The Professor – and thus Axel – would find no peace until he had seen the center of the Earth for himself. “In April, after he had planted in the terra-cotta pots outside his window seedling plants of mignonette and convolvulus, he would go and give them a little pull by their leaves to make them grow faster.” From the moment Professor Liedenbrock found Saknussemm’s message, he became a man obsessed. “The man had no notion how to wait nature herself was too slow for him,” Axel tells us. No matter his comfortable life in Hamburg – Professor Liedenbrock was drawn to the darkness. It would all have been fine were it not for the restless discontent of his uncle. What a nice life he could have been having – in the leaning house in the old quarter of Hamburg, Axel could play with his rocks and one day marry his uncle’s pretty ward Gräuben. Axel loved mineralogy, geology, rocks, pebbles, earth. He was content helping his uncle in the laboratory. From the moment his uncle, the imminent geologist Professor Liedenbrock, found the Runic note penned by the mysterious Icelandic alchemist Arne Saknussemm reporting that he had discovered a passage that led to the very center of the Earth, from the moment Professor Liedenbrock had decided the Professor and Axel himself would go to Iceland and follow Saknussemm’s path to the center of the Earth with the aid of all sorts of wonderful technologies (a night glass, two compasses, a chronometer, an aneroid barometer, an Eigel’s centigrade thermometer), and then return to enlighten the world with their discovery, Axel had known he would find himself in a state of total despair and imminent doom.Īxel would have been perfectly happy to avoid the dark and silent places. “ Lost! LOST! LOST!” screamed Axel to himself as he sat in a vast labyrinth alone – without company, clue or compass - someplace near the core of Earth.
You will imagine that you are tired of the sunlight the waters that unnerve you will tug in the ancient recesses of your mind the midnight will seem restful – you will end by going down.” You will be drawn to it by cords of fear and longing. You will turn immediately to the darkness. “It is a simple prescription,” Eiseley said to us, “but you will not follow it.
If you fear the sound of water hurrying through crevices toward unknown and mysterious destinations, do not consider it. “If you cannot bear the silence and the darkness,” Loren Eiseley warned, “do not go there if you dislike black night and yawning chasms, never make them your profession.
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