“It is a grand thing to devote yourself to science!” (37).
It goes without saying that Jules Verne’s third novel, Voyage au centre de la Terre, is an immensely engrossing work of classic subterranean science fiction. At times, it is a highly claustrophobic novel that maintains a foreboding sense of danger and adventure while remaining more than just a bit harrowing. This early novel in Verne’s oeuvre offers an optimistic take on the modern scientific project as we are invited to join a trio of explorers on a quest into the bowels of the earth. We are treated to passages of thoroughly researched geological, archaeological, and linguistic details (much like the compendium of nautical facts peppered throughout another Jules Verne classic, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Seas). After its publication, Journey to the Center of the Earth left an indelible impact on modern literature, and it influenced the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and J.R.R. Tolkien; incorporating now-foundational elements of fantasy, horror, and cutting-edge scientific research. I found Journey to the Center of the Earth to be another triumph for “the father of science fiction.” Writing at the end of the 19th century, one imagines Jules Verne poring over publications of scientific discoveries, memorizing passages from his literary predecessor Victor Hugo, strolling through the salons of Paris, and eagerly observing newfangled inventions on display at the world’s fair. His works are filled with such insatiable inquisitiveness and imaginative wonder (think of the short silent films of George Melies for comparison). In Verne’s books, highly literate Victorian gentleman-explorers make their way to the farthest reaches of the known world, defying hitherto limits and showing us the possibilities of modernity in strange and fantastical places. In so doing, Verne invites readers to embrace the new world, made possible by modern science, wherein the great mysteries of life can finally be explored freely.
In Journey to the Center of the Earth, our narrator is Monsieur Axel, a skeptical young man and orphaned nephew of internationally renowned mineralogist Professor Otto Lidenbrock (who is also a bit of a zany kook). Axel resides at his famous uncle’s home in Konigstrasse, Hamburg and he also works as his uncle’s laboratory assistant. Professor Lidenbrock is the curator of the Museum of Minerology; he has been delivering a series of lectures at the Johannaeum (a grammar school) on mineralogy, albeit mainly for his own benefit. “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” (2-3). Also in Professor Lidenbrock’s house is his flustered housekeeper Martha, and his god-daughter Grauben, a Virlandaise of seventeen who is secretly betrothed to Axel (they have spent many hours together cataloging the master’s rocks and walking peacefully beside the Elbe).
One day, Professor Lidenbrock comes home with a rare copy of the epic Norse saga called the Heims Kringla (or the “Heimskringla”) by Icelandic poet Snorre Turlleson, the most famous Icelandic author of the twelfth century. Inside this rare copy, the Professor finds a mysterious Runic manuscript, with a cipher that was added at a later date by Arne Saknussemm, a sixteenth century savant Icelander and celebrated alchemist. When translated with the cipher, the script features a maddening code of jumbled Latin (or perturbata seu inordinata as Euclid would have it). While the professor grows ever more frustrated trying to interpret the message in the book, Axel secretly discovers the key even though he is reticent to reveal its message to his uncle, fearing a voyage will be imminent. But when he cannot hold it in any longer, Axel informs his uncle that the translated Latin from the runic script using the cipher has actually been written backwards:
“Descend, bold traveller, into the crater of the jokul of
Sneffels, which the shadow of Scartaris touches before
the kalends of July, and you will attend the centre of the
earth; which I have done, Arne Saknussemm.”
Note: the word jokul refers to a glacier in Icelandic, Sneffels (or Snaefell) is a tall, dormant volcano in Iceland, and the kalends of July refers to late June when the mountain casts its shadow over a crater. In other words, this script is describing a hidden tunnel in Iceland that leads to the center of the earth! Naturally, this discovery greatly excites the good professor. But why did the author, Arne Saknussemm, decide to conceal this astounding discovery inside this elaborate linguistic puzzle? Professor Lidenbrock explains that Arne Saknussemm was heavily persecuted for heresy in the 16th century and in 1573 his books were burned “by the hands of the common hangman.” With religious fanaticism being the great enemy of civilization, he was forced to hide his scientific explorations in esoteric riddles. Now, Professor Lidenbrock is eager to investigate Saknussemm’s secret claim –is there really a passage that leads down to the center of the earth?
Despite Axel’s protestations, Professor Lidenbrock quickly packs a bag for himself and his nephew and together they make haste for a lengthy journey to Iceland (but only after Axel bids a sorrowful farewell to his beloved Grauben). Their trip promises to be “the most wonderful expedition of the nineteenth century” but Axel remains a skeptic.
