XXXIX

XXXIX

FOR ANOTHER HALF HOUR our feet trod on these layers of bones. We pushed on, driven by a burning curiosity. What other marvels, what new treasures for science did this cavern hold? My eyes were prepared for any surprise, my imagination for any amazement.

The shore had long disappeared behind the hills of bones. The rash professor, unconcerned about losing his way, took me along. We advanced in silence, bathed in electric waves. Due to some phenomenon that I cannot explain, and due to its by then complete diffusion, the light illuminated all the sides of an object equally. Its source no longer resided at a particular point in space and cast no shadows. One could have believed that it was midday in the middle of the summer, in the equatorial regions under the vertical rays of the sun. All steam had disappeared.

The rocks, the distant mountains, a few indistinct clumps of distant forests came to look strange in this equal distribution of the light waves. We resembled Hoffmann’s fantastic character who has lost his shadow.11

After a mile’s walk the edge of an immense forest appeared, but no longer one of the mushroom forests near Port Graüben.

It was the vegetation of the Tertiary period in all its magnificence. Tall palm trees of species that have now disappeared, superb palmaceae, pines, yews, cypress, and thujas represented the conifer family, and were linked to each other through a network of inextricable lianas. A lush carpet of moss and hepaticas covered the soil. Some creeks murmured in the shade, which did not deserve the name since the trees cast no shadow. On their banks grew tree-ferns similar to those grown in hothouses on the inhabited earth. Only color was missing from all those trees, shrubs, and plants that were deprived of the life-giving heat of the sun. Everything blended together in a uniform brownish and faded-looking hue. The leaves showed no green, and even the flowers, which were so numerous in the Tertiary period in which they first originated, now had no color or scent and looked under the impact of the atmosphere as if they were made out of faded paper.

My uncle Lidenbrock ventured into this gigantic thicket. I followed him, not without a certain fear. Since nature had here provided plant food, why would there not also be fearsome mammals? In the large clearings left by fallen and decayed trees, I saw leguminous plants, acerineae, rubiceae and many other edible shrubs that are liked by ruminants of all periods. Then trees from vastly different regions on the surface of the globe appeared, blended and mixed in together: the oak grew next to the palm tree, the Australian eucalyptus leaned against the Norwegian fir, the Northern birch-tree interlaced its branches with those of the New Zealand kauri. It was enough to drive the most ingenious classifiers of terrestrial botany mad.

Suddenly I stopped. With my hand I held my uncle back.

The diffuse light allowed us to perceive the most minute objects in the depth of the thicket. I thought I had seen ... No! really, with my own eyes, I did see vast shapes moving under the trees! Indeed, these were gigantic animals, a whole herd of mastodons, not fossil ones, but live ones, similar to those whose remains were found in the swamps of Ohio in 1801! I saw these large elephants whose trunks were writhing under the trees like a legion of snakes. I heard the noise of their long tusks whose ivory bore into the old tree trunks. The branches cracked, and the leaves, torn off in considerable quantities, were swept into the huge maws of these monsters.

So the dream in which I had seen all this prehistoric world of the Tertiary and Quaternary periods rise again finally became reality! And we were there, alone, in the bowels of the earth, at the mercy of its fierce inhabitants!

My uncle stared.

“Let’s go!” he said suddenly, gripping my arm. “Onward! Onward!”

“No!” I cried. “No! We have no weapons! What would we do in the midst of this herd of giant quadrupeds? Come, Uncle, come! No human can safely challenge the rage of these monsters.”

“No human being!” replied my uncle, lowering his voice. “You’re wrong, Axel. Look, look down there! It seems to me I see a living being! a being similar to ourselves! a man!”

I looked, shrugging my shoulders, and resolved to push skepticism to its furthest limits. But although I was reluctant, I had to yield to the evidence.

Indeed, less than a quarter of a mile away, leaning against the trunk of an enormous kauri, a human being, the Proteus of these underground regions, a new son of Neptune,by watched over this countless herd of mastodons!

Immanis pecoris custos, immanior ipse.bz

Yes! Immanior ipse! This was no longer the fossil being whose corpse we had raised up in the boneyard, this was a giant, able to control these monsters. He was more than twelve feet tall. His head, huge like a buffalo’s, disappeared in the underbrush of his unkempt hair. It seemed like a real mane similar to that of the elephant of the first ages. In his hand he wielded an enormous branch with ease, a crook worthy of this prehistoric shepherd.

We stood immobile, stunned. But we might be seen. We had to flee.

“Come, come!” I exclaimed, pulling my uncle away, who for the first time let it happen.

A quarter of an hour later we were out of sight of this formidable enemy.

