The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(21)

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: IntraTerrestrial 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.