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Home -> Jules Verne -> A Journey to the Center of the Earth -> Chapter 37

A Journey to the Center of the Earth - Chapter 37

1. Preface

2. Chapter 1

3. Chapter 2

4. Chapter 3

5. Chapter 4

6. Chapter 5

7. Chapter 6

8. Chapter 7

9. Chapter 8

10. Chapter 9

11. Chapter 10

12. Chapter 11

13. Chapter 12

14. Chapter 13

15. Chapter 14

16. Chapter 15

17. Chapter 16

18. Chapter 17

19. Chapter 18

20. Chapter 19

21. Chapter 20

22. Chapter 21

23. Chapter 22

24. Chapter 23

25. Chapter 24

26. Chapter 25

27. Chapter 26

28. Chapter 27

29. Chapter 28

30. Chapter 29

31. Chapter 30

32. Chapter 31

33. Chapter 32

34. Chapter 33

35. Chapter 34

36. Chapter 35

37. Chapter 36

38. Chapter 37

39. Chapter 38

40. Chapter 39

41. Chapter 40

42. Chapter 41

43. Chapter 42

44. Chapter 43

45. Chapter 44

46. Chapter 45







CHAPTER XXXVII.

THE LIEDENBROCK MUSEUM OF GEOLOGY

How shall I describe the strange series of passions which in
succession shook the breast of Professor Liedenbrock? First
stupefaction, 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 be
begun 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 plots
against me? Shall fire, air, and water make a combined attack against
me? Well, they shall know what a determined man can do. I will not
yield. I will not stir a single foot backwards, and it will be seen
whether man or nature is to have the upper hand!"

Erect upon the rock, angry and threatening, Otto Liedenbrock was a
rather grotesque fierce parody upon the fierce Achilles defying the
lightning. But I thought it my duty to interpose and attempt to lay
some restraint upon this unmeasured fanaticism.

"Just listen to me," I said firmly. "Ambition must have a limit
somewhere; we cannot perform impossibilities; we are not at all fit
for another sea voyage; who would dream of undertaking a voyage of
five hundred leagues upon a heap of rotten planks, with a blanket in
rags 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 should
be fools and madmen to attempt to cross a second time."

I was able to develop this series of unanswerable reasons for ten
minutes without interruption; not that the Professor was paying any
respectful attention to his nephew's arguments, but because he was
deaf 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 would
only have been opposing a will harder than the granite rock.

Hans was finishing the repairs of the raft. One would have thought
that this strange being was guessing at my uncle's intentions. With a
few more pieces of surturbrand he had refitted our vessel. A sail
already hung from the new mast, and the wind was playing in its
waving folds.

The Professor said a few words to the guide, and immediately he put
everything 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? If
Hans had but taken my side! But no, it was not to be. The Icelander
seemed to have renounced all will of his own and made a vow to forget
and 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 to
resume my accustomed place on the raft, when my uncle laid his hand
upon 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 me
on this part of the coast, I will not leave it until I have examined
it."

To understand what followed, it must be borne in mind that, through
circumstances hereafter to be explained, we were not really where the
Professor supposed we were. In fact we were not upon the north shore
of the sea.

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

And leaving Hans to his work we started off together. The space
between the water and the foot of the cliffs was considerable. It
took half an hour to bring us to the wall of rock. We trampled under
our feet numberless shells of all the forms and sizes which existed
in the earliest ages of the world. I also saw immense carapaces more
than fifteen feet in diameter. They had been the coverings of those
gigantic glyptodons or armadilloes of the pleiocene period, of which
the modern tortoise is but a miniature representative. [1] The soil
was besides this scattered with stony fragments, boulders rounded by
water action, and ridged up in successive lines. I was therefore led
to the conclusion that at one time the sea must have covered the
ground on which we were treading. On the loose and scattered rocks,
now out of the reach of the highest tides, the waves had left
manifest traces of their power to wear their way in the hardest stone.

This might up to a certain point explain the existence of an ocean
forty leagues beneath the surface of the globe. But in my opinion
this liquid mass would be lost by degrees farther and farther within
the interior of the earth, and it certainly had its origin in the
waters of the ocean overhead, which had made their way hither through
some fissure. Yet it must be believed that that fissure is now
closed, and that all this cavern or immense reservoir was filled in a
very short time. Perhaps even this water, subjected to the fierce
action of central heat, had partly been resolved into vapour. This
would explain the existence of those clouds suspended over our heads
and the development of that electricity which raised such tempests
within the bowels of the earth.

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

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

We had traversed the shores of the Liedenbrock sea for a mile when we
observed a sudden change in the appearance of the soil. It seemed
upset, contorted, and convulsed by a violent upheaval of the lower
strata. In many places depressions or elevations gave witness to some
tremendous power effecting the dislocation of strata.

[1] The glyptodon and armadillo are mammalian; the tortoise is a
chelonian, 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 chasms
mingled with silex, crystals of quartz, and alluvial deposits, when a
field, nay, more than a field, a vast plain, of bleached bones lay
spread before us. It seemed like an immense cemetery, where the
remains of twenty ages mingled their dust together. Huge mounds of
bony fragments rose stage after stage in the distance. They undulated
away to the limits of the horizon, and melted in the distance in a
faint haze. There within three square miles were accumulated the
materials for a complete history of the animal life of ages, a
history scarcely outlined in the too recent strata of the inhabited
world.

But an impatient curiosity impelled our steps; crackling and
rattling, our feet were trampling on the remains of prehistoric
animals and interesting fossils, the possession of which is a matter
of rivalry and contention between the museums of great cities. A
thousand Cuviers could never have reconstructed the organic remains
deposited in this magnificent and unparalleled collection.

I stood amazed. My uncle had uplifted his long arms to the vault
which was our sky; his mouth gaping wide, his eyes flashing behind
his shining spectacles, his head balancing with an up-and-down
motion, his whole attitude denoted unlimited astonishment. Here he
stood facing an immense collection of scattered leptotheria,
mericotheria, lophiodia, anoplotheria, megatheria, mastodons,
protopithecae, pterodactyles, and all sorts of extinct monsters here
assembled together for his special satisfaction. Fancy an
enthusiastic bibliomaniac suddenly brought into the midst of the
famous Alexandrian library burnt by Omar and restored by a miracle
from its ashes! just such a crazed enthusiast was my uncle, Professor
Liedenbrock.

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 trembling
with 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 I
wish you were standing here at the side of Otto Liedenbrock!"




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