Journey to the Center of the Earth (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 4

  A Note on the Translation

  This edition of Journey to the Center of the Earth is based on the translation of Frederick Amadeus Malleson, which appeared in 1877. Malleson’s translation is more faithful than an earlier one that had appeared in 1872, but it renders Verne’s brisk and variable prose in a distinctly Victorian English that makes the text sound more dated in the translation than it is in the original.

  Malleson also took other liberties with the text: He added chapter headings that did not exist in the original text, added explanatory notes, condensed dialogue that he considered too lengthy, and, being a clergyman, added religious diction in some places and elided or amended phrases of Verne’s that seemed to imply what he considered to be slight disregard for Christian theology and scripture. Malleson’s translation has been comprehensively revised for the present edition so as to bring the English text back into closer correspondence with Verne’s original: The chapter titles have been eliminated, Verne’s dialogues and original wording have been restored in full, and the syntax and vocabulary of the English text have been updated to reflect Verne’s lively, engaged and often witty style as closely as possible.

  —Ursula K. Heise

  A Note on Measurements

  Temperatures in the novel are given in degrees Celsius, not Fahrenheit, as is customary in continental Europe.

  Verne gives measures of length in units, such as leagues and fathoms, that were used in France in the eighteenth century, prior to the introduction of the metric system; those that appear frequently in the text include:

  1 league =approx. 4 kilometers =approx. 2.5 statute miles

  1 fathom =2 meters =approx. 2.2 yards

  1 Danish mile =7.3 kilometers =4.6 statute miles

  I

  ON MAY 24, 1863, a Sunday, my uncle, Professor Lidenbrock, rushed back to his little house located at No. 19 Königstrasse, one of the most ancient streets in the old town of Hamburg.

  Martha, the maid, must have believed that she was far behind schedule, for the dinner had only just begun to cook on the kitchen range.

  “Well,” I said to myself, “if my uncle, the most impatient of men, is hungry, he will cry out in dismay.”

  “Mr. Lidenbrock so soon!” the good Martha exclaimed in amazement, half opening the dining-room door.

  “Yes, Martha; but very likely the dinner is not half cooked, for it’s not two yet. Saint Michael’s clock has only just struck half-past one.”

  “Then why is Mr. Lidenbrock coming home so soon?”

  “He’ll probably tell us himself.”

  “Here he is; I’ll stay out of the way, Mr. Axel, while you argue with him.”

  And the good Martha retreated to her culinary laboratory.

  I was left alone. But arguing with the most irascible of professors was out of the question for someone of my somewhat undecided turn of mind. Just as I was cautiously retreating to my handsome room upstairs, the street door squeaked on its hinges. Large feet made the wooden staircase creak, and the master of the house rushed through the dining-room immediately to his study.

  But during his swift passage, he had flung his hazel walking stick into a corner, his rough broad brim hat on the table, and these emphatic words at his nephew:

  “Axel, follow me!”

  I had scarcely had time to move when the professor already exclaimed in a tone of utter impatience:

  “Well! You aren’t here yet?”

  I rushed into my redoubtable master’s study.

  Otto Lidenbrock had no mischief in him, I readily admit that; but unless he changes in unlikely ways, he will die a confirmed original.

  He was professor at the Johanneuma and taught a course on mineralogy, in the course of which he invariably broke into a rage once or twice each session. Not that he was at all concerned about having diligent students in his class, or about the degree of attention with which they listened to him, or the success they would eventually achieve; such details never bothered him. His teaching was “subjective,” as German philosophy calls it; it was meant for himself, not others. He was a learned egotist, a well of science whose pulleys creaked when you wanted to draw anything out of it: in a word, a miser.

  There are quite a few professors of this sort in Germany.

