Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 21 -- Boys Club Singles
Swallowed by an Earthquake (1894) by E. Douglas Fawcett was
marketed as a "New Story of Romance and Adventure for Boys."
From the book,
Never before had a voyage such as ours been ventured. Three
hundred feet below the valley of the Scherno we were threading a
subterranean watercourse that led no one knew where.
The review in the Journal of Education 16, 1894, notes the centrality of
the underground river setting.
Various writers have made use of underground passages and subterranean rivers for
extricating their heroes and heroines from apparently hopeless positions, but Mr. Fawcett
introduces us to an underground world, lighted by an aurora borealis, still peopled by the sauria
of the mesozoic time, and also by savages of the stone age, who converse chiefly in clicks, and
worship the fire-god... It is a pity that a false note is so often struck by the two young men of
the party. Naturally, they could not help being much more modern than their entourage, but
they need not have been slangy. A more serious, or even tragic, demeanor would have
harmonized better with the story... It is not an easy book to illustrate, but two of the pictures --
the underground river, and the lake of the Aurora -- have come out very well.
Below are the mentioned illustrations.
The Marble City Being the Strange Adventures of Three Boys (1895) was R.D. Chetwode's
warning to Boys Clubs regarding the horrors of socialism. Bob, Jack and Harry -- Boys Club
heroes prefer such unencumbered names -- set out for Australia, but are captured by black
cannibals. Brown-skinned cannibals rescue them, but in turn sell them to yellow-skinned
barbarians who practice socialism. The Great High Priest, however, turns out to be an
Englishman who was captured as a child helps them escape by the secret underground river.
The Fortress of Yadasara, a Narrative Prepared from the Manuscript of Clinton Verrall, Esq.
(1899) by Percy Brebner is another romantic lost-race adventure taken from discovered writings.
While hiking in the Caucasus, the Victorian-era hero falls into a hidden land populated by the
descendent of the last Crusade. We'll skip the central part of the story, just mentioning that -- as
is often the case in such situations -- escape to the outside world is by, yes, an underground river.
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