Journey to the center of the earth: Blog #5 Chapters: 32-38

Journey to the center of the earth: Blog #5 Chapters: 32-38

Blog #5:  How would you describe the author’s use of language in this novel?  Do you each enjoy how it is used?  Explain?  Have you learned a new vocabulary word while reading this novel?

·      Grammy: The language in this novel is easy to read because it is a the abridged format, except for people’s names, like Arne Saknussemm.

·      Alek: The language is also very complicated and complex.

·      When people speak in the dialogue it is in Old English, which is sometimes hard to read because we don’t talk like this anymore.

·      Grammy: I enjoy reading the story and his style of language usage. (exciting, mysterious). I like how the language is different because I am learning a lot of new words.

·      Alek: The language makes it feel like it was written a long time ago because nobody talks like that today.

·      Grammy: I have learned MANY new words, but a word I loved was Mastodon, which is another word for Elephant because they are my favorite animals. 

·      Alek: I have also learned a lot of new words like fulminating which means to explode violently, and incontestably, without a doubt.

     Movie cover:                          Book Cover:                           Authors portrait:

                

  

Summary:

            In the beginning of the four chapters I read, Axle, Professor Leidenbrock and Hans, were in a terrible storm, which threw them off course. Hans, the Professor and Axle decided to keep on going, but their little unsteady raft that they made got destroyed from the impact of the crash and much wasn’t left of it.

After putting Axle on the shore, Hans went back to the raft to save anything he could. He left most of the useless stuff behind, but most of the useful things, he saved from the wreckage. Some of the things he saved were, the whole set of tracking tools and devices used for measuring their depth underground, water, food, backpacks and all of their sleeping stuff.

In the morning they headed off by foot and found a human skull sticking out of the ground, so they decided to investigate. Since the Professor was a GEOLOGIST, he professionally dug up the remains of the still intact body, and figured out that the body was 6 feet long, (meaning 6 feet tall if you stood him up) but they didn’t know who he was. “It is only about six feet in length, which is a long way from the pretended giants of the early days. As to the particular race to which it belonged, it is incontestably Caucasian.” Pg. 240. The professor was puzzled why there would be a human like body down in these depths when he, Axle and Hans had only explored these parts, (not including Arne Saknussemm, the guy who made it out alive and made the actual directions for the journey to the center of the earth).

            As they were walking around the shoreline ‘taking the long way’, Axle discovers that he has a strange dagger that didn’t belong to him, nor Hans, nor the professor. They claimed that they thought that Arne Saknussemm used it to carve his name into a wall maybe. The professor said that the dagger was not, 10 years old, 50 years old, a decade old, but many decades old. With that they continue their journey. “’A.S!’ cried my uncle. ‘You see, I was right. Arne Saknussemm, always Arne Saknussemm.” This was when they found the carvings in the wall of the cavern. 

            In the end, they run into a big wall. They know they can get through it because they can hear the water on the other side, but they cant get through the rock with the picks and the crowbar, so they had to use something bigger. Axle came up with the idea of making kind of a mine in the wall to blow up. Hans took the leftover gunpowder that they had from their guns that they lost in the shipwreck, and gun cotton. Hans made a hole in the wall to put the gunpowder and the gun cotton in. He shoved as much gunpowder in the hole as he could, then closed the hole with the gun cotton and used the damp gun powder as a detonator. That’s where the 6 chapters end.