Journey to the Center of the Earth Read Online

We’ll see what that will give us. But, by St. Michael! Take care that you don’t make mistakes!”

The dictation began. I did my best. Every letter was called out one after the other, and resulted in the unintelligible sequence of the following words:

When this work was ended, my uncle quickly took the paper on which I had been writing, and examined it attentively for a long time.

“What does this mean?” he kept repeating mechanically.

On my honor, I could not have enlightened him. Besides he did not question me, and went on talking to himself.

“This is what we call a cryptogram,” he said, “where the meaning is hidden under deliberately scrambled letters, which in their proper order would result in an intelligible sentence. When I think that there’s perhaps the explanation or clue to some great discovery here!”

As far as I was concerned, there was absolutely nothing in it, but of course, I took care not to reveal my opinion.

Then the professor took the book and the parchment, and compared them with one another.

“These two writings are not by the same hand,” he said; “the cryptogram is of a later date than the book, and I see one irrefutable proof of that. The first letter is actually a double m, a letter which can’t be found in Turleson’s book because it was only added to the Icelandic alphabet in the fourteenth century. So there are at least two hundred years between the manuscript and the document.”

This, I admit, seemed pretty logical to me.

“I’m therefore led to believe,” continued my uncle, “that one of the owners of this book wrote these mysterious letters. But who the devil was that owner? Didn’t he put his name somewhere on the manuscript?”

My uncle raised his spectacles, took up a strong magnifying glass, and carefully examined the first pages of the book. On the back of the second one, the half-title page, he discovered a sort of stain which looked like an ink blot. But in looking at it very closely one could distinguish some half-erased letters. My uncle understood that this was the interesting part; so he focused on the stain, and with the help of his big magnifying glass, he ended up identifying the following symbols, Runic characters that he read without hesitation.

“Arne Saknussemm!” he exclaimed in a tone of triumph. “Now that is a name, and an Icelandic name at that, the name of a sixteenth-century scholar, a famous alchemist!”3

I looked at my uncle with a certain admiration.

“Those alchemists,” he resumed, “Avicenna, Bacon, Lully, Paracelsus, 4 were the real and only scholars of their time. They made discoveries at which we may rightfully be astonished. Why wouldn’t this Saknussemm have hidden some surprising invention in this incomprehensible cryptogram? It must be so. It is so.”

The Professor’s imagination caught fire at this hypothesis.

“No doubt,” I ventured to reply, “but what interest would this scholar have had in hiding a marvelous discovery in this way?”

“Why? Why? How would I know? Didn’t Galileo do the same by Saturn?g Besides, we’ll see. I’ll get at the secret of this document, and I’ll neither sleep nor eat until I’ve found it out.”

“Oh!” I thought.

“Nor you either, Axel,” he added.

“The devil!” I said to myself, “then it’s lucky that I’ve eaten dinner for two!”

“First of all,” said my uncle, “we must find out the language of this ‘cipher’; that can’t be too difficult.”

At these words I quickly raised my head. My uncle continued his soliloquy.

“Nothing’s easier. There are a hundred and thirty-two letters in this document, seventy-seven consonants and fifty-five vowels. Now the words of southern languages approximately match this distribution, whereas northern tongues are infinitely richer in consonants. Therefore this must be a southern language.”

These conclusions were very appropriate.

“But what language is it?”

I expected scholarship in response, but was confronted with in-depth analysis instead.

“This Saknussemm,” he went on, “was an educated man; now since he wasn’t writing in his own mother tongue, he would naturally select the language that was used by the cultivated minds of the sixteenth century, I mean Latin. If I’m mistaken, I can try Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, or Hebrew. But the scholars of the sixteenth century generally wrote in Latin. I’m therefore entitled to declare a priori: this is Latin.”

I jumped up from my chair. My memories of Latin rebelled against the assumption that this sequence of baroque words could belong to the sweet language of Virgil.

“Yes, it’s Latin,” my uncle continued, “but scrambled Latin.”

“Good luck!” I thought. “If you can unscramble this, my uncle, you’re a clever man.”

“Let’s examine it carefully,” he said, taking the sheet on which I had written. “Here is a series of one hundred and thirty-two letters in apparent disorder. There are words that consist only of consonants, like the first one, mm. rnlls; others where vowels predominate, as for instance the fifth one, unteief, or the next-to-last one, oseibo. Now, this arrangement was obviously not planned: it came about mathematically as a consequence of the unknown rule which determined the order of these letters.