Looking back on everything that happened after that extraordinary day, I can hardly believe that my adventures were real. They were so strange and incredible that even now, whenever I think about them, I find myself wondering if they could possibly have happened.
My uncle was German. He had married my mother’s sister, who was English. Since he was very fond of me, his nephew, he invited me to live with him in Germany and study under his guidance.
We lived in a large city, and my uncle, Professor Hardwigg, was an expert in almost every branch of science you could imagine—philosophy, chemistry, geology, mineralogy, and many others.
One day, I had spent several hours in the laboratory. My uncle was away, and I was beginning to feel very hungry.
I was just about to wake our old French cook and ask when dinner would be ready when the street door suddenly flew open.
A moment later, my uncle came rushing up the stairs.
My uncle was not a bad man. In fact, he was kind and generous. But he had a terrible temper and a very unusual personality.
With Uncle Hardwigg, you did as you were told.
The moment his heavy footsteps sounded through the house, I heard him shouting my name.
“Harry! Harry! Harry!”
I hurried toward him.
Before I could reach his study, he was already standing on the landing, stamping his foot impatiently.
“Harry!” he shouted. “Are you coming up?”
To be honest, at that moment I cared much more about dinner than science.
Soup seemed more interesting to me than soda.
An omelette looked far more tempting than arithmetic.
And an artichoke seemed worth ten times more than a mountain of asbestos.
Still, my uncle was not a man who liked to be kept waiting.
So I put aside all thoughts of food and went to him.
My uncle was an extremely learned man.
Most scholars collect knowledge so that they can share it with other people. They study books, gather information, and then teach what they have learned.
My uncle was different.
He studied late into the night.
He read enormous books.
He spent countless hours investigating the secrets of science.
But he mostly wanted to keep all that knowledge inside his own head.
There was a good reason for this.
My uncle stammered.
Whenever he became excited while explaining something complicated, his words often got stuck.
He might begin talking about the sun, the moon, and the stars, only to become completely tangled up in his explanation.
When he could not find the right word, he usually replaced it with a very powerful adjective.
Science was full of long, almost impossible-to-pronounce names.
Some of them sounded like the names of Welsh villages.
My uncle loved using such words.
Unfortunately, this only made his stammering worse.
Sometimes he would struggle with a scientific term for so long that he finally gave up, swallowed his frustration, and took a drink of water.
As I have said, my uncle was a very learned man.
But he was also a very kind relative.
I was attached to him by both affection and gratitude.
I was deeply interested in everything he did, and I hoped that one day I might become almost as knowledgeable as he was.
I rarely missed his lectures.
Like my uncle, I loved mineralogy more than any other science.
More than anything, I wanted to understand the earth itself.
Geology and mineralogy were practically our whole lives.
We spent countless hours examining rocks, stones, chalk, and metals, often smashing them apart with our hammers.
Steel rods, magnets, glass tubes, and bottles filled with acids were more familiar to us than plates and cups.
My uncle had once classified six hundred different geological specimens by their weight, hardness, ability to melt, sound, taste, and smell.
He also corresponded with many of the greatest scientists of his time.
Because of this, I was constantly handling letters from famous men such as Sir Humphry Davy, Captain Franklin, and others.
But before I explain what my uncle wanted to discuss with me, I should describe what he looked like.
Later, after the terrible adventures I am about to relate, my uncle would look very different.
At that time, however, he was fifty years old.
He was tall, thin, and wiry.
He wore enormous spectacles that partly covered his huge, round, bulging eyes.
His nose was so thin that people jokingly compared it to a file.
It was said that even a compass seemed to be affected by it and pointed slightly north whenever it came near his nose.
In reality, however, the only thing that was truly attracted to my uncle’s nose was tobacco.
He had another strange habit.
He always walked in enormous strides, taking almost a yard with every step.
He usually kept his fists tightly clenched, as if he were about to punch someone.
And when he was in one of his bad moods, he was certainly not the easiest person to live with.
We lived in a beautiful old house on Königstrasse in Hamburg.
Although the house stood in the middle of the city, it looked almost like a country home.
It was built partly of wood and partly of brick, with old-fashioned gables.
It was one of the few old houses that had survived the great fire of 1842.
When I call it a beautiful house, I mean that it was handsome rather than comfortable.
It was old, slightly crooked, and seemed to be leaning toward the nearby canal.
A wandering artist would have loved to paint it.
You could hardly see the house clearly because ivy covered much of it, while a magnificent old tree spread its branches above the entrance.
My uncle was wealthy.
The house belonged to him, and he also had a substantial private income.
But in my opinion, the most valuable person in the house was his goddaughter, Gretchen.