And now that I think about it calmly, now that my spirit has found peace again, now that months have gone by since this strange and supernatural encounter, what to think, what to believe? No! It is impossible! Our senses were deceived, our eyes did not see what they saw! No human being exists in that subterranean world! No generation of men dwells in those lower caverns of the globe, unconcerned about the inhabitants of its surface, without contact with them! It is crazy, profoundly crazy!

I prefer to admit the existence of some animal whose structure resembles the human structure, some ape of the early geological ages, some protopithecus, some mesopithecus, like the one discovered by Mr. Lartet in the bone deposit of Sansan!ca But in its size, this one exceeded all the measurements known in modern paleontology.

A human being watched over this countless herd of mastodons!

No matter! An ape, yes, an ape, no matter how unlikely! But a man, a living man, and with him a whole generation buried in the bowels of the earth! Never!

In the meantime, we had left the clear and luminous forest, speechless with amazement, overwhelmed by a stupefaction that bordered on mindlessness. We ran in spite of ourselves. It was a real flight, similar to those terrible impulses that one is subject to in certain night-mares. Instinctively we ran back to the Lidenbrock Sea, and I do not know in what vagaries my mind would have lost itself if it had not been for a concern that brought me back to practical matters.cb

Although I was certain that we were walking on soil where we had never set foot before, I often noticed rock formations whose shape reminded me of those at Port Graüben. This confirmed, in any case, the indications of the compass and our involuntary return to the north of the Lidenbrock Sea. Sometimes one could have mistaken one for the other. Brooks and waterfalls were tumbling everywhere from hundreds of projections in the rocks. I thought I recognized the layer of surturbrand, our faithful Hansbach and the cave in which I had come back to life. Then a few paces farther on, the arrangement of the cliffs, the appearance of a stream, the surprising outline of a rock threw me back in doubt.

I told my uncle about my indecision. Like myself, he hesitated. He could not find his way in this uniform scenery.

“Obviously,” I said to him, “we have not landed at our point of departure again, but the storm has carried us a little lower, and if we follow the shore we’ll find Port Graüben.”

“In that case,” replied my uncle, “it’s useless to continue this exploration, and the best is to return to our raft. But Axel, aren’t you mistaken?”

“It’s difficult to say for sure, Uncle, because all these rocks look alike. Yet I think I recognize the promontory at whose foot Hans built our vessel. We must be close to the little port, if indeed it isn’t right here,” I added, examining an inlet that I thought I recognized.

“No, Axel, we would at least find our own traces, and I see nothing...”

“But I do,” I exclaimed, rushing toward an object that glittered in the sand.

“What is it?”

“This,” I answered.

And I showed my uncle a rust-covered dagger which I had just picked up.

“Well!” he said, “did you bring this weapon with you?”

“Me? Not at all! But you ...”

“No, not that I know,” said the professor. “I’ve never had this object in my possession.”

“Well, this is strange!”

“No, Axel, it’s very simple. Icelanders often have weapons of this kind, and Hans, to whom this belongs, must have lost it...”

I shook my head. Hans had never had this dagger in his possession.

“So is this the weapon of some prehistoric warrior?” I exclaimed, “of a living man, of a contemporary of that gigantic shepherd’s? But no! This is not a tool of the Stone Age! Not even of the Bronze Age! This blade is made of steel...”

My uncle stopped me abruptly on this path into another ramble, and told me in his cold voice:

“Calm down, Axel, and be reasonable. This dagger is a weapon of the sixteenth century, a real dagger, like the ones gentlemen carried in their belts to give the coup de grace. It’s of Spanish origin. It belongs neither to you, nor to me, nor to the hunter, nor even to the human beings who live perhaps in the bowels of the globe!”

“What are you saying ... ?”

“Look, it never got chipped like this by cutting men’s throats; its blade is coated with a layer of rust that’s neither a day, nor a year, nor a hundred years old!”

The professor was getting excited according to his habit, and was getting carried away by his imagination.

“Axel,” he resumed, “we’re on the way toward a great discovery! This blade has been lying on the sand for a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years, and it got chipped on the rocks of this underground ocean!”

“But it hasn’t come on its own,” I cried. “It hasn’t twisted itself out of shape! Someone has been here before us!”

“Yes! a man.”

“And who was that man?”

“A man who has engraved his name somewhere with this dagger. That man wanted once more to indicate the way to the center of the earth with his own hand. Let’s search! Let’s search!”

And with meticulous attention we walked along the high wall, peeping into the most minute fissures that might open out into a tunnel.

So we came to a place where the shore got narrower. The sea almost came to lap the foot of the cliffs, leaving a passage of at most a fathom. Between two boldly projecting rocks one could see the mouth of a dark tunnel.

There, on a granite slab, appeared two mysterious graven and half-eroded letters, the initials of the daring and fantastic traveler:

“A. S.!” shouted my uncle. “Arne Saknussemm! Always Arne Saknussemm!”