Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 25 -- Radio Days and Saturday Matinees
In the honeycombed maze is an underground river with fish bones piled along its banks.
When the guide flees and is found clawed to death, the professor grasps the horrifying possibility
that the trapped wagon train had found the river and their descendants, blind with other senses
magnified, yet survived.
Flashlights fail and the scientist is likewise killed. Martin is attacked soon thereafter, but regains
consciousness with "a heavy, calloused hand" washing his face. Desperate, he jumps into the
river and his savior jumps after him. Martin again passes out and when he wakes a second time,
he and the creature are on a sand bar on the Colorado River.
The story of terror, perfect for radio. The twist at the end is the only possible effective ending.
In “The Unknown,” Family Theater, September 16, 1953, a reporter and a fading socialite
descend by cable beneath the Pyrenees and trek along an uncharted passage until they
encounter an impassable underground gorge.
The woman: What do you think is down there?
The man: More limestone.
The woman: No, there’s something more. There’s mystery in all that blackness... All my life,
I’ve been running, I’ve been afraid. Now I know it’s got to stop.
Against her partner's protestations, she lowers herself into the darkness, pursuing the distant
rumble of an underground river. Then something appears which she describes in unmistakably
religious terms.
The woman: Oh, Dick you should see!… A huge cave, back under the shelf. It’s like a
cathedral!”
The man: Can you see the river?
The woman: No, but I detect a little spring, sort of a, sort of a tiny little waterfall, bursting out of
the rock. It looks almost like a fount. Oh, Dick. I’ve got to go in there!
Perhaps it's an allusion to the fount of Exodus 17:6 (Chapter 4, The Cross). In her own way, she
finds what she was seeking -- the courage to live.
Gumshoes must deal with counterfeiters who duck underground.
From the December 6, 1956, Dick Tracy strip, the underground
river escape tunnel known only to Rodney.
B-Grade Cinema
A Boys Club of years past would never have missed the Saturday matinee at the Bijou.
Harry Houdini starred in The Master Mystery (1919), a 15-part film serial released simultaneously
with the novel of the same name in which Quentin Locke, scientist, agent of the U.S. Department
of Justice and escape artist extraordinaire, takes on a band of criminals and a metal robot, "The
Automaton," which has been robbing inventors of their patent rights.
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