After decoding a scrap of paper in runic script, the intrepid Professor Lidenbrock and his nervous nephew Axel travel across Iceland to find the secret passage to the centre of the earth. Enlisting the silent Hans as a guide, the trio encounter a perilous and astonishing subterranean world of natural hazards, curious sights, prehistoric beasts and sea monsters.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Copyright © Jules Verne 1961
Jules Verne has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Jules Verne
Title Page
Chapter 1 My Uncle Finds a Manuscript
Chapter 2 Saknussemm’s Cryptogram
Chapter 3 The Key to the Cipher
Chapter 4 I Have Doubts
Chapter 5 I Argue with my Uncle
Chapter 6 Preparations for the Journey
Chapter 7 No Head for Heights
Chapter 8 Reykjavik
Chapter 9 Dinner with Mr Fridriksson
Chapter 10 Our Guide Hans
Chapter 11 To Snaefells
Chapter 12 Icelandic Hospitality
Chapter 13 My Last Vain Plea
Chapter 14 Snaefells
Chapter 15 Into the Crater
Chapter 16 Down the Chimney
Chapter 17 In the Bowels of the Earth
Chapter 18 The Wrong Turning
Chapter 19 A Mine with no Miners
Chapter 20 Thirst
Chapter 21 The Search for Water
Chapter 22 Hans Finds Water
Chapter 23 Journey Under the Earth
Chapter 24 Scientific Arguments Under the Ocean
Chapter 25 I Lose My Way
Chapter 26 Lost
Chapter 27 Voices in the Dark
Chapter 28 Saved!
Chapter 29 The Subterranean Sea
Chapter 30 Hans Builds a Raft
Chapter 31 On the Subterranean Sea
Chapter 32 A Battle of Monsters
Chapter 33 Axel Island
Chapter 34 Storm at Sea
Chapter 35 The Compass
Chapter 36 A Human Skull!
Chapter 37 The Dagger of Saknussemm
Chapter 38 An Obstacle
Chapter 39 Into the Abyss
Chapter 40 Our Last Meal
Chapter 41 The Fiery Road
Chapter 42 Stromboli!
Chapter 43 The Crazy Compass
Copyright
Jules Verne was born on 8 February, 1828, in the city of Nantes, France. He is best known for his novels Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Mysterious Island and Around the World in Eighty Days. Verne is often referred to as the ‘father of science fiction’ because he wrote about space, air and underwater travel before aeroplanes, spacecrafts and submarines were invented. He died in 1905.
On Sunday, 24th May, 1863, my uncle Professor Lidenbrock came suddenly home, much too early for dinner. I was in the dining-room of our house, No. 19 Königstrasse, in the old quarter of Hamburg, when I caught a glimpse of him dashing along the street, and at the same time our housekeeper Martha put her head round the door.
‘Here’s the master already!’ she cried, ‘and I’ve only just got the dinner in the oven!’
‘Never mind, Martha,’ I said soothingly, ‘he has no right to expect his dinner yet.’ But in my heart I felt that if my uncle were hungry nothing would stop him from shouting for his food the moment he set foot in the house.
‘Then why is he home so early? Here he is, I’ll get back to my kitchen, do please calm him down, Mr Axel.’
When she had gone, however, I thought it would be more prudent to avoid my violent uncle. I was just going to sneak upstairs to my little room when the street door creaked on its hinges, the wooden staircase echoed with heavy footsteps, and the master of the house rushed through the dining-room on the way to his study. As he passed, he flung his walking-stick with its nutcracker head into a corner, his broad, tousle-haired hat on to the table, and shouted in ringing tones, ‘Axel, follow me!’
Before I had time to move he was calling impatiently:
‘Well, where are you, boy?’
I ran into the study. My uncle Otto Lidenbrock was not unkind, only terribly eccentric. He was a true scientist, and although he sometimes broke his specimens through testing them too abruptly, he was a brilliant geologist and mineralogist.
He was tall and thin, fair-haired, with an iron constitution, looking ten years younger than his age, which was about fifty. His eyes behind his big spectacles were always glancing eagerly about, his long thin nose was like a filed blade, and unkind people said that it was magnetic and attracted iron filings. That was untrue, it only attracted large quantities of snuff. He walked with enormous strides, and always with clenched fists, which is supposed to be the sign of an impulsive nature.
For a German professor he was fairly rich. He owned his house and all that was in it. His household consisted of his goddaughter Gretel – a girl of seventeen – the housekeeper Martha, and myself. As I was his nephew and also an orphan, I became his laboratory assistant. This delighted me because I was passionately interested in geology and had the blood of a mineralogist in my veins.
