The Map of the Sky Page 7

  Reynolds was so absorbed in these thoughts that he nearly leaned on the metal handrail. He stopped himself just in time and gazed at it in disbelief for a few seconds, alarmed by what would have happened if he had touched it. He had been told that metal was a lethal substance in subzero temperatures, even when wearing gloves, and Reynolds had no wish to put that theory to the test. He gave a weary sigh. This accursedly hostile place allowed no respite. Everywhere was fraught with danger: at that very moment, in order to stop the ship from capsizing, a group of men with hatchets and pickaxes was hewing off the ice that had built up on the masts, and chunks of it were dropping onto the deck with loud thuds, like the sound of cannon fire. If Reynolds wanted to gaze up at the starry sky, he was obliged to dodge the lethal shower of icy shards capable of dashing his brains out. Yet, despite the perils, the explorer preferred being on deck, occasionally pacing up and down to get the circulation going in his numb legs, rather than in the infirmary, where the groan of the ice as it crushed the ship’s hull prevented him from falling asleep. That relentless creaking had become a dreadful lullaby, forcing him to ponder each passing hour in that ghastly, interminable twilight.

  It was more than five hours since Captain MacReady and his group had returned from their exploratory trip, having found nothing. Only Carson and Ringwald, who had gone north, had failed to show up at the meeting point. MacReady and the others had waited for almost an hour until finally, tired, cold, and hungry, they had decided to return to the Annawan. No one had drawn any conclusions about their absence, and yet the question everyone was silently asking himself was whether those two poor wretches had stumbled upon what the crew had begun referring to as “the monster from the stars.” They could not know for sure, of course, but it was the most likely explanation. However, even though the captain and most of the rest of the crew had apparently given the two men up for dead, Reynolds imagined that, as soon as MacReady thought they had rested enough, he would organize a fresh search party.

  Earlier, while Foster and Doctor Walker were dragging him back to the ship, reeling with pain, Reynolds had regretted his recklessness, not simply because it made him look foolish in front of the crew, and would fuel the captain’s mockery, but because it had prevented him from exploring the surrounding area as he had been longing to do from the moment they became icebound. But now he was glad of his foolish act because, as Sergeant Allan had pointed out, it would have been impossible in that dense fog to find his longed-for passage to the center of the Earth unless he had fallen directly into it. Not to mention the threat posed by the creature from the machine, which had almost certainly ended the wretched lives of Carson and Ringwald. On hearing that, Reynolds decided that a burn seemed a modest price to pay for having avoided putting his life in peril.

  However, he had to admit that the expedition was not turning out quite as he had expected, and after the recent events it was difficult to predict what would happen next. He remembered the series of obstacles he had been obliged to overcome in order to get this far and the enemies he had made because of his persistence. It had not been easy to find backers for such an expedition, owing to the fact that the vast majority of people gave no thought whatsoever to whether the Earth might be hollow. Needless to say, Reynolds did. Indeed, he could almost claim he had been inside it, albeit only in his dreams.

  • • •

  IT HAD ALL BEGUN on a distant afternoon when, by sheer chance, one man had changed Jeremiah Reynolds’s fate. From that day on, he had ceased drifting and had set off along a single pathway, whose end was very clearly mapped out.

  He had been passing by a public lecture hall in Wilmington, Ohio, when he heard loud guffaws coming from within. And if Reynolds needed anything after a disappointing day’s work at the newspaper he edited, it was laughter. To understand his state of mind that day, you would need to know a little more about him, and so allow me to interrupt our story to give you a brief tour of the explorer’s soul. Like many others before and after, Reynolds was born into abject poverty. He had been obliged to start work young to pay for all his needs, from resoling his boots to enrolling at university. From a tender age, although that may not be the most suitable expression in this case, he had been an avid reader. But he was more interested in accounts of voyages and discoveries than in novels. With astonishing zeal he had devoured Marco Polo’s tales, the flattering biography of Columbus written by the explorer’s own son, the heroic epics of those who first ventured to the North and South poles, and into darkest Africa.

