Pro­logue begins not with adven­ture, but with dis­be­lief. The nar­ra­tor paints a scene where sci­ence meets skep­ti­cism, his tale unwel­come in the hal­lowed halls of estab­lished geol­o­gy. After approach­ing a Fel­low of the Roy­al Geo­log­i­cal Soci­ety, he quick­ly finds his aston­ish­ing nar­ra­tive dis­missed, not for lack of detail or sin­cer­i­ty, but because it dares to defy accept­ed knowl­edge. The more he insist­ed on the truth, the more resis­tance he met, as though sci­ence had built walls too thick to let won­der in. Yet, despite the rejec­tion, he refus­es to let go of what he knows to be real. His con­vic­tion is not born from fan­ta­sy, but from first­hand witness—one root­ed in an encounter so sur­re­al that it leaves a last­ing mark not only on the man but on any­one who hears his words with an open mind. In every sen­tence, there’s a qui­et chal­lenge to the audi­ence: sus­pend judg­ment, and pre­pare to see the impos­si­ble.

He recounts the unusu­al begin­ning of this extra­or­di­nary tale, which took root in the arid expanse of the Sahara Desert. While on a lion hunt with desert tribes­men, the nar­ra­tor notices a white man near an oasis encamp­ment, vis­i­bly dif­fer­ent from the peo­ple around him and star­tling­ly out of place. This stranger reacts with joy at see­ing anoth­er of his kind, ask­ing urgent­ly what year it is, sug­gest­ing that time, as he knows it, has unrav­eled. There’s a hint of des­per­a­tion in his voice, not mad­ness, but a man half-expect­ing the world he left to have van­ished entire­ly. That one ques­tion reveals the unimag­in­able chasm between his last con­tact with civ­i­liza­tion and the moment of their meet­ing. The nar­ra­tor, struck by the man’s sin­cer­i­ty and emo­tion­al inten­si­ty, sens­es that he is at the edge of some­thing mon­u­men­tal. The desert, with its vast silence, seems the only fit­ting stage for the rev­e­la­tion to come.

The man who appears in that oasis is no ordi­nary wan­der­er. His weath­er-worn appear­ance and strange man­ner­isms betray a life lived in con­di­tions for­eign even to the desert. As they speak, he grad­u­al­ly begins to share frag­ments of his past—stories so strange they could be mis­tak­en for hal­lu­ci­na­tion if not for the ground­ed, earnest way in which they are told. He speaks of a realm inside the Earth, not in metaphor, but as a tan­gi­ble land­scape filled with life, light, and dan­ger. The more he reveals, the more appar­ent it becomes that his sto­ry can­not be ignored. He is not try­ing to con­vince any­one; he sim­ply needs to be heard, to unbur­den the truth he’s car­ried alone for far too long. In him, the nar­ra­tor finds not just a curios­i­ty, but a liv­ing con­tra­dic­tion to the assump­tions that gov­ern our under­stand­ing of the world.

That con­ver­sa­tion under the palm trees becomes the thresh­old between real­i­ty and the unimag­in­able. What begins as a tale of explo­ration quick­ly turns into a saga of sur­vival, iden­ti­ty, and a world gov­erned by laws unlike any known above. It’s not just the phys­i­cal reversal—the sun­less sky that’s some­how bright, the oceans with­out tides—but the emo­tion­al toll of return­ing from a place no one believes exists. For the nar­ra­tor, this is no longer a mat­ter of sci­ence, but of hon­or­ing truth in the face of ridicule. The sto­ry he’s about to relay, framed through the lens of this chance meet­ing, is not only a jour­ney to the Earth’s core but a con­fronta­tion with the lim­its of what human­i­ty is will­ing to believe. In doing so, he invites read­ers not only to explore this hid­den world but to ques­tion why so many are quick to reject what doesn’t fit their mod­el of real­i­ty.

Beneath the sur­face of this pro­logue lies a com­men­tary on how soci­ety reacts to the unknown. When faced with evi­dence that stretch­es the imag­i­na­tion, peo­ple often dis­miss rather than inquire. The nar­ra­tor knows this too well, hav­ing watched men of learn­ing close their minds when they should be most open. And yet, the pro­logue is filled not with bit­ter­ness but with persistence—he still tells the sto­ry. Because some­where, per­haps in the minds of a few brave lis­ten­ers, the desire to under­stand some­thing greater still burns. The pro­logue ends not with a con­clu­sion, but a beginning—a door cracked open to a world where won­der has not yet been con­quered by rea­son. And for those will­ing to walk through, what lies ahead is not only a new geog­ra­phy but a new way of think­ing.