When they finally arrive in Iceland, Axel and the Professor briefly stay in the house of a man named M. Fridickssen who connects them with a tall, calm, red-haired hunter named Hans Bjelke, a steady man of few words who will serve as their guide. When the trio departs for Snaefell (or “Snæfellsjökull”) to search for the passage, M. Fridickssen parts ways with a quotation from Virgil (specifically Book XI of The Aeneid):
“Et Quacumque viam dedent fortuna sequamur.”
(“Therever fortune clears a way, Thither our ready footsteps stray.”)
(Also translated as: “And whatever path fortune gives us we shall follow.”)
Along the way, they encounter various things like a remote village, outcasted lepers in the desert, and a house for priests who reside at Stapi, a remote locale with a basaltic wall overlooking a fjord. As they stand at the base of Snaefell, the Professor declares “There stands the giant I shall conquer!” They spot the mountain’s shadow as it is cast over a particular crater, and with all their gear (including Ruhmkorff’s lamps which are also featured in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Seas) they venture down into the vast chasm and plunge themselves into darkness. “I thought, what riches are here buried at an unapproachable depth in the earth, hidden for ever from the covetous eyes of the human race!” (113). However they have only brought enough water for five days for reasons that elude me, and as they pass labyrinthine galleries of lava into the silent depths, using natural staircases beside prehistoric remains, coal mines, shiny diamond formations, and the early fossil record, they unsurprisingly quickly deplete their water resources and Axel very nearly dies. Luckily, Hans manages to find a subterranean river known as a chalybeate spring which revives Axel.
“I had not yet ventured to look down the bottomless pit into which I was about to take a plunge. The supreme hour had come. I might now either share in the enterprise or refuse to move forward. But I was ashamed to recoil in the presence of the hunter. Hans accepted the enterprise with such calmness, such indifference, such perfect disregard of any possible danger that I blushed at the idea of being less brave than he. If I had been alone I might have once more tried the effect of argument; but in the presence of the guide I held my peace; my heart flew back to my sweet Virlandaise, and I approached the central chimney… I had already mentioned that it was a hundred feet in diameter, and three hundred feet round. I bent over a projecting rock and gazed down. My hair stood on end with terror. The bewildering feeling of vacuity laid hold upon me. I felt my centre of gravity shifting its place, and giddiness mounting into my brain like drunkenness. There is nothing more treacherous than this attraction down deep abysses” (89-90).
Despite their terrifying descent into the echoing abyss beneath the surface of the earth, the trio remains hopeful and enthusiastic about the mission:
“Although we were in the very deepest of known depths, there was something not unpleasant about it. And, besides, we were beginning to get accustomed to this troglodyte life. I no longer thought of sun, moon, and stars, trees, houses, and towns, nor of any of those terrestrial superfluities which are necessities of men who live upon earth’s surface. Being fossils, we looked upon all those things as mere jokes” (124).
At one point, Axel accidentally loses track of his companions and he suddenly realizes he is lost in the bowels of the earth while his lamp gradually dies and he goes mad for about four days until they are miraculously reunited thanks to the devices they brought with them (like the chronometer). “Lost at an immeasurable depth! Thirty leagues of rock seemed to weigh upon my shoulders with a dreadful pressure. I felt crushed” (131). Shortly thereafter, the explorers calculate that they must have descended beneath the mid-Atlantic Ocean, and the Professor quotes Xenophon’s Anabasis (“Thalatta! Thalatta!”) when they arrive at the shore of a vast subterranean sea dubbed the “Liedenbrock Sea” at “Port Grauben” near a dense forest filled with giant fungi, and the bones of long-extinct animals like trilobites and mastodons. This all sits beneath a vast cloud formation and the northern lights. The trio fashions a craft to sail across this huge sea and, despite believing “We were the only living creatures in this subterranean world” (150), they soon encounter prehistoric creatures dwelling in the ocean, including two giant battling sea creatures –a massive “ichthyosaurus (fish lizard), the most terrible of the ancient monsters of the deep,” and a “plesiosaurus (almost lizard)… the dreadful enemy of the other.” Luckily, they manage to escape this gruesome scene.
“What other marvels did this cavern contain? What new treasures lay here for science to unfold?” (193).
