The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (15 page)

Shedding my pack, I ran
impulsively towards an enchanting yellow and purple lepidopterous creature half
my own size that had alighted nearby upon the gritty loam, studded with pointy
orange flowers such as I had never seen before, to suck at their sweetness. For
a fanciful moment I almost took it for a fairy, and thought myself in
fairyland.

“Come back, you stupid
girl!” I heard Verne shout imperiously. “That may be poisonous! This isn’t a
dress shop!”

The papillon fluttered
away, more as if swimming than flying — the air felt denser here than on the
surface of the world. If it had been Pierre who called to me to observe
caution, events might have transpired differently. However, it amused Pierre to
give me my head. I was quite fed up with Verne’s little volcanic explosions, so
I followed the object of my admiration somewhat farther. Oh Verne was such a
bundle of contraries! He could be perfectly charming one moment then the next
moment so facetious and curt, fairly snapping at any dissent from his own
viewpoint. Maybe his impatience and nervous tension was a sign of genius, but
his bilious attacks and facial twitches made him less than the perfect travel
companion. Though his insomnia would have made him a good sentry, had there
been anything to guard against in the dark tunnels hitherto!

As I came closer to the
enchanting papillon amidst the floral undergrowth, of a sudden I heard Deville
call out, “Look, look!” He was pointing to the sea, offshore.

Peering between some
giant tree-ferns I espied two monstrous heads rearing up from the water, one
with a long toothy snout like a crocodile’s —

“An ichthyosaurus!” I
heard Deville shout —

- the other like a
serpent —

“A plesiosaurus!”

The two monsters joined
combat ferociously while the water foamed and sprayed, thrashed by oar-like
flappers and tail-fins. Thank God that I hadn’t rushed to bathe but had been
distracted by beauty — and now I was doubly distracted by the battle offshore.
Thus it was that I paid no attention to my vicinity.

Abruptly I was seized
from behind by the thighs and by the waist and dragged backwards, losing my
balance, too surprised to cry out. As I sprawled,
little men
swarmed
over me — muscular naked little men, four, five of them, all as pasty white as
could be! In those first moments I feared an animalistic rape of me, for the
exposed male genitals of the dwarfs all seemed disproportionately large
compared with the bodies. The eyes, too, bulged — such big eyes! Breath panted
from barrel chests. You might have expected that sweat reeked too, but actually
the smell was floral. These persons must bathe regularly in streams that fed
the underground ocean and brush themselves afterwards with squeezed flowers —
only a madman would venture into water where monsters dwelt such as were
battling. A hand clamped over my mouth. Hands gripped my clothing, and I was
lifted. The dwarfs were beginning to bear me away — for what purpose? Sexual?
Cannabilistic? Sacrificial? All the while my companions evidently noticed
nothing, so locked must their attention have been upon the prehistoric sea
monsters.

I struggled and I
writhed, but those dwarfs were strong and persistent. Giant fungi and
tree-ferns shifted above me as I was borne backward through undergrowth. My
captors uttered guttural words to one another. The idea came to me that they
might regard me as a goddess and were carrying me away to be worshipped,
confined in some primitive cave-temple. They would bring me offerings of fish,
and of course 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.

Shedding my pack, I ran
impulsively towards an enchanting yellow and purple lepidopterous creature half
my own size that had alighted nearby upon the gritty loam, studded with pointy
orange flowers such as I had never seen before, to suck at their sweetness. For
a fanciful moment I almost took it for a fairy, and thought myself in
fairyland.

“Come back, you stupid
girl!” I heard Verne shout imperiously. “That may be poisonous! This isn’t a
dress shop!”

The papillon fluttered
away, more as if swimming than flying — the air felt denser here than on the
surface of the world. If it had been Pierre who called to me to observe
caution, events might have transpired differently. However, it amused Pierre to
give me my head. I was quite fed up with Verne’s little volcanic explosions, so
I followed the object of my admiration somewhat farther. Oh Verne was such a
bundle of contraries! He could be perfectly charming one moment then the next
moment so facetious and curt, fairly snapping at any dissent from his own
viewpoint. Maybe his impatience and nervous tension was a sign of genius, but
his bilious attacks and facial twitches made him less than the perfect travel
companion. Though his insomnia would have made him a good sentry, had there
been anything to guard against in the dark tunnels hitherto!

As I came closer to the
enchanting papillon amidst the floral undergrowth, of a sudden I heard Deville
call out, “Look, look!” He was pointing to the sea, offshore.

Peering between some
giant tree-ferns I espied two monstrous heads rearing up from the water, one
with a long toothy snout like a crocodile’s — “An ichthyosaurus!” I heard
Devine shout — the other like a serpent —”A plesiosaurus!”

The two monsters joined
combat ferociously while the water foamed and sprayed, thrashed by oar-like
flappers and tail-fins. Thank God that I hadn’t rushed to bathe but had been
distracted by beauty — and now I was doubly distracted by the battle offshore.
Thus it was that I paid no attention to my vicinity.

Abruptly I was seized
from behind by the thighs and by the waist and dragged backwards, losing my
balance, too surprised to cry out. As I sprawled,
little men
swarmed
over me — muscular naked little men, four, five of them, all as pasty white as
could be! In those first moments I feared an animalistic rape of me, for the
exposed male genitals of the dwarfs all seemed disproportionately large
compared with the bodies. The eyes, too, bulged — such big eyes! Breath panted
from barrel chests. You might have expected that sweat reeked too, but actually
the smell was floral. These persons must bathe regularly in streams that fed
the underground ocean and brush themselves afterwards with squeezed flowers —
only a madman would venture into water where monsters dwelt such as were
battling. A hand clamped over my mouth. Hands gripped my clothing, and I was
lifted. The dwarfs were beginning to bear me away — for what purpose? Sexual?
Cannabilistic? Sacrificial? All the while my companions evidently noticed
nothing, so locked must their attention have been upon the prehistoric sea
monsters.

