Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 30 -- Down to a Sunless Sea
Unlike the Chapter 19 plot of lost-world tales, "Down to the sunless sea" plot does not peak at
midpoint. The phrase is cited now, more than ever before.
We'll quote from a few publications, capitalizing DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA for emphasis,
starting with The Journals of Mary Shelley: 1814-1844.
My imagination finds other vents -- my Kubla Khan
My stately pleasure house
Through which a mighty river ran
DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA
DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA of oblivion which drinks any aspiration, my butterfly winged
dreams which flit about my mind, illumine its recesses -- and finish an ephemeral existence, to
give place to another generation.
George A. Sala's A Journey Due North: Being Notes of a
Residence in Russia (1858) may be a bit obtuse, but Charles
Dickens thought it suitable to preview in his Household Words of
January 3, 1857.
That beefsteak and trimmings with which on board the little
pyroscaphe that brought me to this Vampire Venice -- this
Arabian Nightmare -- this the reality of Coleridge's distempered,
opium-begotten Xanadu; (for here of a surety lives, or lived,
The Kubla Khan who decreed the stately pleasure dome,
And possessed the caverns measureless to man,
Through which ran that river
DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA
-- that beefsteak and trimmings, ruble-costing, with which
coming to Xanadu -- I mean St. Petersburg -- I was incautious
enough to feed the wide-mouthed Petersen, did not turn out
wholly unproductive to me.
Dickens turned again to Coleridge's line in "Up and Down the Great
Sun Garden," All the Year Round, August 8, 1862.
The travelers' first object was attained. The mountain had told its
story. The river was now to be questioned. This river Limbang is
the Nile of Borneo, whose sources in the far interior are yet
undiscovered. The natives talked of it as a second Alph,
The sacred stream which ran
Through caverns measureless by man,
DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA.
It rushed, they declared, through miles of natural tunnel; beyond,
it meandered through a seven days' journey of smooth land,
peopled by tame goats without masters; but no one had been
among these goats, nor visited the watery caverns.
Henry M. Alden 's "Thomas De Quincey," published in the September 1863 Atlantic Monthly,
waxes in metaphor.
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