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

by David Standish

  The Intermerans also have a device that’s rather like an online fax machine. When the displaced narrator asks for news from home, his host goes to a cabinet and opens it: “Soon his hands began to move with rhythmic rapidity over the curiously inlaid center of the flat surface of the open cabinets. At the end of ten or fifteen minutes his manipulations ceased, a compartment noiselessly opened, and eight beautifully printed pages, four by six inches, bound in the form of a booklet, fell upon the table. The pages before me comprised a compendium of yesterday’s doings of the entire world.” In their opinion, surface events, which they keep close track of, are really stupid. “Selfishness, oppression, slaughter, pride, conquest, greed, vanity, self-adulation and base passions make up ninety-nine one-hundredths of this record,” sighs the host. This leads him into a tirade against surface world newspapers. He says this objective compendium “is to promote wisdom. The newspaper [exists] to feed vicious or depraved appetite, as well as to convey useful information. This is the cold, colorless, passionless record of facts and information, from which knowledge and wisdom may be deduced to some extent. Your newspaper is the opposite, taken in its entirety. It consists of the inextricable mingling together of the good and the bad, of the useful and the useless, and the elevating and the degrading, the latter always in the ascendant.”

  Sounds like he’s been reading the papers, all right. In fact, this critique comes from someone who spent much of his career writing them. Taylor was an Ohio lawyer born in 1837 who turned to newspaper work in 1858, and was associated with various papers (chiefly the Cincinnati Enquirer) until 1900. So he knew the failings of American newspapers from the inside.

  Gabriel de Tarde’s Underground Man, first published in 1896, appeared in English translation in 1905 with a preface by H. G. Wells. This hollow earth novel by a French sociologist set in the thirty-first century is a satire on prevailing sociological thinking. It tells the story of how a near-utopia had been created on the surface, until the sun began sputtering out and dying, killing nearly all of mankind. Those remaining are driven beneath the surface, where they establish yet another utopia, bristling with thoroughly modern machines and techniques: thermal power, electric trains, monocyles, and other gizmos. But the main idea is that being driven underground has “produced, so to say, a purificaton of society.” It has, in effect, changed human nature. He writes:

  Secluded thus from every influence of the natural milieu into which it was hitherto plunged and confined, the social milieu was for the first time able to reveal and display its true virtues, and the real social bond appeared in all its vigor and purity. It might be said that destiny had desired to make in our case an extended sociological experiment for its own edification by placing us in such extraordinarily unique conditions…. The mental space left by the reduction of our needs is taken up by those talents—artistic, poetic, and scientific—which multiply and take deep root. They become the true needs of society. They spring from a necessity to produce and not from a necessity to consume.

  Worth noting is that this perfect society has been produced by “the complete elimination of living nature, whether animal or vegetable, man only excepted.” This idea of completely overcoming nature, subduing and totally dominating it, was one that had been growing during the nineteenth century. And how could it not, given the ceaseless succession of scientific and technical marvels that just kept unfolding? So in Underground Man de Tarde pushes such hubris to the limits, by getting rid of nature entirely!

  The Smoky God (1908) by Willis George Emerson has a familiar structure but is more charming than many, thanks to the narrator’s voice, as told to Emerson, the putative editor. Ninety-five-year-old Norwegian Olaf Janson had this adventure in 1829 when he was a teenager, so the telling combines the innocence of a young boy with an old man’s nostalgia. Olaf and his father set off on a fishing voyage to the north in a small sloop and sail over the long gradual curve of a Symmes’ Hole into the interior. There they encounter a beautiful, verdant land lit and warmed by a reddish central sun—the smoky god—and peopled by a race of gentle giants who live to be six hundred years old. They’re twelve feet tall and dress like medieval Scandinavian peasants, with big gold buckles on their shoes—gold being common as beach pebbles there.

