Journey to the Center of the Earth (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 6

  So I felt reassured about this heroic method of solving the problem.

  But time passed; night came on; the street noises ceased; my uncle, bending over his task, noticed nothing, not even Martha half opening the door; he heard not a sound, not even this noble servant saying:

  “Will Professor Lidenbrock not have any dinner tonight?”

  Poor Martha had to go away unanswered. As for me, after long resistance, I was overcome by sleep, and fell asleep at one end of the sofa, while Uncle Lidenbrock went on calculating and erasing his calculations.

  When I awoke the next morning that indefatigable worker was still at his task. His red eyes, his pale complexion, his hair tangled in his feverish hand, the red spots on his cheeks, said enough about his desperate struggle with the impossible, and with what weariness of spirit and exhaustion of the brain the hours must have passed for him.

  In truth, I felt sorry for him. In spite of the reproaches which I thought I had a right to make him, a certain feeling of compassion began to take hold of me. The poor man was so entirely taken up with his one idea that he had even forgotten how to get angry. All his vital forces were concentrated on a single point, and because their usual vent was closed, it was to be feared that their pent-up tension might lead to an explosion any moment.

  I could have loosened the steel vice that was crushing his brain with one gesture, with just one word! But I did nothing.

  Yet I was not an ill-natured fellow. Why did I remain silent in such a crisis? In my uncle’s own interest.

  “No, no,” I repeated, “no, I won’t speak! He’d insist on going, I know him; nothing on earth could stop him. He has a volcanic imagination, and would risk his life to do what other geologists have never done. I’ll keep silent. I’ll keep the secret that chance has revealed to me. To reveal it would be to kill Professor Lidenbrock! Let him find it out himself if he can. I don’t want to have to reproach myself some day that I led him to his destruction.”

  Having made this resolution, I folded my arms and waited. But I had not anticipated a little incident which occurred a few hours later.

  When the maid Martha wanted to go to the market, she found the door locked. The big key was gone. Who could have taken it out? Assuredly, it was my uncle, when he returned the night before from his hurried walk.

  Was this done on purpose? Or was it a mistake? Did he want to expose us to hunger? This seemed like going rather too far! What! should Martha and I be victims of a situation that did not concern us in the least? It was a fact that a few years before this, while my uncle was working on his great classification of minerals, he went for forty-eight hours without eating, and all his household was obliged to share in this scientific fast. As for me, what I remember is that I got severe stomach cramps, which hardly suited the constitution of a hungry, growing lad.

  Now it seemed to me as if breakfast was going to be lacking, just as dinner had been the night before. Yet I resolved to be a hero, and not to be conquered by the pangs of hunger. Martha took it very seriously, and, poor woman, was very much distressed. As for me, the impossibility of leaving the house worried me even more, and for good reason. You understand me.

  My uncle went on working, his imagination went off rambling into the ideal world of combinations; he lived far away from earth, and genuinely beyond earthly needs.

  At about noon, hunger began to sting me severely Martha had, without thinking any harm, cleared out the larder the night before, so that now there was nothing left in the house. Still I held out; I made it a point of honor.

  Two o’clock struck. This was becoming ridiculous; worse than that, unbearable. I opened my eyes wide. I began to say to myself that I was exaggerating the importance of the document; that my uncle would surely not believe in it, that he would set it down as a mere puzzle; that if it came to the worst, we would restrain him in spite of himself if he wanted to undertake the adventure; that, after all, he might discover the key of the cipher by himself, and that I would then have suffered abstinence for nothing.

  These reasons seemed excellent to me, though on the night before I would have rejected them with indignation; I even found it completely absurd to have waited so long, and made a decision to say it all.

  I was looking for a way of bringing up the matter that was not too abrupt when the professor jumped up, put on his hat, and prepared to go out.

  What! Going out again, and locking us in once more? Never.

  “Uncle!” I said.

  He seemed not to hear me.

  “Uncle Lidenbrock?” I repeated, speaking more loudly

  “What?” he said like a man suddenly waking up.

  “Well! The key?”

  “What key? The door key?”

  “But no!” I exclaimed. “The key to the document!”

  The Professor stared at me over his spectacles; no doubt he saw something unusual in physiognomy, for he seized my arm, and questioned me with his eyes without being able to speak. Nonetheless, never was a question more forcibly put.

  I nodded my head up and down.

  He shook his pityingly, as if he was dealing with a lunatic.

  I made a more affirmative gesture.

  His eyes sparkled with live fire, his hand threatened me.

  This mute conversation would, under the circumstances, have interested even the most indifferent spectator. And the truth is that I did not dare to speak out any more, so much did I fear that my uncle would smother me in his joyful embraces. But he became so urgent that I was at last compelled to answer.

  “Yes, that key, chance—”

  “What are you saying?” he shouted with indescribable emotion.

  “There, read that!” I said, giving him the sheet of paper on which I had written.

  “But this doesn’t mean anything,” he answered, crumpling up the paper.

  “No, not when you start to read from the beginning, but from the end...”

  I had not finished my sentence when the professor broke out into a cry, more than a cry, a real roar! A new revelation took place in his mind. He was transfigured.