  Unfortunately, my uncle was not gifted with great skill of delivery, if not in private, then at least when he spoke in public, and this is a deplorable shortfall in a speaker. Indeed, during his lectures at the Johanneum, the professor often came to a complete standstill; he struggled with a reluctant word that did not want to pass his lips, one of those words that resist, expand and finally slip out in the quite unscientific form of an oath. Hence his intense rage.

  Now in mineralogy there are many half-Greek and half-Latin terms that are hard to pronounce, rough words that would injure the lips of a poet. I don’t want to speak ill of this science. Far from it. But when one faces rhombohedral crystals, retinasphaltic resins, gehlenites, fassaites, molybdenites, tungstates of manganese, and titanite of zirconium, even the most skilled tongue may slip.

  In the city, therefore, my uncle’s forgivable weakness was well-known, and it was exploited, and it was expected at the more dangerous moments, and he broke out in a rage, and there was laughter, which is not in good taste, not even for Germans. And if there was always a full audience at the Lidenbrock lectures, how many came regularly to be entertained by the professor’s wonderful fury!

  Nevertheless, my uncle, I must emphasize, was a genuine scholar. Even though he sometimes broke his specimens by handling them too roughly, he combined the geologist’s genius with the mineralogist’s keen eye. Armed with his hammer, his steel pointer, his magnetic needles, his blowpipe, and his bottle of nitric acid, he was a very powerful man. By assessing the fracture, the appearance, the hardness, the fusibility, the sonorousness, the smell, and the taste of any mineral, he was able to classify it unhesitatingly among the six hundred substances known to science today.

  The name of Lidenbrock was therefore mentioned with respect in colleges and learned societies. Humphry Davy, Humboldt, and Captains Franklin and Sabine never failed to call on him on their way through Hamburg. Becquerel, Ebelman, Brewster, Dumas, Milne-Edwards, Saint-Claire Deville1 consulted him about the most difficult problems in chemistry. This discipline was indebted to him for quite remarkable discoveries, and in 1853 A Treaty of Transcendental Crystallography by Professor Otto Lidenbrock had appeared in Leipzig, a large folio with illustrations which, however, did not cover its expenses.

  Add to all this that my uncle was curator of the museum of mineralogy established by Mr. Struve, the Russian ambassador, a valuable collection whose reputation is known throughout Europe.

  This, then, was the person who called me with such impatience. Imagine a tall, slender man, of an iron constitution, and with a fair complexion which made him look a good ten years younger than his fifty. His large eyes moved incessantly behind his full-sized spectacles; his long, thin nose looked like a knife blade; mischievous tongues have even claimed that it was magnetic and attracted iron filings. Sheer calumny: it attracted nothing except snuff, but that, to be honest, in great quantities.

  When I add that my uncle walked in mathematical strides of half a fathom, and if I point out that in walking he kept his fists firmly clenched, a sure sign of an irritable temperament, it will be clear enough that his company was something less than desirable.

  He lived in his little house in the Königstrasse, a building made half of brick and half of wood, with a stepped gable; it overlooked one of those winding canals that intersect in the middle of Hamburg’s old town, which the great fire of 1842 had fortunately spared.

  The old house leaned a little, admittedly, and bulged out towards the street; its roof sloped a little to one side, like the cap over the ear of a Tugendbund student;b its verticality left something to be desired; but overall, it held up well, thanks to an old elm which buttressed it in front, and which in spring pushed its flowering branches through th
e window panes.

  My uncle was reasonably well off for a German professor. The house was all his own, container and contents. The contents consisted of his god-daughter Graüben,2 a seventeen-year-old from Virland, c Martha, and myself. As his nephew and an orphan, I became his laboratory assistant.

  I admit that I plunged eagerly into the geological sciences; I had the blood of a mineralogist in my veins, and never got bored in the company of my precious rocks.

  In a word, one could live happily in the little house in the Königstrasse, in spite of the impatience of its master, for even though he showed it in a somewhat rough fashion, he was nevertheless very fond of me. But that man was unable to wait, and nature herself was too slow for him.