  The argument for the existence of this inner paradise is the same one that Edmond Halley made over two hundred years earlier: it is demanded by God’s purpose and parsimony regarding waste. It had to be there. The Smoky God goes farther. The inner earth is “the cradle of the human race,” the original Eden. In fact, “God created the earth for the ‘within’—that is to say, for its lands, seas, rivers, mountains, forests and valleys, and for its other internal conveniences, while the outside surface of the earth is merely the veranda, the porch … in the beginning this old world of ours was created solely for the ‘within’ world.” It’s not so far from the beliefs of Cyrus Teed, except he thought we were all still inside.

  Olaf and his father are treated to the standard tour, but the novel mercifully treads lightly on the details of the utopia, dealing more with the adventure of getting there and finally, after great hardship, getting home. But we do learn a few things. The smoky red sun is like a natural gro-lite for plants and animals—trees a thousand feet tall, herds of huge elephants, great soaring birds. They are an agricultural people, but they, too, have super fast ships and monorail bullet trains powered by a force suspiciously like electricity. And perhaps most civilized of all, “the people are exceedingly musical. Their cities are equipped with vast palaces of music, where not infrequently as many as twenty-five thousand lusty voices of this giant race swell forth in mighty choruses of the most sublime symphonies.”

  After two years there, Olaf and his father decide it’s time to head for home. They try to return to the surface via the northern opening, but the strong prevailing winds beat against them, so they turn around and practically fly southward and through the opening there. In rough Antarctic seas their fishing boat overturns, Olaf’s father is killed, and Olaf is rescued by a Scottish whaler—and promptly clapped in irons as a madman when he relates what’s happened to him. On getting back to Norway, he tells his story again—and is put in an insane asylum for nearly thirty years. When he gets out, he becomes a successful fisherman, and finally retires to sunny Southern California—“living alone in an unpretentious bungalow out Glendale way, a short distance from the business district of Los Angeles”—where on his deathbed he tells his tale one final time to Emerson.

  By 1908 the hollow earth had become enough of an established landmark on the literary landscape that it had been added to the map of children’s books. In that year two were published, one by a celebrated writer, and another by a writer chiefly celebrated under many pseudonyms.

  L. Frank Baum’s career had been spotty before The Wonderful Wizard of Oz came out in 1900 and became the year’s best-selling book, establishing a franchise for him for the rest of his life—whether he liked it or not. Born in 1856 near Syracuse, New York, to an oil magnate father and a women’s rights activist mother, Baum suffered a lifelong heart ailment that limited his physical activity and expanded his imagination. At fourteen his father gave him a little printing press, and the next year he was writing and publishing a paper, the Rose Lawn Home Journal, in which some of the local businesses even bought advertising. He had an early passion for theater, encouraged by his father, who owned a string of theaters in New York and Pennsylvania—which Baum began managing while in his early twenties. In 1881 he wrote and starred in a musical called The Maid of Arran, which played to good reviews. He also began breeding prize Hamburg chickens, which led to his first book in 1886—The Book of Hamburgs, A Brief Treatise upon the Mating, Rearing, and Management of the Different Varieties of Hamburgs—a long way from Dorothy and her companions. About this time the family fortunes took a nosedive, and Baum moved his wife and children to the Dakota Territory, where he operated a general store in Aberdeen until it went under in 1890. He then got a job runnin
g the local paper. When the paper failed—like his store, victim of the hard times in the early 1890s—he moved to Chicago and took a reporting job on the Evening Post. In 1897 he teamed up with illustrator Maxfield Parrish to produce Mother Goose in Prose, which became a best seller. In 1900 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz quickly became a blockbuster, selling over 90,000 copies within two years.62 Sequel followed sequel—he wrote thirteen Oz books before his death in 1919. The fourth, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908), took the Oz crowd down into the hollow earth.

  The story opens with Dorothy and her kitten, Eureka, getting off a train from San Francisco at a little station stop town in California, where she’s met by a boy named Zeb. He puts them in a buggy drawn by Jim, his bony old horse, and they head off for her uncle’s ranch. But moments later, the ground shakes and cracks open (this was being written just a year after the devastating San Francisco earthquake), and suddenly they’re falling through darkness down into the hollow interior. Dorothy faints but revives as they continue slowly falling, realizing that she isn’t going to die. “She had merely started upon another adventure, which promised to be just as queer and unusual as were those she had before encountered.”

  Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908), in which some of the Oz crowd visited the hollow earth. (© 1908 by L. Frank Baum)

  Good advertising for what’s to come, but not quite true. Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz lacks the moral depth and resonance of the original, in which the characters seek spiritual qualities—wisdom, courage, and heart. In this one, after they land safely in the hollow earth, they pass through a number of fancifully peculiar kingdoms trying to find their way back to the surface; but while diverting, their adventures don’t really add up to much more than that.

  They first come to the Land of the Mangaboos, plant people who grow on bushes and live in glass houses. The Wizard shows up in a hot-air balloon that has also fallen through a crack and has a magic showdown with the resident Sorcerer, in which the Wiz chops the Sorcerer in half with a sword. But no problem—he can be replanted! The Mangaboos drive these Meat Creatures into a dark mountain cave and seal it with stones. The cave leads to the Valley of Voe, another beautiful land, this one inhabited by invisible people. They eat a special fruit to keep them that way, so that the fierce red bears also living there can’t see them and devour them. One of the Voe people gives them directions to Pyramid Mountain, beyond which lies the Land of the Gargoyles, whose inhabitants prove to be aggressive wooden people.

  Dorothy and her faithful pals—Zeb, the farm boy; Jim, the talking cab horse; and Eureka, the mischievous kitten—are plunged into the hollow earth during a California earthquake. (© 1908 by L. Frank Baum)

  Finally, just as they seem hopelessly trapped in a cave full of Dragons, Dorothy remembers that Ozma has a magic picture hanging in her room in Oz, in which she can see whatever Dorothy’s doing. By making a special sign to Ozma, she and her friends can instantly be transported to Oz. Of course, if she had thought of this handy solution earlier, the novel would have been a lot shorter. Soon they are safely back in the Emerald City. After some adventures there, it’s time to use the Magic Belt and go home.

  The other hollow earth novel for kids, 5000 Miles Underground (1908), was written by one of the all-time champions of the pseudonym—Howard Garis. Born in Binghamton, New York, in 1873, his first writing job was as an editor on Sunny-side —a trade magazine for undertakers. In 1896 he went to work for the Newark Evening News and began writing children’s stories on the side. He resigned the newspaper job in 1908 to work for the Stratemeyer Syndicate—a juvenile fiction factory that turned out series titles by the dozens, using writers who worked under various ongoing house pseudonyms. As Victor Appleton, Garis wrote the first thirty-five Tom Swift novels himself, and that was just a drop in his bucket. He also wrote a number of the early Bobbsey Twins books, as well as titles in numerous series now forgotten. And in 1910, under his own name, he created Uncle Wiggley, that wise old rheumatic gentleman rabbit, as a daily feature for the Newark Evening News—averaging a story a day (except Sunday) until 1947. Uncle Wiggley was a hit from the start, leading to many books, tie-in merchandising (much of it designed by Garis himself) that included clothes and dishes, a board game, as well as a popular radio show. Garis’ cumulative output is positively staggering. Altogether it’s estimated that during his long life—Garis died at the age of 89 in 1962—he wrote more than 15,000 stories and about 500 books. Even more remarkable is the fact that for the form, much of it is really quite good.

  Written under the pseudonym Roy Rockwood, 5000 Miles Underground was the third in a series called Marvel Tales and featured an eccentric inventor, two plucky teenage orphan boys, a taciturn big-game hunter descended from Jules Verne’s Hans, and a “comic” black servant named Washington White who murders English and is afraid of everything.

  As the story opens, the Professor has cobbled together an all-purpose dirigible/boat fit for going down under. His Rube Goldberg wizardry is quintessentially American and emblematic of the period. A fictional mega-Edison, he can invent anything, out of anything. His Flying Mermaid incorporates and fancifully improves on many of the ideas and devices that were new at the time—flight, electrical gadgetry, and so on—as well as a few that have yet to be worked out, such as his secret “anti-gravity gas,” five times lighter than hydrogen, that allows his cigar-shaped double-hulled 150-foot Mermaid to scoot along at high speed using blasts of electrically generated compressed air as fuel.