  Understandably, all these daring exploits had shaped Reynolds’s youthful fantasies, and he had grown up dreaming of emulating those men, who had carved their names on the tablet of History and, more important, had won untold wealth and fame for themselves and their descendants. Reynolds despised mediocrity and very early on had begun to feel superior to everyone around him, although even he was unable to define what exactly that superiority was based upon, for it was plain to see he had no outstanding talent, nor any extraordinary physical attributes, nor was he of above average intelligence. Up until then, Reynolds could not be said to differ much from other young men, not even in this persistent belief in his own superiority, so natural in Man. In what way, for example, was he any different from the accountant who lived in the same building and whom he looked down on scornfully whenever they met on the stairs? The thing that made him stand out from his neighbors was his belief in himself, the absolute conviction that he was destined for a life of grand, heroic exploits. For Reynolds sensed he had not come into the world to live such a shamefully dull life. And yet the years went by without anything happening to suggest he could unearth the astonishing secret destiny that awaited him. It is true that he soon stopped suffering hardship, since he managed to finish his studies and even became editor of a newspaper, but these worldly successes, within anyone’s reach, did not quench his thirst for glory. Deep down, Reynolds felt he was wasting his life, the only life he had, a life that, when it ended, he would care so little about that he might as well have been carried off as a child by the smallpox. In short, he was fed up with wallowing in mediocrity while relating the heroic deeds of others, recounting miracles that never happened to him. That was not why he had been born. He had been born so that his brave exploits would be splashed all over the newspapers, exploits that would make him the envy of his fellow men, causing their wives to swoon and their mothers to sigh with admiration; even their lapdogs would bark, for his extraordinary prowess would not go unnoticed even in the animal kingdom.

  Unfortunately, he had no idea how to achieve his dreams, and it should therefore come as no surprise that his nights were as close to torture as it is possible to imagine. Lying in the dark, waiting for the oblivion of sleep, Reynolds would torment himself by recalling epic passages he had read in his books about explorers, and when he grew tired of that, he would puncture the gloom with what sounded like his last gasps, bemoaning the fact that everything worth discovering had already been discovered. For it was clearly not enough simply to discover something. What glory and riches could be gained from mapping out each cranny in the Antarctic’s frozen coastline, for example? None. It took far more ingenuity to be able to discover something that both changed History and guaranteed one immortality, while at the same time, if possible, lining one’s pockets. However, he had to proceed with great caution, for in the years between Marco Polo’s return in 1295 and Columbus’s departure in 1492, dozens of explorers had made important discoveries, and yet their names had been virtually forgotten, eclipsed by the discovery of the Americas. And what was worse, almost none of those brave adventurers had obtained more than a pittance and a lifetime of fevers. Who remembered Brother Oderico da Pordenone, for example, who fought his way into deepest China through India and Malaysia? Or the Arab Ibn Battuta, who explored Central Asia and North Africa? Not even the renowned Christopher Columbus had played his cards right. He managed to convince the royal court that the Earth was much smaller than the ancient Greek Eratosthenes’
calculations had suggested, and that he, Columbus, would discover a sea route to the East Indies that would assure a flourishing spice trade—although what most impressed Reynolds were the advantageous terms he had negotiated for himself. Unfortunately, in the wake of his fabulous success, he acquired some powerful enemies, who were quick to denounce his mistreatment of the native populations. In the end, the deplorable way he governed his viceroyalty had gradually meant the loss of his prestige and power. Yes, the profession of discoverer was clearly fraught with dangers, and not merely the ones lurking in the jungle undergrowth.

  Reynolds was confident he could manage things better, if the occasion ever presented itself. After all, he was a seasoned newspaperman, and he had political contacts and a nose for business. True, his knowledge of geography and navigation was limited, but most frustratingly of all there was no territory left for him to discover. And so, he had little choice but to wait patiently and hope for some miracle that would rescue him from mediocrity. And if not, then he could always marry Josephine. Whilst this was no heroic feat that would guarantee him a place in the history books, it would at least fill his pockets. Although as things stood, Reynolds was not even sure he could still count on that, for the girl seemed more and more immune to his very limited charms. In short, such were the anxieties eating away at the explorer as he walked past the lecture hall and heard those loud guffaws. Therefore it was no surprise that he flung open the door: Reynolds needed to laugh at someone else in order not to feel like a joke himself.

