The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (13 page)

“Alas,” said Pierre, “it seems that Pompey now has a grave, a natural one. However, I’m not some primitive chieftain who buries an expensive saddle along with his steed! We need a long rope and a strapping farmboy to assist me.” He eyed my mount.

Promptly I said, “Diana’ll carry us both, if I take it easy —she isn’t slack-backed. We’ll leave her saddle here, and you can hold on to me.”

“My dear, surely I shall take the reins!”

“Have you ever ridden bare-back before? Besides, I did not lose my mount!”

“Oh Hortense, you mettlesome filly!” Pierre burst out laughing — quite lasciviously. Doubtless he was remembering the previous night when he had ridden me, and vice versa. Of course Pompey’s death was shocking and sad but we must retain our spirits and good humour. Pierre and I were well suited in this regard. Oh was I to remain forever merely a mistress? Of course there was the matter of his wife’s large inheritance to which he would lose access — that inheritance had paid for his various adventures in exotic places.

I’m spending a little too long upon the start of this unparalleled adventure which we were about to share. Suffice it to say that we returned in company with a hulking, beefy-faced, and amiable lad called Antoine, me still riding Diana, Pierre maintaining his dignity upon a carthorse laden with rope, Antoine trotting beside us at no great speed, carrying an oil lantern.

Antoine obviously assumed that he should descend into the abyss on behalf of the posh gentleman. Without further ado he began roping himself to the sturdy carthorse. But I intervened. I was lighter and slimmer — surely it was more sensible for me to go down? Pierre wouldn’t countenance this. He himself would make the descent while the lad controlled the carthorse, if, that is, I didn’t feel reluctant to be left alone with the lad.

So it was that presently Antoine and I heard Pierre shouting from below that, in the light from the lantern, he could see big pictures upon one wall of the cave, of bison and other beasts — vivid pictures in red and black and violet. Other pictures were visible along a passage which led from the cave in a downward direction.

“I must see where that passage leads!” he called up to us.

It was a full hour before my Pierre returned, amazed, to the cave, and thence to us who had awaited him — Antoine phlegmatically so, I with increasing concern. Had there been a second lantern, I swear I would have gone in search of my lover.

Numerous weeks were to pass. Professors of Prehistory were to visit our discovery, the hole now rendered safe by timbers, and a simple stairway constructed. One professor declared the cave paintings to be tens of thousands of years old because the animals depicted were extinct. Another denounced the pictures as a hoax — though of course
not
perpetrated by Captain Dumont d’Urville, who was well-known as an adventurer but also as a man of honour.

Pierre was much less excited about those pictures, vigorous but primitive, than about where that tunnel led to. On his first sortie he had reached an underground river, alongside which a wide ledge provided ample safe footage. Wisely he had returned before the oil in the lamp was half-consumed.

On a second sortie, with obliging Antoine as porter, Pierre reached an underground lake. What he was soon calling “the route” took a sideways twist into a passage running through geological formations differing from the limestone hitherto. A route indeed! — for if a passage forked, presenting an ambiguous choice, a small stick-like figure scrawled in ochre often pointed faintly. Presently that route began to descend through rocks more impervious to water. Ever to descend!

How could it be that our primitive ancestors — or one ancestor such, of genius and courage — had penetrated so far? Obviously the cave artists used something to light their work. Perhaps a small bonfire? They would be fairly close to the light of day, to some entrance which later collapsed, and it was difficult to imagine them carrying burning brands deeper and deeper into the bowels of the Earth. Phosphorescent lichen existed here and there in the depths but its light was very feeble.

Greatly enthused, Pierre contacted an acquaintance of his, the geologist Charles Sainte-Claire Deville, who was likewise an adventurer — he had explored active volcanoes such as Vesuvius and Stromboli. Monsieur Deville was already a member of the Academy of Sciences in Paris, and influential. And lo, it transpired that Monsieur Deville himself was in correspondence with that young writer Jules Verne who had just recently caused quite a stir with his novel
Five Weeks in a Balloon.
Monsieur Verne was quizzing Monsieur Deville concerning questions of geology and volcanoes, because he was planning a new novel — about none other than a journey to the centre of the Earth!

