Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 17 -- Underground Rivers in Continental Fiction
Perrault's "The Fairies" is set at a spring, the story of a
younger sister, gentle and sweet, and her older sister,
disagreeable and arrogant. Of the younger,
One of the poor child's many duties was to go twice a day
and draw water from a spring a good half mile away,
bringing it back in a large pitcher. One day when she was
at the spring an old woman came up and begged for a
drink.
"Why, certainly, good mother," said the beautiful girl.
Rinsing the pitcher, she drew some water from the cleanest
part of the spring and handed it to her, lifting up the pitcher
so that she might drink more easily.
Now this old woman was a fairy.
The remainder is somewhat predictable, as Mother Goose tends to be. Charles did not publish
Mother Goose under his own name, but rather under the name of his son Pierre. Thus there
were two Pierre Perraults, uncle and nephew, who wrote about water from springs, one for the
Académie des Sciences, the other for les enfants.
Norwegian Ludvig Holberg's Nicolai Klimii
iter Subterraneum (1741, Nicholas Klim's
Subterraneous Journey, written in Latin) was
pure and simple science fiction, a description
of a utopian society from an outsider's
(literally) point of view. Philosophy and
theology student Klim falls into a cave and
finds himself orbiting a planet revolving
around an inner sun. He's attacked by a
gryphon, but survives to lands on the planet
and explores such topics as the morality,
science, sexual equality, religion, and
government of this interior world.
But most of interest (to us, at least) is Holberg's hydrology.
The country is intersected by greater and lesser canals, on which boats propelled by oars, skim
with wonderful celerity. The oars are driven by self-moving machines, so quietly that very little
motion is given to the water.
The waters are filled with fish, and upon the banks of the rivers are seated splendid country
houses.
There are numberless silver mines within its borders; the sand of its rivers is colored by gold,
and its coasts are paved with pearl oysters of the finest water.
At the time of my arrival the water was very high, owing to the nearness of Nazar. This planet
has the same effect upon the tides of the firmament, as our moon has upon those of the earth.
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