The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (14 page)

I’m spending a little
too long upon the start of this unparalleled adventure which we were about to
share. Suffice it to say that we returned in company with a hulking, beefy-faced,
and amiable lad called Antoine, me still riding Diana, Pierre maintaining his
dignity upon a carthorse laden with rope, Antoine trotting beside us at no
great speed, carrying an oil lantern.

Antoine obviously
assumed that he should descend into the abyss on behalf of the posh gentleman.
Without further ado he began roping himself to the sturdy carthorse. But I
intervened. I was lighter and slimmer — surely it was more sensible for me to
go down? Pierre wouldn’t countenance this. He himself would make the descent
while the lad controlled the carthorse, if, that is, I didn’t feel reluctant to
be left alone with the lad.

So it was that presently
Antoine and I heard Pierre shouting from below that, in the light from the
lantern, he could see big pictures upon one wall of the cave, of bison and
other beasts — vivid pictures in red and black and violet. Other pictures were
visible along a passage which led from the cave in a downward direction.

“I must see where that
passage leads!” he called up to us.

It was a full hour
before my Pierre returned, amazed, to the cave, and thence to us who had
awaited him — Antoine phlegmatically so, I with increasing concern. Had there
been a second lantern, I swear I would have gone in search of my lover.

Numerous weeks were to
pass. Professors of Prehistory were to visit our discovery, the hole now
rendered safe by timbers, and a simple stairway constructed. One professor
declared the cave paintings to be tens of thousands of years old because the
animals depicted were extinct. Another denounced the pictures as a hoax —
though of course
not
perpetrated by Captain Dumont d’Urville, who was
well-known as an adventurer but also as a man of honour.

Pierre was much less
excited about those pictures, vigorous but primitive, than about where that
tunnel led to. On his first sortie he had reached an underground river,
alongside which a wide ledge provided ample safe footage. Wisely he had
returned before the oil in the lamp was half-consumed.

On a second sortie, with
obliging Antoine as porter, Pierre reached an underground lake. What he was
soon calling “the route” took a sideways twist into a passage running through
geological formations differing from the limestone hitherto. A route indeed! —
for if a passage forked, presenting an ambiguous choice, a small stick-like
figure scrawled in ochre often pointed faintly. Presently that route began to
descend through rocks more impervious to water. Ever to descend!

How could it be that our
primitive ancestors — or one ancestor such, of genius and courage — had
penetrated so far? Obviously the cave artists used something to light their
work. Perhaps a small bonfire? They would be fairly close to the light of day,
to some entrance which later collapsed, and it was difficult to imagine them
carrying burning brands deeper and deeper into the bowels of the Earth.
Phosphorescent lichen existed here and there in the depths but its light was
very feeble.

Greatly enthused, Pierre
contacted an acquaintance of his, the geologist Charles Sainte-Claire Deville,
who was likewise an adventurer — he had explored active volcanoes such as
Vesuvius and Stromboli. Monsieur Deville was already a member of the Academy of
Sciences in Paris, and influential. And lo, it transpired that Monsieur Deville
himself was in correspondence with that young writer Jules Verne who had just
recently caused quite a stir with his novel
Five Weeks in a Balloon.
Monsieur
Verne was quizzing Monsieur Deville concerning questions of geology and
volcanoes, because he was planning a new novel — about none other than a
journey to the centre of the Earth!

Presently Messieurs
Deville and Verne hastened to the Dordogne, to accompany us underground with
sufficient food, water, lamps and so forth (carried by Antoine) to allow for a
return journey of four days in total. Yes, to accompany Pierre and Antoine
and
me too.
I had insisted, and I had prevailed. I think Pierre was proud of
me, even though he raised trivial objections such as regarding the privacy that
a woman requires for matters of personal hygiene. What, in
darkness?
Actually,
Verne was the one who most demurred about the participation of a woman in a
scientific enterprise. I understood that Verne was married, yet at the same
time I sensed, as women can sense in a way inexplicable to men, that in the
past the author had experienced disillusionments which made him bitter towards
my sex in general. Disillusionments, yes, though also excitements — a woman has
instincts. However, Verne was a junior participant in this enterprise, under
the wing of Deville. Deville and my Pierre were the men of experience; and for
a fairly generous sum Pierre had bought the land which —gave access to the
cave. Verne was lucky to be invited to participate in our initial foray — and
he was eager to do so.