  “Aha, ingenious Saknussemm!” he exclaimed, “so you first wrote out your sentence backwards?”

  And throwing himself on the paper, eyes dimmed and voice choked, he read the entire document from the last letter to the first.

  It was phrased as follows:

  In Sneffels Yoculis craterem kem delibat umbra Scartaris Julii intra calendas descende, audas viator, et terrestre centrum attinges. Kod feci. Arne Saknussemm.

  Which bad Latin may be translated like this:

  Descend into the crater of Snaefells Jökull, which the shadow of Scartaris touches before the calendsj of July, bold traveler, and you will reach the center of the earth. I did it. Arne Saknussemm.

  In reading this, my uncle jumped up as if he had inadvertently touched a Leyden jar.k His audacity, his joy, and his conviction were magnificent to see. He came and he went; he gripped his head with both his hands; he pushed the chairs out of their places, he piled up his books; incredible as it may seem, he juggled his precious geodes; he sent a kick here, a thump there. At last his nerves calmed down, and like a man exhausted by too great an expenditure of vital power, he sank back into his armchair.

  “What time is it?” he asked after a few moments of silence.

  “Three o’clock,” I replied.

  “Really? The dinner has passed quickly. I’m starving. Let’s eat. And then ...”

  “Well?”

  “After dinner, pack my suitcase.”

  “What!” I exclaimed.

  “And yours!” replied the merciless professor and entered into the dining-room.

  VI

  AT THESE WORDS A cold shiver ran through me. Yet I controlled myself; I even decided to put a good face on it. Scientific arguments alone could have any weight with Professor Lidenbrock. Now there were good ones against the practicability of such a journey. Go to the center of the earth! What nonsense! But I kept my dialectics in reserve f
or a suitable opportunity, and focused on dinner.

  It is no use to tell of the rage and imprecations of my uncle before the empty table. Explanations were given, Martha was set at liberty, ran off to the market, and did her part so well that an hour afterwards my hunger was appeased, and I returned to the gravity of the situation.

  During the dinner, my uncle was almost merry; he indulged in some of those learned jokes which never do anybody any harm. Dessert over, he signaled to me to follow him to his study.

  I obeyed; he sat at one end of his table, I at the other.

  “Axel,” he said very mildly; “you’re a very ingenious lad, you’ve done me a splendid service, at a moment when I, tired of the struggle, was going to abandon the combinations. Where would I have lost myself? Impossible to know! Never, my lad, will I forget it; and you’ll have your share in the glory to which your discovery will lead.”

  “Oh, come!” I thought, “he is in a good mood. Now’s the time for discussing this glory.”

  “Before anything else,” my uncle resumed, “I recommend that you keep absolute secrecy, you understand? There are not a few in the scientific world who envy my success, and many would be ready to undertake this enterprise who’ll only find out about it at our return.”

  “Do you really think there are many people bold enough?”

  “Certainly; who would hesitate to acquire such fame? If that document were divulged, a whole army of geologists would be ready to rush into the footsteps of Arne Saknussemm.”

  “That’s something I’m not convinced of, Uncle, because we have no proof of the authenticity of this document.”

  “What! And the book inside which we discovered it?”

  “Granted. I admit that Saknussemm may have written these lines. But does it follow that he’s really carried out such a journey? Couldn’t this old parchment be misleading?”

  I almost regretted uttering this last, somewhat daring word. The professor knitted his thick brows, and I feared I had seriously compromised my own safety. Happily no great harm came of it. A kind of smile sketched itself on the lips of my severe interlocutor, and he answered:

  “That is what we’ll see.”

  “Ah!” I said, a bit offended. “But allow me to exhaust all the possible objections against this document.”

  “Speak, my boy, don’t be afraid. You’re quite at liberty to express your opinions. You’re no longer my nephew only, but my colleague. Go ahead.”

  “Well, in the first place, I’d like to ask what are this Jökull, this Snaefells, and this Scartaris, names which I’ve never heard before?”

  “Nothing’s easier. I received a map from my friend Augustus Petermann l at Leipzig not long ago; it could not have come at a better time. Take down the third atlas on the second shelf in the large bookcase, series Z, plate 4.”

  I rose, and with the help of such precise instructions could not fail to find the required atlas. My uncle opened it and said:

  “Here’s one of the best maps of Iceland, that of Handerson, and it’ll solve all our difficulties.”

  I bent over the map.

  “Look at this volcanic island,” said the professor; “and observe that all of them are called Jökulls. This word which means ‘glacier’ in Icelandic, and because of Iceland’s high latitude, almost all the eruptions break through layers of ice. Hence this term of Jökull is applied to all the island’s volcanoes.”

  “Very good;” I said; ”but what of Snaefells?”

  I was hoping that this question would be unanswerable; but I was mistaken. My uncle replied:

  “Follow my finger along the west coast of Iceland. Do you see Reykjavik, the capital? Yes. Good. Go up the innumerable fjordsm on those shores eaten away by the sea, and stop just under 65° latitude. What do you see there?”

