Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 17 -- Underground Rivers in Continental Fiction
Every movable thing on deck floated off, for besides the ever-rolling billows, an immense rain
fell in terrific water-spouts, accompanied by thunder and lightning. It seemed as though all the
elements had conspired for our destruction.
Based on Klim's account, water in the underworld seems to satisfy the same needs and present
the same challenges as water in the outer world. As Holberg would wish us to believe, we've
much to learn from such places.
Victor Hugo's Les Miserables (1862) is an underground river tale, albeit an
unpleasant waterway, but it can wait until Chapter 58, The Grand Tour,
European Sewers of Distinction.
And now we arrive at perhaps the most-celebrated underground
adventurist of all, Jules Verne (1828-1905).
Edgar Allan Poe was translated into French when Verne was 26
and Verne became a devoted admirer of the American, writing a
sequel to Poe's unfinished narrative of Gordon Pym, The Sphinx of
the Ice-Fields (1897).
At the center of Verne’s works is the heroic scientist whose startling discoveries caught the
enterprising spirit of the 19th century and its uncritical fascination with scientific progress. The
popular science context in which Verne wrote Voyage au Centre de la Terre (1864, Journey to
the Center of the Earth) included notions of a hollow earth proposed by John Cleves Symmes
(Chapter 14). But Verne wasn't satisfied with make-believe, interviewing geographer Charles
Sainte-Claire Deville who had explored the volcanoes of Teneriffe and Stromboli, where the
Journey adventurers emerge at the end of their expedition.
Verne’s rivers are pathways to discovery. An excerpt from Journey,
Then I began to hear distinctly quite a new sound of something running within the thickness of
the granite wall, a kind of dull, dead rumbling, like distant thunder. During the first part of our
walk, not meeting with the promised spring, I felt my agony returning; but then my uncle
acquainted me with the cause of the strange noise.
DRAFT 1122//66//22001122
Uppddaatteess aatt hhttttpp::////www. .uunnm. .eedduu//~rrhheeggggeenn//UnnddeerrggrroouunnddRi ivveerrss. .hhttml l
190