There were only four of us living there: Gretchen, our old cook, Professor Hardwigg, and me.
I loved mineralogy.
I loved geology.
I loved stones.
If only my uncle had possessed a little more patience, we might have been the happiest family in the world.
His impatience was extraordinary.
I remember that whenever the flowers in our sitting room began to grow, my uncle would get up at four in the morning.
He would then pull at the leaves because he believed that this would make the plants grow faster.
Having described my uncle, I can now tell you what happened when I went to see him that day.
He was waiting for me in his study.
The room was like a museum.
It contained almost every kind of natural curiosity imaginable, although minerals were by far the most numerous.
I knew every specimen in the room because I had personally catalogued them.
When I entered, however, my uncle seemed to have forgotten that he had called for me.
He was completely absorbed in a book.
My uncle had a particular love for old editions, rare copies, and unique books.
“Wonderful!” he exclaimed, tapping his forehead.
“Wonderful!”
“Wonderful!”
The book was one of those old, yellowed volumes that are now rarely seen even in secondhand bookshops.
To me, it did not seem particularly valuable.
To my uncle, however, it was a treasure.
He admired its binding.
He admired the clear printing.
He admired the way the book opened so easily in his hands.
Then he repeated several times that it was incredibly old.
I thought he was making an enormous fuss over an old book.
But I knew better than to say so.
Instead, I pretended to be just as interested as he was.
“What is it about?” I asked.
“It is the Heimskringla of Snorre Sturlason,” he replied.
“He was the famous Icelandic writer of the twelfth century.”
“This book contains the true history of the Norwegian princes who ruled Iceland.”
“What language is it written in?” I asked.
I secretly hoped he would tell me that it had been translated into German.
My uncle looked offended by the very idea.
“A translation?” he exclaimed.
“I would not give a penny for a translation!”
He was delighted because he had found the original Icelandic text.
According to him, Icelandic was one of the most beautiful and simple languages in the world.
At the same time, its grammar was incredibly complex and varied.
“About as easy as German?” I asked innocently.
My uncle merely shrugged.
“The letters are difficult to understand, at least,” I added.
“It is a Runic manuscript!” he cried.
“These are the letters of the ancient people of Iceland. Odin himself invented them!”
I was just about to make some foolish joke about the subject when something fell from between the pages.
It was a small piece of parchment.
My uncle grabbed it immediately, like a starving man snatching a piece of bread.
The parchment was about five inches long and three inches wide.
It was covered with strange symbols and lines.
The writing was so unusual that I could hardly make sense of it.
Those strange lines were an exact copy of what had been written on the ancient parchment.
And that little piece of parchment was about to change our lives forever.
My uncle stared at it intensely for several moments.
Then he spoke.
“It is Runic.”
The symbols looked similar to the letters in the book.
But what did they mean?
That was exactly what I wanted to know.
I had always suspected that the Runic alphabet and language were nothing more than a complicated invention designed to confuse ordinary people.
So I was secretly delighted when I discovered that my uncle seemed to understand no more of the mysterious writing than I did.
The trembling of his fingers made this quite clear.
“And yet…” he muttered.
“It is old Icelandic. I am certain of it.”
My uncle was usually right about languages.
He was practically a walking dictionary.
He did not boast, like certain scholars, that he could speak two thousand languages and four thousand dialects from every corner of the earth.
But he did know all the important ones.
I have often wondered what my uncle might have done in his excitement if the clock had not suddenly struck two.
At that exact moment, our old French cook called from downstairs.
“Dinner is ready!”
“Damn the dinner!” my uncle shouted.
I, however, was hungry.
So I went into the dining room and sat down in my usual place.
Out of politeness, I waited three minutes.
My uncle did not appear.
I was surprised.
He was normally not the sort of man who ignored a good dinner.
And this was an especially fine one.
We had parsley soup, a ham omelette with sorrel, veal cooked with prunes, delicious fruit, and sparkling Moselle wine.
But my uncle was so absorbed in the ancient piece of parchment that he refused to leave his study.
To ease my conscience, I ate his share as well as my own.
Our old cook and housekeeper was nearly beside herself.
She had worked hard to prepare the meal, and seeing her master refuse to come to the table was deeply upsetting to her.
As she watched me steadily emptying the dishes, her disappointment slowly turned into worry.
What if my uncle suddenly came down and discovered that there was nothing left?
Fortunately for me, I had just eaten the last apple and drunk the last glass of wine when a terrifying voice suddenly thundered through the house.
It was my uncle.
He was roaring for me to come to him.
I nearly jumped out of my chair.
His voice was so loud and furious that I immediately rushed to find out what had happened.