Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 21 -- Boys Club Singles
In Ella M. Scrymsour's The Perfect World, A Romance of Strange People & Strange Places
(1922), purple-skinned one-horned descendents of the Korahites, swallowed by the earth for
rebelling against Moses.
Tirelessly he worked, until success met his efforts and he had made a hole big enough to crawl
through, and from whence came the sound of rushing waters.
He lifted his lantern above his head in his endeavor to discover where he was, and its feeble
rays shone upon a swiftly flowing, subterranean river that disappeared through a tunnel on
either side. The place he was in was very small and had no outlet except by way of the water.
The river was narrow, perhaps four feet wide at the most, but with a current so strong that Alan,
good swimmer though be was, would not have dared to have trusted himself in its cruel-looking
depths. Mechanically he dropped a lump of coal into the water. There was a slight splash --
but no sound came to tell him that it had reached the bottom.
He looked at the water curiously, and dabbled his fingers in the brackish fluid. Suddenly a pain
in his hand made him draw it out quickly, and by the light of the lantern he saw it was covered
with blood. As he wiped it clean he saw the impression of two teeth on his first and third,
fingers. Slowly his lips moved and he murmured, "There is animal life in this river then-I
wonder where it leads-can there be humanity near too?"
Soviet geologist and geographer, explorer, and indefatigable popularizer of scientific knowledge,
Vladimir Obruchev wrote Plutonia in 1924. A comet knocks a hole in the earth's shell,
permitting access into an underground world of rivers, lakes, volcanoes and strange vegetation, a
world with its own sun -- Pluto, a world inhabited by monstrous animals and primitive people.
Edward M. Forster's 12,000-word The Machine Stops (1928) describes a subterranean world in
which almost all humans have lost the ability to live on the surface. Each individual lives in
isolation, with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. The
population uses a "speaking apparatus" and the "cinematophote" (television) to conduct their only
activity, the sharing knowledge.
The people forget that they, the humans, created the Machine, and treat it as a mystical entity
having whose needs that supersede their own. Those not accepting subordinate to the the
Machine are viewed as unmechanical and threatened with expulsion.
Eventually, defects begin to appear in the Machine. At first, humansHumankind at first accepts
the deteriorations as the whim of the Machine, but as the knowledge of how to repair the Machine
has been lost, the Machine apocalyptically collapses, bringing civilization with it.
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