“How,” he exclaimed, “can
I possibly contemplate writing about a journey into the Earth — when what I
write may be contradicted by reality? But oh what a novel I shall now be able
to write!”

Interestingly, according
to Deville, half a century ago a bizarre American by the name of Symmes had
sent a proclamation to the Academy of Sciences in Paris to the effect that the
Earth is hollow and habitable within, accessible — so the American declared —
by way of a big hole at the North Pole. The Academy had responded scornfully
and declined to sponsor him.

Imagine us in the simple
though adequate inn of Montignacsur-Vézères after we returned safely from those
four days underground.

Ah, I have not mentioned
our small but powerful Ruhmkorff chemical lamps, which were far superior to the
simple oil lamp with which Pierre originally descended, and which wouldn’t
cause an explosion should we encounter fire-damp — these, courtesy of a mine
owner, at whose mansion Deville sometimes dined. Visualize us: bearded Deville,
moustachioed Pierre, the clean-shaven Verne with his curly dark hair, stalwart
laconic Antoine — and me, tall and slim, my dark hair gathered in a tight bun.

Those two days of
outbound subterranean travel had taken us some eight leagues in a generally
north-easterly direction into the roots of the Massif Central, and some three
leagues downward from our original height above sea level. Latterly, our
downward progress was increasing — and whenever we encountered an ambiguous
branching of routes, we would find a stick figure as guide.

Jules enthused, “It
seems as if we’re being invited to travel —-deeper — to the very centre of the
Earth, just as in the novel I’m planning! I chose Iceland as an entry point
because of volcanoes and empty lava tubes, but here there’s an opening in
France itself.”

Pierre nodded. “Certainly
this merits a serious expedition, with supplies sufficient for several weeks or
months.”

“Might it be,” I
ventured, “that the stick figures aren’t the work of our primitive ancestors —
but that the truth is the reverse? Those guide-marks were made by explorers
from
within
the Earth, venturing up to the surface?”

A tic afflicted Jules’
left
eye.
His voice became clipped. “I suppose next you’ll suggest that
these venturesome troglodytes painted the bison and other beasts in the cave, from
sheer astonishment, or as a warning of what lives on the surface!” He was a man
who could veer quickly from witty bonhomie to irritability.

“Perhaps it’s wise,” I
said, mildly yet stubbornly, “to entertain all possibilities.”

“Only within the bounds
of scientific possibility, my dear lady! What would these denizens of the
underworld feed upon? Sheep abducted from the surface?”

“What of the legends of
fairy folk abducting people and taking them underground?”

“So you believe in fairies!”

“I only wish to keep an
open mind.”

“One that a wind blows
through because it is mostly empty.”

“That’s damn’d unfair,”
said Pierre. “Hortense has a very full mind, uniquely her own.”

“Full of fancies
perhaps. Reason plays no part in feminine lives.”

Diplomatically Deville
asked Jules, “Have you read the work of Darwin,
On the Origin of Species?”

“I only just bought the
translation — I’m reading it at the moment.”

“A sub-species of
Homo
adapted to life underground seems unlikely . . .” Deville commenced
lighting a pipe.

“Still,” said Pierre, “we’ll
be well advised to take revolvers and a good supply of gun-cotton too.
Personally I’m glad of your suggestion, Hortense.”

I smiled. “Let’s hope we
don’t need to use the revolvers.” Pierre gaped at me.
“We?”

Pierre led me aside.

“Taking you underground
initially was an
indulgence.
Now we’re planning in terms of weeks or
months. Stern stuff, men’s stuff.”

I whispered, “If I don’t
go with you, I shall tell your wife everything! Including your opinion of her
performance in bed. Then you’ll have no money for gun-cotton or anything else.”