Presently Messieurs Deville and Verne hastened to the Dordogne, to accompany us underground with sufficient food, water, lamps and so forth (carried by Antoine) to allow for a return journey of four days in total. Yes, to accompany Pierre and Antoine
and me too.
I had insisted, and I had prevailed. I think Pierre was proud of me, even though he raised trivial objections such as regarding the privacy that a woman requires for matters of personal hygiene. What, in
darkness?
Actually, Verne was the one who most demurred about the participation of a woman in a scientific enterprise. I understood that Verne was married, yet at the same time I sensed, as women can sense in a way inexplicable to men, that in the past the author had experienced disillusionments which made him bitter towards my sex in general. Disillusionments, yes, though also excitements — a woman has instincts. However, Verne was a junior participant in this enterprise, under the wing of Deville. Deville and my Pierre were the men of experience; and for a fairly generous sum Pierre had bought the land which —gave access to the cave. Verne was lucky to be invited to participate in our initial foray — and he was eager to do so.

“How,” he exclaimed, “can I possibly contemplate writing about a journey into the Earth — when what I write may be contradicted by reality? But oh what a novel I shall now be able to write!”

Interestingly, according to Deville, half a century ago a bizarre American by the name of Symmes had sent a proclamation to the Academy of Sciences in Paris to the effect that the Earth is hollow and habitable within, accessible — so the American declared — by way of a big hole at the North Pole. The Academy had responded scornfully and declined to sponsor him.

Imagine us in the simple though adequate inn of Montignacsur-Vézères after we returned safely from those four days underground.

Ah, I have not mentioned our small but powerful Ruhmkorff chemical lamps, which were far superior to the simple oil lamp with which Pierre originally descended, and which wouldn’t cause an explosion should we encounter fire-damp — these, courtesy of a mine owner, at whose mansion Deville sometimes dined. Visualize us: bearded Deville, moustachioed Pierre, the clean-shaven Verne with his curly dark hair, stalwart laconic Antoine — and me, tall and slim, my dark hair gathered in a tight bun.

Those two days of outbound subterranean travel had taken us some eight leagues in a generally north-easterly direction into the roots of the Massif Central, and some three leagues downward from our original height above sea level. Latterly, our downward progress was increasing — and whenever we encountered an ambiguous branching of routes, we would find a stick figure as guide.

Jules enthused, “It seems as if we’re being invited to travel —-deeper — to the very centre of the Earth, just as in the novel I’m planning! I chose Iceland as an entry point because of volcanoes and empty lava tubes, but here there’s an opening in France itself.”

Pierre nodded. “Certainly this merits a serious expedition, with supplies sufficient for several weeks or months.”

“Might it be,” I ventured, “that the stick figures aren’t the work of our primitive ancestors — but that the truth is the reverse? Those guide-marks were made by explorers from
within
the Earth, venturing up to the surface?”

A tic afflicted Jules’ left
eye.
His voice became clipped. “I suppose next you’ll suggest that these venturesome troglodytes painted the bison and other beasts in the cave, from sheer astonishment, or as a warning of what lives on the surface!” He was a man who could veer quickly from witty bonhomie to irritability.

“Perhaps it’s wise,” I said, mildly yet stubbornly, “to entertain all possibilities.”

“Only within the bounds of scientific possibility, my dear lady! What would these denizens of the underworld feed upon? Sheep abducted from the surface?”

“What of the legends of fairy folk abducting people and taking them underground?”

“So you believe in fairies!”

“I only wish to keep an open mind.”

“One that a wind blows through because it is mostly empty.”

“That’s damn’d unfair,” said Pierre. “Hortense has a very full mind, uniquely her own.”

“Full of fancies perhaps. Reason plays no part in feminine lives.”

Diplomatically Deville asked Jules, “Have you read the work of Darwin,
On the Origin of Species?”

“I only just bought the translation — I’m reading it at the moment.”

“A sub-species of
Homo
adapted to life underground seems unlikely . . .” Deville commenced lighting a pipe.

“Still,” said Pierre, “we’ll be well advised to take revolvers and a good supply of gun-cotton too. Personally I’m glad of your suggestion, Hortense.”

I smiled. “Let’s hope we don’t need to use the revolvers.” Pierre gaped at me.
“We?”

Pierre led me aside.