  In April, after he had planted seedlings of mignonette and morning glory in the clay pots in his living-room, he would go every morning and tug them by their leaves to accelerate their growth.

  Faced with such a character, one could do nothing other than obey. I therefore rushed after him into his study.

  II

  THIS STUDY WAS A genuine museum. Specimens of everything known in mineralogy lay there labeled in the most perfect order, according to the great divisions into inflammable, metallic, and lithoid minerals.

  How well I knew all these bits of mineralogical science! How many times, instead of enjoying the company of boys of my own age, had I enjoyed dusting these graphites, anthracites, coals, lignites, and peats! And the bitumens, resins, organic salts that needed to be protected from the least atom of dust! And these metals, from iron to gold, whose current value disappeared in the absolute equality of scientific specimens! And all these stones, enough to rebuild the house in the Königstrasse, even with a handsome additional room, which would have suited me admirably!

  But on entering this study, I barely thought of all these wonders. My uncle alone filled my thoughts. He had thrown himself into an armchair covered with Utrecht velvet, and held in his hands a book that he contemplated with the profoundest admiration.

  “What a book! What a book!” he exclaimed.

  This exclamation reminded me that my uncle was also a bibliophile in his moments of leisure; but an old book had no value in his eyes unless it was very difficult to find or at least illegible.

  “Well!” he said to me, “don’t you see? Why, this is a priceless treasure that I found this morning browsing in Hevelius the Jew’s shop.”

  “Magnificent!” I replied, with an enthusiasm made to order.

  But actually, what was the point of all this fuss about an old quarto, apparently bound in rough calfskin, a yellowish volume with a faded seal hanging from it?

  Nonetheless, there was no end to the professor’s admiring exclamations.

  “Look,” he went on, both asking the questions and supplying the answers. “Isn’t it a beauty? Yes; admirable! Did you ever see such a binding? Doesn’t this book open easily? Yes, because it remains open anywhere. But does it shut equally well? Yes, because the binding and the leaves are flush, all in a straight line, with no gaps or separations anywhere. And look at this spine, which doesn’t show a single crack even after seven hundred years! Why, Bozerian, Closs, or Purgoldd might have been proud of such a binding!”

  As he was speaking, my uncle kept opening and shutting the old tome. I really could do no less than ask a question about its contents, although it did not interest me in the least.

  “And so what’s the title of this marvelous work?” I asked with an eagerness so pronounced that it had to be fake.

  “This work,” replied my uncle with renewed enthusiasm, “is the Heims Kringla of Snorre Turleson, the famous Icelandic author of the twelfth century!e It’s the chronicle of the Norwegian princes who ruled in Iceland.”

  “Really!” I exclaimed, with my best effort, “and of course it’s a German translation?”

  “What!” replied the professor sharply, “a translation! And what would I do with a translation? Who cares about a translation? This is the original work in Icelandic, that magnificent language, rich and simple at the same time, which allows for an infinite variety of grammatical combinations and multiple word modifications!”

  “Like German,” I skillfully remarked. “Yes,” replied my uncle, shrugging his shoulders; “but in addition Icelandic has three genders like Greek, and declensions of nouns like Latin.”

  “Ah!” I said, a little shaken in my indifference; “and is the typeface beautiful?”

  “Typeface! What do you mean by typeface, wretched Axel? Type! As if it were a matter of typeface! Ah! do you think this a printed book? But, ignorant fool, this is a manuscript, and a Runicf manuscript at that!”

  “Runic?”

  “Yes! Are you going to ask me now to explain that word to you?”

  “Of course not,” I replied in the tone of a man whose self-esteem has been hurt.

  But my uncle persevered anyway, and told me, against my will, about things that I did not care to know.

  “Runes,” he explained, “were characters once used in Iceland, and according to legend, they were invented by Odin himself. So look at this, impious young man, and admire these letters created by the imagination of a god!”

