Voyage au centre de la terre. English Read online

  CHAPTER XXXVII.

  THE LIEDENBROCK MUSEUM OF GEOLOGY

  How shall I describe the strange series of passions which insuccession shook the breast of Professor Liedenbrock? Firststupefaction, then incredulity, lastly a downright burst of rage.Never had I seen the man so put out of countenance and so disturbed.The fatigues of our passage across, the dangers met, had all to bebegun over again. We had gone backwards instead of forwards!

  But my uncle rapidly recovered himself.

  "Aha! will fate play tricks upon me? Will the elements lay plotsagainst me? Shall fire, air, and water make a combined attack againstme? Well, they shall know what a determined man can do. I will notyield. I will not stir a single foot backwards, and it will be seenwhether man or nature is to have the upper hand!"

  Erect upon the rock, angry and threatening, Otto Liedenbrock was arather grotesque fierce parody upon the fierce Achilles defying thelightning. But I thought it my duty to interpose and attempt to laysome restraint upon this unmeasured fanaticism.

  "Just listen to me," I said firmly. "Ambition must have a limitsomewhere; we cannot perform impossibilities; we are not at all fitfor another sea voyage; who would dream of undertaking a voyage offive hundred leagues upon a heap of rotten planks, with a blanket inrags for a sail, a stick for a mast, and fierce winds in our teeth?We cannot steer; we shall be buffeted by the tempests, and we shouldbe fools and madmen to attempt to cross a second time."

  I was able to develop this series of unanswerable reasons for tenminutes without interruption; not that the Professor was paying anyrespectful attention to his nephew's arguments, but because he wasdeaf to all my eloquence.

  "To the raft!" he shouted.

  Such was his only reply. It was no use for me to entreat, supplicate,get angry, or do anything else in the way of opposition; it wouldonly have been opposing a will harder than the granite rock.

  Hans was finishing the repairs of the raft. One would have thoughtthat this strange being was guessing at my uncle's intentions. With afew more pieces of surturbrand he had refitted our vessel. A sailalready hung from the new mast, and the wind was playing in itswaving folds.

  The Professor said a few words to the guide, and immediately he puteverything on board and arranged every necessary for our departure.The air was clear--and the north-west wind blew steadily.

  What could I do? Could I stand against the two? It was impossible? IfHans had but taken my side! But no, it was not to be. The Icelanderseemed to have renounced all will of his own and made a vow to forgetand deny himself. I could get nothing out of a servant so feudalised,as it were, to his master. My only course was to proceed.

  I was therefore going with as much resignation as I could find toresume my accustomed place on the raft, when my uncle laid his handupon my shoulder.

  "We shall not sail until to-morrow," he said.

  I made a movement intended to express resignation.

  "I must neglect nothing," he said; "and since my fate has driven meon this part of the coast, I will not leave it until I have examinedit."

  To understand what followed, it must be borne in mind that, throughcircumstances hereafter to be explained, we were not really where theProfessor supposed we were. In fact we were not upon the north shoreof the sea.

  "Now let us start upon fresh discoveries," I said.

  And leaving Hans to his work we started off together. The spacebetween the water and the foot of the cliffs was considerable. Ittook half an hour to bring us to the wall of rock. We trampled underour feet numberless shells of all the forms and sizes which existedin the earliest ages of the world. I also saw immense carapaces morethan fifteen feet in diameter. They had been the coverings of thosegigantic glyptodons or armadilloes of the pleiocene period, of whichthe modern tortoise is but a miniature representative. [1] The soilwas besides this scattered with stony fragments, boulders rounded bywater action, and ridged up in successive lines. I was therefore ledto the conclusion that at one time the sea must have covered theground on which we were treading. On the loose and scattered rocks,now out of the reach of the highest tides, the waves had leftmanifest traces of their power to wear their way in the hardest stone.

  This might up to a certain point explain the existence of an oceanforty leagues beneath the surface of the globe. But in my opinionthis liquid mass would be lost by degrees farther and farther withinthe interior of the earth, and it certainly had its origin in thewaters of the ocean overhead, which had made their way hither throughsome fissure. Yet it must be believed that that fissure is nowclosed, and that all this cavern or immense reservoir was filled in avery short time. Perhaps even this water, subjected to the fierceaction of central heat, had partly been resolved into vapour. Thiswould explain the existence of those clouds suspended over our headsand the development of that electricity which raised such tempestswithin the bowels of the earth.

  This theory of the phenomena we had witnessed seemed satisfactory tome; for however great and stupendous the phenomena of nature, fixedphysical laws will or may always explain them.

  We were therefore walking upon sedimentary soil, the deposits of thewaters of former ages. The Professor was carefully examining everylittle fissure in the rocks. Wherever he saw a hole he always wantedto know the depth of it. To him this was important.

  We had traversed the shores of the Liedenbrock sea for a mile when weobserved a sudden change in the appearance of the soil. It seemedupset, contorted, and convulsed by a violent upheaval of the lowerstrata. In many places depressions or elevations gave witness to sometremendous power effecting the dislocation of strata.

  [1] The glyptodon and armadillo are mammalian; the tortoise is achelonian, a reptile, distinct classes of the animal kingdom;therefore the latter cannot be a representative of the former.(Trans.)

  We moved with difficulty across these granite fissures and chasmsmingled with silex, crystals of quartz, and alluvial deposits, when afield, nay, more than a field, a vast plain, of bleached bones layspread before us. It seemed like an immense cemetery, where theremains of twenty ages mingled their dust together. Huge mounds ofbony fragments rose stage after stage in the distance. They undulatedaway to the limits of the horizon, and melted in the distance in afaint haze. There within three square miles were accumulated thematerials for a complete history of the animal life of ages, ahistory scarcely outlined in the too recent strata of the inhabitedworld.

  But an impatient curiosity impelled our steps; crackling andrattling, our feet were trampling on the remains of prehistoricanimals and interesting fossils, the possession of which is a matterof rivalry and contention between the museums of great cities. Athousand Cuviers could never have reconstructed the organic remainsdeposited in this magnificent and unparalleled collection.

  I stood amazed. My uncle had uplifted his long arms to the vaultwhich was our sky; his mouth gaping wide, his eyes flashing behindhis shining spectacles, his head balancing with an up-and-downmotion, his whole attitude denoted unlimited astonishment. Here hestood facing an immense collection of scattered leptotheria,mericotheria, lophiodia, anoplotheria, megatheria, mastodons,protopithecae, pterodactyles, and all sorts of extinct monsters hereassembled together for his special satisfaction. Fancy anenthusiastic bibliomaniac suddenly brought into the midst of thefamous Alexandrian library burnt by Omar and restored by a miraclefrom its ashes! just such a crazed enthusiast was my uncle, ProfessorLiedenbrock.

  But more was to come, when, with a rush through clouds of bone dust,he laid his hand upon a bare skull, and cried with a voice tremblingwith excitement:

  "Axel! Axel! a human head!"

  "A human skull?" I cried, no less astonished.

  "Yes, nephew. Aha! M. Milne-Edwards! Ah! M. de Quatrefages, how Iwish you were standing here at the side of Otto Liedenbrock!"