XXXVII

XXXVII

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!

But my uncle quickly regained control of himself.

“Ah! Fate plays these tricks on me!” he exclaimed. “The elements conspire against me! Air, fire and water join their efforts to oppose my journey! Well then! They’ll find out what my will power is made of. I will not yield, I will not take a single step backwards, and we’ll see whether man or nature wins out!”

Standing on the rock, enraged, threatening, Otto Lidenbrock seemed to challenge the gods like the fierce Ajax.bp But I thought it appropriate to intervene and restrain this irrational energy.

“Listen to me,” I said to him in a firm voice. “There’s a limit to ambition down here; we can’t struggle against the impossible. We’re ill-equipped for another sea voyage; one can’t travel five hundred leagues on a paltry assemblage of wood beams, with a blanket for a sail, a stick for a mast, and the winds unleashed against us. We cannot steer, we’re a plaything for the storms, and it’s madness to attempt this impossible crossing for a second time!”

I was able to unfold this series of irrefutable reasons for ten minutes without being interrupted, but only because of the inattention of the professor, who did not hear a word of my arguments.

“To the raft!” he shouted.

That was his reply. It was no use begging him or flying into a rage, I was up against a will harder than granite.

Hans was finishing up the repairs of the raft at that moment. One would have thought that this strange being guessed my uncle’s plans. He had reinforced the vessel with a few pieces of surturbrand. He had already hoisted a sail in whose folds the wind was playing.

The professor said a few words to the guide, and immediately he put everything on board and arranged everything for our departure. The air was rather clear, and the north-west wind blew steadily.

What could I do? Stand alone against the two of them? Impossible. If only Hans had taken my side. But no! The Icelander seemed to have given up any will of his own and to have made a vow of self-denial. I could not get anything out of a servant so beholden to his master. I had to go along.

I was therefore about to take my usual place on the raft when my uncle stopped me with his hand.

“We won’t leave until tomorrow,” he said.

I made the gesture of a man who is resigned to anything.

“I must not neglect anything,” he resumed; “and since fate has driven me to this part of the coast, I won’t leave it until I’ve explored it.”

To understand this remark, one must know that we had come back to the north shore, but not to the exact point of our first departure. Port Graüben must have been further to the west. Therefore, nothing more reasonable than to explore carefully the surroundings of this new landing spot.

“Let’s go on discovery!” I said.

And leaving Hans to his activities, we started off together. The space between the water and the foot of the cliffs was considerable. It took us half an hour to get to the wall of rock. Our feet crushed innumerable shells of all shapes and sizes in which the animals of the earliest ages had lived. I also saw enormous turtle shells that were more than fifteen feet in diameter. They had belonged to those gigantic glyptodonts of the Pliocene period,bq of which the modern turtle is but a small reduction. The ground was in addition strewn with a lot of stone fragments, shingles of a sort that had been rounded by the waves and arranged in successive lines. This led me to the remark that at one time the sea must have covered this ground.

On the scattered rocks, now out of their reach, the waves had left manifest traces of their passage.

This might up to a point explain the existence of this ocean forty leagues beneath the surface of the globe. But in my opinion this liquid mass had to be gradually disappearing into the bowels of the earth, and it obviously had its origin in the waters of the ocean overhead, which had made their way here through some fissure. Yet it had to be conceded that this fissure was now stopped up, because this entire cavern, or better, this immense reservoir had filled up in a relatively short time. Maybe the water, struggling against the subterranean fire, had even partly evaporated. That would explain the clouds suspended over our heads and the discharge of the electricity that gave rise to tempests in the interior of the earth.

This theory of the phenomena we had witnessed seemed satisfactory to me; for however great the wonders of nature may be, they can always be explained by physical causes.

We were therefore walking on a kind of sedimentary terrain, deposited by water like all the soils of that period, of which there are so many across the globe. The professor examined every fissure in the rock carefully. Wherever an opening showed, it was important to him to probe its depth.br

We had walked along the shores of the Lidenbrock Sea for a mile when soil suddenly changed in appearance. It seemed turned upside down, convulsed by a violent upheaval of the lower strata. In many places depressions or elevations testified to a powerful displacement of the earth’s substance.

We were moving with difficulty across these cracks of granite mixed with flint, quartz, and alluvial deposits, when a field, more than a field, a plain of bones appeared before our eyes. One would have thought it was an immense graveyard, where the generations of twenty centuries mingled their eternal dust. Tall mounds of residue stretched away into the distance. They undulated to the limits of the horizon and vanished into a hazy mist. Here, in perhaps three square miles, the complete history of animal life was piled up, a history that has hardly yet been written in the too recent strata of the inhabited world.

But an impatient curiosity drove us on. With a dry noise, our feet crushed the remains of these prehistoric animals, fossils over whose rare and interesting residues the museums of great cities fight. A thousand Cuviers would not have been enough to reconstruct the skeletons of the organic beings lying in this magnificent boneyard.

I was stunned. My uncle had lifted his long arms to the massive vault that served us as sky. His mouth gaping wide, his eyes flashing behind the glass of his spectacles, his head moving up and down, from left to right, his whole posture indicated infinite amazement. He stood facing an invaluable collection of leptotheria, mericotheria, lophiodons, anoplotheria, megatheria, mastodons, protopithecae, pterodactyls, of all the prehistoric monsters, piled up for his personal satisfaction. Imagine an enthusiastic bibliophile suddenly transported to the famous library of Alexandria that was burned by Omar, and which by a miracle had been reborn from its ashes! That was my uncle, Professor Lidenbrock.

But it was a very different amazement when, running across this organic dust, he seized a bare skull and shouted with a trembling voice:

“Axel! Axel! a human head!”

“A human head!” I exclaimed, no less astonished.

“Yes, nephew. Ah! Mr. Milne-Edwards! Ah! Mr. de Quatrefages,bs I wish you were standing here where I, Otto Lidenbrock, am standing!”

The complete history of animal life was piled up.