  “A kind of peninsula looking like a bare bone with an enormous knee cap at the end.”

  “A fair comparison, my boy. Now do you see anything on that knee cap?”

  “Yes; a mountain that seems to have grown out of the sea.”

  “Right. That’s Snaefells.”

  “Snaefells?”

  “It is. It is a mountain of five thousand feet, one of the most remarkable ones on the island and certainly the most famous one in the whole world if its crater leads down to the center of the earth.”

  “But that’s impossible!” I exclaimed, shrugging my shoulders, and put off by such a ridiculous assumption.

  “Impossible?” replied the professor severely. “Why?” “Because this crater is obviously filled with lava and burning rocks, and therefore ...”

  “But suppose it’s an extinct volcano?”

  “Extinct?”

  “Yes; the number of active volcanoes on the surface of the globe is currently only about three hundred. But there’s a much larger quantity of extinct ones. Now, Snaefells is one of these, and since historic times it’s had only one eruption, that of 1219; from that time on, it has quieted down more and more, and now it is no longer counted among active volcanoes.”

  To such definitive statements I could make no reply. I therefore took refuge in other dark passages of the document.

  “What’s the meaning of this word Scartaris, and what have the calends of July to do with it?”

  My uncle stopped to think for a few moments. I had a minute of hope, but only one, because he soon answered me as follows:

  “What is darkness to you is light to me. This proves the ingenious care with which Saknussemm wanted to indicate his discovery. Snaefells has several craters. So it was necessary to point out which one of these leads to the center of the globe. What did the Icelandic scholar do? He observed that at the approach of the calends of July, that’s to say in the last days of June, one of the peaks, called Scartaris, throws its shadow down the mouth of that particular crater, and he committed that fact to his document. Could there possibly have been a more exact guide? As soon as we arrive at the summit of Snaefells we’ll have no hesitation as to the proper road to take.”

  Decidedly, my uncle had answered every one of my objections. I saw that his position on the old parchment was impregnable. I therefore ceased to press him on that part of the subject, and as above all things he had to be convinced, I passed on to scientific objections, which in my opinion were far more serious.

  “Well, then,” I said, “I’m forced to agree that Saknussemm’s sentence is clear, and leaves no room for doubt. I even admit that the document looks perfectly authentic. That learned scholar did go to the bottom of Snaefells; he saw the shadow of Scartaris touch the edge of the crater before the calends of July; he even heard the legendary stories of his time about that crater leading to the center of the world; but as reaching it himself, as for carrying out the journey and returning, if he ever went, no, a hundred times no!”

  “And your reason?” said my uncle in an especially mocking tone of voice.

  “It’s that all the theories of science demonstrate that such a feat is impossible!”

  “All the theories say that, do they?” replied the professor in a jovial tone. “Oh! evil theories! How they will bother us, those poor theories!”

  I saw that he was mocking me, but I continued all the same.

  “Yes; it’s perfectly well known that the interior temperature rises one degree for every 70 feet in depth; now if this proportion to be constant and the radius of the earth is fifteen hundred leagues, the temperature at the core must be more than 200,000°C. Therefore all the substances in the interior of the earth are in a state of incandescent gas, because the metals, gold, platinum, the hardest rocks, can’t resist such heat. So I have the right to ask whether it’s possible to enter into such an environment!”

  “So, Axel, it’s the heat that troubles you?”

  “Of course it is. If we reach a depth of only ten leagues we’ll have arrived at the limit of the terrestrial crust, for there the temperature will be more than 1,300°C.”

  “And are you afraid of melting?”

  “
I’ll leave it up to you to decide that question,” I answered rather sullenly.

  “This is my decision,” replied Professor Lidenbrock, putting on one of his grandest airs. “Neither you nor anybody else knows with any certainty what’s going on in the interior of this globe, since not the twelve thousandth part of its radius is known; science is eminently perfectible, and every theory is constantly put in question by a newer one. Wasn’t it believed until Fouriern that the temperature of the interplanetary spaces was constantly decreasing? And don’t we know today that the greatest cold of the ethereal regions never goes beyond 40 or 50°C below zero? Why wouldn’t it be the same with the interior heat? Why wouldn’t it, at a certain depth, reach an upper limit instead of rising to the point where it melts the most resistant metals?”

  Since my uncle was now moving the question to the terrain of theories, I had no answer.

  “Well, I’ll tell you that true scholars, amongst them Poisson,o have demonstrated that if a heat of 200,000°C existed in the interior of the globe, the white-hot gases from the molten matter would expand so much that the crust of the earth could not resist, and it would explode like the sides of a boiler under steam.”

  “That’s Poisson’s opinion, Uncle, nothing more.”

  “Granted, but other distinguished geologists also hold the opinion that the interior of the globe is neither gas nor water, nor any of the heaviest minerals known, for in that case, the earth would weigh less than it does.”

  “Oh, with numbers you can prove anything!”

  “But is it the same with facts, my boy? Is it not known that the number of volcanoes has considerably diminished since the first days of creation? And if there is heat at the core, can we not therefore conclude that it’s decreasing?”