  Yet as soon as he walked in, he discovered with amazement that the man onstage who was producing all that mirth was no comedian at all. On the contrary, the ex–army captain John Cleves Symmes Jr. appeared very serious about his subject, which, incredible as it sounded, was that the Earth was like a gigantic hollow shell. In fact, it was like an egg, in which shell, white, and yolk were quite separate. It was possible to enter this shell through two immense holes, one at each pole, and at its core four equally hollow spheres floated in a kind of gelatinous fluid that was responsible for gravity. But what most astonished Reynolds was that it was deep inside the Earth that the miracle of life had occurred. Symmes claimed that underneath them, a second warmer and more diverse world existed, where plants, animals, and possibly even human life thrived. Predictably, this comment unleashed more peals of laughter from the audience, and Reynolds, who had taken a seat in the back row, joined in heartily.

  Symmes tried to silence the guffaws by explaining that his ideas had their origin in the writings of some of the most celebrated scholars of the past. He cited Edmond Halley, who had also envisaged the Earth’s interior as teeming with life and illuminated by an iridescent gas that occasionally seeped through the fine crust at its poles, coloring our night skies with the aurora borealis. He mentioned many more besides, whose extravagant theories only made the audience laugh even louder, including Reynolds, who chortled in his seat as though possessed, exorcising his life’s frustrations. Meanwhile, Symmes went on describing the center of the Earth, where vast four-hundred-year-old herbivores dwelled, and creatures who communicated their thoughts to one another through the airwaves, albino dwarves who traveled in antigravitational trains, and mammoths and other animals that Man had long ago thought extinct. The belly of the Earth, according to Symmes, was a very crowded place. But all of a sudden, while the audience’s guffaws crescendoed, Reynolds’s laughter dried up in his throat, and while his mouth remained fixed in an amused smile, his eyes began to narrow, and he leaned forward, like a slowly falling tree, in order to hear more clearly what the pitiful little man was saying. His words plummeted like raindrops as they tried to pierce the noise of the jeering crowd.

  Even so, hardly daring to breathe, his pulse quickening, Reynolds managed to catch the scientist Trevor Glynn’s theories about the Earth’s subterranean deposits. As everyone knew, Man labored hard to reach them, boring inch by inch through the thick rock upon whose surface he lived, digging coal, diamond, and other mines, risking life and limb to plunder those precious metals from an Earth whose crust seemed to offer them an almost motherly protection. However, once Man reached the center of the Earth through one of its poles, access to such deposits was easy. For it seemed (and here Symmes displayed a vast collection of corroborative charts, maps, and complex diagrams) there were hundreds of deposits deep inside the Earth that were infinitely richer and more plentiful than those closer to the surface. For the inhabitants of the hollow planet, those caverns were as easy to reach as the apples on the trees were for us; it was not difficult to imagine them using gold, diamonds, and other precious stones with the same insouciance as their outside neighbors used clay. No doubt those minerals, of inestimable value on the Earth’s surface, were commonly used to help make their cities, roads, and even their clothes. This meant that finding the path to the center of the Earth was equivalent to discovering the path to all those riches. Symmes’s last words were scarcely audible amid the peals of laughter, but by now Reynolds was no longer listening. He was stunned, hands clutching the sides of the chair, throat dry and burning. This was the answer to all his prayers. Not everything had been discovered. Perhaps no one had much interest anymore in the Earth’s surface, but beneath it a new world was waiting to be conquered. A world in which whoever arrived first would be able to consolidate his power and even establish a new Spice Route, a route that would pour gold, coal, minerals, and precious stones out to the Earth’s surface, creating one of the greatest enterprises the world had ever known. And clearly whoever set up that business would control it in the name of his country, with all the attendant privileges.

