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With the new morning, Nemo hiked up to the cave and stared at the wide opening. From inside wafted strange and lush smells, humid air with a taint of sulfur, mixed with the freshness of thick vegetation. Fog crept out of the cave mouth, and faint light came from a glow down the steep passage.

Nemo knew that he must investigate this place. It was what Captain Grant would have done, to see, to explore, to learn.

From the tales he and Jules Verne had told each other during their imaginative musings, the theories they had read, as well as discussions he’d had aboard the Coralie, Nemo was no stranger to the idea that the Earth might be hollow, that a new world lay waiting to be explored beneath the crust. To explain the magnetic phenomena of the Earth’s poles, the renowned astronomer Edmund Halley had hypothesized a hollow world composed of concentric spheres rotating like a dynamo around a small central sun, and the American soldier John Cleves Symmes had recently repopularized the idea.

Now Nemo had a chance to test it for himself. He didn’t know where these tunnels might take him, whether they led to passages extending beneath the ocean floor . . . or even to the center of the Earth.

He did not undertake such a journey lightly. He secured every useful item he could bring, found a scrap of rope from the ship wreckage and even retrieved two cutlasses and a brace of pistols that the pirates had dropped during their flight from the dinosaur.

He stitched together a satchel made of burnt scraps of sailcloth that had washed ashore from the wreck of the Coralie. He would carry torches coated with sulfur and dried resin, though he could not bring enough to guide his way for long. He hoped that the greenish underground illumination would remain steady enough for him to find his way.

Nemo sliced flesh from the fallen dinosaur’s carcass, cooked and tasted the meat. Although it was bitter, the flesh seemed nourishing enough and in plentiful supply. Anxious to go, he didn’t want to take the time to hunt other game, so he built a green, smoky fire and cured strips of the reptile meat, which he wrapped in fresh leaves and packed in his satchel.

His final and most important task was to tear out the writing-covered pages from his journal. He rolled them into a tight tube, which he then inserted into the empty brandy bottle he had kept for so long. He added a note instructing whoever found this message to deliver it to his friend Jules Verne in Nantes, France. He sealed the bottle and went to the end of the lagoon.

When the strongest current of the tide went out, he gripped the bottle, knowing there was virtually no chance in all the vast oceans that this message would ever see its intended reader. But he had beaten the odds before.

He hurled the bottle into the waves, watched it bob on the surface for some minutes and float away. He hoped it would drift into the shipping lanes. For a long time he’d clung to nothing more than hope. . . but hope had served him well enough over the years.

Taking his satchel, Nemo climbed the volcanic slopes to the intriguing cave opening. He took one last look around him at the shores that had encompassed his world for so long, and then he turned toward the mystery ahead.

Nemo ventured into the cave, not knowing if he would ever come back.

Part IV

A JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE

i

Nantes, 1848

Caroline Aronnax stood at the head of the crowd on the docks, wearing her best silk gown, her finest lace cuffs, and her proudest expression. Her whalebone corset was laced up so that she stood as straight as the masts on the exploration ship about to depart. On the street beside the quays, a band played lively patriotic tunes. Spectators cheered and howled for Captain Hatteras.

“I am so happy for you, my dear,” Madame Aronnax said, touching her daughter’s shoulder. “You must be very proud of your captain.”

Marie stood apart from Caroline in the crowd, craning her neck to get a better view; Madame Aronnax insisted it would be unseemly for a mere