For more than an hour, we trudged across the vast field of bones.
Curiosity drove us onward. What else could this enormous cavern contain? What other wonders were waiting for us—especially wonders that would astonish a scientist like my uncle?
I was ready for almost anything. My mind was constantly expecting some new and impossible sight.
The great Central Ocean had already disappeared behind the hills scattered across the plain of bones.
My uncle, reckless as ever and completely unconcerned about getting lost, urged me forward.
We walked in silence, surrounded by waves of strange electric light.
I could not explain where the light came from. It seemed to be spread everywhere at once. It shone equally on every hill, every rock, and every distant object. There was no clear source of light, and nothing cast a shadow.
It looked exactly like a tropical landscape at noon, beneath the vertical rays of the summer sun.
Even the mist had vanished.
The rocks, distant mountains, and vague masses of forests in the far distance all took on a strange, almost supernatural appearance beneath that perfectly even light.
We looked like characters from one of Hoffmann’s fantastic stories—the kind of people who had somehow lost their shadows.
About a mile farther on, we reached the edge of a huge forest.
It was nothing like the enormous mushroom forests we had seen near Port Gretchen.
This was the magnificent vegetation of the Tertiary Age, growing in all its ancient glory.
Towering palms of species unknown to the modern world rose above us. There were enormous fossil palms, pines, yews, cypresses, and countless other cone-bearing trees. Creeping vines tangled everything together in a dense, almost impossible web.
Mosses and ferns formed a soft carpet beneath our feet.
Clear little streams murmured beneath the branches of the trees.
But calling those branches shady would have been misleading. There was no shade here at all.
Small tree-like shrubs grew along the banks, much like those found in the hottest regions of the world today.
Yet something was terribly wrong with this magnificent forest.
There was no color.
Without the life-giving warmth of the sun, every plant had become dull and lifeless.
Everything had the same faded brownish tone.
The leaves had none of the green we knew from the surface world.
The flowers were just as strange. Although they had once been abundant during the Tertiary Age, they now had neither color nor fragrance. They looked like pieces of paper that had been left exposed to the air for centuries.
My uncle walked boldly beneath the gigantic trees.
I followed, but I could not shake off a feeling of uneasiness.
If nature could produce plants of such enormous size, what kind of animals might live among them?
And if there were mammals as gigantic as these trees, they might be extremely dangerous.
In several clearings, where fallen trees had slowly rotted away, I noticed many bean-bearing plants and other edible shrubs.
They were exactly the kind of vegetation that would attract large grazing animals.
Then I noticed something even stranger.
Trees from completely different parts of the world were growing side by side.
An oak stood beside a palm.
An Australian eucalyptus leaned against a tall Norwegian pine.
Northern poplars mingled with New Zealand kauri trees.
It was as if someone had gathered the plants of every continent and thrown them together into one impossible forest.
Any botanist from the surface world would have gone mad trying to classify it.
All the rules we knew about the natural world seemed to have been overturned.
Suddenly, I stopped.
I grabbed my uncle’s arm.
“Wait!”
He turned toward me.
“What is it?”
The strange, evenly spread light allowed me to see even the smallest details far away among the trees.
I stared into one of the distant clearings.
At first I thought I was imagining things.
Then I realized I wasn’t.
I could actually see enormous animals moving beneath the trees.
“Uncle…”
“What do you see?”
“Look over there!”
He followed my gaze.
There, moving slowly through the forest, was an entire herd of gigantic animals.
They were mastodons.
Not fossilized remains.
Living mastodons.
They looked exactly like the enormous creatures whose remains had been discovered in 1801 along the marshy banks of the Ohio River in North America.
I could hardly breathe.
The enormous beasts used their trunks to tear down huge branches.
Their trunks twisted among the trees like an army of giant serpents.
We could hear their massive tusks ripping through roots and breaking apart trees.
Branches snapped loudly.
Entire masses of leaves and fresh branches disappeared into their enormous mouths.
The impossible dream I had once experienced seemed to have become reality.
I had dreamed that the ancient world had come back to life—that the Tertiary and Quaternary Ages had returned before my eyes.
Now it was happening for real.
We were deep beneath the earth, completely alone, surrounded by gigantic prehistoric creatures.
And we had no idea what might happen next.
My uncle stood frozen, staring at the herd.
After a long moment, he finally spoke.
“Come on.”
“Come where?”
“Closer. Let’s get a better look at them.”
I immediately grabbed his arm.
“No!”
He tried to pull me forward.
“We have no weapons,” I said. “What do you think will happen if we walk into the middle of that herd?”
My uncle frowned.
“We must observe them.”
“Observe them from here!”
I held him back.
“Please, Uncle. We cannot possibly provoke creatures like those and expect to survive.”
He stared at me for a moment.
Then his expression suddenly changed.
He lowered his voice to a whisper.
“Henry…”
“What?”
“You’re wrong.”
“About what?”
“Look over there.”
He pointed toward the trees.
“I think I see a human being.”
I stared at him.
“A human being?”
“Yes.”
He whispered even more quietly.
“A man.”
I looked again.
My first reaction was disbelief.
I wanted desperately to convince myself that my uncle had mistaken some animal for a person.
But then I saw it.
And there was no longer any room for doubt.
About a quarter of a mile away, leaning against the trunk of an enormous tree, stood a human figure.
Or at least something that looked human.
He was a strange creature of this underground world—a gigantic shepherd watching over the enormous herd of mastodons.
I could hardly believe my eyes.
This was no fossil.
This was a living being.
A giant who seemed to control and guide these monstrous animals.
He stood more than twelve feet tall.
His head was as large as that of a buffalo, and it was covered by a huge mass of tangled hair.
The hair formed a thick mane, much like the long hair that ancient elephants were believed to have possessed.
In one hand he held a large tree branch.
It served as a shepherd’s staff.
We stood perfectly still.
Neither of us spoke.
We were too astonished even to breathe normally.
Then I realized something terrible.
The giant might see us at any moment.
“We have to go,” I whispered.
My uncle did not answer.
“Now!”
I grabbed his arm.
“Come on!”
For once, he did not resist.
We ran.
Fifteen minutes later, we were far away from that terrifying creature.
Only then did we dare to slow down.
Even now, when I think about that event calmly, after so many months and years have passed, I still ask myself the same question.
What did we really see?
What are we supposed to believe?
No.
It simply cannot be true.
Our ears must have deceived us.
Our eyes must have played tricks on us.
There could not possibly have been a human being living in that world beneath the earth.
How could an entire race of people have survived down there without ever knowing that people lived on the surface?
How could they have existed for generations without any contact with the outside world?
It was absurd.
Completely absurd.
I can perhaps accept the possibility that we saw some unknown animal whose body resembled that of a human being.
Perhaps it was some ancient ape, dating from the earliest geological periods, like the creature discovered by M. Lartet in the fossil beds of Sansan.
That explanation, strange as it sounds, is at least possible.
But the creature we saw was far too tall for any known animal.
Still, perhaps it really was some enormous prehistoric ape.
That I might be able to believe.
But a living man?
A gigantic man?
And an entire herd of enormous prehistoric animals living with him deep inside the earth?
No.
That was too extraordinary.
It was simply too monstrous to believe.