Voyage au Centre de la Terre

An uncle finds a scrap of runes and takes it personally. Days later a professor, his nephew, and a silent Icelander are climbing a dead volcano with enough rope to disappear. Down there the earth is not dead. It is older, wetter, and unwilling to be visited. Lamps fail. Time stretches. Something lives in the dark that textbooks did not mention. The center of the earth is not a metaphor. Pack for it.