Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio

by David Standish

  On the Polar King, frustrated at trying to find an opening in the ring of polar ice, they fire one of their powerful guns containing shells of “terrorite” at it—a supergunpowder of White’s invention—cleaving the mountain of ice and creating a narrow passage to, yes, the open polar sea lying beyond. As they sail into it, White reflects, “I was romantic, idealistic. I loved the marvelous, the magnificent, and the mysterious … I wished to discover all that was weird and wonderful on the earth.” And does his wish ever come true.

  White says he became absorbed in this polar quest after learning about the failure of a recent expedition whose ship was frozen in at Smith’s Sound in Baffin Bay, but had tried for the pole in a “monster balloon,” failing when the balloon’s car smashed into an iceberg. This reminded him of “the ill-fated Sir John Franklin and Jeannette expeditions,” which in turn led him to read “almost every narrative of polar discovery” and to converse “with Arctic navigators both in England and the United States.” His polar homework fits neatly into a tradition of hollow earth novels going back to Symmes and Poe. He says he found it strange that modern sailors “could only get three degrees nearer the pole than Henry Hudson did nearly three hundred years ago,” and when his father opportunely dies and leaves him a huge fortune, he decides to try for the pole. He builds the Polar King according to his own advanced specs, one being a handy device also of his own invention, an “apparatus that both heated the ship and condensed the sea water for consumption on board ship and for feeding the boilers.” As he’s listing the other provisioning details, the first hint of the novel’s deep eccentricity appears. Along with “the usual Arctic outfit to withstand the terrible climate of high latitudes,” White has a special item of clothing made for all:

  Believing in the absolute certainty of discovering the pole and our consequent fame, I had included in the ship’s stores a special triumphal outfit for both officers and sailors. This consisted of a Viking helmet of polished brass surmounted by the figure of a silver-plated polar bear, to be worn by both officers and sailors. Each officer and sailor was armed with a cutlass having the figure of a polar bear in silver-plated brass surmounting the hilt.

  White sets out with his ace crew, not via Greenland and Baffin Bay as so many had before him, but through the Bering Straits, despite the Jeannette expedition’s horrific experiences while attempting the same route.60 They encounter the open polar sea and the usual abundance of wildlife up there, and at last Professor Starbottle, the chief scientist aboard, proclaims, “I am afraid, Commander, we will never reach the pole … we are falling into the interior of the earth!” After predictable shouts of “Turn back the ship!” the pilot observes that they are still sailing along nicely. “If the earth is a hollow shell having a subterranean ocean, we can sail thereon bottom upward and masts downward, just as easily as we sail on the surface of the ocean here.” Here, as in other hollow earth novels, ideas of gravity are conveniently cockeyed. They press on into the polar opening. “The prow of the Polar King was pointed directly toward the darkness before us, toward the centre of the earth.” A dozen of the more fearful sailors are permitted to take a boat and head back where they came from.

  About 250 miles down into the abyss they begin to experience lessened gravity, while getting their first glimpse of “an orb of rosy flame”—Swang, the inner earth sun. Professor Starbottle exclaims, surveying the scene with his telescope, “The whole interior planet is covered with continents and oceans just like the outer sphere!”

  “‘We have discovered El Dorado,’ said the Captain.”

  “‘The heaviest elements fall to the centre of all spheres,’ said Professor Goldrock. ‘I am certain we shall discover mountains of gold ere we return.’” Ideas of profit never lag far behind the excitement of discovery.

  A storm comes up after a week’s subterranean sailing, providing the first real taste of the sensuous detail to come:

  The sun grew dark and appeared like a disc of sombre gold. The ocean was lashed by a furious hurricane into incredible mountains of water. Every crest of the waves seemed a mass of yellow flame. The internal heavens were rent open with gulfs of sulphur-colored fire … a golden-yellow phosphorescence covered the ocean. The water boiled in maddening eddies of lemon-colored seas, while from the hurricane decks streamed cataracts of saffron fire. The lightning, like streaks of molten gold, hurled its burning darts into the sea. Everything bore the glow of amber-colored fire.

