My comment on this was “Oh!”
“First of all we must find out the key to this cipher; that cannot be difficult.”
At that I quickly raised my head.
“There’s nothing easier. In this document there are a hundred and thirty-two letters: seventy-seven consonants and fifty-five vowels. So this is a southern language. But what language is it?”
I was looking at the letters.
“This Saknussemm,” the Professor went on, “was a very well-informed man; so he was not writing in his own mother tongue, he selected Latin. The savants of the sixteenth century generally wrote in Latin. So it is Latin.”
I jumped up in my chair. These barbarous words belong to the sweet language of Virgil[20]!
“Yes, it is Latin,” my uncle went on; “but it is Latin confused and in disorder. Let us examine carefully. Here is a series of one hundred and thirty-two letters in apparent disorder. This arrangement has arisen mathematically in obedience to the unknown law. Whoever possesses the key of this cipher will read it with fluency. What is that key? Axel, have you got it?”
I did not answer, and for a very good reason. My eyes had fallen upon a charming picture: the portrait of Gräuben. We had become engaged unknown to my uncle. Gräuben was a lovely blue-eyed blonde. I adored her. Every day she helped me to arrange my uncle’s precious specimens; she and I labelled them together. Mademoiselle Gräuben was an accomplished mineralogist. How often I envied the stones which she handled with her charming fingers.
“No, no, no,” cried my uncle, “there’s no sense in it!”
Then he rushed outside onto the Königstrasse and fled.
4
“He is gone!” cried Martha, running out of her kitchen.
“Yes,” I replied, “completely gone.”
“Well; and how about his dinner?” said the servant.
“He won’t have any.”
“And his supper?”
“He won’t have any.”
“What?” cried Martha, with clasped hands.
“No, my dear Martha, he will eat no more. Uncle Liedenbrock is going to decipher an undecipherable scrawl.”
“Oh, my dear!”
She returned to the kitchen.
I was alone. That old document kept working in my brain[21]. My head throbbed with excitement, and I felt an undefined uneasiness. I took the sheet of paper with mysterious letters; and repeated to myself “What does it all mean?”
I tried to group the letters so as to form words. Quite impossible! I was stifling; I wanted air. Unconsciously I fanned myself [22]with the bit of paper, the back and front of which successively came before my eyes. What was my surprise when, in one of those rapid revolutions, at the moment when the back was turned to me I thought I noticed the Latin words “craterem”, “terrestre”, and others.
A sudden light burst in upon me; I had discovered the key to the cipher! To read the document, it was not even necessary to read it through the paper. My eyes were dim, I could scarcely see. I laid the paper upon the table. At a glance I could tell the whole secret.
“Now I’ll read it,” I cried.
I leaned over the table; and I read the whole sentence aloud.
“Ah!” I cried. “But no! No! My uncle will never know it. He will try to know all about it. Ropes will not hold him, such a determined geologist as he is! He will start, in spite of everything and everybody, and he will take me with him, and we will never get back. No, never! never!”
My over-excitement was beyond all description.
“No! No!” I declared energetically; “and as it is in my power to prevent the knowledge of it, I will do it. I will destroy this paper.”
There was a little fire on the hearth. I was about to fling the paper upon the coals, when the study door opened, and my uncle appeared.
5
I replaced the unfortunate document upon the table. Professor Liedenbrock was greatly abstracted. The mystical letters gave him no rest. He sat in his armchair, took the pen and began to write algebraic formulas. For three long hours my uncle worked on without a word, without lifting his head. But time was passing away; night came on; the street noises ceased; my uncle noticed nothing. Martha opened the door and said:
“Will monsieur take any supper tonight?”
But there was no answer. As for me, after long resistance, I began to sleep.
When I awoke next morning the Professor was still working. To tell the plain truth, I pitied him. “No, no,” I repeated, “I shall not speak. He will go at once; nothing on Earth can stop him. His imagination is a volcano, and he will risk his life. I will preserve silence. I will keep the secret which mere chance has revealed to me. To discover it is to kill Professor Liedenbrock! Let him find it out himself if he can.”
I folded my arms and waited. Two o’clock struck. This was becoming ridiculous; worse than that, unbearable. The Professor jumped up, clapped on his hat, and prepared to go out.
“Uncle!” I cried.
He did not hear me.
“Uncle Liedenbrock!” I cried, lifting up my voice.
“Ay,” he answered.
“Uncle, that key!”
“What key? The door key?”
“No, no!” I cried. “The key of the document.”
The Professor stared at me over his spectacles. I nodded my head up and down.
“Yes, that key, chance—”
“What is that you are saying?” he shouted with indescribable emotion.
“There, read that!” I said, presenting a sheet of paper on which I wrote the sentences.
“But there is nothing in this,” he answered.
“No, nothing until you proceed to read from the end to the beginning.”
A new revelation burst in upon the Professor. He was transformed!
“Aha, clever Saknussemm!” he cried. And he read the whole document from the last letter to the first:
In Sneffels Joculis craterem quem delibat
Umbra Scartaris Julii
intra calendas descende,
Audax viator,
et terrestre centrum attinges.
Quod feci, Arne Saknussemm.
Which may be translated thus:
“Descend, bold traveller, into the crater of the Jokul of Sneffels[23], which the shadow of Scartaris [24]touches before the kalends [25]of July, and you will attain the centre of the Earth; which I have done, Arne Saknussemm.”
My uncle sprang very high. He seized his head between both his hands; he pushed