Journey to the Center of the Earth

Summary

On 24 May 1863 Otto Liedenbrock, a hot-tempered professor of mineralogy at the Johannaeum in Hamburg, rushes home to his house in the Königstrasse with a rare manuscript of Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla. Out of it falls a scrap of parchment covered in runes. Liedenbrock and his nephew Axel, who tells the story, transliterate it into a jumble of letters, and the Professor locks the household in without food until the cipher is solved. Axel, fanning himself with the paper, sees by accident that it is Latin written backwards: a message from the sixteenth-century Icelandic alchemist Arne Saknussemm saying that a bold traveller who descends into the crater of Snaefells, where the shadow of the peak Scartaris falls before the first of July, will reach the centre of the earth, as he did. Axel argues that the earth's interior must be molten; his uncle replies that he and Humphry Davy had agreed the core cannot be liquid. Gräuben, the Professor's god-daughter and Axel's sweetheart, encourages Axel to go. Uncle and nephew travel by Kiel and Copenhagen, where Liedenbrock makes Axel climb a church spire to cure his giddiness, to Reykjavik, and engage the calm eider-down hunter Hans Bjelke as guide. At the end of June the shadow of Scartaris marks one of the crater's three chimneys, and they descend. They follow old lava tunnels, take a wrong branch, nearly die of thirst until Hans hears and taps an underground stream they name the Hansbach, and go on through primitive rock. Axel loses his companions in a side passage, wanders alone in darkness, and is found through the acoustics of a whispering gallery. Below lies a vast cavern lit by electric light, with forests of giant mushrooms and a sea the Professor names after himself. On a raft they cross the Liedenbrock Sea, watch an ichthyosaurus and a plesiosaurus fight, pass a geyser on an island named for Axel, and are driven by an electric storm back to the coast. There they find fields of bones, a preserved fossil human, a giant herdsman of mastodons glimpsed among the trees, and a rusted dagger and Saknussemm's carved initials beside a blocked tunnel. They blast the rock with gun-cotton; the explosion drains the sea into an abyss, and the raft is carried up a volcanic chimney on rising water and lava until the travellers are flung out of Stromboli in Sicily. They return to Hamburg in September as celebrities, and the Professor's puzzling compass, which had pointed the wrong way, is explained by the storm's reversal of its poles. The novel was published by Hetzel in Paris in November 1864; the library text is the 1877 English translation by the Rev. Frederick Amadeus Malleson, issued by Ward, Lock as A Journey into the Interior of the Earth.

Top Lessons

• Science grows by correcting itself

  Uncle and nephew disagree about the earth's interior from the first chapters to the last: Liedenbrock trusts that the core is cool, Axel that it is molten. Their journey neither proves nor quite disproves either view, and the Professor says that science is built on errors that were good to fall into because they led to the truth. Verne shows argument and observation as the normal life of science, not a sign of failure.

• Courage can be learned

  Axel begins as a nervous young man who fears heights and the dark and hopes the voyage will be cancelled. Through the climb on the Copenhagen spire, the descent of the crater, the ordeal of thirst and his solitary wandering in the tunnels, he learns to master his fear. By the end Gräuben can call him a hero.

• The quiet strength of Hans

  Hans speaks little, wants only his weekly pay, and never panics. It is he who finds water, guides the way, tends the injured Axel and steers the raft. Verne sets the Icelander's steadiness against the Professor's fire and Axel's nerves, showing that faithfulness and calm can be as heroic as genius.

• Reading the earth like a book

  The journey begins with a coded parchment and continues as a reading of rock strata, fossils and minerals, each layer a page of the earth's history. The travellers go down through time as they go down through stone, until they meet creatures of earlier ages. Verne teaches that the earth itself is a record that patient students can learn to decipher.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Verne treats the body under stress with some care. In Hamburg the Professor's household is kept without food while he works on the cipher, and Axel records the effects of hunger on his own mind. Axel's fear of heights is handled as a nervous weakness that can be trained away: in Copenhagen his uncle makes him climb the outside stair of a church spire daily until the giddiness lessens, a period form of graded exposure, and Axel notes the benefit when he looks down the crater. The thirst in the eastern tunnel is the novel's most clinical episode, with weakness, burning mouth, collapse and hallucinatory confusion before the Professor gives him the last water. After his fall in the whispering gallery Axel wakes bruised and feverish under his uncle's and Hans's nursing. He also describes nights of delirium and dreams of abysses before the departure, and on the raft a waking dream in which the ages of the earth run backward. At the end Hans leaves Hamburg seized by mal de pays, the homesickness that nineteenth-century medicine still discussed as a real disorder under the name nostalgia; reading it in modern terms is an interpretation.

• Chapter IV, The Enemy to Be Starved into Submission

  The Professor keeps the house locked and unfed while he struggles with the cipher, and Axel describes the effect of hunger on his thinking.

• Chapter VIII, Serious Preparations for Vertical Descent

  Liedenbrock trains Axel against giddiness by making him climb the open spiral stair of the Vor Frelsers Kirk in Copenhagen.

• Chapters XX-XXI, The First Signs of Distress; Compassion Fuses the Professor's Heart

  Water fails in the eastern tunnel; Axel collapses and his uncle revives him with the last mouthful he has saved.

• Chapter XXXII, Wonders of the Deep

  On the raft Axel falls into a waking dream in which he passes back through the geological ages to the beginning of the world.

• Chapter XLV, All's Well that Ends Well

  Hans leaves Hamburg suffering from mal de pays, homesickness, and returns to Reykjavik.