  There is a sumptuous, painterly quality to the writing throughout the book. This is a hollow earth paradise of exquisite detail described in exquisite detail, literally reveling in it, though after a while it almost becomes overwhelming, like one too many bites of a thirteen-layer German chocolate cake. This hyperestheti-cism is part of Atvatabar’s larger purpose—to show a society as devoted to art and spirituality as most are to profit and power. It’s as if Bradshaw is straining to take the visual ideas and aesthetics of newly developing art nouveau—a style that had just come along in the 1880s, breaking with classicism, emphasizing rich organic qualities—and render them in prose. One goal of art nouveau (which had its origins in the 1860s with William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement) was to integrate beauty into everyday life, to make people’s lives better by greater exposure to it, and this is a main pillar of the civilization White & Co. encounter—before they begin crashing around in it ruining everything, anyway.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son, Julian, wrote the introduction to The Goddess of Atvatabar, in which he raves about the novel as a fine example of portraying the “ideal” in fiction, taking the opportunity to beat such “realists” as Zola and Tolstoy about the head and shoulders and claiming that their day has come and gone—a singularly wrongheaded judgment that served his own writerly purposes. Like Bradshaw’s novel, Julian Hawthorne’s fiction chiefly dealt with the fantastic and the supernatural. After citing Symmes, Verne, and Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race—proof he’s done his hollow earth homework—Hawthorne declares that Bradshaw “has not fallen below the highest standard that has been erected by previous writers,” and in fact “has achieved a work of art which may rightfully be termed great.” It’s actually superior to Verne, who, “in composing a similar story, would stop short with a description of mere physical adventure.” Bradshaw goes beyond this, creating “in conjunction therewith an interior world of the soul, illuminated with the still more dazzling sun of ideal love in all its passion and beauty.” This world of the soul lies at Atvatabar’s core:

  The religion of the new race is based upon the worship of the human soul, whose powers have been developed to a height unthought of by our section of mankind, although on lines the commencement of which are already within our view. The magical achievements of theosophy and occultism, as well as the ultimate achievements of orthodox science, are revealed in their most amazing manifestations, and with a sobriety and minuteness of treatment that fully satisfies what may be called the transcendental reader.

  While it strives for a certain high-mindedness, The Goddess of Atvatabar is shot through with elements of Gilbert and Sullivan–style comic opera. The Polar King’s first encounter with the people down here comes when the crew sees several flying soldiers, hovering above the ship like large bumblebees, wearing strange uniforms and flapping mechanical wings. Flathootley, the resident buffoon, makes a leap at one, who flits out of the way, leaving Flathootley to plop into the ocean, from which he is rescued by one of the flying soldiers, who deposits him back on deck—and is promptly captured as a reward for his kindness. Examining the captive’s wings, they discover that a small “dynamo” powers them, consisting “of a central wheel made to revolve by the attraction of a vast occult force evolved from the contact of two metals … a colossal current of mysterious magnetism made the wheel revolve.” Here again electromagnetism appears as the occult force that propels all sorts of ingenious gadgets down here in Plutusia, as the realm is known.

  Lyone, the goddess of Atvatabar, in all her over-the-top splen
dor.

  They learn Atvatabarese from the two flying soldiers, who direct the Polar King to Atvatabar’s principal port and fill them in on the basics of the geography and social structure. The layout of the interior world is analogous to the known surface world—its map is reproduced here on page 186. The government is an elective monarchy, with a king and nobles elected for life. “The largest building in Calnogor was the Bormidophia, or pantheon, where the worship of the gods was held. The only living object of worship was the Lady Lyone, the Supreme Goddess of Atvatabar. There were different kinds of golden gods worshipped, or symbols that represented the inventive forces, art, and spiritual power.” The summary continues: “The Atvatabarese were very wealthy, gold being as common as iron in the outer world.” As always, luxury beyond imagination is the rule down here. Things are really up-to-date in Atvatabar:

