We were up early on August 13. There was no time to waste. We had found a new way to travel—one that promised to be much faster and less exhausting than walking.
Hans had built a mast from two pieces of wood tied tightly together for extra strength. Another piece served as the yard, and our bedsheet became the sail. Luckily, we had plenty of rope, and when everything was put together, the raft looked surprisingly strong and seaworthy.
At six in the morning, my uncle gave the signal to set off.
“We’re ready!” he called. “Put everything aboard.”
We loaded our food, luggage, scientific instruments, weapons, and a good supply of fresh water that we had collected from springs in the rocks.
Hans had also made a clever little rudder. With it, he could control the raft without much trouble. He naturally took the tiller. Our faithful guide was every bit as good a sailor as he was a guide and a duck hunter.
I untied the rope holding us to the shore. The sail caught the wind, and the raft quickly moved away from land.
At last, our sea voyage had begun.
Once again, we were heading toward distant and unknown places.
Just before we left the little harbor where the raft had been built, my uncle, who always took great interest in geographical names, suddenly said,
“We ought to give this harbor a proper name.”
He considered several possibilities and then suggested my name.
“Why not call it Harry Harbor?” he said.
“Before you decide,” I replied, “I have another name to suggest.”
“Go ahead.”
“I’d like to call it Gretchen. Port Gretchen would look wonderful on our future map.”
My uncle smiled.
“Very well. Port Gretchen it is.”
And so the memory of my dear Gretchen became part of our strange and unforgettable expedition.
When we left the shore, the wind was coming from the northeast. We sailed directly before it, and to our surprise, the raft moved much faster than we had expected.
The thick atmosphere at this enormous depth seemed to give the sail tremendous power.
After an hour, my uncle had made several careful observations.
“If we keep moving at this speed,” he said, “we should cover at least thirty leagues in twenty-four hours. For a simple raft, that’s almost unbelievable.”
I was amazed.
Without answering, I moved toward the front of the raft.
Already, the northern shore was disappearing into the distance. The two sides of the sea seemed to be spreading farther and farther apart, opening a vast passage before us.
There was nothing ahead but an enormous, apparently endless sea.
And we were the only living creatures upon it.
Huge, dark clouds hung overhead and cast gray shadows across the dull, lifeless water. I had never seen anything so gloomy or so suggestive of a world buried in darkness.
From time to time, silvery flashes of electric light appeared on the water. They reflected off the small waves and created bright sparks in the long trail behind our raft.
Soon the land disappeared completely.
There was not even the slightest sign of a shore.
We had no idea where we were going.
The sea was so vast and still that, without the glowing trail behind us, I might have believed we were not moving at all.
But I knew we were traveling at tremendous speed.
Around noon, we found ourselves surrounded by enormous quantities of seaweed.
I knew that seaweed could grow to astonishing sizes. Some varieties on the great oceans were so large that they could interfere with ships. But nothing I had ever heard of could compare with the plants growing in this underground sea.
Some of them were so huge that, from a distance, they could easily have been mistaken for living creatures.
Our raft passed enormous pieces of fucus, or sea wrack, some three or four thousand feet long.
They looked like gigantic snakes stretching beyond the horizon.
I couldn’t stop staring at them.
“What extraordinary plants!” I exclaimed.
For hour after hour, the floating seaweed continued.
There seemed to be no end to it.
My amazement grew, but so did my impatience.
What force of nature could have produced such enormous plants?
And what must the earth have looked like in its earliest days, when heat and moisture allowed vegetation to cover almost everything?
These were questions that would have fascinated any geologist or philosopher.
Meanwhile, our raft continued forward.
Eventually night arrived.
Yet, just as I had noticed the previous evening, the strange light in the atmosphere did not weaken at all.
Whatever caused it, the phenomenon seemed remarkably constant. We could almost depend on it.
After dinner, we spent a little time discussing our theories.
Then I stretched out beside the mast.
Before long, I fell asleep.
Hans remained at the tiller, quietly allowing the raft to rise and fall with the waves. The wind was behind us and the sail was spread straight across the mast, so all he had to do was keep the steering oar centered.
Ever since we had left Port Gretchen, my uncle had insisted that I keep a detailed log of our journey.
He wanted me to record everything—the direction of the wind, our speed, the distance traveled, unusual sights, scientific observations, and every other detail of our extraordinary voyage.
