CHAPTER XXXVII.

THE LIEDENBROCK MUSEUM OF GEOLOGY

How shall I describe the strange series of passions which in

succession shook the breast of Professor Liedenbrock? First

stupefaction, then incredulity, lastly a downright burst of rage.

Never had I seen the man so put out of countenance and so disturbed.

The fatigues of our passage across, the dangers met, had all to be

begun over again. We had gone backwards instead of forwards!

But my uncle rapidly recovered himself.

"Aha! will fate play tricks upon me? Will the elements lay plots

against me? Shall fire, air, and water make a combined attack against

me? Well, they shall know what a determined man can do. I will not

yield. I will not stir a single foot backwards, and it will be seen

whether man or nature is to have the upper hand!"

Erect upon the rock, angry and threatening, Otto Liedenbrock was a

rather grotesque fierce parody upon the fierce Ajax defying the

lightning. But I thought it my duty to interpose and attempt to lay

some restraint upon this unmeasured fanaticism.

"Just listen to me," I said firmly. "Ambition must have a limit

somewhere; we cannot perform impossibilities; we are not at all fit

for another sea voyage; who would dream of undertaking a voyage of

five hundred leagues upon a heap of rotten planks, with a blanket in

rags for a sail, a stick for a mast, and fierce winds in our teeth?

We cannot steer; we shall be buffeted by the tempests, and we should

be fools and madmen to attempt to cross a second time."

I was able to develop this series of unanswerable reasons for ten

minutes without interruption; not that the Professor was paying any

respectful attention to his nephew's arguments, but because he was

deaf to all my eloquence.

"To the raft!" he shouted.

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. A sail

already hung from the new mast, and the wind was playing in its

waving folds.

The Professor said a few words to the guide, and immediately he put

everything on board and arranged every necessary for our departure.

The air was clear--and the north-west wind blew steadily.

What could I do? Could I stand against the two? It was impossible? If

Hans had but taken my side! But no, it was not to be. The Icelander

seemed to have renounced all will of his own and made a vow to forget

and deny himself. I could get nothing out of a servant so feudalised,

as it were, to his master. My only course was to proceed.

I was therefore going with as much resignation as I could find to

resume my accustomed place on the raft, when my uncle laid his hand

upon my shoulder.

"We shall not sail until to-morrow," he said.

I made a movement intended to express resignation.

"I must neglect nothing," he said; "and since my fate has driven me

on this part of the coast, I will not leave it until I have examined

it."

To understand what followed, it must be borne in mind that, through

circumstances hereafter to be explained, we were not really where the

Professor supposed we were. In fact we were not upon the north shore

of the sea.

"Now let us start upon fresh discoveries," I said.

And leaving Hans to his work we started off together. The space

between the water and the foot of the cliffs was considerable. It

took half an hour to bring us to the wall of rock. We trampled under

our feet numberless shells of all the forms and sizes which existed

in the earliest ages of the world. I also saw immense carapaces more

than fifteen feet in diameter. They had been the coverings of those

gigantic glyptodons or armadilloes of the pleiocene period, of which

the modern tortoise is but a miniature representative. [1] The soil

was besides this scattered with stony fragments, boulders rounded by

water action, and ridged up in successive lines. I was therefore led

to the conclusion that at one time the sea must have covered the

ground on which we were treading. On the loose and scattered rocks,

now out of the reach of the highest tides, the waves had left

manifest traces of their power to wear their way in the hardest stone.

This might up to a certain point explain the existence of an ocean

forty leagues beneath the surface of the globe. But in my opinion

this liquid mass would be lost by degrees farther and farther within

the interior of the earth, and it certainly had its origin in the

waters of the ocean overhead, which had made their way hither through

some fissure. Yet it must be believed that that fissure is now

closed, and that all this cavern or immense reservoir was filled in a

very short time. Perhaps even this water, subjected to the fierce

action of central heat, had partly been resolved into vapour. This

would explain the existence of those clouds suspended over our heads

and the development of that electricity which raised such tempests

within the bowels of the earth.

This theory of the phenomena we had witnessed seemed satisfactory to

me; for however great and stupendous the phenomena of nature, fixed

physical laws will or may always explain them.

We were therefore walking upon sedimentary soil, the deposits of the

waters of former ages. The Professor was carefully examining every

little fissure in the rocks. Wherever he saw a hole he always wanted

to know the depth of it. To him this was important.

We had traversed the shores of the Liedenbrock sea for a mile when we

observed a sudden change in the appearance of the soil. It seemed

upset, contorted, and convulsed by a violent upheaval of the lower

strata. In many places depressions or elevations gave witness to some

tremendous power effecting the dislocation of strata.

[1] The glyptodon and armadillo are mammalian; the tortoise is a

chelonian, a reptile, distinct classes of the animal kingdom;

therefore the latter cannot be a representative of the former.

(Trans.)

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. There within three square miles were accumulated the

materials for a complete history of the animal life of ages, a

history scarcely outlined in the too recent strata of the inhabited

world.

But an impatient curiosity impelled our steps; crackling and

rattling, our feet were trampling on the remains of prehistoric

animals and interesting fossils, the possession of which is a matter

of rivalry and contention between the museums of great cities. A

thousand Cuviers could never have reconstructed the organic remains

deposited in this magnificent and unparalleled collection.

I stood amazed. My uncle had uplifted his long arms to the vault

which was our sky; his mouth gaping wide, his eyes flashing behind

his shining spectacles, his head balancing with an up-and-down

motion, his whole attitude denoted unlimited astonishment. Here he

stood facing an immense collection of scattered leptotheria,

mericotheria, lophiodia, anoplotheria, megatheria, mastodons,

protopithecæ, pterodactyles, and all sorts of extinct monsters here

assembled together for his special satisfaction. Fancy an

enthusiastic bibliomaniac suddenly brought into the midst of the

famous Alexandrian library burnt by Omar and restored by a miracle

from its ashes! just such a crazed enthusiast was my uncle, Professor

Liedenbrock.

But more was to come, when, with a rush through clouds of bone dust,

he laid his hand upon a bare skull, and cried with a voice trembling

with excitement:

"Axel! Axel! a human head!"

"A human skull?" I cried, no less astonished.

"Yes, nephew. Aha! M. Milne-Edwards! Ah! M. de Quatrefages, how I

wish you were standing here at the side of Otto Liedenbrock!"