Journey to the Center of the Earth (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (27 page)

 

Sunday, August 23.
—Where are we? Driven on at incalculable speed.

The night has been horrible. The thunderstorm does not abate. We live in the midst of noise, a constant explosion. Our ears are bleeding. We cannot exchange a word.

The lightning flashes never stop. I see reverse zigzags that after flashing momentarily rebound back up and strike against the granite vault. What if it crumbled! Other lightning flashes bifurcate or take the shape of fiery spheres that explode like bombshells. But the general noise does not seem to increase when they do; it has exceeded the volume that the human ear can perceive, and even if all the powder kegs of the world exploded at once, we would not hear it anymore.

There is continuous light emission at the surface of the clouds; the electric substance is constantly discharged from their molecules; obviously the gaseous principles in the air have changed; innumerable fountains of water rush upwards into the air and fall back again foaming.

Where are we going? My uncle lies stretched out at the end of the raft.

The heat increases. I look at the thermometer; it indicates ... [the figure is obliterated].

 

Monday, August 24.
—It will never end! Why would the state of this very dense atmosphere, now that it has been changed, not be definitive?

We are worn out by exhaustion. Hans as usual. The raft speeds invariably to the south-east. We have run two hundred leagues since we left Axel Island.

At noon the violence of the storm doubles. We must safely stow every piece of cargo. Each of us ties himself down as well. The waves rise above our heads.

Impossible to address a single word to each other for the last three days. We open our mouths, we move our lips, but no perceptible sound comes forth. Even talking into each other’s ears we cannot hear each other.

My uncle has approached me. He has uttered a few words. I believe he has told me, “We are lost.” But I am not sure.

I decide to write down these words: “Let us lower the sail.”

He nods his consent.

Scarcely has he risen up again when a disk of fire appears at the edge of the raft. Mast and sail are swept away together in one stroke, and I see them fly up to a prodigious height, resembling a pterodactyl, that fantastic bird of the first ages.

We are frozen with fear. The half-white, half-blue ball, as large as a ten-inch bombshell, moves about slowly, but revolves with surprising speed under the whiplash of the hurricane. It goes here and there, it climbs up onto one of the raft’s crossbeams, jumps onto the sack of provisions, comes back down easily, leaps, and skirts along the box of gunpowder. Horror! We’ll blow up! No. The dazzling disk moves away; it approaches Hans, who looks at it steadily; it approaches my uncle, who falls down on his knees to avoid it; it approaches me, pale and trembling in the glare of the light and heat; it spins close to my foot, which I try to pull back. I cannot do it.

A smell of laughing-gas fills the air; it enters the throat, the lungs. We suffocate.

Why am I unable to pull back my foot? It must be riveted to the planks! Ah! the descent of this electric sphere has magnetized all the iron on board; the instruments, the tools, the weapons, move about and clash with a sharp jangle; the nails in my shoes cling tenaciously to a plate of iron set into the wood. I cannot pull my foot away!

At last, I tear it away with a violent effort just when the ball was about to seize it in its gyration and drag me along with it....

Ah! what glaring light! the sphere bursts! we are covered with tongues of fire!

Then all the light goes out. I had the time to see my uncle stretched out on the raft. Hans still at the helm and “spitting fire” under the impact of the electricity that penetrates him.

Where are we going? Where are we going?

HERE ENDS WHAT I have called my “ship log,” happily saved from the wreckage. I resume my narrative as before.

What happened when the raft was dashed on the reefs of the shore I cannot tell. I felt myself being hurled into the waves, and if I escaped from death, if my body was not torn on the sharp rocks, it was because Hans’ powerful arm pulled me back from the abyss.

The courageous Icelander carried me out of reach of the waves to a burning sand where I found myself side by side with my uncle.

Then he returned to the rocks, against which the furious waves were beating, to save a few pieces from the shipwreck. I was unable to speak; I was shattered by emotion and fatigue; it took me a long hour to recover.

Meanwhile, a deluge of rain was still falling, but with the increased intensity that precedes the end of a thunderstorm. A few overhanging rocks afforded us shelter from the torrents falling from the sky. Hans prepared some food that I could not touch, and each of us, exhausted by three sleepless nights, fell into a painful sleep.

The next day the weather was splendid. The sky and the ocean had calmed down in perfect synchrony. Any trace of the tempest had disappeared. The professor’s joyful words greeted my awakening. His good cheer was terrible.

“Well, my boy,” he exclaimed, “have you slept well?”

Would not one have thought that we were still in the house on the Königstrasse, that I was coming down peacefully for breakfast, that I was to be married to poor Graüben the very same day?

Alas! if the tempest had only driven the raft to the east, we would have passed under Germany, under my beloved city of Hamburg, under the very street where all that I loved in the world dwelled. Then just under forty leagues would have separated us! But they were forty vertical leagues of granite wall, and in reality we were a thousand leagues apart!

All these painful reflections rapidly crossed my mind before I answered my uncle’s question.

“Well, now,” he repeated, “won’t you tell me whether you slept well?”

“Very well,” I said. “I still feel shattered, but it’ll soon turn to nothing.”

“Absolutely nothing, a bit of fatigue, that’s all.”

“But you seem very cheerful this morning, Uncle.”

“Delighted, my boy, delighted! We’ve arrived!”

“At the goal of our expedition?”

“No, but at the end of that unending ocean. Now we’ll travel by land again, and really go down into the bowels of the globe.”

“Uncle, allow me to ask you a question.”

“Of course, Axel.”

“How do we return?”

“Return? Ah! You think about returning before we’ve arrived.”

“No, I only want to know how we’ll do it.”