So the following account comes directly from the log I kept during our journey across the Central Sea.
August 14 — A Strange Catch
A steady northwest wind was blowing.
The raft was moving incredibly fast and remained almost perfectly on course. The coast was still faintly visible about thirty leagues behind us, but there was nothing ahead as far as the eye could see.
The strange light in the atmosphere remained exactly the same. It neither grew stronger nor weaker.
The weather was remarkably clear. The clouds were high, thin, and soft, and the air around them looked like silver melted in a furnace.
The temperature was 32 degrees Celsius.
Around noon, Hans prepared a fishing hook.
He attached a small piece of meat to it, hiding the hook inside the bait, and threw the line into the underground sea.
I watched eagerly.
For a long time, nothing happened.
“Do you think there are any fish here?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” my uncle replied.
I was beginning to think the answer was no when suddenly the line jerked hard.
Hans calmly pulled it in.
A fish appeared at the end of the line, struggling violently.
“A fish!” my uncle cried.
“A sturgeon!” I exclaimed. “A small sturgeon, surely!”
My uncle carefully examined the creature.
After a while, he shook his head.
“No, Harry. I don’t think it is a sturgeon.”
The fish had a flat head and a round body. Its lower body was covered with bony scales. Its mouth had no teeth at all. Its large pectoral fins grew directly from the body, and it hardly seemed to have a proper tail.
It certainly resembled fish belonging to the sturgeon group, but several important features were completely different.
My uncle continued examining it.
Then his face suddenly lit up.
“My boy,” he said, “this fish belongs to a family that has been extinct for ages.”
“Extinct?”
“Yes. Scientists have never found a living example. We know this family only from fossils discovered in very ancient Devonian rocks.”
“You mean we’ve caught a living fish from the world before the great flood?”
“Exactly.”
He continued examining the fish with great excitement.
“Look carefully. Fossil specimens of these ancient fish are quite different from the fish alive today. To hold a living member of such an ancient group in your hands would be enough to make any naturalist happy for the rest of his life.”
“But what family does it belong to?”
“The Ganoids,” he replied. “More specifically, the Cephalaspides. Their scales are angular and covered with a beautiful enamel-like surface.”
He paused.
I noticed that he was thinking carefully.
“Well?” I asked.
“The genus is Pterychtis. Yes, I’m certain of it.”
“Then what’s so unusual about it?”
“This fish has a feature that is extremely rare. It is something we normally find only in creatures living in underground waters—deep wells, caves, hidden lakes, and similar places.”
“What feature?”
“It is blind.”
“Blind?”
I stared at the fish.
“Not merely blind,” my uncle continued. “It has no organs of sight at all.”
I examined it myself.
He was right.
There were no eyes.
“Perhaps this is just one strange specimen,” I suggested.
Hans baited the hook again and threw it back into the water.
The result quickly proved me wrong.
The underground sea must have contained an enormous number of fish. Within two hours, we had caught many more Pterychtis, along with other fish from another supposedly extinct family called the Dipterides.
My uncle couldn’t identify the second type with complete certainty, but there was one thing we soon discovered.
Every single fish was blind.
“This is extraordinary,” I said.
“It is more than extraordinary,” my uncle replied. “It changes our understanding of this entire underground world.”
Our unexpected catch also gave us a very welcome supply of fresh food.
We were now convinced that this subterranean sea was filled with creatures known to science only through fossils.
And the farther back their ancient origins went, the more primitive and complete these creatures seemed to be.
“We may even discover some of the great saurians,” my uncle said. “Science has reconstructed many of them from little more than bones and pieces of cartilage.”
I immediately picked up the telescope and searched the horizon.
Nothing.
I examined the entire surface of the sea.
Still nothing.
There was not a living creature anywhere in sight.
“We must still be too close to the coast,” I said.
Then I raised the telescope toward the strange sky above us.
Why shouldn’t one of the enormous prehistoric birds reconstructed by the famous naturalist Cuvier be flying somewhere up there?
There was certainly enough food below. The sea was full of fish.
I stared upward for a long time.
Nothing moved.
The sky was just as empty as the shores we had left behind.
Yet my imagination began to fill that emptiness with creatures from another age.
I imagined enormous prehistoric turtles floating on the surface of the sea, so large that they looked like islands.
Along the dark shores I imagined ancient mammals walking slowly through the shadows.