In spite of my uncle’s fiercely impatient nature, I was happy, because he was very fond of me. But he did not know how to wait. When in April he planted mignonette and morning-glory in pots on the drawing-room window-sill, he went every day regularly to pull them by the leaves to make them grow faster.
He was certainly not a man to put up with disobedience, and so when he called me I hurried into his study. I found him deep in his large plush armchair, holding a book in his hands and turning over the pages with delighted admiration.
‘What a book! What a treasure!’ he cried. My uncle was a lover of rare books, and spent his idle moments rummaging in the second-hand bookstalls.
‘What book is it?’ I asked, trying to sound as if I really cared.
‘Why, it’s the Heimskringla of Snorri Sturlusson, the famous Icelandic author of the twelfth century; it is the Chronicle of the Norwegian princes who ruled in Iceland!’
‘Is it finely printed?’ I asked.
‘Print! My dear boy, it’s not print, it’s a manuscript, a runic manuscript!’
‘Runic?’
‘Yes, runic – I suppose you don’t know what runes are? I’ll explain – they are an ancient form of writing supposed to have been invented by Odin, the Father of the Gods, himself.’
I was trying to think of something suitable to say, when suddenly a greasy parchment slipped out of the book and glided to the floor. My uncle fell upon it with an excited cry and unfolded it carefully on the table. The parchment was five inches long by three inches wide, covered with lines of cabbalistic writing. I will copy them exactly, because they were the cause of sending us off on the strangest expedition of the nineteenth century:
The professor brooded for a long time over these outlandish signs, then he pushed up his glasses and said:
‘It’s certainly runic, the characters are just the same as in the manuscript. But what can they mean? Surely the language must be ancient Icelandic?’
I must say I was rather pleased to see my uncle mystified, because he was supposed to know most of the languages of the world. However, he was naturally irritated because he did not immediately understand the writing, and I was preparing for a violent scene, when the study door opened and Martha announced that the soup was on the table.
‘To hell with the soup!’ he cried, ‘and with you too!’
Martha fled, I followed her and took my place at the dinner table. I waited for a few minutes, but the professor did not come. It was certainly very unlike him to miss dinner. And what a dinner! Parsley soup, a ham omelette spiced with sorrel and nutmeg, a loin of veal with plum sauce, and for dessert, sugared prawns, all washed down with a good Moselle wine. That is what my uncle’s old piece of paper cost him. But I made up for his loss, like a devoted nephew. I was just munching my last prawn when he started shouting for me, and I hurried back into the study.
‘It’s certainly runic,’ said the professor with a frown. ‘But there’s a secret, and I’m going to find it out, or else!’ He waved his arms fiercely. ‘Sit there,’ he went on, pointing with his fist, ‘and write.’ I sat down at the table. ‘Now, I’m going to dictate to you each letter of our alphabet which corresponds to each one of these Icelandic characters, and we’ll see what we get. Mind you don’t make any mistakes!’
He called out the letters and I wrote them down, and soon we had the following nonsensical words:
When I had finished my uncle snatched the paper and studied it carefully for a long time.
‘What can it mean? It must be a cipher. When I think that some great discovery must be hidden here!’ He was almost beside himself with frustration. Then he took up the book and the parchment and compared them carefully.
‘The writings are not in the same hand,’ he said. ‘The cipher is later than the book. I’ll tell you how I know: the first letter is a double m which only came into the Icelandic alphabet in the fourteenth century. Therefore there must be at least two hundred years between the manuscript and the document.’
I saw his point.
‘That leads me to suppose,’ my uncle went on, ‘that one of the owners of the book must have drawn these mysterious characters. I wonder if he signed his name somewhere in the manuscript?’
He pushed up his spectacles and took a strong reading-glass, then began to examine the first pages of the book. On the back of the fly-leaf he discovered a sort of blotch, looking like an ink-stain. He examined it closely and at last managed to make out some faint runic characters, which I will copy:
‘Arne Saknussemm!’ he cried triumphantly. ‘I know that name! He was an Icelandic scholar of the sixteenth century, a famous alchemist.’
Even I was beginning to be excited now.
‘These alchemists, like Roger Bacon and Paracelsus, were the only real scientists of their time; they made the most astonishing discoveries. Now I wonder what Saknussemm wanted to conceal in this cipher – what fantastic invention? I’ll find out. I’ll crack his code, I’ll tear out his secret, I’ll neither eat nor sleep till I’ve mastered this document!’ My heart sank. ‘And that goes for you too, Axel!’ I was glad I had done so well at dinner.
‘Now first of all,’ my uncle went on, ‘what is the language of this cipher? It can’t be too difficult. There are one hundred and thirty-two letters in the document, with seventy-nine consonants and fifty-three vowels. The languages of Southern Europe are made up in about those proportions, while those of the North are very much richer in consonants. Now what language, do you think?’ I waited for him to go on.
