Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 23 -- Girls, Too!
Here's a synopsis of Cheryl Kaye Tardif's, The River (2005).
Seven years past, Professor of Anthropology Del Hawthorne’s
father and three of her friends disappeared near Canada's
Nahanni River. When one of the missing stumbles onto the
university grounds, alive but barely recognizable and aging
before her eyes, Del is shocked, and even more so when the
man rambles about a secret river and time travel. Then he tells
her that her father is still alive!
Del travels to the Nahanni were she finds a secret channel that
plunges into a subterranean technologically-advanced world of
nanobots and uncovers a conspiracy that threatens us all. Will
humanity be sacrificed for the taste of eternal life?
And then there's Mask in the Corridor (2006) by T.A. Chappel.
The wooden floor creaked under her. There were a few loose
boards and she could hear the sound of fast-moving water
beneath her. Rapids? The underground river? she wondered.
Suddenly, the floor below her split open and Jillian fell through
screaming. She landed, scared stiff, on a suspended rope
bridge, which was rotted in some places. She held on for dear
life and looked down in horror at the swiftly moving dark river,
illuminated by her halogen lamp. Petrified, her knuckles white
from gripping the rope, she looked around the cave and could
faintly see an outline of daylight streaming into the cave,
farther down the river... Jillian looked ahead to see where the
bridge led to, maybe she could crawl to the other side, but all
she saw was just another dark tunnel and the rope bridge
didn’t look very safe... Suddenly, she felt it move under her
and got a better grip of it just in time as the rotted remains of
the bridge broke. She found herself swinging on a very thin
cord forty feet above a swiftly moving river.
The Boys Club may now be the Boys and Girls Club, but bad writing is still bad writing.
The Magic Medallion (2006) by Mary Cunningham is a time travel adventure in which Cynthia
and Gus are swept into an underground river while searching a Southern Indiana cave for a lost
medallion. An excerpt:
I went flailing into the water the split second Cynthia reached out to grab me. I couldn't see
what happened to her, but the scream I heard and the following splash said it all.
The current seemed to be moving faster and faster. I tried unsuccessfully to grab onto the
rough ledge, but instead, I floated deeper and deeper into the cave.
I helplessly tumbled over and over in the blackness and thought about the irony of the
swimming trophies and scout badges I'd collected over the past three summers. Hmmmphh. A
lot of good that did me!
With every breath, I gulped more and more water. A feeling that I probably wasn't going to get
out of this alive swept over me, and at the same time I wondered if Cynthia was faring any
better. For some reason, it was comforting to know that she was probably going to drown with
me...
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