Fairytale adults can believe
Priyanka Singh

Journey to the Centre of the Earth
by Jules Verne. Rupa. Pages 281. Rs 95.

UNDERTAKING a journey right through the core of a dormant volcano crater down to the very centre of the earth seemed a possibility to Jules Verne, who embarked on this futuristic work. For those who have read and enjoyed Around the World in Eighty Days, Jules Verne needs no introduction. A writer par excellence, his works provided a cogent framework for the evolution of modern science fiction.

Journey to the Centre of the Earth is an adaptation from the French novel Voyage au centre de la Terre published in 1864. An eccentric and an oddly ambitious German professor, Otto Lidenbrock, quite by chance discovers a cryptic message in a worn-out manuscript. He takes the help of his nephew Axel to decode the message that reads "Descend, bold traveller, into the crater of the jokul of Sneffels, which the shadow of Scartaris touches before the kalends of July, and you will attain the centre of the earth; which I have done, Arne Saknussemm." In a matter of hours, the excitable professor decides to take the passage to the core of the earth along with a reluctant Axel. What follows is a hurried and hush-hush arrangement entailing the collection of various instruments best suited to the adventure, besides essential provisions.

Next comes their voyage to Iceland and their search for Mount Snefell and a competent local guide, who is soon found. The description of the descent is so vivid that the veracity of the message and the existence of the passage is easily believed.

Solid granite walls, gigantic animals, the presence of a giant human with a head as "huge and unshapely as a buffalo’s" in the nether regions, vegetation of the tertiary period lit by luminous electric fluid, besides the surreal description of an old sea with primordial sea animals, thought to be extinct, and violent storms take the imagination to new heights.

The travails of the threesome inside of the earth, their near-death encounters and their final spitting out from an active volcano to a region 2000 miles from Iceland form the remainder of the work.

Jules Verne is an effective raconteur who conjures reality through fiction. The smooth narrative of his work would draw even those who find science fiction to be a drag. Interspersed with light moments, the book has been divided into brief sections that are manageable and don’t run on when your patience has run out.

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