Complete and unabridged. A German professor decodes a runic note in an Icelandic manuscript and takes his nephew down a volcano, into a sea lit by electric storms and inhabited by animals extinct for a hundred million years. Verne wrote it in 1864 from the geology of his own decade, and got the argument about the earth's interior heat exactly wrong in the most productive way. The raft, the storm and the ascent by lava are the three passages every later underground story borrows. Its 72 original illustrations have been carefully restored and coloured for this edition.