  There were plenty of newspapers, and the most wonderful inventions had been in use for ages. Railroads, pneumatic tubes, telegraphs, telephones, phonographs, electric lights, rain makers, seaboots, marine railroads, flying machines, megaphones, velocipedes without wheels, aërophers, etc., were quite common, not to speak of such inventions as sowing, reaping, sewing, bootblacking and knitting machines. Of course printing, weaving, and such like machines had been in use since the dawn of history. Strange to say they had no steam engines, and terrorite and gunpowder were unknown. Their great source of power was magnicity, generated by the two powerful metals terrelium and aquelium, and compressed air their explosive force.

  The bockhockids, shown here towering above the crowd, are “immense walking machines” reminiscent of ostriches. These are the ungainly mounts of the Atvatabarese cavalry and police force.

  The lillipoutum, shown here, “was another wonderful creature, half-plant, half-bird.”

  “They were a peaceful people, and Atvatabar being itself an immense island continent, lying far from any other land, there had been no wars with any external nation, nor even civil war, for over a hundred years.” As soon as virile Commander White lays eyes on Lyone, not only fetching but a goddess to boot, Atvatabar’s comfortable tranquillity is doomed.

  The Polar King pulls up to the wharf—constructed of white marble—to a huge festive greeting by the governor and welcoming throngs that include regiments of cavalry mounted on mechanical ostriches. “They were forty feet in height from toe to head … The iron muscles of legs and body, moved by a powerful magnic motor inside the body of the monster, acted on bones of hollow steel.” As the sailors scurry up the legs to mount them, “a military band composed of fifty musicians, each mounted on a bockhockid, played the March of Atvatabar in soul-stirring strains … A brigade of five thousand bockhockids fell into line as an escort of honor,” and it’s off in procession through the beautiful all-marble city. These ungainly, not to say wildly unlikely, bockhockids would suggest this is satire, but given all the other oddball stuff in the book, I’d have to say it’s not. Rather it seems to be evidence that Bradshaw was letting his imagination sprout any strange fruit it might—and may have had a little help from his chemical friends as well. There’s a distinctly druggy cast to the whole business. Another such example from a little farther on is a little botanical garden containing specimens merging the plant and animal kingdoms, flowers blooming kitten heads, flitting birds trailing aerial roots. A spoof on Darwin? Or just trippy flashes? My vote goes to the latter. There’s a hypersensuous quality, a reveling in minute physical detail and description practically for its own sake—along with these stoner ideas—that suggests Bradshaw may have been indulging in some writer’s little helpers.

  Boarding the Sacred Locomotive, after appropriate preparatory prayers (“Glorious annihilator of time and space, lord of distance, imperial courier”), White and a few officers are whisked five hundred miles inland to Calnogor for a reception with the king and queen. Between heady glasses of squang, the king explains Atvatabar’s religion to White. “We worship the human soul,” he says, “under a thousand forms, arranged in three great circles of deities.” These are the gods of invention, the gods of art, and a third group containing “the spiritual gods of sorcery, magic and love.” Together “this universal human soul forms the one supreme god Harikar, whom we worship in the person of a living woman, the Supreme Goddess Lyone.”

  (above) Lyone’s Aerial Yacht (left) and The Sacred Locomotive (right). Note too Atvatabar’s dramatic, picturesque landscape.

  The king drones on, detailing the various religious divisions. After the obligatory tour of religious temples, they’re taken to meet the living goddess Lyone, who is lovely, with bright blue hair and “firm and splendid” breasts. “I was entranced with the appearance of the divine girl … All at once she gazed at me! I felt filled with a fever of delicious delight, of intoxicating adoration.”

  “Our religion is a state of ecstatic joy,” Lyone says, “chiefly found in the cultured friendship of counterpart souls, who form complete circles with each other.” They are known as “twin-souls,” and there are twenty thousand in Egyplosis, where Lyone and these devotees live.

