Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 21 -- Boys Club Singles
beneath the ground with a subdued gurgleen sound. Hunters avoided the wood, for some
careless persons had come here and fallen through the holes into the rusheen tide. Their
bodies were afterwards found floateen in Silent Lake. One day my grandfather and two of his
men came to see the treacherous underground river; and they moved cautiously down the
stream till they came where it sank into a hole in the ground, that looked like a huge sluice-way.
My grandfather looked at the strange sight for a time, and then at the great bridge of trees and
boulders that lay across the original course of the river. They wondered why he gazed at all so
earnestly; and why his eyes grew so bright. Then he slapped the capteen, who was yet a boy,
upon the back, and said,
"Just the very place we want. Here we will have a quiet castle of our own, where no limb of the
law can find us."'
It is not uncommon for Boys Club, we observe, to suspend the rules of spelling.
In the World Below (1897) by Fred Thorpe features a Subterranean Boring Car, its outer shell
fitted with revolving cutting edges, its inner core, cabin and stationary. In a planned bore from the
Amazon to China, the machine runs out of control and the passengers find themselves swimming
in the water of an inner earth. The vegetation is odd and the force of gravity is weak. The
explorers are about to be speared by blue-skinned natives when they are rescued by a white man
who'd fallen into the inner world from the Andes. The Subterranean Boring Car is their only
chance for escape, but it's submerged and blocking the drainage of the inner world. As the
waters rise, the explorers wisely build a raft. The fortuitous appearance of a white savior isn't an
uncommon happening in such novels. In the World Below was written within memory of Henry
Stanley's, "Doctor Livingstone, I presume?"
In Charles W. Beale's The Secret of the Earth (1899), Guthrie and Torrence Attlebridge, coinventors
of the airplane, enter the earth's interior where they find roofless houses and a city of
white and gold, a paradise that was man's first home. As the Wright Brother's success at Kitty
Hawk wasn't until 1904, the Attlebridges would seem to deserve aeronautical recognition. As
they were acting as agents of an innerterrestrial benefactor, however, we tend to minimize their
accomplishment.
James De Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888) is couched in the
style (if not plot plagiarism) of Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym. Adam, the hero, is swept into a channel
that leads into a chasm into the depths of the earth.
The darkness grew so intolerable that I longed for something to dispel it, if only for a moment. I
struck a match. The air was still, and the flame flashed out, lighting up the boat and showing
the black water around me. This made me eager to see more. I loaded both barrels of the rifle,
keeping my pistol for another purpose, and then fired one of them. There was a tremendous
report, that rang in my ears like a hundred thunder-volleys, and rolled and reverberated far
along, and died away in endless echoes. The flash lighted up the scene for an instant, and for
an instant only; like the sudden lightning, it revealed all around. I saw a wide expanse of water,
black as ink -- a Stygian pool; but no rocks were visible, and it seemed as though I had been
carried into a subterranean sea.
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