Journey to the Center of the Earth (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

the crustaceans, mollusks, and articulated beings. The zoophytes of the Transition period also return to nothingness. All the world’s life is concentrated in me, and my heart is the only one that beats in this depopulated world. There are no more seasons; climates are no more; the heat of the globe continually increases and neutralizes that of the radiant star. Vegetation grows excessively. I glide like a shade amongst arborescent ferns, treading with unsteady feet the iridescent clay and the multicolored sand; I lean against the trunks of immense conifers; I lie in the shade of sphenophylla, asterophylla, and lycopods, a hundred feet tall.
    Centuries pass by like days! I move back through the series of terrestrial transformations. Plants disappear; granite rocks lose their purity; solids give way to liquids under the impact of increasing heat; water covers the surface of the globe; it boils, evaporates; steam envelops the earth, which gradually dissolves into a gaseous mass, white-hot, as large and radiant as the sun!
    In the midst of this nebula, fourteen hundred thousand times more voluminous than this globe that it will one day become, I am carried into planetary spaces! My body subtilizes, sublimates itself in its turn and, like an imponderable atom, mingles with these immense vapors that follow their flaming orbits through infinite space.
    What a dream! Where is it carrying me? My feverish hand sketches the strange details out on paper! I have forgotten everything, the professor, the guide, and the raft! A hallucination possesses my spirit (pp. 162-163).
    It is, of course, noteworthy that this journey to the beginnings of the cosmos fictionalizes, in reverse time sequence, some of the chief scientific findings of Verne’s era—the discovery of the enormous age of the Earth and Darwin’s theory of evolution, which was published in 1859, just five years prior to Journey to the Center of the Earth. It is also remarkable that Axel, in the throes of a properly scientific hallucination, loses the analytical distance that usually characterizes scientific work, and gradually shifts from normal scientific observation with a telescope to a visual imagination of nonexistent natural objects. He then places himself physically among these objects (leaning against the trunks of imaginary trees) and finally feels his body merge with the elementary forces of the cosmos in a climactic moment of transcendence. That such visionary states clearly cannot be sustained for long (Axel almost falls off the expedition’s raft because of his hallucination!) does not diminish their importance for science as Verne represents it. Otto Lidenbrock, a man who pulls the leaves of plant seedlings to speed along their growth, is clearly incapable of the kind of surrender to nature that is spelled out in his nephew’s vision, and this capability, in the novel, is an indispensable ingredient for a truly inspired and innovative scientific perspective.
    The enormous lyrical power of Axel’s vision arises not only from what it tells us about Verne’s understanding of science and its relationship to the natural world. It is also gripping because it forms part of what is clearly the initiation voyage of a young man who has still to learn how to occupy his position in the social and scientific realms. The vision occurs after Axel has already suffered two near-death experiences—he almost dies from thirst, and he gets lost and spends agonizing hours alone in complete darkness and despair. Axel’s vision includes two very different bodily experiences: first, a concentration of all the biological life forces of the world in his body and the beating of his heart, then a complete dissolution of his body in its merger with the inanimate physical forces of the universe. Both, clearly, form part of an initiatory process during which the descent into the realm of death gradually metamorphoses into a physical, social, and perhaps spiritual rebirth.
    The journey