I struggled and I
writhed, but those dwarfs were strong and persistent. Giant fungi and
tree-ferns shifted above me as I was borne backward through undergrowth. My
captors uttered guttural words to one another. The idea came to me that they
might regard me as a goddess and were carrying me away to be worshipped,
confined in some primitive cave-temple. They would bring me offerings of fish,
and of course there would be a priest whom I would come to understand and to
cultivate till he would be quite in my thrall and who would co-operate in my
escape. After returning to the surface I would exhibit the dwarf priest in
Paris and I would become rich and famous, not least because of the memoir I
would write, maybe with some assistance from Verne — if he could bring himself
to offer this and if I could bear to accept it and to work with him to our
mutual advantage.
Twenty-Five Leagues Under the Earth
might be a good
title.

Maybe the priest would
try to copulate ceremonially with me in that temple, to promote the fertility
of his tribe! My vivid imagination summoned up the scene of degradation to
which I might be subjected, perhaps many times — then an image, too, of myself
giving birth in primitive circumstances to a dwarf who would be a vile
caricature of me. By now we were crossing some open ground, perhaps quarter of
a league distant from the place of my abduction. I bit the hand clamped upon my
mouth, and as it jerked away from my teeth I screamed.

Did I hear a distant
echo of my cry, from the lips of my dearest Pierre, distraught at my mysterious
disappearance? I think that was an echo of my own cry bouncing from the mighty
wall of the vast cavern. A new hand gripped my mouth even more firmly than
before — new, I reasoned, since I did not taste any blood upon the palm. My
bite had been quite savage. I could be
wild,
as Pierre knew well. In
actuality the dwarfs had not behaved savagely towards me, not as yet — no blow
had struck me. It was
I
who had been the savage, perhaps with due
reason, but nevertheless. And, truth to tell, it was myself who smelled
animalistic rather than my naked abductors. I had of course brought an adequate
supply of good perfume for the journey, reasoning that I would need to mask
bodily odours, but those big squat noses of the dwarfs probably detected the
imposture. Carried away by the dwarfs like some princess in a fairy tale, I was
such a mixture of fear and fancy and reason and rage.

Then I heard a sharp
bang — and abruptly my right leg dropped, my boot striking the ground. Jerked
sideways, I

glimpsed one of my
captors sprawling, blood gushing from his stout neck. As the echo of that first
bang rebounded, I heard another such — and my left leg became free. Another
dwarf was collapsing, blood running from his back. I assumed that my Pierre had
found me already and had used one of the Purdley More rifles to deadly effect
and with great accuracy.

In panic the other
dwarfs let go of me. With a spine-jarring jolt all of me was upon the ground.
Three dwarfs were running for the cover of vegetation. A gun chattered
unbelievably quickly and yet another dwarf fell before the remaining two
reached cover and disappeared. What sort of weapon could fire so quickly?
Surely not any rifle, nor even the Colt revolvers. Circumspectly I lay still,
as though in a swoon, squinting.

Three men,
who were
not my companions,
ran towards me from out the undergrowth beyond. Two wore
black uniforms, black boots, smooth steel helmets on their heads — and carried
guns such as I never saw before. Imagine a black pistol stretched out almost to
arm’s length. The third man, who was shorter and stocky, wore black leather
trousers and a jacket with many pockets flying open to reveal a holstered
pistol at his hip — he clutched a rifle equipped on top with what looked like a
miniature telescope. A roughly trimmed dark beard jutted from his chin at the
same angle as his nose. Abundant short hair curled rebelliously.

Since it seemed these
strangers were intent on rescuing me, I sat up.

The strangers — six in
total — proved to be Germans. Thanks to visits during my adolescence to an aunt
of mine in Alsace-Lorraine I was fairly conversant with the German language. So
as not to keep the reader in suspense I shall state right away that these six
constituted an expedition similar to our own, into the hollow Earth. Their
starting point had been from deep labyrinthine salt mines in Poland just
outside of Cracow, rock salt resting upon the compact sandstone which breaks
surface elsewhere as the peaks of the Carpathian Mountains. But here ends all
similarity between our own and
Ernst Schafer’s
expedition, as well as
any anxiety that we had been preceded in our discoveries by Germans!

THEY HAD SET OUT IN THE
YEAR 1943.
Excuse me if I sound shrill: yes,
eighty
years
after ourselves. Of course they were as astonished as I was by this
incongruity, and disbelieved me at first.

“No,” said Schafer,
their bearded leader, whose crack shots had killed two of the dwarfs without
even risking grazing me. “It must be that you are from a subterranean colony of
French people who have been here for a very long time, and who have lost track
of the years.” He surveyed my smart if rather soiled clothing, puzzled. “You
were born down here, yes?” We were at their improvised camp, a recess in the
cavern wall.

“Certainly not,” I said.

I was much more easily
persuaded of the futurity of Schafer and his men on account of the equipment
and the guns they had with them, and the way they introduced themselves — with
such titles!

The leader was SS
Hauptsturmführer Ernst Schafer, zoologist, geologist, and veteran of Tibetan
exploration, who wore on his finger a death’s-head ring. Then there was Untersturmführer
Karl Wienert, geographer and geophysicist. And Ernst Krause, cameraman. And Dr
Josef Rimmer, geologist and diviner. Plus two tall blond soldiers — and porters
— Schwabe and Hahn, who belonged to something called the Leibstandarte Adolf
Hitler.

“The
what?”