‘Saknussemm was a learned man, and if he wasn’t writing in his mother tongue he would be almost bound to use the common language of scholars, that is to say, Latin. If that doesn’t work out, I’ll try Spanish, French, Italian, Greek and Hebrew. But I’m almost certain that it will turn out to be Latin.’
‘That stuff?’ I said. ‘It doesn’t look like Latin to me.’
‘Yes, Latin,’ said my uncle, ‘but scrambled Latin.’
If you unscramble that, I was thinking, I’ll give you full marks.
‘The words are all jumbled up,’ he went on, ‘but there must be a key. Axel, can you find the key?’
I hardly heard his question, I was day-dreaming. My eyes had been caught by Gretel’s picture on the wall. She was away staying with relations at Altona, and I missed her very much; she and I were in love and had become secretly engaged. My uncle had no suspicions, he was sunk in his geology and had forgotten what it was like to be young. Gretel was a lovely blonde with blue eyes, rather a serious girl, and we were very much in love.
My uncle roused me by banging the table with his fist.
‘Now attend to me!’ he said. ‘The most obvious way of mixing up the letters of a sentence is to write the words vertically instead of horizontally. Let’s see what happens. Axel, write a sentence on this piece of paper – any sentence – but write it downwards in columns, in groups of five or six letters.’
I saw what he meant and at once I wrote, from the top downwards:
Good,’ said the professor. ‘Now write those letters out like words along one line.’ This was the result:
‘Fine!’ said my uncle, snatching the paper from my hands. ‘That begins to look like the old parchment – vowels and consonants in strange disorder, capitals and commas in the middle of words. Now all I have to do to read your sentence is to take the first letter of each word, then the second, and so on.’ And then, to his great surprise and also to mine, he read:
‘I love you, my darling Gretel.’
I had given myself away in my thoughtlessness.
‘Well, well, so you love Gretel!’ said my uncle in a stern voice.
‘Yes … that is, no …’ I stammered in confusion.
‘Well, well, you love Gretel,’ he went on mechanically. ‘Well now, let’s try the same thing with the document!’ He had already forgotten my foolish words. He took up the parchment with a trembling hand, in great excitement. Then he cleared his throat, and taking the first letter of each word, then the second, he dictated the following series:
mmessunkaSenrA.icefdoK.segnittamurtn
ecertserrette,rotaivsadua,ednecsedsadne
lacartniiiluJsirtracSarbmutabiledmek
meretarcsilucoYsleffenSnI
As I took down the letters they meant nothing to me, of course, but I hoped that when I had finished the professor would roll out a magnificent Latin sentence. But instead he banged the table, the ink spurted, the pen flew out of my hands.
‘It’s all wrong!’ he shouted. ‘There’s not an atom of sense in it!’ He shot out of the study like a bullet, rushed down the stairs like an avalanche, flung himself into the street and made off like a whirlwind.
When he had gone I began classifying a collection of geodes, those hollow stones lined with little crystals, which a French mineralogist had just sent us. I sorted and labelled them and arranged them in a glass case, but all the time I was thinking about the old document. I was troubled by a strange anxiety; I felt that some catastrophe was hanging over us.
After an hour or so I had finished arranging the stones. I sank down at ease in the big armchair and lit my pipe. This pipe had a long curved stem and a bowl carved in the form of a graceful nymph: little by little she was burning black and changing into a negress. I listened for my uncle’s step on the stair, but all was quiet. I wondered where he could be and imagined him dashing along under the trees of the country road, running his stick along the wall, punishing the grasses, beheading the thistles and disturbing the solitary storks.
I was wondering whether he would return triumphant or discouraged, whether the riddle would beat him or he the riddle, and all the time I was holding idly in my hands the paper on which I had written down that series of incomprehensible letters.
What can it all mean? I was thinking. I began trying to make sense out of the letters, and first I tried grouping them in twos, and threes, and fives, and sixes. But that was no good. Then I noticed that certain words could indeed be discovered – for example the English words ‘ice’ and ‘sir’, the Latin ‘mutabile’ and ‘ira’ the French ‘mer’ and ‘mère’. But these words seemed to have been formed purely by chance and I did not feel I was on the right track.
I was beginning to grow dizzy through studying these one hundred and thirty-two letters so long. They seemed to be floating round my head, as if they had got loose from the paper and were buzzing about like a swarm of bees. I felt I was suffocating and began automatically to fan myself with the sheet of paper.
And then, as I waved the paper, with sometimes the front and sometimes the back towards me, it seemed that words were forming before my eyes – Latin words, quite easy to read. I caught the word ‘craterem’ and then ‘terrestre’.
