Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 21 -- Boys Club Singles
Despite himself, Frank's teeth begin to chatter. He had estimated eight to ten hours immersion
would his resistance bear it.
Then suddenly the phosphorescent glow disappeared. The water seemed quicker; then
apparently the current became a scarcely perceived flow.
He touched the side-wall. His senses had not deceived him. The current had indeed
diminished.
As he splashed forward to assist with the effort of downstream progress, he began to be aware
that ahead of him there showed a light that was not the greenish yellow of phosphorous.
He could not let himself believe that the grayish dimness that suffused the blackness ahead of
him was the end of the cavern. His disappointment, he knew, would be too keen. The clumsy
life belt impeded his progress; yet he dared not dispense with it lest some weakness overcome
him, or some mishap occur.
A vagrant eddy caught him and hurried him forward. He was whirled dizzyingly for an instant.
He bumped against a buttress of rock projecting into the channel. The stream made a twist to
the left; then to the right.
Sudden realization swept him. The underground river discharged here at sea level; but also it
plunged into the hidden chasm that could have no outlet except in the floor under that glittering,
turquoise sea ahead.
The breath gasped in his lungs. Deeper the suction pulled him. He was spun about in the
inflexible grip of a whirlpool.
Gasping for a last despairing breath, he was shot down a great tunnel. A crashing and roaring
sound filled his ears. His body was hammered and flailed against the rough sides of this
terrible aqueduct. His lungs were on fire -- no, they were bursting.
S. Fowler Wright's, The Hidden Tribe (1938) concerns the fortunes of a tribe which has isolated
itself for over two thousand years in an oasis, watered by a subterranean river in the midst of the
vast barrenness of the Libyan dessert. They are ruled by a race of kings who have continued the
ancient Egyptian custom of marrying their sisters, but at the time of this story the destruction of all
but one of the royal race renders this custom impossible. As a consequence, an English lass
whose "aeroplane" has crashed in the desert finds herself in unwelcome competition with an
American girl who has been kidnapped from a Cairo train for the dubious honor of sharing the
throne.
"There is a river here?" Leonard asked, in a natural surprise. "There is a stream that flows
underground."
The fault of strata, the consequent outcrop of rocks of different solidity, the presence of
subterranean water -- it was all no more than the Western Sahara illustrates a hundred times
on a smaller scale, where green oases have resulted, and men have sunk wells to find that
abundant water will rise so long as it be kept dear of the choking sand.
But this misconception did not alter the importance of the fact that there was a method of
contact with the outer world which was known and used. And the channel of this contact was
clearly indicated as being the subterranean river. But on the essential point of where and how
access had been obtained to it in the far Egyptian desert, Helen Vincent had nothing helpful to
say.
Somewhere, in the 20,000 square miles of that monstrous and repellent wilderness, there must
be access to the subterranean river. But this was a point on which Miss Vincent could give no
guidance at all.
And, after all, it is better to go to rest on a goat-skin couch than to spend the night clambering in
the black bowels of earth, afraid at every moment to be faced by a sudden light and a circle of
lifted spears; or to be launched on a subterranean river, perhaps with no light at all (and how
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