Jules Verne - Journey to the Centre of the Earth

JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH

Jules Verne

Cover

Title Page JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH Jules Verne

CHAPTER 1: The Professor and His Family

CHAPTER 2: A Mystery to be Solved at any Price

CHAPTER 3: The Runic Writing Exercises the Professor

CHAPTER 4: The Enemy to be Starved into Submission

CHAPTER 5: Famine, then Victory, Followed by Dismay

CHAPTER 6: Exciting Discussions about an Unparalleled Enterprise

CHAPTER 7: A Woman’s Courage

CHAPTER 8: Serious Preparations for Vertical Descent

CHAPTER 9: Iceland! but what Next?

CHAPTER 10: Interesting Conversations with Icelandic Savants

CHAPTER 11: A Guide Found to the Centre of the Earth

CHAPTER 12: A Barren Land

CHAPTER 13: Hospitality Under the Arctic Circle

CHAPTER 14: But Arctics can be Inhospitable, too

CHAPTER 15: SnÆfell at Last

CHAPTER 16: Boldly Down the Crater

CHAPTER 17: Vertical Descent

CHAPTER 18: The Wonders of Terrestrial Depths

CHAPTER 19: Geological Studies in Situ

CHAPTER 20: The First Signs of Distress

CHAPTER 21: Compassion Fuses the Professor’s Heart

CHAPTER 22: Total Failure of Water

CHAPTER 23: Water Discovered

CHAPTER 24: Well Said, Old Mole! Canst Thou Work I’ the Ground so Fast?

CHAPTER 25: De Profundis

CHAPTER 26: The Worst Peril of All

CHAPTER 27: Lost in the Bowels of the Earth

CHAPTER 28: The Rescue in the Whispering Gallery

CHAPTER 29: Thalatta! Thalatta!

CHAPTER 30: A New Mare Internum

CHAPTER 31: Preparations for a Voyage of Discovery

CHAPTER 32: Wonders of the Deep

CHAPTER 33: A Battle of Monsters

CHAPTER 34: The Great Geyser

CHAPTER 35: An Electric Storm

CHAPTER 36: Calm Philosophic Discussions

CHAPTER 37: The Liedenbrock Museum of Geology

CHAPTER 38: The Professor in His Chair Again

CHAPTER 39: Forest Scenery Illuminated by Electricity

CHAPTER 40: Preparations for Blasting a Passage to the Centre of the Earth

CHAPTER 41: The Great Explosion and the Rush Down Below

CHAPTER 42: Headlong Speed Upward Through the Horrors of Darkness

CHAPTER 43: Shot Out of a Volcano at Last!

CHAPTER 44: Sunny Lands in the Blue Mediterranean

CHAPTER 45: All’s Well that Ends Well

CLASSIC LITERATURE: WORDS AND PHRASES adapted from the Collins English Dictionary

About the Author

History of Collins

Copyright

About the Publisher

On the 24th of May, 1863, my uncle, Professor Liedenbrock, rushed into his little house, No. 19 Königstrasse, one of the oldest streets in the oldest portion of the city of Hamburg.

Martha must have concluded that she was very much behindhand, for the dinner had only just been put into the oven.

“Well, now,” said I to myself, “if that most impatient of men is hungry, what a disturbance he will make!”

“M. Liedenbrock so soon!” cried poor Martha in great alarm, half opening the dining-room door.

“Yes, Martha; but very likely the dinner is not half cooked, for it is not two yet. Saint Michael’s clock has only just struck half-past one.”

“Then why has the master come home so soon?”

“Perhaps he will tell us that himself.”

“Here he is, Monsieur Axel; I will run and hide myself while you argue with him.”

And Martha retreated in safety into her own dominions.

I was left alone. But how was it possible for a man of my undecided turn of mind to argue successfully with so irascible a person as the Professor? With this persuasion I was hurrying away to my own little retreat upstairs, when the street door creaked upon its hinges; heavy feet made the whole flight of stairs shake; and the master of the house, passing rapidly through the dining-room, threw himself in haste into his own sanctum.

But on his rapid way he had found time to fling his hazel stick into a corner, his rough broadbrim upon the table, and these few emphatic words at his nephew:

“Axel, follow me!”

I had scarcely had time to move when the Professor was again shouting after me:

“What! not come yet?”

And I rushed into my redoubtable master’s study.

Otto Liedenbrock had no mischief in him, I willingly allow that; but unless he very considerably changes as he grows older, at the end he will be a most original character.

He was professor at the Johannæum, and was delivering a series of lectures on mineralogy, in the course of every one of which he broke into a passion once or twice at least. Not at all that he was over-anxious about the improvement of his class, or about the degree of attention with which they listened to him, or the success which might eventually crown his labours. Such little matters of detail never troubled him much. His teaching was, as the German philosophy calls it, “subjective”; it was to benefit himself, not others. He was a learned egotist. He was a well of science, and the pulleys worked uneasily when you wanted to draw anything out of it. In a word, he was a learned miser.

Germany has not a few professors of this sort.

To his misfortune, my uncle was not gifted with a sufficiently rapid utterance; not, to be sure, when he was talking at home, but certainly in his public delivery; this is a want much to be deplored in a speaker. The fact is, that during the course of his lectures at the Johannæum, the Professor often came to a complete standstill; he fought with wilful words that refused to pass his struggling lips, such words as resist and distend the cheeks, and at last break out into the unasked-for shape of a round and most unscientific oath: then his fury would gradually abate.

Now in mineralogy there are many half-Greek and half-Latin terms, very hard to articulate, and which would be most trying to a poet’s measures. I don’t wish to say a word against so respectable a science, far be that from me. True, in the august presence of rhombohedral crystals, retinasphaltic resins, gehlenites, Fassaites, molybdenites, tungstates of manganese, and titanite of zirconium, why, the most facile of tongues may make a slip now and then.

It therefore happened that this venial fault of my uncle’s came to be pretty well understood in time, and an unfair advantage was taken of it; the students laid wait for him in dangerous places, and when he began to stumble, loud was the laughter, which is not in good taste, not even in Germans. And if there was always a full audience to honour the Liedenbrock courses, I should be sorry to conjecture how many came to make merry at my uncle’s expense.

Nevertheless my good uncle was a man of deep learning—a fact I am most anxious to assert and reassert. Sometimes he might irretrievably injure a specimen by his too great ardour in handling it; but still he united the genius of a true geologist with the keen eye of the mineralogist. Armed with his hammer, his steel pointer, his magnetic needles, his blowpipe, and his bottle of nitric acid, he was a powerful man of science. He would refer any mineral to its proper place among the six hundred * elementary substances now enumerated, by its fracture, its appearance, its hardness, its fusibility, its sonorousness, its smell, and its taste.

The name of Liedenbrock was honourably mentioned in colleges and learned societies. Humphry Davy, † Humboldt, Captain Sir John Franklin, General Sabine, never failed to call upon him on their way through Hamburg. Becquerel, Ebelman, Brewster, Dumas, Milne-Edwards, Saint-Claire-Deville frequently consulted him upon the most difficult problems in chemistry, a science which was indebted to him for considerable discoveries, for in 1853 there had appeared at Leipzig an imposing folio by Otto Liedenbrock, entitled, “A Treatise upon Transcendental Chemistry,” with plates; a work, however, which failed to cover its expenses.