“Taking you underground initially was an
indulgence.
Now we’re planning in terms of weeks or months. Stern stuff, men’s stuff.”

I whispered, “If I don’t go with you, I shall tell your wife everything! Including your opinion of her performance in bed. Then you’ll have no money for gun-cotton or anything else.”

He groaned. The noise was very similar to what I could evoke from him by other means. “My peach, this expedition of ours will be the talk of France — maybe the world! Journalists will seize upon your participation. Mathilde would be very stupid not to put two and two together.”

“Maybe the expedition will make us all rich, then you’ll have no further
_.
need of her!”

“Hmm,” he said and played with his moustache.

“I shall go underground,” I said, “a day before your official departure; so that no one will see me, and I’ll await the four of you. I want an adventure such as no woman has experienced before! If my adventure must remain a secret afterwards, so be it. At least /will know what I have achieved.”

“Verne won’t like this. If the temperature increases progressively the deeper we descend, a man can strip to the waist . . .”

Men could be so illogical. “If heat increases progressively, then you won’t be able to descend far or you’ll melt. Verne must grin and bear me, or there won’t be any expedition, so there! Fortunately Deville has a less nervous attitude towards women.”

“You can be very stubborn.” Nevertheless, Pierre’s eyes twinkled.

Not all of our time since Pompey’s demise had been spent at that village in the Dordogne. Pierre had affairs to attend to in Bordeaux, and he was obliged to spend some time with his wife even if Mathilde was accustomed to frequent adventurous absences on Pierre’s part. I refer to Pierre’s business affairs — our private affair could be conducted with perfect ease in Bordeaux where Pierre maintained me in a pretty apartment. Our jaunt to Montignac-sur-Vézères had been a special holiday outing because I love riding, and Pierre could hardly ride with me publicly in the city, or else tongues would wag. Anyway, by the tenth of September our expedition was fully provisioned and ready — and I made myself scarce, to spend a night underground all on my own half a league along our destined route, so that I shouldn’t feature in the official photographs of departure. I wasn’t in the least bit worried about the isolation nor the darkness. Next day I even conserved my chemicals until I saw the lamps of my fellow explorers approaching Now I really must leap forward in time — back to where I began this narrative — skipping over many undoubtedly fascinating details of rocks and tunnels and shafts and galleries and caverns.

Six weeks had passed and we had journeyed in a mainly east-northeasterly direction for some 200 leagues, which put us almost directly underneath the Bavarian city of Munich — at a depth, by our manometer of compressed air, of an incredible 25 leagues. We imagined the bustle of Germans up on the surface, so remote from us (as we thought!) that they might as well have been on the Moon.

All of us were still fully dressed. As we descended, contrary to scientific wisdom the temperature had risen only moderately, then stabilised. Personally I would have preferred Antoine to shed some garments — not, of course, so as to admire his musculature, but because his clothes had become smelly with sweat, he being of all of us the most burdened . . . by a silk rope-ladder a hundred metres long, mattocks, pickaxes, iron wedges and spikes, long knotted cords, meat extract and biscuits. To a greater or lesser degree all of us were burdened — myself included; I insisted on this! — but Antoine was more weighed down than the rest of us. At the end of every Saturday’s march he received payment for his labour. To his phlegmatic mind the money seemed the entire rationale for a journey which continued to amaze the rest of us, not least when we came . . .

. . .
to an underground sea of vast expanse!

From the strand on which we stood the walls of an immense cavern stretched away to right and to left, into invisibility. Far ahead was a horizon of water — and we could see a long way because the very air seemed phosphorescently alive with light. Masses of cloud hid any view of a roof, those clouds stained kaleidoscopically (maybe I mean prismatically) by what must have been auroras at even higher altitude. Widening out to half a league, the shore of this ocean was richly vegetated by ferns the size of trees and by umbrella-crowned trees which I saw to be enormous fungi. No wonder the air was invigorating compared with the tunnels that had led here! Perhaps for this reason — coupled with the release from two months’ confinement in stygian natural corridors — I became headstrong, spurred by delight at the
aerial
denizens of this subterranean realm, namely butterflies rather than birds, butterflies of all sizes and hues, and dragonflies with huge wingspans such as must have flown in the forests of the Carboniferous Era and which still survived here hidden away beneath the earth.