  Well, not knowing what to say, I was going to prostrate myself before this wonderful book, a way of answering equally pleasing to gods and kings, because it has the advantage of never giving them any embarrassment, when a little incident happened to turn the conversation into another direction.

  It was the appearance of a dirty slip of parchment which slipped out of the volume and fell to the floor.

  My uncle pounced on this shred with understandable eagerness. An old document, hidden for time immemorial in an old book, inevitably had an immeasurable value for him.

  “What’s this?” he exclaimed.

  And at the same time, he carefully spread on the table a piece of parchment, five inches by three, which was covered with horizontal lines of illegible characters.

  Here is the exact facsimile. It is important to me to let these bizarre signs be publicly known, for they incited Professor Lidenbrock and his nephew to undertake the strangest expedition of the nineteenth century.

  My uncle pounced on this shred with understandable eagerness.

  The professor mused a few moments over this series of characters; then he said, raising his spectacles:

  “These are Runic letters; they are identical to those of Snorre Turleson’s manuscript. But what could they possibly mean?”

  Since Runic letters seemed to me an invention of the learned to mystify this poor world, I was not sorry to see that my uncle did not understand them. At least, it seemed that way to me, judging from the movement of his fingers, which began to tremble violently.

  “But it’s certainly old Icelandic!” he muttered between his teeth.

  And Professor Lidenbrock should know, for he was considered a genuine polyglot. Not that he could speak all two thousand languages and four thousand dialects which are spoken on the earth, but he did know his share of them.

  And so, faced with this difficulty, he was going to give way to all the impetuosity of his character, and I was anticipating a violent outbreak, when two o’clock struck on the little timepiece over the fireplace.

  Immediately, the housekeeper Martha opened the study door and said:

  “Dinner is ready!”

  “To hell with dinner!” shouted my uncle, “and the one who prepared it, and those who will eat it!”

  Martha fled. I followed her, and hardly knowing how I got there, I found myself seated at my usual place in the dining-room.

  I waited a few moments. The professor did not come. This was, to my knowledge, the first time he had ever missed the ritual of dinner. And yet what a dinner it was! Parsley soup, ham omelet garnished with spiced sorrel, fillet of veal with compote of prunes, and for dessert, sugared shrimp, the whole washed down with a nice Moselle wine.

  All this my uncle was going to sacrifice to a bit of old paper. Well, as a devoted nephew I consi
dered it my duty to eat for him as well as for myself. That I did conscientiously.

  “I’ve never seen such a thing,” said Martha the housekeeper. “Mr. Lidenbrock not at table!”

  “Who could believe it?”

  “This means something serious is going to happen,” said the old servant, shaking her head.

  In my opinion, it meant nothing more serious than an awful scene when my uncle discovered that his dinner had been devoured.

  I had come to my last shrimp when a stentorian voice tore me away from the pleasures of dessert. With one leap I bounded out of the dining-room into the study.

  III

  “IT’S OBVIOUSLY RUNIC,” SAID the professor, knitting his brows. “But there’s a secret here, and I’ll discover it, or else ...”

  A violent gesture finished his thought.

  “Sit there,” he added, pointing with his fist at the table, “and write.”

  I was ready in an instant.

  “Now I’ll dictate to you every letter of our alphabet which corresponds with one of these Icelandic characters. We’ll see what that will give us. But, by St. Michael! Take care that you don’t make mistakes!”

  The dictation began. I did my best. Every letter was called out one after the other, and resulted in the unintelligible sequence of the following words:

  mm.rnlls esreuel seecJde

  sgtssmf unteief niedrke

  kt,samn atrateS Saodrrn

  emtnael nuaect rrilSa

  Atvaar .nscrc ieaabs

  ccdrmi eeutul frntu

  dt,iac oseibo KediiY

  When this work was ended, my uncle quickly took the paper on which I had been writing, and examined it attentively for a long time.