Good evening. Welcome to the Just Sleep podcast. I'm Tasia, your host.

Every week, I will read you an old story to help you relax

of the stressful day behind you and drift off to sleep.

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Rest assured, there will be no ads during or after the story.

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Visit JustSleeppodcast.com slash support for more information.

Tonight, I continue the story,

Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne.

So lie down, close your eyes,

and let me read you a story.

Chapter 14. But Artics can be inhospitable too.

Stappi is a village consisting of about 30 huts built of lava at the south side of the base of the volcano.

It extends along the inner edge of a small fjord and close between basaltic walls of the strangest construction.

Basalt is a brownish rock of igneous origin.

It assumes regular forms, the arrangement of which is often very surprising.

Here, nature, had done her work geometrically, with square and compass and plummet.

Everywhere else, her art consists alone in throwing down huge masses together and disorder.

You see cones imperfectly formed, irregular pyramids with a fantastic disarrangement of lines. But here, as if to

exhibit an example of regularity, though in advance of the very earliest architects, she has created

a severely simple order of architecture,

never surpassed either by the splendors of Babylon or the wonders of Greece.

...