  After a successful test run, the chipper all-male contingent (not a single girl in this one—presumably perfect for the target readership of twelve-year-old boys) heads toward the South Pole to the hole where the ocean pours into the earth’s interior. But first, they’re attacked by a whale, which Andy the hunter, without a moment’s hesitation, shoots in the eye, understandably distracting the creature from going after them. Right after that, they fly over a burning ship and rescue its crew—a major mistake, since they prove to be vicious pirates who take over the Mermaid. By faking a near crash, they con the pirates into jumping ship near an uninhabited island and are again safely on their way. During the voyage, one of the boys begins to suspect that they have a mysterious stowaway aboard, but the Professor pooh-poohs the idea. They find the hole leading inside, and it’s down the dark wet scary drain, for hundreds of miles, until, as you might expect, they plop into a sunny beautiful land. One more unspoiled paradise down there—where, as in The Smoky God and others, conditions are so salubrious that everything grows on a gigantic scale. It’s just so darn great there that everything’s bigger, too!

  They’ve come to rest in a field of grass and clover as tall as a house, with red and yellow flowers the size of easy chairs. The Professor decides it’s due to some unusual quality of the atmosphere and quickly produces a cosmological theory: “I believe we are on a sort of small earth that is inside the larger one we live on. This sphere floats in space, just as our earth does, and we have passed through a void that lies between our globe and this interior one. I think this new earth is about a quarter the size of ours and in some respects the same. In others it is vastly different.”

  Mark, one of the boys, says he thinks he saw a strange figure fleeing the ship after they landed, but nobody pays attention to him. Soon they begin exploring, and it’s trouble right away. Jack stumbles down a steep hill into the cup of an enormous pitcher plant—those gently carnivorous plants best known on the surface as the Venus flytrap. Jack’s fallen in and is covered with its sweet digestive goo. But they chop him out before any harm is done. Ants the size of “large rats” come swarming to the mess, as the intrepid explorers move on to an orchard where six-foot peaches grow on vines and several grasshoppers the size of motorcycles are pushing a ripe one along. Andy characteristically wants to blast a couple to kingdom come but is dissuaded on the grounds that they probably aren’t very good to eat.

  After many days of travel and a close encounter with a deadly half-plant, half-animal “snake tre
e,” they come upon something truly weird—a delirium tremens monstrosity that “had the body of a bear, but the feet and legs were those of an alligator, while the tail trailed out behind like a snake, and the head had a long snout, not unlike the trunk of an elephant. The creature was about ten feet long and five feet in height.” Andy is eager to shoot it, but it’s suddenly caught in a geyser and drops to the ground dead—not far from a twelve-foot giant. Only Mark sees him before he disappears into the underbrush. Can it be their stowaway?

  They continue for several days more, until they come upon a village, whose buildings consist of mounds rudely made from clay—dwellings of a half-civilized Mud Age people. Suddenly, “seeming to rise from the very ground, all about the ship, there appeared a throng of men … Not one was less than ten feet tall, and some were nearly fifteen! ‘The giants have us!’ cried Bill, as he saw the horde of creatures surrounding the ship.”

  A brief battle ensues, and the giants prove to practically be made of mud themselves. A peculiarity of increased gravity has made the giants’ bodies soft and pliant, unmuscular. “They look like men made of putty! They’re soft as snow men!” Our explorers prevail for a while, but sheer numbers do them in and they’re finally captured. The Putty People are about to execute them, when a figure even taller than the rest appears wearing golden armor and bearing a golden sword. He orders everyone to stop! It’s the Putty People’s long-lost king, who was the mysterious stowaway on the Mermaid. He got stuck on the surface after riding a waterspout up, and he is eternally grateful to the Professor and his crew for bringing him back home. His land is their land.