Journey to the Interior of the Earth

Journey to the Centre of the Earth begins in May 1863, in the Lidenbrock house in Hamburg, Germany, with Professor Lidenbrock rushing home to peruse his latest purchase, an original runic manuscript of an Icelandic saga written by Snorri Sturluson ("Heimskringla"; the chronicle of the Norwegian kings who ruled over Iceland). While looking through Journey to the Centre of the Earth begins, Lidenbrock and his nephew Axel find a coded note written in runic script. (This was a first indication of Verne's love for cryptography. Coded, cryptic or incomplete messages as a plot device would continue to appear in many of his works and in each case Verne would go a long way to explain not only the code used but also the mechanisms used to retrieve the original text.) Lidenbrock and Axel transliterate the runic characters into Latin letters, revealing a message written in a seemingly bizarre code. Lidenbrock attempts a decipherment, deducing the message to be a kind of transposition cipher; but his results are as meaningless as the original. Professor Lidenbrock decides to lock everyone in the house and force himself and the others (Axel, and the maid, Martha) to go without food until he cracks the code. Journey to the Centre of the Earth begins: Axel discovers the answer when fanning himself with the deciphered text: Lidenbrock's decipherment was correct, and only needs to be read backwards to reveal sentences written in rough Latin. Journey to the Centre of the Earth begins is a book highly recommended to read. journey to the centre of the earth center of the earth jules verne books interior of the earth journey to the center of the earth book center of earth centre of the earth a journey to the center of the earth the center of the earth centre of earth jules verne journey to the center of the earth the journey to the center of the earth where is the center of the earth interior of earth journey to the interior of the earth