Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 30 -- Down to a Sunless Sea
other indication that they had come at all near to the source of the mysterious underground
river. The light of their torches but dimly revealed the roaring torrent ceaselessly speeding out
from dark, distant channels like those
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA.
Robert Bennet's Out of the Depths: A Romance of Reclamation (1913) provides a platform from
which to promote engineering.
"It's sure some canon," admitted her husband. "That French
artist Doré ought to have seen it."
"If only we had a copy of Dante's Inferno to read here on the
brink!" she whispered.
"It always reminds me of Coleridge's poem," murmured Isobel,
and she quoted in an awed whisper:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man,
DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA.
"Fortunately for us, this is a canyon, not a string of measureless
caverns," said Blake. "It can be measured, one way or another.
If I had a transit, I could calculate the depth at any point where
the water shows -- triangulate with a vertical angle. But it would
cause a long delay to send on for a transit. We shall first try to
chain down at that gulch break."
"Adventures in a Cavern," Outing, October 1914-March 1915, by Horace Kephart, reports "What
Two Men Found in One of Earth's Secret Places Among the Ozark Hills."
But there is a fascination in solving the mystery of what has lain for untold ages beyond human
ken; in venturing, as we were about to venture, where no foot of man has ever trod. What was
there within these forbidding arches? Vast chambers, perhaps hung with weird pendants, walls
glittering with crystals, forests of stalagmites, columns of alabaster or of "onyx." There might be
relics of prehistoric races buried in stone since some past geological epoch, petrifactions of
plants and animals that died ages before man was born, living species unknown to the upper
world. There might be dripping springs trickling through crannies in the rock, rills rumbling from
ledge to ledge in fairy waterfalls and gathering far below in some subterranean stream that ran
Through caverns measureless to man
DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA.
"Prehistoric Remains (Forts and Dolmens) in Burren and Its South Western Border, Co. Clare,"
Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 5:1, March 31, 1915, is a droll geographic
piece by Thomas Westropp, but such can be spiced up by poetic reference.
There the fissured grey crag, level as a pavement, shelters in its clefts the hartstongue and
maidenhair ferns. There the underground stream runs "DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA."
"The Humanizing of Knowledge," Science, July 28, 1922, undertakes "to introduce the scientist to
himself," a formidable task, indeed. Quotations within the passage below, other than that from
Kubla Kahn, are from Alfred Tennyson.
Among the wonderers and pointers-out the poet, who "fancy light from Fancy caught," whose
"thought leapt out to wed with thought," has always been surest of a large audience. For
songs, heroic tales and rhapsodies can be attuned to the heart's desire-they are magic carpets
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