Journey to the Center of the Earth

Part One · The Secret Message

Professor Otto Lidenbrock of Hamburg was the most impatient man in Germany, a brilliant geologist who studied rocks and minerals and who was incapable of waiting for anything, not even his dinner. His nephew Axel, who lived with him and assisted in his laboratory, was precisely the opposite: cautious, quiet, and extremely fond of remaining exactly where he was. One Sunday in May 1863, the professor burst into the house carrying an ancient manuscript from Iceland, and as he turned its crumbling pages, a scrap of parchment fluttered to the floor. It was covered in peculiar old letters called runes, scrambled together into complete nonsense. Underneath was a signature the professor recognized immediately: Arne Saknussemm, a celebrated Icelandic scholar and alchemist who had lived three centuries earlier. "This is a secret message," the professor announced, "and nobody in this household will eat a mouthful until we have deciphered it."

He meant it, too: the professor locked the front door, pocketed the key, and sat scowling at the parchment through the night, while Axel grew hungrier and hungrier. Eventually, fanning himself with the scrap of paper, Axel happened to glimpse the letters from behind, and suddenly the nonsense became sentences, because the message had been written backward, in Latin. He read it with mounting horror, for it declared that a bold traveler who descended into the crater of an Icelandic volcano called Snaefells, at the spot where the shadow of a peak named Scartaris fell before the first of July, would arrive at the center of the earth. "I did it," the message concluded. "Arne Saknussemm." Axel's first impulse was to burn the paper, because he understood his uncle perfectly. By the second day, however, his stomach was louder than his conscience, and he confessed everything.

The professor leaped up with a shout that rattled the windows, embraced his nephew, and announced that they would depart for Iceland immediately. Axel protested with every scientific argument he could summon. Everybody knew that the temperature of the earth increased the deeper you went, he insisted, so that far below the surface even the rocks would be melted, and they would be roasted like chestnuts long before they arrived anywhere. His uncle dismissed the objection, pointing out that nobody had ever actually traveled down there to check. Axel appealed for help to Gräuben, the professor's goddaughter, a sensible girl who loved him dearly. To his astonishment, her eyes sparkled with enthusiasm. "It is a magnificent expedition," she told him, "and worthy of a scientist's nephew." Within days the two of them were steaming north, with ropes, pickaxes, lamps, instruments, and an alarming quantity of gunpowder.

Part Two · Down the Volcano

In Iceland they engaged a guide named Hans, a tall, imperturbable hunter of eider ducks who spoke almost nothing but Danish and who never appeared surprised by anything whatsoever. Hans was paid every Saturday, and as long as he received his wages, he was perfectly willing to accompany them to the center of the earth. They rode across a bare green island of lava fields and steaming springs until the snowy cone of Snaefells loomed ahead of them. The ascent occupied an entire day, over loose rubble and treacherous ice, and at the summit they peered down into an enormous crater with three black chimneys at its bottom. The professor scampered among them like a schoolboy, and on a boulder beside the central chimney he discovered the name of Arne Saknussemm carved in runes. Axel's final hope, that the whole message was an elaborate hoax, crumbled into dust.

The sky remained overcast for three anxious days, and without sunshine there could be no shadow. Then, on the twenty-eighth of June, the sun emerged, the shadow of the peak called Scartaris slid down the crater wall, and its tip pointed directly at the central chimney. "There is the road to the center of the earth!" cried the professor. They fastened their ropes and lowered themselves down the shaft, hour after exhausting hour, into a darkness that seemed to continue forever. Their only illumination came from two electric lamps, a recent invention, which glowed without any flame. At the bottom they discovered a tunnel slanting downward, its walls glittering with crystals where ancient lava had once poured through. It was beautiful, Axel admitted, and it was also remarkably similar to walking into the throat of a sleeping monster.

For days they trudged downward through the tunnels, measuring their depth with their instruments, and to Axel's surprise the temperature did not rise dramatically. Their genuine enemy was thirst. They had carried only enough water for a few days, and there were no springs in the parched rock, so before long the water was gone. Axel's tongue swelled, his head swam, and he collapsed on the tunnel floor, convinced that he would perish there. His uncle, who had secretly preserved one final mouthful, gave it to him, and then Hans disappeared into the darkness. Through the granite wall, the guide had detected the sound of a river rushing. He attacked the rock with his pickaxe until a jet of water exploded out, so scalding that they had to let it cool. It was the most delicious drink of their lives, and they christened the stream the Hansbach, in honor of their guide.

