It was something of a disappointment to learn that I couldn’t penetrate Earth’s crust with a shovel. Alas, the crude realities of geology tend to intrude upon every child who dreams of digging that far down. That did not stop my friends and me from undertaking excavations — including one in my own backyard, about six feet deep and wide.
Nor did it stop me from enjoying Jules Verne’s 19th-century adventure novel Journey to the Center of the Earth. The novel’s initially skeptical narrator calls such a journey “madness.” He is proven wrong when he accompanies his eccentric scientist uncle into the inner Earth, which turns out to be hollow: there he discovers unexpected delights (a vast inner sea) and dangers (live dinosaurs).
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