all of a sudden, seizing me by the arm. ‘Forward! Forward!’
‘No!’ I cried. ‘No! We are unarmed. What could we do in the midst of that herd of giant quadrupeds? Come along, Uncle, come along! No human being could brave the anger of those monsters with impunity.’
‘No human being?’ replied my uncle, lowering his voice. ‘You are wrong, Axel! Look, look, over there! It seems to me that I can see a living creature, a creature similar to ourselves – a man!’
I looked, shrugging my shoulders, and determined to carry incredulity to its uttermost limits. But however sceptical I tried to be, I had to accept the evidence of my eyes.
For there, less than a quarter of a mile away, leaning against the trunk of an enormous kauris, stood a human being, a Proteus of those subterranean regions, a new son of Neptune, watching over that great herd of mastodons.
Immanis pecoris custos, immanior ipse … Yes, indeed, the shepherd was bigger than his flock. This was not something like the fossil creature whose corpse we had found in the ossuary; it was a giant capable of mastering those monsters. He was over twelve feet tall. His head, which was as big as a buffalo’s, was half hidden in the tangled growth of his unkempt hair – a positive mane, like that of the primitive elephant. In his hand he was brandishing an enormous bough, a crook worthy of this antediluvian shepherd.