Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 21 -- Boys Club Singles
Josiah Flintabbatey Flonatin, the distinctively-named hero of J.E. Preston Muddock's The
Sunless City (1905), chronicles a descent.
Flin occupied himself with carefully writing up his diary and examining his instruments. He felt
very well satisfied, for so far success had attended his venture, and the theory he had
advanced at the meeting had now become actual fact, and he was sailing beneath the surface
of a subterranean river.
Before him rushed the river which might have been taken for the fabled Styx, and the gloomy
caverns the abode of the grim ferryman, Charon... He knew that the rushing river led
somewhere, and wherever it led to he was willing to go.
H. Henry Rhodes, Where Men Have Walked, A Story of the Lucayos (1909) begins in a cave.
Cautiously I brought my boat nearer the entrance, and I wondered why I had not seen the arch
before. But the water was lower now, the tide was out and left clear to view what had before
passed as a rock projecting from the ocean's depths. I stepped out on the broad, stone
threshold, and gazed around. The water looked black and dismal and bottomless. It was still,
not a ripple, for the ocean had no influence here. It could beat its waves against the outside,
but could not molest the weird quiet of the waters within, that, in their depths, mirrored the
sword-like rocks that hung from the ceiling.
A peculiar gurgling sound attracted my attention, and I looked a few feet away from where I
stood, to the right, and saw that the waters were disturbed slightly as though a little rivulet
made its way over the rocks, down, down the depths below, where it fanned an underground
stream.
Near the center of the cave, a fountain played, formed by a little stream that bubbled up,
sparkling and rippling awhile, for observation, seemingly, then gurgled down into the inner
recesses or the earth. A crystal cup rested invitingly near on a ledge of rock, and I advanced to
drink. As I drank, the same cooling liquid that had been my salvation when I lay neath the
shelter of the rocks, cooled my dry, parched tongue... Could this streamlet, only showing itself
for a moment, rippling over the stones for the space at a foot or two, be the same stream that,
travelling through the bowels of the earth, became heated almost to boiling, and formed the
fabled river that led to hell?
"The fabled river that lead to hell." By its temperature, it must be the River Pyriphlegethon.
Willis George Emerson's The Smoky God, or a Voyage to the Inner
World (1908) capitalized on Symmes' hollow-earth. Olaf and father
are caught in a great polar maelstrom fails (a singularity we know from
Chapter 15) which sweeps them 10 miles downward. Their compass
fails (the other singularity) and the two mariners discover that the
seawater is now fresh. How the water can pass around the verge, but
not the salt, isn't explained.
For two years the two live with the hollow earth inhabitants whose
capital is surrounded by four rivers taking their source from an
artesian fountain.
When time comes to bid adieus, Olaf and father head south, as the wind constantly blows from
the north. The first intimation of their approach to an exit is an island inhabited by 9-ft penguins.
The compass again behaves erratically as they ascend the curvature of the opening and the two
Norwegians find themselves among the Antarctic ice.
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