Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 21 -- Boys Club Singles
Then we are going through dirt again and all of a sudden we come out of it and I see a city
below us all lit up and the buildings are made of stuff that looks like jade run through with
streaks of black.....
Encountering a nefarious subterranean dweller,
"Come, schwine," the creep says. "I will show you something... I am Agrodyte Hitler, grandson
of the Liberator."
We walk up a long flight of steps and come to a cadaver memorial and on the front there are
big letters and numerals in what looks like bloodstone that says: ADOLPH HITLER, 1981.
"He escaped in a submarine, bringing three of Nazi Germany's smartest scientists with him. He
brought plans showing us he could split the atom. He brought working models." The creep
laughs mockingly. "We have certain elements down here also. Puranium, better than your
uranium. And pitchblende Plus Nine. It will power our fleet of submarines that will conquer
Earth... We will leave through the underground river that our benefactor found three miles
below the surface of the ocean near Brazil. It spirals down through this earth and empties into
Lake Schicklegruber eighty miles from here."
He looks at me, and then goes on: "We will proceed to the lock that will raise us to the
underground river and cruise along its course for a few hundred miles. It is the treat I should
accord such distinguished visitors from the outside of Earth, nein?"
The skipper of the Subterro sub pulls a switch and there is a noise like three contented cats
purring. The metal fish slides along the surface of the underground lake and comes to a hole in
a big rock ledge.
We see all this through a monitor which registers the scenery outside the sub within a radius of
three miles. The sub slides into the side of the rock, and then is lifted up to the underground
river that winds and winds upward like a corkscrew to the outlet under Brazil.
Drawn by the mystery revealed through holes cut into the pages of The Darkness of the Night
(1956), Bruno Munari leads the reader through the darkness, into the meadow and then into a
mysterious cave where an underground river flows and walls tell stories.
Conon Fraser's The Underground River (1959) is set in the Mendip
district of Somerset, home to Wookey Cave (Chapter 51, The
Tourist Trade Worldwide). That's an underground lake in the
center.
Trevayne (1973) by Robert Ludlum was published under the pseudonym Jonathan Ryder,
probably to preserve the author's reputation, but it does contain a nice passage.
Yet now, as he stared down at the Genessee notebooks piled beside the folder newspaper, he
found himself strangely reluctant to plunge back into the work he'd set aside three days ago.
He'd traveled to and from his River Styx. Like Charon, he'd carried the souls of the dead
across the turbulent waters, and now he needed rest, peace. He had to get out of the lower
world for a while.
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