The eccentric but intrepid German Professor Otto Lidenbrock discovers a parchment in an old manuscript of an Icelandic saga. It has a cipher written in runes on it which, when decoded, tells of a passage down a dead Icelandic volcano to the centre of the Earth. Lidenbrock and Axel, his nephew who actually found the clue to the cipher, travel to Iceland and descend into the volcano. Soon, they find themselves amid a lost world of wonders and prehistoric creatures which ceased to exist on the surface of the Earth but continued to flourish under it. Journey to the Centre of the Earth is a timeless sci-fi adventure novel, as popular as Verne s Around the World in Eighty Days and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea