In the book “Journey to the Center of the Earth” the setting plays a large role. The characters (the scientist uncle and his nephew the main character) start out in their home in Germany, where they are completely safe, and they have a chef that provides food whenever they need it, a stark contrast to their journey, when they must ration. They travel to Iceland after they find a note that tells them how to reach the center of the earth, but the trip to Iceland wasn’t eventful other than them meeting a guide who would travel with them, and so they quickly came to the entrance to the center of the earth.
They then came across a tunnel system that would bring them towards their goal. They came to a fork in the road and accidentally went down a tunnel with a dead end, and ran out of water. They then went back and chose a different tunnel with a hot spring behind the tunnel wall, which their servant (Hans) broke through with a pickax, and thusly follow the river, which flowed down one of the tunnels. Throughout this they had to ration their food, and the main character, Harry, was exceptionally whiny, and thought constantly of food and of all the ills that had befallen them, and I did not like him very much. They got lost a handful of times, and once Harry broke his foot after falling through the floor into a lower tunnel, though he was fine after a few days of resting. The whole tunnel system had no light, and so they were forced to use old style flashlights to see, which did not help the atmosphere.
When they reached the end of the tunnels they found a massive chamber filled with an ocean of unknown size, which the uncle named “The Central Sea”. There was an electrical light emitted from the constant lighting in the clouds, due to the atmospheric pressure, and the clouds were formed by the evaporation of hot springs by their own heat. They tried to make a raft and to sail across the ocean, but encountered sea monsters and storms, losing the majority of their food and forcing them to ration more strictly, causing the greatest joy1 in the protagonist. On the shoreline they found many fossils and huge tree-size mushrooms, and thought they saw mastodons (similar to mammoths, which are similar to elephants) but never directly encountered anything. The story ended with them using gunpowder to blow open a sealed tunnel, but accidentally blowing a hole into a volcano shaft, causing them to flow in with some sea water and blow out of the volcano, ending up on a small island near Italy.
At the end of the story it took people a while to accept that what they had done was real, but eventually came around and gave the uncle several awards and titles and such, the protagonist married his sweetheart, and the guide/servant went back to duck hunting in Iceland.
1 I’m being sarcastic. Obviously.
School Essays 