Henry

Henry, also called Harry, is the first-person narrator of the expedition, and his geological observations make the underground journey read as a passage through the history of life. His account joins the changing strata to the nineteenth-century controversy over humanity’s antiquity, while its personal arc ends in reunion with Gretchen and marriage.

Identity and Narrative Perspective

Henry narrates the expedition retrospectively in the first person, recording both what the travelers encounter and how he interprets it. His viewpoint moves between scientific description, immediate danger, and private feeling: the same narrator who identifies ancient rocks and fossils also hopes that an apparent ascent is carrying him back toward the surface—and toward Gretchen. That combination makes his account more than a record of exploration. Geological evidence is filtered through a participant whose hopes and uncertainties shape the meaning of what he sees.

His narration also distinguishes observation from explanation. As the strata change, Henry classifies them and reads the sequence as evidence that life is advancing toward humanity. Yet the expedition’s discoveries do not resolve every question. The narration can make the underground landscape tangible while leaving the age and preservation of its most startling remains uncertain.

Reading the Geological Record

During the ascent through the gallery, Henry identifies the rocks as belonging to the Silurian period, a transition in the geological sequence. His account explains the name through the Silures, an ancient Celtic people associated with parts of England where such formations were common. He interprets the schists and calcareous rocks as sediment deposited when waters once covered the earth, and compares the route’s direction to traveling from Hamburg to Lubeck by way of Hanover. The comparison conveys his alarm: the apparent upward movement seems to be taking the explorers away from the route they intended.

Farther along, the gallery’s character remains unsettlingly ambiguous. Its inclination is hard to discern, and the rocks continue to display the transition formation rather than the clear change Henry would expect if the travelers were moving into a different geological period. Under the electric light, calcareous rock and old red sandstone gleam beside exposed pieces of marble, marked with grey, white, yellow, and red veins. The richness of the stone is also a record: Henry sees fossil traces on many of the marbles.

Those traces suggest to him that the travelers are encountering forms of life more developed than the trilobites seen earlier. He identifies among them a fish whose eye, in geological interpretation, reveals the first form of the reptile, and notes that Devonian seas supported vast numbers of such animals. Henry reads this succession as an ascent in the scale of life, with humanity at its summit. The fossils thus give the journey a second direction: even when the route underground seems to turn the explorers back or lead them downward, the record in the rock appears to advance through time.

Deep Time and the Human Fossil Debate

Henry’s narration places the expedition’s encounter with ancient human remains against a scientific dispute that began before the travelers left the surface. On 28 March 1863, workers under M. Boucher de Perthes found a human jawbone fourteen feet below ground in the quarries of Moulin-Quignon, near Abbeville. Stone hatchets and carved flints were found nearby. The discovery became the focus of the jawbone question: many geologists accepted the bone’s authenticity and argued that it established human presence in the Quaternary, while M. Elie de Beaumont disputed the dating of the deposit and rejected the conclusion that humans had lived alongside Quaternary animals.

Henry presents Professor Hardwigg as a committed supporter of the majority position in that controversy. By the time the expedition is considered alongside these developments, further jawbones and associated tools from caves in France, Switzerland, and Belgium had made the case for Quaternary humanity more persuasive to its advocates. Other finds from Tertiary or Pliocene deposits extended the proposed antiquity further: they were not human bones, but fossil animal bones bearing what researchers regarded as deliberate carving. Henry reports the period’s argument that such evidence placed humanity more than a hundred thousand years in the past and even made humans contemporaries of the southern elephant.

This scientific history prepares the reader for the explorers’ discovery in the plains’ great cemetery. After advancing about twenty yards, Professor Hardwigg finds a recognizable human skull attributed to the Quaternary period. Henry sees abundant hair, intact teeth, and skin stretched and parchment-like; the sight appears almost lifelike. Yet the narrator marks a limit to what can be concluded: he wonders whether an unusual soil, like that of the cemetery of St. Michel at Bordeaux, could have preserved the remains, but cannot answer the question. The scene turns an abstract dispute about human antiquity into a direct encounter, without pretending that the spectacle by itself explains how the body endured.

Crisis, Return, and Gretchen

The narrator’s attention to personal life persists alongside the scientific record. During an apparent upward passage, Henry finds secret consolation in the thought that the route is leading toward the earth’s surface. Each step strengthens that belief, and he begins imagining marriage to his cousin Gretchen. The hope is explicitly tied to a geographical interpretation: the possible return home makes a possible shared future feel near.

Later, after the storm on the Central Sea, Henry wakes to discover that he is still on the raft with Professor Hardwigg and Hans. As his hearing returns and the waters fall silent, Professor Hardwigg calls for him; Henry answers faintly, and the Professor announces that they are moving upward. In a separate moment of danger, Henry is too weak from hunger even to scream or struggle. Professor Hardwigg’s search is guided by the mortar and small stones that have newly fallen from above; their movement reveals Henry’s position and gives the explorers a way to find him. These scenes place survival, not just geological interpretation, at the center of the narrator’s account.

When the travelers emerge from the volcano, Henry exclaims that they are in Asia, on the coast of India, among the Malay islands, and at Europe’s antipodes. His confidence immediately meets a difficulty: the compass indicates that they had been traveling north. The unexplained instrument remains a source of concern even after the explorers are received by fishermen and brought to safety. They reach Messina after a forty-eight-hour delay, sail onward to Marseilles, and arrive in Hamburg on 9 October, still troubled by the erratic compass.

At home, Gretchen’s joy makes Henry’s private hope a reality. She greets him as a hero and says there is no reason he should leave her again; he sees her weeping with happiness. The compass mystery is eventually explained through the storm: the ball of fire made the iron in the raft magnetic and reversed the compass. Once Professor Hardwigg understands the reversal, he is delighted, and Henry describes himself as the happiest of ordinary mortals. Gretchen, formerly his ward, takes her place in the house in the Konigstrasse as both niece and wife. The ending brings the expedition’s public triumph and Henry’s personal return together, while the compass’s reversal supplies a final reminder that even the explorers’ most dependable measure of direction had been transformed by the journey.