  Reynolds could not help but begin to daydream, lulled like a baby in his cradle by the public’s laughter. How would people refer to those new territories—as the Other New World, the Inside World? And of course this new trade route would not be across the seas. A new term would have to be coined: Intra-Terrestrial Trade? The Route of the Depths? He imagined the turmoil all of this would create in society: As happened after the discovery of the Americas, an endless stream of eager adventurers would travel to the new territories, drawn by the promise of wealth. But only the person who got there first and knew how to play his cards right would be singled out for glory. All at once, Reynolds could not bear the thought of someone beating him there. He had to approach the little man and contrive to glean as much information as he could in order to find out if this was another crackpot idea or if it had the makings of a successful venture. Reynolds had his misgivings, but nevertheless he imagined he could feel a slight tremor beneath his feet that emanated from the Earth’s entrails: a sign of the mysterious life going on below, busily yet calmly, oblivious to the debates about its existence.

  And so, when the audience had left the hall, shaking their heads at the gibberish they’d heard, and Symmes, with the helpless air of a drowning man, began to collect the drawings he had used to illustrate his lecture, Reynolds approached the chubby-faced speaker, congratulated him on his lecture, and offered to help him gather up his things. The delighted lecturer accepted, eager to go on spouting his ideas to this unexpected listener that Fate had sent his way. Reynolds soon found out that after the captain had quit the army, he had spent ten years traveling around the country like a zealous preacher, proclaiming his theory from every kind of pulpit, greeted with either roars of laughter or pitying smiles.

  “The evidence substantiating my theory is overwhelming,” Symmes declared as he took down the drawings he had placed on various easels. “What else causes hurricanes and tornados if not the air sucked into the polar openings? And why do thousands of tropical birds migrate north in winter?”

  Reynolds saw these as rhetorical questions and let them dissolve like snowflakes. He was not sure whether Symmes was saying that the migrating birds flew into the polar openings in order to nest inside the Earth, or something completely different, but either way he did not care. He decided to nod enthusiastically, pretending to listen to Symmes’s grating voice while he feverishly
examined the jumble of papers, maps, illustrations, and charts with which the captain tried to give his ideas some credence. Most of them looked like serious articles, many by scientists of renown, and he regretted that the champion of all this eccentric knowledge was this clumsy, buffoonish little man. He imagined that he could give the project the veneer of credibility that was lacking from Symmes’s sideshow routine. Yes, Reynolds said to himself as he contemplated the drawings, perhaps the Hollow Earth theory was true after all.

  “Not forgetting the numerous allusions in ancient myths to places in the Earth’s interior,” the captain added, studying the young man’s response. “Surely you have heard of Atlantis or the Kingdom of Agartha, my boy.”

  Reynolds nodded absentmindedly: he had found Trevor Glynn’s drawings. He studied the annotations and intricate calculations jotted in the margins. They gave such an accurate account of the distances between the various deposits, the different access routes, the approximate quantities of minerals, and the geological and topographical data that it was easy to picture Glynn himself having charted the territory, strolling through those hidden caverns wielding a pencil. And Reynolds understood in a flash that this was not about believing or not, but simply about taking a chance or not. He decided there and then to take a chance on the Hollow Earth theory. He would believe in it in the same childish way he believed in God: if God turned out not to be true, the consequences of having believed in Him would no doubt be less terrible than if God did exist and Reynolds had declared himself an atheist. Even so, it was easier for Reynolds to believe in the Hollow Earth theory, for if he believed in anything at all, he believed in destiny, and it was destiny that had made him walk into the lecture hall that afternoon. He reflected about all of this, trying to blot out Symmes’s droning voice. If there was a world to discover, he was not going to waste time arguing over its existence. He would leave that to others; he had decided to take a chance on the Hollow Earth, and he would simply go to look for it. After all, the only thing he had to lose was his detestable life. And so it could be said that when he walked into a crowded lecture hall that afternoon, Reynolds discovered the hitherto elusive meaning of his life. And he had no choice but to embrace it with open arms.