Next, they come upon a land formation in the middle of the sea dubbed “Axel Island” where a geyser is blasting and this is followed by a violent fiery storm that tosses their raft nearly to the point of destruction. Here, gathering his notes many years after-the-fact, Axel’s log gets occasionally a bit mixed, especially his notes from the sea voyage (I very much appreciated this element of epistolary realism Verne incorporated into the novel). When they wash ashore, the now-mad Professor indicates his plan not to return to the surface the same way they came. They come upon a vast plain which appears to be a graveyard of extinct creatures with bones strewn about everywhere, and they shockingly find a human skeleton –a primitive man down at these depths! This discovery is consistent with other discoveries of the day which suggested that humanity had been in existence on earth far longer than was initially believed. “Until the present time we had seen alive only marine monsters and fish. Might not some living man, some native of the abyss, be yet a wanderer below on this desert strand?” (193). Sure enough, after arriving at a luminous forest, the Professor exclaims, “Immanis pecoris custos, immanior ipse” (or “The shepherd of gigantic herds, and huger still himself”) as he spots a large, twelve-foot-tall human (or at least someone who appears to be a human from a distance) carrying a bow near a herd of non-extinct mastodons. What an alarming discovery!
“I had thought I saw –no! I did see, with my own eyes, vast colossal forms moving amongst the trees. They were gigantic animals; it was a herd of mastodons –not fossil remains, but living and resembling those the bones of which were found in the marshes of Ohio in 1801. I saw those huge elephants whose long, flexible trunks were grouting and turning up the soil under the trees like a legion of serpents… And there we were alone, in the bowels of the earth, at the mercy of its wild inhabitants!” (195).
“I looked, shaking my head incredulously. But though at first I was unbelieving I had to yield to the evidence of my sense… In fact, at a distance of a quarter of a mile, leaving against the trunk of a gigantic kauri, stood a human being, the Proteus of those subterranean regions, a new son of Neptune, watching this countless herd of mastodons” (195).
But can Axel trust his senses? Did he really see a giant primitive human creature living in the heart of the earth, completely oblivious to life above on the surface? While gathering his notes and reflections in the future, Axel starts to doubt his own senses while scrambling around below the earth:
“And yet, now that I can reflect quietly, now that my spirit has grown calm again, now that months have slipped by since this strange and supernatural meeting, what am I to think? What am I to believe? I must conclude that it was impossible that our senses had been deceived, that our eyes did not see what we supposed they saw. No human being lives in this subterranean world; no generation of men dwells in those inferior caverns of the globe, unknown to and unconnected with the inhabitants of its surface. It is absurd to believe it!” (197).
At any rate, Axel and the Professor decide to flee from this fearsome creature before they can be spotted. And as they approach the center of the earth, the trio finds a dagger with the rune initials of Arne Saknussemm from the sixteenth century, confirming that they have indeed followed the path laid out several hundred years before them. Lastly, they find a sizable boulder blocking the way which they decide to destroy using the gunpowder they brought with them. However, the resulting explosion opens a seemingly bottomless sinkhole which swallows their whole raft down to the depths, and when sinkhole soon turns into an erupting volcanic chimney, they are vaulted aggressively back upward for an unbearably long amount of time until they are at last ejected from the mountain. As they gaze up at the sun from terra firma once again, they realize they have actually been erupted out of the Italian mountain called Stromboli in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea (off the north coast of Sicily). In total, they had been voyaging underground for about two months, however since they were unable to continue past the boulder blocking their path, the three explorers never did actually arrive at the center of the earth. With this in mind, we are left to wonder what other mysteries might lie ahead in the bowels of the earth? Would they merely find extreme heat and more rock formations? Or perhaps a nod to classical mythology with reminders of Odysseus’s visit to the shades in the underworld, or even a scene reminiscent of the cruel, sadistic fetishism found in Dante’s The Inferno?
“What a journey we had accomplished! How marvellous! Having entered by one volcano, we had issued out of another more than two thousand miles from Snaefell and from that barren, far-away Iceland! The strange chances of our expedition had carried us into the heart of the fairest region in the world. We had exchanged the bleak regions of perpetual snow and of impenetrable barriers of ice for those of brightness and ‘the rich hues of all glorious things.’ We had left over our heads the murky sky and cold fogs of the frigid zone to revel under the azure sky of Italy!” (226).
After posing as shipwrecked mariners and being taken in by friendly Italians, the trio travels together back home to Hamburg where they become instantly famous. Axel’s log is widely published, and Mr. Barnum offers to exhibit Professor Lidenbrock across all the principal cities in the United States. And eventually, Hans returns home to Iceland after a bout of mal de pays (homesickness) and Axel finally settles down with his Virlandaise love, Grauben.
“Science, my lad, has been built upon many errors; but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth” (153).
Verne, Jules. Journey to the Center of the Earth. Seawolf Press, Orinda, CA, 2019 (taken from the 1877 Ward, Lock & Co edition, with Edouard Riou’s illustrations taken from the French J. Hetzel edition, translated by Frederick Malleson in 1871).
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The errors in our science eventually leading us somehow to the truth can be most encouraging. Thank you for all your reviews in 2024 and Happy Holidays. 🎄