Suddenly I saw light. I had discovered the key to the cipher. The professor had been perfectly correct in his guesses, both as to the arrangement of the letters and the language of the document. Only one little piece had been missing from the jigsaw, and now I had stumbled by chance on that missing clue!
I was overcome by excitement, my eyes were swimming so that I could not see. I laid the sheet of paper on the table and walked twice round the room to steady my nerves, then I sank down into the enormous armchair.
At last I took a deep breath and said to myself, ‘Read!’
I stood up and leaned over the table, and putting my finger under each letter in turn, I read the sentence through without a pause.
I was struck with terror. That a man should have dared such a deed!
I uttered a wild cry. ‘No! No! My uncle must never know! Nothing would stop him from following in this man’s footsteps, from attempting this desperate journey! And he’d drag me with him, and we should never come back! Never! Never!’ I was almost fainting with fear. Then a thought struck me. ‘I must destroy the paper at once, before he can stumble on the solution.’
There was still a little fire in the grate. I snatched up not only the sheet of paper, but also Saknussemm’s original parchment. I was just going to throw them on the coals and wipe out this dangerous secret for ever, when the study door opened and my uncle appeared.
I put the paper back hastily on the table, but Professor Lidenbrock had noticed nothing, he was deep in thought.
He sat down in his armchair and, pen in hand, began working out permutations and combinations according to some mathematical formula which he must have thought out during his walk. I watched his trembling hand as he wrote. My own nerves were keyed up to fever pitch by my secret knowledge.
For three hours he worked without speaking or raising his head, endlessly scratching out and beginning again. Night fell, the street-sounds were hushed, my uncle was still bent over his task. He neither saw nor heard Martha when she put her head round the door to ask him if he would take supper. At last I was overcome by drowsiness and fell asleep on the sofa.
When I awoke next morning he was still at work. I could see by his red-rimmed eyes and haggard look, his tousled hair and feverish cheeks, that he had not slept a wink. I was sorry for him, and when I gently reproached him he was not even angry with me. All his energy was concentrated on his single purpose so that I felt he would blow up like a blocked volcano. By one word I could loosen the steel vice which bound his brain. But I did not speak.
‘No, no!’ I thought to myself. ‘I know him too well; if I tell him there’ll be no holding him back. I should be signing his death-warrant if I were to tell him the secret.’ So I sat back with folded arms.
But I was reckoning without the professor’s peculiarities. When Martha wanted to go to market she found the street door locked and the key missing. My uncle had evidently taken away the key, either by accident or design, when he came back from his walk the evening before.
‘So that’s it, is it,’ I thought. ‘Martha and I are to die of hunger, we are to be the innocent victims of his crazy notions.’
I remembered an occasion a few years back, when my uncle had been working at his great mineralogical classification. He had gone without food for forty-eight hours, and all the household had had to do likewise. I had a good healthy appetite and I still remembered my pangs of hunger.
Now it looked as if there would be no dinner today, as there had been no supper the night before. I made up my mind to bear it stoically, but Martha was very doleful. My uncle was still at work. He was in a world of his own, far above the earth, and evidently he had no need of earthly nourishment.
But it was different with us. Towards midday I grew almost desperate with hunger. Martha had innocently eaten up everything in the larder the night before, and there was nothing in the house. However, I decided to stick it out as a point of honour.
The clock struck two. My resolution was weakening, the whole affair began to appear slightly ridiculous. My uncle would surely never believe the document, or if he did, he could be forcibly prevented from following in Saknussemm’s footsteps. Anyway, he might discover the key to the cipher for himself at any moment, and then all my sufferings would have been in vain.
Now I thought how foolish I had been to wait for so long. I was working out some means of breaking it gently when the professor got to his feet, took his hat, and made ready to go out. So he was going out and leaving us still locked in! It was the last straw.
‘Uncle!’ I said. He took no notice.
‘Uncle Otto!’ I called in a louder voice.
‘What?’ he muttered, like a man suddenly roused from sleep.
‘The key …’
‘What key? The door-key?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘the key of the document.’
The professor looked at me over the top of his glasses; he must have seen something in my face, because he gripped my arm. His question was silent but none the less clear to my mind.
I nodded. He shook his head sorrowfully, as if I were mad. I nodded again, very definitely. His eyes darted fire, his grip on my arm was fierce. It was the strangest conversation, held entirely in silence, and indeed I hardly dared utter a word; I was terrified that my uncle would hug me to death like a bear in the transport of his joy. But he gripped me so violently that at last I was forced to answer.
‘Yes, the key … quite by chance …’
‘Well? Well?’ He was bursting with excitement.
‘Here,’ I said, giving him the piece of paper on which I had written, ‘read.’
‘But it’s nonsense!’ He crumpled the paper angrily.