Journey to the Center of the Earth
It was on Sunday, the 24th of moncler outlet sale May, 1863, that my uncle, Professor Lidenbrock, came rushing suddenly back to his little house in the old part of Hamburg, No. 19, Knigstrasse.
Our good Martha could not but think she was very much behindhand with the dinner, for the pot was scarcely beginning to simmer, and I said to myself:
I was left alone, but not feeling equal to the task of making the most irascible of professors listen to reason, was about to escape to my own little room upstairs, when the street door creaked on its hinges, and the wooden stairs cracked cheap moncler coats mens beneath a hurried tread, and the master of the house came in and bolted across the dining room, straight into his study. But, rapid as his flight was, he managed to fling his nutcracker headed stick into a corner, and his wide brimmed rough hat on the table, and to shout out to his nephew:
„Axel, follow me.“
Before I had time to stir he called out again, in the most impatient tone imaginable:
„What! Not here yet?“
In an instant I was on my feet and in the study of my dreadful master.
Otto Lidenbrock was not a bad man. I grant that, willingly. But, unless he mightily changes, he will live and die a terrible origi nal.
He was professor in the Johannum, and gave the course of lectures on mineralogy, during which he regularly put himself into a passion once or twice. Not that he troubled himself much about the assiduity of his pupils, or the amount moncler outlet woodbury of attention they paid to his lessons, or their corresponding success. These moncler outlet online points gave him no concern. He taught subjectively, to use a German philosophical expression, for himself, and not for others. He was a selfish discount moncler jackets savant a well of science, and nothing could be drawn up from it without the grinding noise of the pulleys: in a word, he was a miser.
There moncler online store are professors of this stamp in Germany.
My uncle, unfortunately, did not enjoy great facility of pronunciation, unless he was with intimate friends; at least, not when he spoke in public, and this is a deplorable defect in an orator. In his demonstrations at the Johannum the professor moncler outlet store would often stop short, struggling with cheap moncler jackets womens some obstinate word that refused to slip over his lips one of those words which resist, swell out, and finally come forth in the anything but scientific shape of an oath. This put moncler outlet prices him in a great rage.
Now, in mineralogy, there are many names difficult to pronounce half Greek, half Latin, barbarous appellations which would blister the lips of a poet. I have no wish to speak ill of the science. moncler outlet Far from it. But when one has to do with rhomboidal crystallisations, retinasphaltic resins, galena favosite, molybdates of lead, tungstates of manganese, and titanites of zircon, the most nimble tongue may be allowed to stumble.
The cheap moncler jackets mens townsfolk were aware of this pardonable infirmity of my uncle’s, and they took advantage of it, and were on the watch for the dangerous passages; and when he put himself in a fury laughed at him, which was not in good taste, even for Germans. His lectures moncler outlet store were always very numerously attended, but how many of those who were most regular auditors came for anything else but moncler sale to make game of the professor’s grand uk moncler outlet fits of passion I shouldn’t like to say. Whatever my uncle might be, and I can best moncler jackets hardly say too much, he was moncler usa a true savant.
Though he sometimes broke his specimens by his rough handling, he had https://www.monclerdownjacket.biz both the genius of a geologist and the eye of a mineralogist. With his hammer and steel pointer and magnetic needle, his blow pipe and his flask of nitric acid, he was a master indeed. By the fracture, the hardness, the fusibility, the ring, the smell, of any mineral whatever, he classed it without hesitation among the six hundred species science numbers to day.
The name of Lidenbrock was consequently mentioned with hon our in gymnasiums and national associations. Humphry Davy, Humboldt, and Captains Franklin and Sabine, paid him a visit when they passed through Hamburg. Becqueul, Ebolmann, Brewster, Dumas, Milne Edwards, Sainte Clarice Deville, took pleasure in consulting him on the most stirring questions of chemistry, a science which was indebted to him for discoveries of considerable importance; and in 1853 a treatise on Transcendent Crystallography, by Professor Otto Lidenbrock, was published at Leipsic, a large folio, with plates, which did not pay its cost, however.
Moreover, my uncle was curator of the Museum of Mineralogy, belonging to M. Struve, the Russian ambassador, a valuable collection, of European moncler womens jackets celebrity.
Such, moncler sale online then, was the personage who summoned me so impatiently.
Fancy to yourself cheap moncler jackets a tall, spare man, with an iron constitution, and a juvenile fairness of complexion, which took off full ten years of his fifty. His large eyes rolled about incessantly behind his great goggles; his long thin nose resembled a knife blade; malicious people declared it was magnetised, and attracted steel filings a pure calumny; it attracted nothing but snuff, but, to speak truth, a super abundance of that. When I have added that my uncle made mathematical strides of three feet at every step, and marched along with his fists firmly clenched a sign of an impetuous temperament you will know enough of him not to be over anxious for his company.
He lived in his little house in Knigstrasse, a dwelling built partly of brick moncler sale outlet and partly of stone, with a crenated gable end, which looked on to one of those winding canals moncler uk outlet which intersect each other in the centre of the oldest part of Hamburg, which happily escaped the great fire in 1842.
The old house leaned forward slightly, and bulged out towards the passers by. The roof inclined to one side, in the position a German student belonging to the Tugendbund wears his cap. The perpendicular of the house was not quite exact, but, on the whole, the house stood well enough, thanks to an old elm, firmly imbedded in the faade, which pushed its flower buds across the uk moncler sale window panes in spring.
My uncle was pretty rich for a German professor. The house was his own, and all its belongings. These belongings were his godchild Gruben, a Virland girl, seventeen years old, his servant Martha, and myself. In my double quality of nephew and orphan, I became his assistant in his experiments.
I must confess I have a great appetite for geological science. The blood of a mineralogist flows cheap moncler sale in my veins, and I never grow weary in the society of my beloved stones.