There was the gigantic Liptotherium, once found in the caves of Brazil.
Then came the Mesicotherium, a creature from the frozen regions of Siberia.
Farther away stood the strange Lophrodon, an enormous tapir-like animal.
Nearby was the Anoplotherium, a bizarre creature with characteristics resembling a rhinoceros, horse, hippopotamus, and camel all at once.
Then I imagined a giant Mastodon.
Its enormous trunk twisted through the air as it crushed rocks along the shore.
Nearby, the huge Megatherium dug into the ground with its massive claws, its back arched like an angry cat.
Then it let out a terrible roar.
The sound seemed to shake the entire underground world.
High above, I imagined the first monkey ever to exist, climbing and playing among the granite hills.
Farther away, a Pterodactyl flew through the dense underground air, its winged hands carrying it through the darkness like an enormous bat.
And above all of them, close to the heavy stone ceiling, enormous prehistoric birds spread their wings.
They were bigger and more powerful than ostriches or cassowaries.
They beat their wings against the vast rocky roof of the underground sea.
My imagination became so vivid that I felt as though I were actually seeing all these creatures.
For a moment, I seemed to have traveled millions of years into the past—to an age when human beings did not yet exist.
I saw the whole history of life unfolding before me.
First the ancient mammals disappeared.
Then the great birds.
Then the reptiles of the secondary age.
Then the fish, crustaceans, and mollusks.
Finally, even the vertebrates disappeared.
The earliest forms of life sank into extinction one after another.
It seemed as though the entire history of prehistoric life had come alive again.
And I was the only human being in this forgotten world.
There were no seasons.
There were no familiar climates.
The natural heat of the earth kept increasing, while the warmth of the distant sun became almost meaningless.
Vegetation grew beyond all normal limits.
I imagined myself walking through forests where the plants towered as high as the giant trees of California.
The ground beneath my feet was wet, warm, and covered with thick, rotting vegetation.
I leaned against enormous tree trunks that made the tallest trees of Canada look like tiny ferns.
Hundreds and hundreds of years seemed to pass in a single day.
Then the scene changed again.
I watched the earth itself transform.
The plants disappeared.
The solid granite began to melt.
The entire surface of the planet became liquid beneath unimaginable heat.
Water spread across the globe.
It boiled.
It turned into vapor.
A gigantic cloud of steam wrapped around the earth.
Eventually, the whole planet seemed to become one enormous ball of glowing gas, its color somewhere between white-hot and deep red.
It was as large and brilliant as the sun.
I felt myself being swept through the center of this gigantic mass, which seemed more than a million times larger than our earth.
I was carried through space and drawn toward other planets.
My body became lighter and lighter until I seemed to dissolve into atoms of vapor, mixing with enormous clouds that rushed through space like a giant comet.
What a strange dream!
Where was it taking me?
My feverish hand continued writing down everything I imagined.
The things I recorded were so wild that they sounded more like the visions of a madman than the observations of a scientist.
I had completely forgotten my uncle.
I had forgotten Hans.
I had forgotten the raft.
I had forgotten the sea.
My mind was drifting in a strange half-conscious state.
Suddenly, my uncle’s voice broke through.
“Harry! What’s wrong with you?”
My eyes were wide open, but I was staring straight through him.
I couldn’t really see him.
I couldn’t clearly see anything around me.
“Harry, be careful!” my uncle shouted. “You’re going to fall into the sea!”
At that very moment, I felt a strong hand grab me from the other side.
It was Hans.
He pulled me back just as I was about to fall.
Without him, I would certainly have gone overboard and drowned.
“Have you gone mad?” my uncle cried, shaking me.
“What… what happened?” I asked.
I was finally beginning to understand where I was.
“Are you sick, Henry?” my uncle asked anxiously.
“No. No, I’m all right. I just had the strangest dream.”
I looked around me in confusion.
“But it’s gone now. I feel fine.”
My uncle relaxed.
“Good. The wind is beautiful, and the sea is calm. We’re moving very quickly.”
He looked toward the horizon.
“If my calculations are correct, we should soon see land. I won’t be sorry to leave this little raft behind and reach the mysterious shore of this underground sea.”
I stood up and carefully searched the horizon.
But there was still nothing.
The distant water seemed to merge with the low, dark clouds above it, and far away the two appeared to meet at the very edge of the sea.