Journey to the Center of the Earth quotes

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.

Fancy a tall, spare man, of an iron constitution, and with a fair complexion which took off a good ten years from the fifty he must own to. His restless eyes were in incessant motion behind his full-sized spectacles.

His long, thin nose was like a knife blade.

Boys have been heard to remark that that organ was magnetised and attracted iron filings. But this was merely a mischievous report; it had no attraction except for snuff, which it seemed to draw to itself in great quantities.

In a word, a man might live happily enough in the little old house in the Königstrasse, in spite of the restless impatience of its master, for although he was a little too excitable—he was very fond of me.

But the man had no notion how to wait; nature herself was too slow for him.

In April, after he had planted in the terracotta pots outside his window seedling plants of mignonette and convolvulus, he would go and give them a little pull by their leaves to make them grow faster.

But the man had no notion how to wait; nature herself was too slow for him.

In April, after he had planted in the terracotta pots outside his window seedling plants of mignonette and convolvulus, he would go and give them a little pull by their leaves to make them grow faster.

In dealing with such a strange individual there was nothing for it but prompt obedience. I therefore rushed after him.

All this my uncle was going to sacrifice to a bit of old parchment.

As an affectionate and attentive nephew I considered it my duty to eat for him as well as for myself, which I did conscientiously.

“I have never known such a thing,” said Martha. “M. Liedenbrock is not at table!”

“Nor you either, Axel,” he added.

“The deuce!” said I to myself; “then it is lucky I have eaten two dinners today!”

“First of all we must find out the key to this cipher; that cannot be difficult.”

“No, no,” I repeated, “I shall not speak. He would insist upon going; nothing on earth could stop him.

His imagination is a volcano, and to do that which other geologists have never done he would risk his life.

I will preserve silence. I will keep the secret which mere chance has revealed to me. To discover it, would be to kill Professor Liedenbrock! Let him find it out himself if he can.

“Granted. But it is likewise the creed adopted by other distinguished geologists, that the interior of the globe is neither gas nor water, nor any of the heaviest minerals known, for in none of these cases would the earth weigh what it does.”

“Oh, with figures you may prove anything!”

“But is it the same with facts! Is it not known that the number of volcanoes has diminished since the first days of creation? And if there is central heat may we not thence conclude that it is in process of diminution?”

“No, my dear Axel, and I would willingly go with you, but that a poor girl would only be in your way.”

Ah! Women and young girls, how incomprehensible are your feminine hearts! When you are not the timidest, you are the bravest of creatures.

Reason has nothing to do with your actions. What! Did this child encourage me in such an expedition! Would she not be afraid to join it herself? And she was driving me to it, one whom she loved!

“Gräuben, we will see whether you will say the same thing tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow, dear Axel, I will say what I say today.”

Gräuben and I, hand in hand, but in silence, pursued our way. The emotions of that day were breaking my heart.

I spent it dreaming of abysses. I was a prey to delirium. I felt myself grasped by the Professor’s sinewy hand, dragged along, hurled down, shattered into little bits. I dropped down unfathomable precipices with the accelerating velocity of bodies falling through space.

My life had become an endless fall.

I awoke at five with shattered nerves, trembling and weary. I came downstairs. My uncle was at table, devouring his breakfast. I stared at him with horror and disgust. But dear Gräuben was there; so I said nothing, and could eat nothing.

At that moment my uncle was solemnly investing Gräuben with the reins of government. My pretty Virlandaise was as calm and collected as was her wont. She kissed her guardian; but could not restrain a tear in touching my cheek with her gentle lips.

“Go, my dear Axel, go! I am now your betrothed; and when you come back I will be your wife.”

I pressed her in my arms and took my place in the carriage. Martha and the young girl, standing at the door, waved their last farewell. Then the horses, roused by the driver’s whistling, darted off at a gallop on the road to Altona.

“That’s a lunatic asylum,” said one of our travelling companions.

Very good! thought I, just the place we want to end our days in; and great as it is, that asylum is not big enough to contain all Professor Liedenbrock’s madness!

At ten in the morning, at last, we set our feet in Copenhagen; the luggage was put upon a carriage and taken with ourselves to the Phoenix Hotel in Breda Gate. This took half an hour, for the station is out of the town.

“Look down!” he cried.

“Look down well! You must take a lesson in abysses.”

I opened my eyes. I saw houses squashed flat as if they had all fallen down from the skies; a smoke fog seemed to drown them.

“The worst!” I said, astonished.

“To be sure, now we have nothing to do but go down.”

“Oh, if that is all, you are quite right; but after all, when we have gone down, we shall have to get up again, I suppose?”

