Read Naar het middelpunt der aarde in Dutchwith every sentence explained

Naar het middelpunt der aarde by Jules Verne was first published in 1864. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked intermediate and filed under science fiction and young adult. It runs to about 68,900 words.

A secret code. An extinct volcano. A road that leads straight down.

Hamburg, 1863. The hot-tempered Professor Otto Lidenbrock comes home with a rare old Icelandic book — and out of it falls a scrap of parchment covered in runes. When his nephew Axel cracks the code, the message is breathtaking: a sixteenth-century alchemist, Arne Saknussemm, claims to have reached the centre of the Earth through the crater of the Icelandic volcano Sneffels.

Axel is terrified; his uncle is overjoyed. Within days the two are on their way to Iceland, where they hire Hans, a calm, nearly silent eider-down hunter, as their guide. Then the three of them climb into the volcano and begin to descend into the dark, towards wonders and dangers no one has ever seen.

Jules Verne's classic of 1864 helped invent modern science fiction and has inspired films, comics and dreamers for over a century and a half.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in Dutch. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:

• a natural translation of that exact sentence,
• a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
• the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
• all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.

It's marked intermediate: comfortable once everyday Dutch feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.