What Is It?

: A Journey To The Centre Of The Earth

For a long and weary hour we tramped over this great bed of bones. We

advanced regardless of everything, drawn on by ardent curiosity. What

other marvels did this great cavern contain what other wondrous

treasures for the scientific man? My eyes were quite prepared for any

number of surprises, my imagination lived in expectation of something

new and wonderful.



The borders of the great Central Ocean had fo some time disappeared

behind the hills that were scattered over the ground occupied by the

plain of bones. The imprudent and enthusiastic Professor, who did not

care whether he lost himself or not, hurried me forward. We advanced

silently, bathed in waves of electric fluid.



By reason of a phenomenon which I cannot explain, and thanks to its

extreme diffusion, now complete, the light illumined equally the sides

of every hill and rock. Its seat appeared to be nowhere, in no

determined force, and produced no shade whatever.



The appearance presented was that of a tropical country at midday in

summer in the midst of the equatorial regions and under the vertical

rays of the sun.



All signs of vapor had disappeared. The rocks, the distant mountains,

some confused masses of far-off forests, assumed a weird and mysterious

aspect under this equal distribution of the luminous fluid!



We resembled, to a certain extent, the mysterious personage in one of

Hoffmann's fantastic tales the man who lost his shadow.



After we had walked about a mile farther, we came to the edge of a vast

forest not, however, one of the vast mushroom forests we had discovered

near Port Gretchen.



It was the glorious and wild vegetation of the Tertiary period, in all

its superb magnificence. Huge palms, of a species now unknown, superb

palmacites a genus of fossil palms from the coal formation pines,

yews, cypress, and conifers or cone-bearing trees, the whole bound

together by an inextricable and complicated mass of creeping plants.



A beautiful carpet of mosses and ferns grew beneath the trees. Pleasant

brooks murmured beneath umbrageous boughs, little worthy of this name,

for no shade did they give. Upon their borders grew small treelike

shrubs, such as are seen in the hot countries on our own inhabited

globe.



The one thing wanting in these plants, these shrubs, these trees was

color! Forever deprived of the vivifying warmth of the sun, they were

vapid and colorless. All shade was lost in one uniform tint, of a brown

and faded character. The leaves were wholly devoid of verdure, and the

flowers, so numerous during the Tertiary period which gave them birth,

were without color and without perfume, something like paper discolored

by long exposure to the atmosphere.



My uncle ventured beneath the gigantic groves. I followed him, though

not without a certain amount of apprehension. Since nature had shown

herself capable of producing such stupendous vegetable supplies, why

might we not meet with mammals just as large, and therefore dangerous?



I particularly remarked, in the clearings left by trees that had fallen

and been partially consumed by time, many leguminous (beanlike) shrubs,

such as the maple and other eatable trees, dear to ruminating animals.

Then there appeared confounded together and intermixed, the trees of

such varied lands, specimens of the vegetation of every part of the

globe; there was the oak near the palm tree, the Australian eucalyptus,

an interesting class of the order Myrtaceae leaning against the tall

Norwegian pine, the poplar of the north, mixing its branches with those

of the New Zealand kauris. It was enough to drive the most ingenious

classifier of the upper regions out of his mind, and to upset all his

received ideas about botany.



Suddenly I stopped short and restrained my uncle.



The extreme diffuseness of the light enabled me to see the smallest

objects in the distant copses. I thought I saw no, I really did see

with my own eyes immense, gigantic animals moving about under the

mighty trees. Yes, they were truly gigantic animals, a whole herd of

mastodons, not fossils, but living, and exactly like those discovered in

1801, on the marshy banks of the great Ohio, in North America.



Yes, I could see these enormous elephants, whose trunks were tearing

down large boughs, and working in and out the trees like a legion of

serpents. I could hear the sounds of the mighty tusks uprooting huge

trees!



The boughs crackled, and the whole masses of leaves and green branches

went down the capacious throats of these terrible monsters!



That wondrous dream, when I saw the antehistorical times revivified,

when the Tertiary and Quaternary periods passed before me, was now

realized!



And there we were alone, far down in the bowels of the earth, at the

mercy of its ferocious inhabitants!



My uncle paused, full of wonder and astonishment.



"Come!" he said at last, when his first surprise was over, "Come along,

my boy, and let us see them nearer."



"No," replied I, restraining his efforts to drag me forward, "we are

wholly without arms. What should we do in the midst of that flock of

gigantic quadrupeds? Come away, Uncle, I implore you. No human creature

can with impunity brave the ferocious anger of these monsters."



"No human creature," said my uncle, suddenly lowering his voice to a

mysterious whisper, "you are mistaken, my dear Henry. Look! look yonder!

It seems to me that I behold a human being a being like ourselves a

man!"



I looked, shrugging my shoulders, decided to push incredulity to its

very last limits. But whatever might have been my wish, I was compelled

to yield to the weight of ocular demonstration.



Yes not more than a quarter of a mile off, leaning against the trunk of

an enormous tree, was a human being a Proteus of these subterranean

regions, a new son of Neptune keeping this innumerable herd of

mastodons.





Immanis pecoris custos, immanior ipse![5]







[5] The keeper of gigantic cattle, himself still more gigantic!



Yes it was no longer a fossil whose corpse we had raised from the

ground in the great cemetery, but a giant capable of guiding and driving

these prodigious monsters. His height was above twelve feet. His head,

as big as the head of a buffalo, was lost in a mane of matted hair. It

was indeed a huge mane, like those which belonged to the elephants of

the earlier ages of the world.



In his hand was a branch of a tree, which served as a crook for this

antediluvian shepherd.



We remained profoundly still, speechless with surprise.



But we might at any moment be seen by him. Nothing remained for us but

instant flight.



"Come, come!" I cried, dragging my uncle along; and, for the first time,

he made no resistance to my wishes.



A quarter of an hour later we were far away from that terrible monster!



Now that I think of the matter calmly, and that I reflect upon it

dispassionately; now that months, years, have passed since this strange

and unnatural adventure befell us what am I to think, what am I to

believe?



No, it is utterly impossible! Our ears must have deceived us, and our

eyes have cheated us! we have not seen what we believed we had seen. No

human being could by any possibility have existed in that subterranean

world! No generation of men could inhabit the lower caverns of the globe

without taking note of those who peopled the surface, without

communication with them. It was folly, folly, folly! nothing else!



I am rather inclined to admit the existence of some animal resembling in

structure the human race of some monkey of the first geological epochs,

like that discovered by M. Lartet in the ossiferous deposit of Sansan.



But this animal, or being, whichsoever it was, surpassed in height all

things known to modern science. Never mind. However unlikely it may be,

it might have been a monkey but a man, a living man, and with him a

whole generation of gigantic animals, buried in the entrails of the

earth it was too monstrous to be believed!