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Journey to the Center of the Earth
Chapter 36. WHAT IS IT?
For a long and tiring hour we walked over that great bed of bones.
We kept going, not caring about anything, pulled on by eager curiosity.
What other marvels did that great cavern hold?
What other strange treasures for the scientific man?
My eyes were ready for many surprises, and my imagination waited for something new and wonderful.
The borders of the great Central Ocean had for some time disappeared behind the hills that lay on the plain of bones.
The imprudent and excited Professor, who didn't care if he lost his way, hurried me along.
We moved in silence, bathed in waves of electric light.
Because of a phenomenon I can't explain, and thanks to its great spread, the light now lit equally the sides of every hill and rock.
It seemed to come from nowhere, in no fixed place, and it made no shadows at all.
The sight looked like a tropical country at midday in summer, under the vertical rays of the sun in the equatorial regions.
All signs of mist had gone, leaving the air utterly clear and strangely bright.
The rocks, the distant mountains, and some confused masses of far forests took on a strange and mysterious look under this even spread of light.
We looked, in a way, like the mysterious man in one of Hoffmann's strange tales, the man who lost his shadow.
After walking a mile, we reached the edge of a vast forest, not the giant mushroom forests we had found near Port Gretchen.
It was the glorious and wild vegetation of the Tertiary period, in all its grand beauty.
Huge palms, of a species now unknown, splendid palmacites, pines, yews, cypress, and cone-bearing trees, all tied together by a very tangled mass of climbing plants.
A beautiful carpet of mosses and ferns grew under the trees.
Pleasant brooks murmured beneath shady boughs, though they gave little real shade, for no shadow was made.
On their banks grew small tree-like shrubs, like those seen in hot countries on our own world.
The one thing missing in these plants, shrubs, trees, was color.
Forever without the warming sun, they were weak and colorless.
All shade was lost in one uniform tint of brown and faded gray.
The leaves lacked green, and the many Tertiary flowers had no color or smell, like paper faded by long exposure.
My uncle went under the gigantic groves.
I followed him, though I felt some fear.
Since nature could make such huge plant life, why might we not find mammals just as large, and so dangerous?
I noticed, in clearings of fallen, partly rotted trees, many beanlike shrubs, maples and other edible trees loved by grazing animals.
Then trees from many lands were mixed together.
Oak stood beside palm, Australian eucalyptus leaned on tall Norwegian pine, northern poplar mixed branches with New Zealand kauris.
It was enough to confuse the most clever classifier and to upset all his ideas about botany.
Suddenly I stopped and held my uncle back.
The extreme spread of the light let me see small objects in the distant copses.
I thought I saw, No, I really did see with my own eyes immense, gigantic animals moving under the mighty trees.
Yes, they were truly gigantic animals, a whole herd of mastodons, not fossils but living.
They were just like those found in 1801 on the marshy banks of the great Ohio in North America.
Yes, I could see those enormous elephants, whose trunks were tearing down large boughs, working in and out among the trees like a legion of snakes.
I could hear the tusks uprooting huge trees.
The boughs crackled, and whole masses of leaves and green branches went down the wide throats of those terrible monsters.
That wondrous dream, when I had seen the old times come to life, when the Tertiary and Quaternary periods passed before me, was now real.
And there we were alone, far down in the bowels of the earth, at the mercy of its fierce inhabitants.
My uncle stopped, full of wonder, his eyes wide as he gazed at them.
"Come!" he said at last, when his first surprise was over, "Come along, my boy, and let us see them nearer."
"No," I said, stopping him from pulling me forward, "we're completely without arms."
"What would we do in that flock of giant animals, come away, Uncle, I beg you, for no human being can face their fierce anger without protection".
"No human being," said my uncle, suddenly lowering his voice to a mysterious whisper.
"You're wrong, my dear Henry. Look, look over there. It seems to me I see a human being, a being like ourselves, a man."
I looked, shrugging my shoulders, ready to push my disbelief as far as I could.
But whatever I wanted to think, I had to accept what my eyes showed me.
Yes, not more than a quarter of a mile off, leaning against the trunk of an enormous tree, was a human being.
He was a Proteus of these underground regions, a new son of Neptune, watching this huge herd of mastodons.
Immanis pecoris custos, immanior ipse! a monstrous guardian of the herd, more monstrous himself.
It was no longer a fossil we had raised in the cemetery, but a giant able to guide and drive those prodigious monsters.
He was over twelve feet tall, his head, as big as a buffalo's head, was lost in a mane of matted hair.
It was indeed a great mane, like those of the elephants of the early ages of the world.
In his hand was a branch of a tree that served as a crook for this antediluvian shepherd.
We stayed utterly still, speechless with surprise.
But he might see us at any moment, Nothing was left but instant flight.
"Come, come!" I cried, dragging my uncle along, and for the first time, he didn't fight my wish.
A quarter of an hour later we were far away from that terrible giant.
Now that I think about it calmly and reflect without passion, months and years have passed since this strange and unnatural adventure.
What am I to think?
What am I to believe, after all that I have seen and experienced here?
No, it's completely impossible, Our ears must have tricked us, and our eyes must have cheated us.
We didn't see what we believed we had seen.
No human being could possibly have lived in that underground world.
No group of people could live in the lower caverns of the globe without being known to those on the surface, without some contact with them.
It was folly, folly, folly, nothing else.
I'm more ready to accept the existence of some animal like the human form, some monkey from the first geological ages, like the one M.
Lartet found in the ossiferous deposit of Sansan.
But this animal or being, whatever it was, was taller than anything known to modern science, Never mind.
Even if unlikely, it could have been a monkey.
But a living man, with a generation of giant animals buried in the earth's entrails, was too monstrous to be believed.