I
ON MAY 24, 1863, a Sunday, my uncle, Professor Lidenbrock, rushed back to his little house located at No. 19 Königstrasse, one of the most ancient streets in the old town of Hamburg.
Martha, the maid, must have believed that she was far behind schedule, for the dinner had only just begun to cook on the kitchen range.
“Well,” I said to myself, “if my uncle, the most impatient of men, is hungry, he will cry out in dismay.”
“Mr. Lidenbrock so soon!” the good Martha exclaimed in amazement, half opening the dining-room door.
“Yes, Martha; but very likely the dinner is not half cooked, for it’s not two yet. Saint Michael’s clock has only just struck half-past one.”
“Then why is Mr. Lidenbrock coming home so soon?”
“He’ll probably tell us himself.”
“Here he is; I’ll stay out of the way, Mr. Axel, while you argue with him.”
And the good Martha retreated to her culinary laboratory.
I was left alone. But arguing with the most irascible of professors was out of the question for someone of my somewhat undecided turn of mind. Just as I was cautiously retreating to my handsome room upstairs, the street door squeaked on its hinges. Large feet made the wooden staircase creak, and the master of the house rushed through the dining-room immediately to his study.
But during his swift passage, he had flung his hazel walking stick into a corner, his rough broad brim hat on the table, and these emphatic words at his nephew:
“Axel, follow me!”
I had scarcely had time to move when the professor already exclaimed in a tone of utter impatience:
“Well! You aren’t here yet?”
I rushed into my redoubtable master’s study.
Otto Lidenbrock had no mischief in him, I readily admit that; but unless he changes in unlikely ways, he will die a confirmed original.
He was professor at the Johanneuma and taught a course on mineralogy, in the course of which he invariably broke into a rage once or twice each session. Not that he was at all concerned about having diligent students in his class, or about the degree of attention with which they listened to him, or the success they would eventually achieve; such details never bothered him. His teaching was “subjective,” as German philosophy calls it; it was meant for himself, not others. He was a learned egotist, a well of science whose pulleys creaked when you wanted to draw anything out of it: in a word, a miser.
There are quite a few professors of this sort in Germany.
Unfortunately, my uncle was not gifted with great skill of delivery, if not in private, then at least when he spoke in public, and this is a deplorable shortfall in a speaker. Indeed, during his lectures at the Johanneum, the professor often came to a complete standstill; he struggled with a reluctant word that did not want to pass his lips, one of those words that resist, expand and finally slip out in the quite unscientific form of an oath. Hence his intense rage.
Now in mineralogy there are many half-Greek and half-Latin terms that are hard to pronounce, rough words that would injure the lips of a poet. I don’t want to speak ill of this science. Far from it. But when one faces rhombohedral crystals, retinasphaltic resins, gehlenites, fassaites, molybdenites, tungstates of manganese, and titanite of zirconium, even the most skilled tongue may slip.
In the city, therefore, my uncle’s forgivable weakness was well-known, and it was exploited, and it was expected at the more dangerous moments, and he broke out in a rage, and there was laughter, which is not in good taste, not even for Germans. And if there was always a full audience at the Lidenbrock lectures, how many came regularly to be entertained by the professor’s wonderful fury!
Nevertheless, my uncle, I must emphasize, was a genuine scholar. Even though he sometimes broke his specimens by handling them too roughly, he combined the geologist’s genius with the mineralogist’s keen eye. Armed with his hammer, his steel pointer, his magnetic needles, his blowpipe, and his bottle of nitric acid, he was a very powerful man. By assessing the fracture, the appearance, the hardness, the fusibility, the sonorousness, the smell, and the taste of any mineral, he was able to classify it unhesitatingly among the six hundred substances known to science today.
The name of Lidenbrock was therefore mentioned with respect in colleges and learned societies. Humphry Davy, Humboldt, and Captains Franklin and Sabine never failed to call on him on their way through Hamburg. Becquerel, Ebelman, Brewster, Dumas, Milne-Edwards, Saint-Claire Deville1 consulted him about the most difficult problems in chemistry. This discipline was indebted to him for quite remarkable discoveries, and in 1853 A Treaty of Transcendental Crystallography by Professor Otto Lidenbrock had appeared in Leipzig, a large folio with illustrations which, however, did not cover its expenses.
Add to all this that my uncle was curator of the museum of mineralogy established by Mr. Struve, the Russian ambassador, a valuable collection whose reputation is known throughout Europe.
This, then, was the person who called me with such impatience. Imagine a tall, slender man, of an iron constitution, and with a fair complexion which made him look a good ten years younger than his fifty. His large eyes moved incessantly behind his full-sized spectacles; his long, thin nose looked like a knife blade; mischievous tongues have even claimed that it was magnetic and attracted iron filings. Sheer calumny: it attracted nothing except snuff, but that, to be honest, in great quantities.
When I add that my uncle walked in mathematical strides of half a fathom, and if I point out that in walking he kept his fists firmly clenched, a sure sign of an irritable temperament, it will be clear enough that his company was something less than desirable.
He lived in his little house in the Königstrasse, a building made half of brick and half of wood, with a stepped gable; it overlooked one of those winding canals that intersect in the middle of Hamburg’s old town, which the great fire of 1842 had fortunately spared.
The old house leaned a little, admittedly, and bulged out towards the street; its roof sloped a little to one side, like the cap over the ear of a Tugendbund student;b its verticality left something to be desired; but overall, it held up well, thanks to an old elm which buttressed it in front, and which in spring pushed its flowering branches through the window panes.
My uncle was reasonably well off for a German professor. The house was all his own, container and contents. The contents consisted of his god-daughter Graüben,2 a seventeen-year-old from Virland, c Martha, and myself. As his nephew and an orphan, I became his laboratory assistant.
I admit that I plunged eagerly into the geological sciences; I had the blood of a mineralogist in my veins, and never got bored in the company of my precious rocks.
In a word, one could live happily in the little house in the Königstrasse, in spite of the impatience of its master, for even though he showed it in a somewhat rough fashion, he was nevertheless very fond of me. But that man was unable to wait, and nature herself was too slow for him.
In April, after he had planted seedlings of mignonette and morning glory in the clay pots in his living-room, he would go every morning and tug them by their leaves to accelerate their growth.
Faced with such a character, one could do nothing other than obey. I therefore rushed after him into his study.