Professor Lindenbrock and his nephew Axel, the story's narrator, on a quest to reach the very core of the earth, gain access to the interior by travelling north to cold and barren Iceland, where they enter the subterranean regions through the cone of the extinct volcano Sneffels. In their descent they must in effect read nature backwards as they pass through the strata of successively earlier and earlier periods, eventually finding themselves in a marvelous underground world filled with exotic plants and long extinct animals. Finally, they have a brief glimpse of a prehistoric man guarding a herd of mastodon.