Part Three · The Sea Under the World

Following the Hansbach, they descended deeper than any human being had ever ventured, until one day Axel, walking ahead, realized that he had wandered into the wrong passage. He retraced his steps, but the stream had vanished, and his companions with it. He shouted until he was hoarse, and nobody answered, and alone in the absolute darkness, he wept and prayed and ran, and he stumbled and struck his head. Then, faintly, he heard voices murmuring inside the rock. Through some peculiar property of the stone, sound was traveling along the curving passages as though through a speaking tube, and by shouting and counting the seconds between each call and its answer, he and his uncle calculated that they were several miles apart. "Walk toward us," called the professor's distant voice. Axel walked, then slid, then tumbled helplessly down a steep slope, and the world went black.

He awoke in a cave, bandaged, with his uncle beaming beside him, and he heard something impossible: the sound of waves. Stumbling outside, Axel found himself on a beach beside an immense sea. It stretched away to the horizon beneath a ceiling of rock so lofty that clouds drifted underneath it, and the entire cavern glowed with a mysterious silvery light, like electricity in the atmosphere. Along the shore stood a forest, but not a forest of trees. These were mushrooms, white and gigantic, thirty or forty feet tall, with caps as wide as rooftops, growing so densely that the light beneath them was as dim as midnight. Beyond them grew colossal ferns and mosses taller than houses, plants that had disappeared from the surface of the earth millions of years earlier. The professor proudly named this underground ocean the Lidenbrock Sea.

Hans constructed a raft from logs of fossilized wood that lay piled along the beach, and they set sail across the Lidenbrock Sea, with a blanket for a sail and a compass to guide them. For days they saw nothing except water, gray and endless. Then, one morning, the raft was jolted from below, and two monsters erupted from the depths. One was an ichthyosaurus, a gigantic reptile shaped like a fish, with eyes as large as a man's head; the other was a plesiosaurus, its long serpentine neck towering above the waves. They had not come for the raft but to battle each other, and they did, churning the sea into foam and raising waves that nearly swamped the travelers. Finally the plesiosaurus sank, its neck writhing, the ichthyosaurus vanished, and the three exhausted explorers lay clinging to their logs.

A few days later a tremendous storm erupted across the underground sky, the most violent storm Axel had ever witnessed. Lightning flashed from the rocky ceiling, thunder rolled continuously, and the raft was hurled along at terrific speed for days. A glowing ball of fire, half white and half blue, rolled onto the raft, bounced around their feet, and exploded. When the storm finally deposited them on a rocky coast, they discovered the shore littered with bones. On a plain beyond lay the skeletons of creatures that no living person had seen alive, and among them, astonishingly, a human skull. Wandering into another forest, Axel and his uncle glimpsed, between the trunks, a herd of mastodons, shaggy elephants from the Ice Age, and supervising them stood a gigantic shepherd, more than twelve feet tall. The two scientists did not wait to be introduced; they fled back to the beach.

Part Four · Up Through the Fire

Near the shore the professor gave a cry of triumph. Carved into a rock at the entrance of a dark tunnel were two letters: A. S. Arne Saknussemm had stood on this very spot three centuries before them! Unfortunately, the tunnel was blocked by an enormous fallen boulder, and nothing could budge it, nothing except gunpowder. They packed an explosive charge beneath the boulder, lit a long fuse, and pushed off on the raft to wait at a safe distance. The explosion was considerably bigger than they had anticipated. The rock vanished, and the floor beneath it vanished too, because the boulder had been plugging a bottomless abyss. The entire Lidenbrock Sea began pouring into the hole, and the raft went with it, whirling downward through the darkness at a velocity that took their breath away. Their lamp shattered, most of their provisions were lost, and all they could do was hold on.

After what felt like hours, the falling stopped, and the raft began to rise. The water was propelling them upward through a narrow shaft, faster and faster, and the walls around them grew hotter and hotter, until the air resembled the inside of an oven and the compass spun wildly as though it had lost its mind. Beneath them the water was boiling, and beneath the water, Axel realized with terror, was molten rock. They were inside a volcano, and it was about to explode. The professor, delighted, declared that this was the most fortunate thing imaginable, because an eruption was obviously the fastest route back to the surface. There was a roar like a thousand cannons, and the raft was flung upward through fire and smoke and showers of glowing ash. The next thing Axel knew, he was lying on a mountainside beneath a blazing blue sky.

They were not in Iceland at all, for a little boy, herding goats among the olive trees, informed them in Italian that the mountain was Stromboli, a volcano on an island off the coast of Italy, more than two thousand miles from where they had climbed down. The three travelers, scorched and ragged, feasted on grapes and pomegranates from an orchard and laughed until they cried. Back in Hamburg, the professor became the most celebrated scientist in the world, Hans returned to Iceland with his wages, and Axel, who had once been nervous about crossing the street, married Gräuben. Only one mystery continued to puzzle him. Why had their compass, throughout the voyage, pointed south instead of north? Months later he solved it: the fireball on the underground sea had reversed the needle. "So it was not my imagination," Axel said. "We truly did journey toward the center of the earth."