Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 21 -- Boys Club Singles
The Mystery of the Piper's Ghost (1954) by Zillah Macdonald
involves a mysterious bagpiper rising out of a Nova Scotia lake. Our
boys suspect that this relates to a secret gold mine and become lost
in the tunnels.
Emerging, a la Sinbad, from a cave river into a
strange world is a standard ploy in Boys Club
fiction. In the American-Czech hybrid film
Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955), four
boys row into a cave in New York's Central Park
and emerge into a prehistoric world. After their
boat is crushed by a dinosaur, they travel yet
further back in time on a makeshift raft and
themselves begin to become primitive. In
mythology fashion, they at last return to the sea. ,
The film was serialized into 5-minute chapters for
U.S. television.
A Hollow-Earth passage via Brazil has long been speculated
(Chapter 14, Hollow Earth Geophysics), something which may
have been of use to the Nazis. Consider "Operation
Earthworm," Fantastic Universe, September 1955, by Joe
Archibald
"For the last seventy years, all we have thought about was
outer space... I am announcin' for the benefit of the press and
everybody from here to Mars and Jupiter and back that I
intend to explore inner space! I have already got the project
underway...
The Magnificent Mole is built mostly of titanium, a metal which
is only about half as heavy as steel and twice as rugged. It is
not quite as big in diameter as the auger, for if it was any
Martian moron knows we would scrape our sides away before
we got down three miles...
Whir-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-o-o-om! The Mole shudders like a citizen looking at his income tax bite and
then starts boring. There is a big bright light all around us, changing color every second, then
there is a sound like all the pneumatomic drills in all the universe is biting through a thousand
four-inch layers of titanium plate...
I look at the instrument panel again and see we are close to being seven thousand miles down,
and all at once the gauges show we are out of energy. I look out the port and see a fish staring
in at me, and a crab with eyes like two poached eggs swimming in ketchup.
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