  When Lyone is called to Egyplosis to oversee the installation of a twin-soul, White is invited to go along on her aerial yacht, another ornate contraption powered by magnicity. This seat of worship is a city consisting of a great temple carved from a single block of pale green marble, with “one hundred subterranean temples and labyrinths” beneath it, having “the enchanted charm of Hindoo and Greek architecture, together with the thrilling ecstasy of Gothic shrines.” Bradshaw can’t resist voluptuous descriptions that amount to aesthetic heavy breathing:

  The chief temple at Egyplosis was interiorly of semi-circular shape, like a Greek theatre, five hundred feet in width. It was covered like the pantheon with a sculptured roof and dome of many-colored glass. The roof was one hundred and thirty feet above the lowest tier of seats beneath. The walls were laboriously sculptured dado and field and frieze, with bas-reliefs of the same character as the golden throne of the gods that stood at the centre of the semi-circle.

  The Living Battery consists of hundreds of twin-souls.

  The dado was thirty-two feet in height, on which were carved the emblems of every possible machine, implement or invention that conferred supremacy over nature in idealized grandeur. Battles of flying wayleals [soldiers] and races of bockhockids were carved in great confusion. It was a splendid reunion of science and art…

  Above all rose the dome whose lights were fadeless. The pavement of the temple had been chiselled in the form of a longitudinal hollow basin, containing a series of wide terraces of polished stone, whereon were placed divans of the richest upholstery. In each divan sat a winged twin-soul, priest and priestess, the devotees of hopeless love. On the throne itself sat Lyone, the supreme goddess, in the semi-nude splendor of the pantheon, arranged with tiara and jewelled belt and flowing skirt of sea-green aquelium lace. She made a picture divinely entrancing and noble. Supporting the throne was an immense pedestal of polished marble, fully one hundred feet in diameter and twenty feet in height, which stood upon a wide and elevated pavement of solid silver, whereon the priests and priestesses officiated in the services to the goddess. On crimson couches sat their majesties the king and queen of Atvatabar, together with the great officers of the realm. Next to the royal group myself and the officers and seamen of the Polar King occupied seats of honor. Behind, around and above us, filling the immense temple, rose the concave mass of twin-souls numbering ten thousand individuals, each seated with a counterpart soul. The garments of both priests and priestesses were fashioned in a style somewhat resembling the decorative dresses seen on Greek and Japanese vases, yet wholly original in design. In many cases the priestesses were swathed in transparent tissues that revealed figures like pale olive gold within.

  Stop him before he describes more!

  Afterward, in a private audience, Lyone and White at last get down to it. “The pleasure we aspire to is superior to any physical delight,” she insists. “It is the quintessence
of existence. We are willing to pay the price of hopelessness to taste such nectar.” She explains that at one time in its past, Atvatabar experimented with a form of free love, but the result was disastrous: “unbridled license devastated the country.” So the lawmakers reestablished marriage as “the only law suitable to mankind.” But some of these married couples chose to remain celibate, and “for these Egyplosis was founded, for the study and practice of what is really a higher development of human nature and in itself an unquestionable good.” This higher state of celibacy, of course, echoes the practices of many nineteenth-century utopian communities, from the Rappites to the Koreshans.

  But White isn’t convinced. “Hopeless love seems to me one of the most disquieting things in life. Its victims, happy and unhappy, resisting passion with regret or yielding with remorse, are ever on the rack of torture.” Is everyone content with their celibate state here? he asks. Just then they hear a terrible commotion, shouts, a woman shrieking. Two twin-souls are brought before Lyone, and the woman of the pair is carrying a beautiful baby. Apparently not everyone. “Did you not think of your lifelong vows of celibacy?” asks Lyone. “We have,” says the youth. “Such vows are a violation of nature. Everything here bids us love, but the artificial system under which we have lived arbitrarily draws a line and says, thus far and no further. Your system may suit disembodied spirits, if such exist, but not beings of flesh and blood. It is an outrage on nature. We desire to leave Egyplosis.” And furthermore, he says, “There are thousands of twin-souls ready to cast off this yoke. They only await a leader to break out in open revolt.”