“To be sure, now we have nothing to do but go down.”

“Oh, if that is all, you are quite right; but after all, when we have gone down, we shall have to get up again, I suppose?”

“Oh I don’t trouble myself about that. Come, there’s no time to lose; I am going to the library. Perhaps there is some manuscript of Saknussemm’s there, and I should be glad to consult it.”

“Oh, that is very uninteresting to me.

It is not what is upon this island, but what is underneath, that interests me.

”

… robust but heavy, blond Germans with pensive eyes, conscious of being far removed from their fellow creatures, poor exiles relegated to this land of ice, poor creatures who should have been Eskimo, since nature had condemned them to live only just outside the arctic circle!

In vain did I try to detect a smile upon their lips; sometimes by a spasmodic and involuntary contraction of the muscles they seemed to laugh, but they never smiled.

Their costume consisted of a coarse jacket of black woollen cloth called in Scandinavian lands a vadmel, a hat with a very broad brim, trousers with a narrow edge of red, and a bit of leather rolled round the foot for shoes.

“Oh, M. Liedenbrock, they are all over the country. In this icy region we are fond of study. There is not a farmer nor a fisherman that cannot read and does not read.

Our principle is, that books, instead of growing mouldy behind an iron grating, should be worn out under the eyes of many readers.

Therefore, these volumes are passed from one to another, read over and over, referred to again and again; and it often happens that they find their way back to their shelves only after an absence of a year or two.”

“Oh, M. Liedenbrock, they are all over the country. In this icy region we are fond of study.

There is not a farmer nor a fisherman that cannot read and does not read.

Our principle is, that books, instead of growing mouldy behind an iron grating, should be worn out under the eyes of many readers. Therefore, these volumes are passed from one to another, read over and over, referred to again and again;

“They are neither in Iceland nor anywhere else.”

“Because Arne Saknussemm was persecuted for heresy, and in 1573 his books were burned by the hands of the common hangman.”

“Very good! Excellent!” cried my uncle, to the great scandal of the professor of natural history.

This part of the conversation was in Latin; I had understood every word of it, and I could hardly conceal my amusement at seeing my uncle trying to keep down the excitement and satisfaction which were brimming over in every limb and every feature.

He tried hard to put on an innocent little expression of simplicity; but it looked like a diabolical grin.

“Yes,” said he, “your words decide me. We will try to scale that Snæfells; perhaps even we may pursue our studies in its crater!”

He stood with arms crossed, perfectly unmoved by my uncle’s incessant gesticulations. A negative was expressed by a slow movement of the head from left to right, an affirmative by a slight bend, so slight that his long hair scarcely moved.

He carried economy of motion even to parsimony.

Certainly I should never have dreamt in looking at this man that he was a hunter; he did not look likely to frighten his game, nor did he seem as if he would even get near it. But the mystery was explained when M.

Nevertheless, they soon came to understand each other.

Neither looked at the amount of the payment: the one was ready to accept whatever was offered; the other was ready to give whatever was demanded.

Never was bargain more readily concluded.

but there was always enough room to pass. Besides, our horses instinctively chose the easiest places without ever slackening their pace. My uncle was refused even the satisfaction of stirring up his beast with whip or voice. He had no excuse for being impatient.

I could not help smiling to see so tall a man on so small a pony, and as his long legs nearly touched the ground he looked like a six-legged centaur.

“Good horse! good horse!” he kept saying. “You will see, Axel, that there is no more sagacious animal than the Icelandic horse. He is stopped by neither snow, nor storm, nor impassable roads, nor rocks, glaciers, or anything. He is courageous, sober, and sure-footed.

… fields, where the poor beasts had to content themselves with the scanty moss they could pull off the rocks and a few meagre sea weeds, and the next day they would not fail to come of themselves and resume the labours of the previous day.

Then calmly, automatically, and dispassionately he kissed the host, the hostess, and their nineteen children.

This ceremony over, we sat at table, twenty-four in number, and therefore one upon another. The luckiest had only two urchins upon their knees.

That evening, after having forded two rivers full of trout and pike, called Alfa and Heta, we were obliged to spend the night in a deserted building worthy to be haunted by all the elfins of Scandinavia.

The ice king certainly held court here, and gave us all night long samples of what he could do.

No particular event marked the next day. Bogs, dead levels, melancholy desert tracks, wherever we travelled. By nightfall we had accomplished half our journey, and we lay at Krösolbt.

Basalt is a brownish rock of igneous origin. It assumes regular forms, the arrangement of which is often very surprising.

Here nature had done her work geometrically, with square and compass and plummet.

