Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 21 -- Boys Club Singles
the rocks close to the water. And, moreover, had a vast deluge rushed out almost beneath the
opening which lighted the cave, it must have been heard by some of the party. He concluded,
therefore, that the water had escaped through a subterranean channel below the rocks from
which he looked down.
Edith Nesbit's The Magic City (1910) was simply credited to E.
Nesbit, as Boys Club boys might not appreciate a lady author. An
unhappy 10-year-old escapes into a magical city he has built out of
books, chessmen, candlesticks and other household items.
He listened. And he heard a dull echoing roar that got louder and
louder. And he looked. The light of the lamps shone ahead on the
dark gleaming water, and then quite suddenly it did not shine on
the water because there was no longer any water for it to shine on.
Only great empty black darkness. A great hole, ahead, into which
the stream poured itself. And now they were at the edge of the
gulf. The Lightning Loose gave a shudder and a bound and hung
for what seemed a long moment on the edge of the precipice
down which the underground river was pouring itself in a smooth
sleek stream, rather like poured treacle, over what felt like the
edge of everything solid.
The moment ended, and the little yacht, with Philip and Lucy and the parrot and the two dogs,
plunged headlong over the edge into the dark unknown abyss below.
"It's all right, Lu," said Philip in that moment. "I'll take care of you."
And then there was silence in the cavern--only the rushing sound of the great waterfall echoed
in the rocky arch.
And all the time the yacht was speeding along the underground stream, beneath the vast arch
of the underground cavern.
'The worst of it is we may be going ever so far away from where we want to get to,' said Philip,
when Max had undertaken the steering again.
"All roads," remarked the parrot," lead to Somnolentia. And besides the ship is travelling due
north -- at least so the ship's compass states, and I have no reason as yet for doubting its
word."
"Hullo!" cried more than one voice, and the ship shot out of the dark cavern into a sheet of
water that lay spread under a white dome. The stream that had brought them there seemed to
run across one side of this pool. Max, directed by the parrot, steered the ship into smooth
water, where she lay at rest at last in the very middle of this great underground lake.
Of the pulp-fiction magazines dedicated to the American West, Old Scout -- an oft-used
pseudom -- wrote "Young Wild West's Leap in the Dark, or Arietta and the Underground Stream,"
Wild West Weekly, August 17, 1906.
In Darkness and Dawn (1914), George Allan England made use of the whirlpool, by then a
standard ploy.
From the warmth of the sea and the immense quantities of vapor that filled the abyss, they
concluded that it must be at a tremendous depth in the earth -- perhaps as far down as Stern's
extreme guess of five hundred miles -- and also that it must be of very large extent.
Beatrice had noted also that the water was salt. This led them to the conclusion that in some
way or other, perhaps intermittently, the oceans on the surface were supplying the
subterranean sea.
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