“In the simplest way in the world. Once we’ve reached the center of the globe, we’ll either find a new route to go back to the surface, or we’ll just return the way we came like ordinary folks. I’d like to think that it won’t be closed off behind us.”

“But then we’ll have to repair the raft.”

“Of course.”

“As for food supplies, do we have enough left to accomplish all these great things?”

“Yes, certainly. Hans is a skillful fellow, and I’m sure that he’s saved a large part of our cargo. Let’s go and make sure, at any rate.”

We left this grotto which was open to every wind. I cherished a hope that was a fear as well; it seemed impossible to me that the terrible wreckage of the raft would not have destroyed everything on board. I was wrong. When I arrived on the shore, I found Hans in the midst of a multitude of items, all arranged in order. My uncle shook hands with him in an expression of deep gratitude. This man, with a superhuman devotion that perhaps had no equal, had worked while we were sleeping and had saved the most precious items at the risk of his life.

It’s not that we had not suffered appreciable losses; our firearms, for instance; but we could do without them. Our stock of powder had remained intact after having almost blown us up during the tempest.

“Well,” exclaimed the professor, “since we have no guns we won’t have to bother hunting.”

“All right; but the instruments?”

“Here’s the manometer, the most useful of them all, for which I’d have exchanged all the others! With this I can calculate the depth so as to know when we’ve reached the center. Without it we risk going beyond it and re-emerging at the antipodes!”

This cheerfulness was ferocious.

“But the compass?” I asked.

“Here it is, on this rock, in perfect condition, as well as the thermometers and the chronometer. Ah! The hunter is an invaluable man!”

There was no denying it. As far as instruments, nothing was missing. As for tools and devices, I saw ladders, ropes, picks, pickaxes, etc. lying strewn about in the sand.

Still there was the question of food supplies to investigate.

“And the food?” I said.

The boxes that contained them were lined up on the gravel, perfectly preserved; for the most part the sea had spared them, and what with biscuits, salted meat, gin and dried fish, we still had a four-month food supply.

“Four months!” exclaimed the professor. “We have time to go and return, and with what’s left I’ll give a grand dinner for all my colleagues at the Johanneum!”

I should have been used to my uncle’s temperament for a long time, and yet he never ceased to amaze me.

“Now,” he said, “we’ll replenish our supply of fresh water with the rain that the storm has left in all these granite basins; that way we’ll have no reason to fear being overcome by thirst. As for the raft, I’ll recommend to Hans to do his best to repair it, although I don’t expect it’ll be of any further use to us!”

“How so?” I exclaimed.

“An idea of my own, my boy. I don’t think we’ll go out where we came in.”

I looked at the professor with a certain mistrust. I wondered whether he had not gone mad. And yet he would turn out to be right.

“Let’s go and have breakfast,” he resumed.

I followed him to an elevated promontory after he had given his instructions to the hunter. Dried meat, biscuits, and tea made us an excellent meal there, one of the best, I’ll admit, that I have ever had in my life. Hunger, fresh air, calm weather after the trouble, all contributed to give me an appetite.

During breakfast, I asked my uncle where we were now.

“That,” I said, “seems to me difficult to calculate.”

“Difficult to calculate exactly, yes,” he replied; “impossible, actually, since during these three days of tempest I’ve not been able to keep track of the speed or direction of the raft; but we can still make an approximate estimate.”

“In fact, we made the last observation on the island with the geyser ...”

“On Axel Island, my boy. Don’t reject the honor of having given your name to the first island ever discovered in the interior of the earth.”

“All right. On Axel Island, we had covered two hundred and seventy leagues of ocean, and we were six hundred leagues away from Iceland.”

“Good! Let’s start from that point, then, and count four days of storm, during which our speed could not have been less than eighty leagues per twenty-four hours.”

“That’s right. So that would be three hundred leagues in addition.”

“Yes, and so the Lidenbrock Sea would be about six hundred leagues from shore to shore! Do you realize, Axel, that it competes in size with the Mediterranean?”

“Yes, especially if we’ve not crossed all of it!”

“Which is quite possible!”

“And curiously,” I added, “if our calculations are accurate, we now have the Mediterranean right above our heads.”

“Really!”

“Really, since we are nine hundred leagues away from Reykjavik!”

“That’s a nice long way, my boy; but whether we’re under the Mediterranean rather than under Turkey or the Atlantic, depends on whether our direction hasn’t changed.”

“No, the wind seemed steady; so I think this shore should be south-east of Port Graüben.”

“Well, it’s easy to make sure of that by consulting the compass. Let’s go and see what it says!”

The professor went toward the rock where Hans had put the instruments. He was cheerful, lively, he rubbed his hands, he posed! A real young man! I followed him, rather curious to know if I was not mistaken in my estimate.

When we reached the rock, my uncle took the compass, placed it horizontally and observed the needle, which after a few oscillations stopped in a fixed position due to the magnetic attraction.

My uncle looked, and rubbed his eyes, and looked again. Finally he turned to me, thunderstruck.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

He motioned to me to look at the instrument. An exclamation of surprise burst from me. The tip of the needle indicated north where we assumed the south to be! It pointed to the shore instead of the open sea!

I shook the compass, I examined it; it was in perfect condition. No matter in what position we placed the needle, it obstinately returned to this unexpected direction.

Therefore, there could be no doubt: during the storm, the wind had changed without our noticing, and had taken our raft back to the shore that my uncle thought he had left behind.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO describe the succession of emotions that shook Professor Lidenbrock, amazement, incredulity, and finally rage. Never had I seen a man so disoriented at first, and then so furious. The exhaustion of our journey across the ocean, the dangers we had incurred, all that had to be started over again! We had gone backwards instead of forwards!