Everywhere else her art consists alone in throwing down huge masses together in disorder. You see cones imperfectly formed, irregular pyramids, with a fantastic disarrangement of lines;

For my own part the incidents of the journey had hitherto kept me amused, and made me forgetful of coming evils; but now my fears again were beginning to get the better of me. But what could I do?

The place to resist the Professor would have been Hamburg, not the foot of Snæfells.

One thought, above all others, harassed and alarmed me; it was one calculated to shake firmer nerves than mine.

… in their usual condition, if they display no augmentation of force, and if you add to this the observation that the wind and rain are not ceasing and being replaced by a still and heavy atmosphere, then you may affirm that no eruption is preparing.”

“No more; that is sufficient. When science has uttered her voice, let babblers hold their peace.”

I returned to the parsonage, very crestfallen. My uncle had beaten me with the weapons of science.

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.

I was just about to drop down, when a hand laid hold of me. It was that of Hans. I suppose I had not taken as many lessons on gulf exploration as I ought to have done in the Frelsers Kirke at Copenhagen.

“Very well, now it is our turn.”

Now I ask any sensible man if it was possible to hear those words without a shudder.

The Professor fastened his package of instruments upon his shoulders; Hans took the tools; I took the arms: and the descent commenced in the following order; Hans, my uncle, and myself.

“Well, Axel, what do you say to it?” cried my uncle, rubbing his hands. “Did you ever spend a quieter night in our little house at Königsberg? No noise of cart wheels, no cries of basket women, no boatmen shouting!”

“No doubt it is very quiet at the bottom of this well, but there is something alarming in the quietness itself.”

“Now come!” my uncle cried; “if you are frightened already, what will you be by and by? We have not gone a single inch yet into the bowels of the earth.”

crystals of opaque quartz, set with limpid tears of glass, and hanging like clustered chandeliers from the vaulted roof, seemed as it were to kindle and form a sudden illumination as we passed on our way.

It seemed as if the genii of the depths were lighting up their palace to receive their terrestrial guests.

“It is magnificent!” I cried spontaneously. “My uncle, what a sight! Don’t you admire those blending hues of lava, passing from reddish brown to bright yellow by imperceptible shades? And these crystals are just like globes of light.”

“A coal mine!” I cried.

“A mine without miners,” my uncle replied.

“I know,” the Professor pronounced decidedly, “I am certain that this gallery driven through beds of coal was never pierced by the hand of man. But whether it be the hand of nature or not does not matter. Supper time is come; let us sup.”

Now, this is my proposal. When Columbus asked of his ships’ crews for three days more to discover a new world, those crews, disheartened and sick as they were, recognised the justice of the claim, and he discovered America.

I am the Columbus of this nether world, and I only ask for one more day.

If in a single day I have not met with the water that we want, I swear to you we will return to the surface of the earth.”

We had above us a league and a half of terrestrial crust. The weight of it seemed to be crushing down upon my shoulders. I felt weighed down, and I exhausted myself with imaginary violent exertions to turn round upon my granite couch.

A few hours passed away. A deep silence reigned around us, the silence of the grave.

No sound could reach us through walls, the thinnest of which were five miles thick.

And Hansbach it was from that moment.

Hans was none the prouder. After a moderate draught, he went quietly into a corner to rest.

“Now,” I said, “we must not lose this water.”

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 necessaries of men who live upon the earth’s surface.

Being fossils, we looked upon all those things as mere jokes.

The grotto was an immense apartment. Along its granite floor ran our faithful stream. At this distance from its spring the water was scarcely tepid, and we drank of it with pleasure.

“And all this solid granite ought to be running in fusion.”

“You see that it is not so, and that, as so often happens, facts come to overthrow theories.”

“I am obliged to agree; but, after all, it is surprising.”

“But how shall we go down then.”

“Why, we must fill our pockets with stones.”

“Well, indeed, my worthy uncle, you are never at a loss for an answer.”

“Why, we must fill our pockets with stones.”

“Well, indeed, my worthy uncle, you are never at a loss for an answer.”

I dared venture no farther into the region of probabilities, for I might presently have stumbled upon an impossibility, which would have brought the Professor on the scene when he was not wanted.

How was I to return? There was not a trace of their footsteps or of my own, for the foot left no mark upon the granite floor. I racked my brain for a solution of this impracticable problem. One word described my position. Lost!

Lost at an immeasurable depth! Thirty leagues of rock seemed to weigh upon my shoulders with a dreadful pressure.

I felt crushed.

A terrible cry of anguish burst from me. Upon earth, in the midst of the darkest night, light never abdicates its functions altogether. It is still subtle and diffusive, but whatever little there may be, the eye still catches that little.

