Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 15 -- The Maelstrom
The etching to the right is Doré's illustration "The
Whirl," for the 1876 edition of The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner, not the Norwegian Maelstrom, we
recognize, but worth including for three reasons:
The dramatic whirlpool.
We encounter Doré's immediately-recognizable
work elsewhere in our voyage, particularly in
Chapter 33, Twenty-Five Centuries of
Subterranean Portraits.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is by the poet
Samuel Coleridge, author of "Kubla Kahn," the
subject of Chapter 30, Down to a Sunless Sea.
It's an example of what so often we will find in our
exploration of underground rivers. The tunnels
intertwine.
The idea of water circulating deep within remained acceptable into the 18th century, as evidenced
by Joseph Mead's An Essay on Currents at Sea (1758), and we will see in Chapter 27,
Virtualizing the Imagined: Underground Rivers in Games, that such geography is yet with us.
Here's a schematic of how Kircher's "umbilicus maris" maintaining "a circulation like that of the
blood in the human body" fits within a dual hydrologic cycle.
Evaporation
Ocean
Whirlpool
Precipitation
Rivers
Underground
Rivers
Clouds
Land
Caverns
The Dual Hydrologic Cycle with Whirlpool
Springs
We earlier cited Moskenstrom lore from Duncan's The Mariner's Chronicle (1934). Duncan,
however, was explicit in distancing himself from Kircher's subterranean hydrologic scheme.
The Maelstrom, a very dangerous whirlpool on the coast of Norway... Its violence and roarings
exceed that of a cataract, being heard to a great distance, and without any intermission except
a quarter every sixth hour, that is, at the turn of high and low water... This circumstance,
among others, makes strongly against Kircher and others, who imagine that there is here an
abyss penetrating the globe, and issuing in some very remote parts, which Kircher is so
particular as to assign, for he names the gulf of Bothnia. But after the most exact researches
which the circumstances will admit, this is but a conjecture without foundation: for this and three
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