This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
A cipher, a crater, and a sea under the world.
Professor Otto Liedenbrock, a mineralogist of the Johannæum in Hamburg, buys a rune-scrawled manuscript of Snorri Sturluson and finds a slip of parchment inside it signed by Arne Saknussemm, a sixteenth-century Icelandic alchemist. The parchment says, in cipher, that the way down to the centre of the earth is through the crater of Snæfell, and that the traveller who goes there will come back out of another mountain. Liedenbrock's nephew Axel deciphers it — and then spends the rest of the book wishing he had not, because his uncle takes the sentence as an instruction and drags him along.
They go north: Hamburg, Copenhagen, Rejkiavik, the Icelandic interior, the crater at Stapi. Hans Bjelke, an eider-duck hunter who speaks perhaps forty words in the whole book, is hired as guide and turns out to be the only competent person on the expedition. At the bottom of the shaft the three of them find not fire but a sky: a vast cavern lit by electricity, a subterranean ocean, a forest of giant mushrooms, and fossil animals that ought to be extinct. They cross the Liedenbrock Sea on a raft, survive a storm that nearly electrocutes them, sail past a fight between two prehistoric monsters, and land on a shore where a herd of mastodons is driven by a shepherd taller than the beasts — and where Axel finds a dagger and a carved rune: **A. S.**, Arne Saknussemm, who came this way three hundred years earlier.
The passage Saknussemm marked is blocked. They blast it open, and the explosion does not open a passage — it starts an eruption. The three are carried up a volcanic shaft, up through granite, gneiss and lava, and are thrown out of the crater of **Stromboli**, in the Mediterranean, two thousand miles from where they went in. A small boy answers their questions in Italian, and the professor realizes he has crossed Europe underground without noticing...