Here there was not an atom; the total darkness made me totally blind.

Then I began to lose my head. I arose with my arms stretched out before me, attempting painfully to feel my way.

A terrible cry of anguish burst from me.

Upon earth, in the midst of the darkest night, light never abdicates its functions altogether.

It is still subtle and diffusive, but whatever little there may be, the eye still catches that little. Here there was not an atom; the total darkness made me totally blind.

When I returned to partial life my face was wet with tears. How long that state of insensibility had lasted I cannot say. I had no means now of taking account of time.

Never was solitude equal to this, never had any living being been so utterly forsaken.

After my fall I had lost a good deal of blood. I felt it flowing over me. Ah! how happy I should have been could I have died, and if death were not yet to be gone through. I would think no longer.

but there was a cloud hanging far above, the height of which we estimated at 12,000 feet, a greater height than that of any terrestrial vapour, and no doubt due to the great density of the air.

The word cavern does not convey any idea of this immense space; words of human tongue are inadequate to describe the discoveries of him who ventures into the deep abysses of earth.

Besides I could not tell upon what geological theory to account for the existence of such an excavation. Had the cooling of the globe produced it?

I remarked: “It is so; and here is a fact which science has scarcely suspected.”

“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.”

“What depth have we now reached?”

“Four months!” cried the Professor. “We have time to go and to return; and with what is left I will give a grand dinner to my friends at the Johannæum.”

I ought by this time to have been quite accustomed to my uncle’s ways; yet there was always something fresh about him to astonish me.

“Now,” said he, “we will replenish our supply of water with the rain which the storm has left in all these granite basins; therefore we shall have no reason to fear anything from thirst.

Such was his only reply.

It was no use for me to entreat, supplicate, get angry, or do anything else in the way of opposition; it would only have been opposing a will harder than the granite rock.

Hans was finishing the repairs of the raft. One would have thought that this strange being was guessing at my uncle’s intentions. With a few more pieces of surturbrand he had refitted our vessel.

We moved with difficulty across these granite fissures and chasms mingled with silex, crystals of quartz, and alluvial deposits, when a field, nay, more than a field, a vast plain, of bleached bones lay spread before us.

It seemed like an immense cemetery, where the remains of twenty ages mingled their dust together.

Huge mounds of bony fragments rose stage after stage in the distance. They undulated away to the limits of the horizon, and melted in the distance in a faint haze.

“What does that signify, uncle?

Our business is not to explain facts, but to use them!

”

Was there any chance of escaping from the fury of this impetuous torrent, and of returning to the surface of the globe? I could not form the slightest conjecture how or when.

But one chance in a thousand, or ten thousand, is still a chance; whilst death from starvation would leave us not the smallest hope in the world.

The thought came into my mind to declare the whole truth to my uncle, to show him the dreadful straits to which we were reduced, and to calculate how long we might yet expect to live. But I had the courage to preserve silence.

The wick had burnt itself out. Black night reigned again; and there was no hope left of being able to dissipate the palpable darkness. We had yet a torch left, but we could not have kept it alight.

Then, like a child, I closed my eyes firmly, not to see the darkness.

After a considerable lapse of time our speed redoubled. I could perceive it by the sharpness of the currents that blew past my face. The descent became steeper. I believe we were no longer sliding, but falling down.

It might have been, as I guessed, about ten at night. The first of my senses which came into play after this last bout was that of hearing. All at once I could hear; and it was a real exercise of the sense of hearing.

I could hear the silence in the gallery after the din which for hours had stunned me.

At last these words of my uncle’s came to me like a vague murmuring:

“Axel,” replied the Professor with perfect coolness, “our situation is almost desperate; but there are some chances of deliverance, and it is these that I am considering.

If at every instant we may perish, so at every instant we may be saved.

Let us then be prepared to seize upon the smallest advantage.”

“What! do you think there is any chance of safety left?”

“Yes, I do; as long as the heart beats, as long as body and soul keep together, I cannot admit that any creature endowed with a will has need to despair of life.”

Resolute words these! The man who could speak so, under such circumstances, was of no ordinary type.

A glimpse of hope had returned, although without cause. But our last meal was over, and it was now five in the morning.

Man is so constituted that health is a purely negative state.

Hunger once satisfied, it is difficult for a man to imagine the horrors of starvation; they cannot be understood without being felt.

Man is so constituted that health is a purely negative state.

Hunger once satisfied, it is difficult for a man to imagine the horrors of starvation; they cannot be understood without being felt.

Therefore it was that after our long fast these few mouthfuls of meat and biscuit made us triumph over our past agonies.