I did not answer, and for a very good reason. My eyes had fallen upon a charming picture: the portrait of Gräuben. We had become engaged unknown to my uncle. Gräuben was a lovely blue-eyed blonde. I adored her. Every day she helped me to arrange my uncle’s precious specimens; she and I labelled them together. Mademoiselle Gräuben was an accomplished mineralogist. How often I envied the stones which she handled with her charming fingers.
“No, no, no,” cried my uncle, “there’s no sense in it!”
Then he rushed outside onto the Königstrasse and fled.
4
“He is gone!” cried Martha, running out of her kitchen.
“Yes,” I replied, “completely gone.”
“Well; and how about his dinner?” said the servant.
“He won’t have any.”
“And his supper?”
“He won’t have any.”
“What?” cried Martha, with clasped hands.
“No, my dear Martha, he will eat no more. Uncle Liedenbrock is going to decipher an undecipherable scrawl.”
“Oh, my dear!”
She returned to the kitchen.
I was alone. That old document kept working in my brain[21]. My head throbbed with excitement, and I felt an undefined uneasiness. I took the sheet of paper with mysterious letters; and repeated to myself “What does it all mean?”
I tried to group the letters so as to form words. Quite impossible! I was stifling; I wanted air. Unconsciously I fanned myself [22]with the bit of paper, the back and front of which successively came before my eyes. What was my surprise when, in one of those rapid revolutions, at the moment when the back was turned to me I thought I noticed the Latin words “craterem”, “terrestre”, and others.
A sudden light burst in upon me; I had discovered the key to the cipher! To read the document, it was not even necessary to read it through the paper. My eyes were dim, I could scarcely see. I laid the paper upon the table. At a glance I could tell the whole secret.
“Now I’ll read it,” I cried.
I leaned over the table; and I read the whole sentence aloud.
“Ah!” I cried. “But no! No! My uncle will never know it. He will try to know all about it. Ropes will not hold him, such a determined geologist as he is! He will start, in spite of everything and everybody, and he will take me with him, and we will never get back. No, never! never!”
My over-excitement was beyond all description.
“No! No!” I declared energetically; “and as it is in my power to prevent the knowledge of it, I will do it. I will destroy this paper.”
There was a little fire on the hearth. I was about to fling the paper upon the coals, when the study door opened, and my uncle appeared.
5
I replaced the unfortunate document upon the table. Professor Liedenbrock was greatly abstracted. The mystical letters gave him no rest. He sat in his armchair, took the pen and began to write algebraic formulas. For three long hours my uncle worked on without a word, without lifting his head. But time was passing away; night came on; the street noises ceased; my uncle noticed nothing. Martha opened the door and said:
“Will monsieur take any supper tonight?”
But there was no answer. As for me, after long resistance, I began to sleep.
When I awoke next morning the Professor was still working. To tell the plain truth, I pitied him. “No, no,” I repeated, “I shall not speak. He will go at once; nothing on Earth can stop him. His imagination is a volcano, and he will risk his life. I will preserve silence. I will keep the secret which mere chance has revealed to me. To discover it is to kill Professor Liedenbrock! Let him find it out himself if he can.”
I folded my arms and waited. Two o’clock struck. This was becoming ridiculous; worse than that, unbearable. The Professor jumped up, clapped on his hat, and prepared to go out.
“Uncle!” I cried.
He did not hear me.
“Uncle Liedenbrock!” I cried, lifting up my voice.
“Ay,” he answered.
“Uncle, that key!”
“What key? The door key?”
“No, no!” I cried. “The key of the document.”
The Professor stared at me over his spectacles. I nodded my head up and down.
“Yes, that key, chance—”
“What is that you are saying?” he shouted with indescribable emotion.
“There, read that!” I said, presenting a sheet of paper on which I wrote the sentences.
“But there is nothing in this,” he answered.
“No, nothing until you proceed to read from the end to the beginning.”
A new revelation burst in upon the Professor. He was transformed!
“Aha, clever Saknussemm!” he cried. And he read the whole document from the last letter to the first:
In Sneffels Joculis craterem quem delibat
Umbra Scartaris Julii
intra calendas descende,
Audax viator,
et terrestre centrum attinges.
Quod feci, Arne Saknussemm.
Which may be translated thus:
“Descend, bold traveller, into the crater of the Jokul of Sneffels[23], which the shadow of Scartaris [24]touches before the kalends [25]of July, and you will attain the centre of the Earth; which I have done, Arne Saknussemm.”
My uncle sprang very high. He seized his head between both his hands; he pushed the chairs out of their places, he piled up his books. At last his nerves calmed down, and he sank back into his armchair.
“What’s the time?” he asked after a few moments of silence.
“Three o’clock,” I replied.
“Is it really? It’s the dinner-hour! I am half dead with hunger[26]. Come on, and after dinner—”
“Well?”
“After dinner, pack up my trunk.”
“What?” I cried.
“And yours!” replied the indefatigable Professor, entering the dining-room.
6
At these words a cold shiver ran through me. Yet I controlled myself. During all dinner time my uncle was almost merry. After the dessert, he invited me into his study.
I obeyed; he sat at one end of his table, I at the other.
“Axel,” said he very mildly; “you are a very ingenious young man, you have done me a splendid service, when I was going to abandon the contest. Never, my lad, shall I forget it. But I want to preserve the secrecy: you understand? There are people in the scientific world who envy my success.”
“Do you really think there are many people bold enough?” said I.
“Certainly! A whole army of geologists is ready to follow Arne Saknussemm.”
“But, uncle,” I replied; “we have no proof of the authenticity of this document.”
“What! Not of the book, inside which we have discovered it?”
“I admit that Saknussemm wrote these lines. But has he really accomplished such a journey?”
A smile flitted across the lip of my uncle, and he answered:
“That is what we shall see.”
“Ah!” said I. “But let me present all the possible objections against this document.”
“Speak, my boy, don’t be afraid. You are no longer my nephew only, but my colleague.”
“Well, I want to ask what are this ‘Jokul’, this ‘Sneffels’, and this ‘Scartaris’?”
“Nothing easier. I received not long ago a map from my friend. Take that atlas in the second shelf in the large bookcase.”
I rose from my seat and found the required atlas. My uncle opened it and said:
“Here is one of the best maps of Iceland, and I believe this will solve the worst of our difficulties.”
I bent over the map.
“You see this volcanic island?” said the Professor; “All the volcanoes are called jokuls, a word which means glacier in Icelandic.”
“Very good,” said I; “but what of ‘Sneffels’?”
My uncle replied:
“Follow my finger along the west coast of Iceland. Do you see Reykjavik[27], the capital? You do. Well; ascend the innumerable fiords, and stop at the sixty-fifth degree of latitude. What do you see there?”
“I see a peninsula, and a mountain rising out of the sea.”
“Right. That is Sneffels. It is a mountain five thousand feet high, one of the most remarkable in the world, if its crater leads down to the centre of the Earth.”
“But that is impossible,” I disgusted at such a ridiculous supposition.
“Impossible?” said the Professor severely; “and why?”
“Because this crater is evidently filled with lava and burning rocks, and therefore—”
“But suppose it is an extinct volcano[28]?”
“Extinct?”
“Yes; the number of active volcanoes on the surface of the globe is about three hundred. But there is a much larger number of extinct ones. Now, Sneffels is one of these.”