CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

This discovery was quite important, and related to an event that happened in France just before we began our journey.

On March 28, 1863, workmen in southern France found human bones fourteen feet below the surface of the Earth. The bones proved that humans had lived on the Earth thousands of years before scientists had believed. Many scientists in France, Germany and England had many arguments about the findings. Some believed the bones to be fake, and others strongly believed them to be real, that these bones were nearly one hundred thousand years old. One of the strongest supporters of the bones being real was my uncle, Professor Otto Lidenbrock.

We examined the bones for a short time before we saw, only sixty feet from us, a man, who had recently died. He was the same type of human alive on the surface of the Earth one hundred thousand years ago. I was speechless.

My uncle then forgot that he was no longer in a classroom in Germany teaching, but rather in the depths of the Earth because he soon began giving a speech about this mysterious ancient man. While he was speaking, I had many questions about this mysterious underground place. Had those people and animals fallen through cracks in the Earth to come to live on the beach of the Lidenbrock Sea, or had they lived in that underground world, from birth to death? Could there be some underground man still living there?

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