Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 16 -- Underground Rivers in English Fiction
“My name is Arthur Gordon Pym” is less gripping than Herman Melville's “Call me Ishmael,” but
Poe's narrative does involve disaster in the South Pacific. Pym’s schooner is in the pack-ice
where (due to Poe’s misinformation of Antarctic fauna) the explorers encounter a “gigantic
creature of the race of the Arctic bear.”
Sailing further south, Pym's vessel encounters warmer weather and lands upon a wooded island
where treacherous savages lead them to a chasm inland which descends into the bowels of the
earth. Excerpts of Pym’s diary entries catch the gist of the sojourn.
March 9 -- The range of vapour to the southward had arisen prodigiously in the horizon, and
began to assume more distinctness of form. I can liken it to nothing but a limitless cataract,
rolling silently into the sea from some immense and far-distant rampart in the heaven. The
gigantic curtain ranged along the whole extent of the southern horizon. It emitted no sound.
March 21 -- The summit of the cataract was utterly lost in the dimness and the distance. Yet
we were evidently approaching it with a hideous velocity. At intervals there were visible in it
wide, yawning, but momentary rents, and from out these rents, within which was a chaos of
flitting and indistinct images, there came rushing and mighty, but soundless winds, tearing up
the enkindled ocean in their course.
March 22 -- The darkness had materially increased, relieved only by the glare of the water
thrown back from the white curtain before us. Many gigantic and pallidly white birds flew
continuously now from beyond the veil, and their scream was the eternal Tekeli-li! as they
retreated from our vision... And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a
chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human
figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of
the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.
The white curtain. The white birds. A white human figure. Nothingness.
There is no March 23 entry, and Pym leaves untold how he came to write his memoir.
In the January 1837 Southern Literary Messenger, Poe reviewed the Congressional address by
Symmes' devotee, Jeremiah Reynolds, discussed in the previous chapter.
He has seen his measures adopted in the teeth of opposition, and his comprehensive views
thoroughly confirmed in spite of cant, prejudice, ignorance and unbelief… With mental powers
of the highest order, his indomitable energy is precisely of that character which will not admit of
defeat.
Poe used some 700 words of Reynold's speech in Pym.
In all three tales, Poe leaves unwritten what lies below the whirlpool; there's terror enough in the
approach. And, as we will see in the chapter to follow, grist enough for many lesser mills.
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
We'll get to the Dickensonian underground rivers of 19th-century London
in Chapter 73, The Sinking of the Fleet.
J.W. De Forest (1826-1906)
There is a body of serious fiction that's lost in the libraries -- perhaps for good reason -- but when
it comes to underground rivers, is thunderous English. We'll cite just one, De Forest's "Overland,"
The Galaxy, February 1871.
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