Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

H. Rider Haggard
Haggard's sequel to King
Solomon's Mines (1885),
Allan Quatermain,
Further Adventures and
Discoveries (1887) tells
of a white race in Africa,
a cross between
Zoroastrian Persians and
Druidic Celts. The
travelers reach this
country through an
underground river which
conducts them past a jet
of flame and into to the
country of living
sacrifices.
Chapter 20 -- More Boys Club Serials
By the river's edge was a little shore formed of round fragments of rock washed into this shape
by the constant action of water, and giving the place the appearance of being strewn with
thousands of fossil cannon balls. Evidently when the water of the underground river is high
there is no beach at all, or very little.
Our river that was, Sir Henry said, a literal realization of the wild vision of the poet.
Haggard's endnote, "Where Alph the sacred river ran through caverns measureless to man down
to a sunless sea," identifies the poet as Samuel Coleridge. As for the "sunless sea," we will
further visit its shores in Chapter 30, Down to a Sunless Sea.
Indeed Haggard's plots are violent and racist and his language, stilted, but he doesn't take his
readership as uncultured. His Stygian line,
And when all's said and done an underground river will make a very appropriate burying-place.'
In the "Authorities," Haggard mentions,
There is an underground river in "Peter Wilkins," but at the time of writing the foregoing pages I
had not read that quaint but entertaining work.
Which leads us to the underground river of Robert Paltock's Life and Adventures of Peter
Wilkins (1751), a tale of an English castaway and a remote race of humans, a Gulliver's Travels
meets Robinson Crusoe.
I soon found myself in an eddy; and the boat drawing forward beyond all my power to resist it, I
was quickly sucked under a low arch, where, if I had not fallen flat in my boat, having barely
light enough to see my danger, I had undoubtedly been crushed to pieces or driven overboard.
At length, finding the perturbation of the water abate, and as if by degrees I came into a
smoother stream, I took courage just to lift up my affrighted head; but guess, if you can, the
horror which seized me, on finding myself in the blackest of darkness, unable to perceive the
smallest glimmer of light.
However, as my boat seemed to glide easily, I roused myself and struck a light; but if I had my
terrors before, what must I have now! I was quite stupefied at the tremendous view of an
immense arch over my head, to which I could see no bounds; the stream itself, as I judged, was
about thirty yards broad, but in some places wider, in some narrower. It was well for me I
happened to have a tinder-box, or, though I had escaped hitherto, I must have at lust perished;
for in the narrower parts of the stream, where it ran swiftest, there were frequently such crags
stood out from the rock, by reason of the turnings and windings, and such sets of the current
DRAFT 1122//66//22001122
Uppddaatteess aatt hhttttpp::////www. .uunnm. .eedduu//~rrhheeggggeenn//UnnddeerrggrroouunnddRi ivveerrss. .hhttml l
227