He groaned. The noise
was very similar to what I could evoke from him by other means. “My peach, this
expedition of ours will be the talk of France — maybe the world! Journalists will
seize upon your participation. Mathilde would be very stupid not to put two and
two together.”

“Maybe the expedition
will make us all rich, then you’ll have no further
_.
need of her!”

“Hmm,” he said and
played with his moustache.

“I shall go underground,”
I said, “a day before your official departure; so that no one will see me, and
I’ll await the four of you. I want an adventure such as no woman has
experienced before! If my adventure must remain a secret afterwards, so be it.
At least /will know what I have achieved.”

“Verne won’t like this.
If the temperature increases progressively the deeper we descend, a man can
strip to the waist . . .”

Men could be so
illogical. “If heat increases progressively, then you won’t be able to descend
far or you’ll melt. Verne must grin and bear me, or there won’t be any
expedition, so there! Fortunately Deville has a less nervous attitude towards
women.”

“You can be very
stubborn.” Nevertheless, Pierre’s eyes twinkled.

Not all of our time
since Pompey’s demise had been spent at that village in the Dordogne. Pierre
had affairs to attend to in Bordeaux, and he was obliged to spend some time
with his wife even if Mathilde was accustomed to frequent adventurous absences
on Pierre’s part. I refer to Pierre’s business affairs — our private affair
could be conducted with perfect ease in Bordeaux where Pierre maintained me in
a pretty apartment. Our jaunt to Montignac-sur-Vézères had been a special
holiday outing because I love riding, and Pierre could hardly ride with me
publicly in the city, or else tongues would wag. Anyway, by the tenth of
September our expedition was fully provisioned and ready — and I made myself
scarce, to spend a night underground all on my own half a league along our
destined route, so that I shouldn’t
feature in the official
photographs of departure. I wasn’t in the least bit worried about the isolation
nor the darkness. Next day I even conserved my chemicals until I saw the lamps
of my fellow explorers approaching Now I really must leap forward in time — back
to where I began this narrative — skipping over many undoubtedly fascinating
details of rocks and tunnels and shafts and galleries and caverns.

Six weeks had passed and
we had journeyed in a mainly east-northeasterly direction for some 200 leagues,
which put us almost directly underneath the Bavarian city of Munich — at a
depth, by our manometer of compressed air, of an incredible 25 leagues. We
imagined the bustle of Germans up on the surface, so remote from us (as we
thought!) that they might as well have been on the Moon.

All of us were still
fully dressed. As we descended, contrary to scientific wisdom the temperature
had risen only moderately, then stabilised. Personally I would have preferred
Antoine to shed some garments — not, of course, so as to admire his
musculature, but because his clothes had become smelly with sweat, he being of
all of us the most burdened . . . by a silk rope-ladder a hundred metres long,
mattocks, pickaxes, iron wedges and spikes, long knotted cords, meat extract
and biscuits. To a greater or lesser degree all of us were burdened — myself
included; I insisted on this! — but Antoine was more weighed down than the rest
of us. At the end of every Saturday’s march he received payment for his labour.
To his phlegmatic mind the money seemed the entire rationale for a journey
which continued to amaze the rest of us, not least when we came . . .

. . .
to an
underground sea of vast expanse!

From the strand on which
we stood the walls of an immense cavern stretched away to right and to left,
into invisibility. Far ahead was a horizon of water — and we could see a long
way because the very air seemed phosphorescently alive with light. Masses of
cloud hid any view of a roof, those clouds stained kaleidoscopically (maybe I
mean prismatically) by what must have been auroras at even higher
altitude. Widening out to half a league, the shore of this ocean
was richly vegetated by ferns the size of trees and by umbrella-crowned trees
which I saw to be enormous fungi. No wonder the air was invigorating compared
with the tunnels that had led here! Perhaps for this reason — coupled with the
release from two months’ confinement in stygian natural corridors — I became
headstrong, spurred by delight at the
aerial
denizens of this
subterranean realm, namely butterflies rather than birds, butterflies of all
sizes and hues, and dragonflies with huge wingspans such as must have flown in
the forests of the Carboniferous Era and which still survived here hidden away
beneath the earth.