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

by David Standish

  He directs them to an abandoned temple heaped with diamonds and gold, telling them to take as much as they like. They find it and load up, but then realize their entry hole has been closed by an earthquake. The only way back to the surface is to ride the waterspout. Luckily the Professor has brought along a waterproof escape cylinder that’s just the ticket for riding the waterspout, but they’ll only have room for a few token diamonds in their pockets during the return ride. So it’s up, up, and away in an exit borrowed from Verne. They float in the Atlantic until they’re picked up by a passing ship and soon are back on the island in Maine. In an ending duly in keeping with the American Dream, those pocketfuls of diamonds they brought back make them all rich: “There was money enough so that they all could live in comfort, the rest of their lives.” The Professor feels it’s time to hang up his inventor’s cap and retire. The rest, in a true sign of the times, decide to invest the money they get for the jewels “in different business ventures, and each one did well.” They all live happily ever after through business savvy!

  The number of hollow earth novels dropped off precipitously after 1910. One likely factor was increased scientific knowledge. Information has a way of dousing the fires of dreams. By then repeated expeditions seeking both poles had failed to confirm Symmes’ Holes, so closely tied to the notion of a hollow earth. Until 1910 or so, the hollow earth conceit remained a terrific vehicle for adventure and utopian speculation. It provided a handy alternate world very much like our own and at least a marginally believable one. As polar exploration advanced and increasingly established that there were no inviting holes at the poles surrounded by a temperate open polar sea, the required suspension of disbelief became more difficult.

  Nevertheless, a few true believers continued to hold on, despite all evidence to the contrary, and two nonfiction books appeared filled with “scientific” proof of the hollow earth.

  In 1906, when William T. Reed’s The Phantom of the Poles appeared, though Peary had made it to the North Pole, and Reed blithely argued that the poles hadn’t been discovered because they don’t exist! Instead, there are openings into the hollow earth where the poles are supposed to be, so vast, and their inclination so gradual, that various polar explorers have traveled a short way into them without realizing it: “I claim that the earth is not only hollow,” Reed wrote, “but that all, or nearly all, of the explorers have spent much of their time past the turning-point, and have had a look into the interior of the earth.” He accounts for the aurora borealis as “the reflection of a fire within the earth,” and is convinced meteors don’t come from outer space, but are rather being spat out by volcanoes in the interior—along with a host of other earnestly misinformed thoughts on the working of the compass, and the origins of glaciers, arctic dust, and driftwood, among others. And what’s down there? “That, of course, is speculative … It is not like the question, ‘Is the earth hollow?’ We know that it is, but do not know what will be found in its interior.” His guess? “From what I am able to gather … game of all kinds—tropical and arctic—will be found there; for both warm and cold climates must be in the interior—warm inland and cold near the poles. Sea monsters, and possibly the much-talked of sea serpent, may also be found, and vast territories of arable land for farming purposes. Minerals may be found in great quantities, and gems of all kinds. We may succeed, too, in finding large quantities of radium, which would be used to relieve the darkness if it should be unusually dark. I also believe the interior of the earth will be found inhabited. The race or races may be varied, but some at least will be of the Eskimo race, who have found their way in from the exterior.” Like Symmes, he urges immediate exploration and colonization. “[The interior] can be made accessible to mankind with one-fourth the outlay of treasure, time, and life that it cost to build the subway in New York City. The number of people that can find comfortable homes (if it not already be occupied) will be billions.” His whole case, presented in 283 obsessive pages, is little more than a rehash of Symmes’ ideas from a hundred years earlier.

  Marshall Gardner’s A Journey to the Earth’s Interior; or, Have the Poles Really Been Discovered? (1913) covers the same hollow ground. Gardner, who made his living as a maintenance man in an Aurora, Illinois, corset factory, posits a central sun six hundred miles across, a leftover bit of nebula from the time the earth was first formed. Reflected light from this inner sun accounts for the aurora borealis. Gardner was most fired up about the possibilities of developing this interior world (particularly mining), which he was certain contained a bonanza of diamonds, platinum, and gold. And this should be done not out of greed but as a patriotic act. Writing on the eve of World War I, he asked, “Do we want one of the autocratic countries of Europe to perpetuate in this new world all the old evils of colonial oppression and exploitation?” Not on your life. America, “with her high civilization, her free institutions, her humanity,” has a “duty” to get there first. And “our country has the men, the aeroplane, the enterprise, and the capital” to pull it off.

  With Gardner and Reed we enter the modern phase of hollow earthology —earnest believers marshaling increasingly desperate (and increasingly detailed) evidence to support a theory increasingly at odds with the growing weight of scientific data. But as we’ll see, even today a few true believers continue to hang in there, despite all evidence to the contrary.

  “At the Earth’s Core,” published in All-Story magazine, which featured a pensive-looking Dian the Beautiful on the cover. (© Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.)

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  EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS AT THE EARTH’S CORE

  THE NUMBER OF HOLLOW EARTH NOVELS dropped off drastically after 1910, largely because polar exploration revealed no Symmes’ holes. Consequently it was harder for readers (and writers) to create the suspension of disbelief needed to make such stories work. Something similar happened in the 1960s in regard to Venus. Its thick atmosphere and proximity to the sun had allowed generations of science fiction writers to create stories set in a steamy tropical wonderland of mysterious jungles and strange creatures. But then the facts intruded: under all those clouds Venus is too hot for life and too dry. And so the fetching bosomy Venusian maidens that routinely adorned pulp magazine covers from the 1930s through the 1950s disappeared. And although they didn’t disappear completely, stories set in the hollow earth began to seem too far-fetched once science established the geophysical impossibility of a hollow earth.

  But one writer remained undaunted by facts to the contrary.

  Edgar Rice Burroughs liked the idea of a hollow earth well enough to set six novels and several short stories in what he called Pellucidar, starting with At the Earth’s Core, first published serially in 1914 in All-Story Weekly.

  Burroughs’s life before turning to writing at the age of thirty-five was like Baum’s compounded for the worse—a study in lack of direction and repeated failure. He was born into a prosperous Chicago family in 1875. His father was a wealthy whiskey distiller, which proved ironic given Burroughs’s later struggle with alcoholism. As a teenager he’d been sent to the prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and was elected class president in 1892—but got yanked out of school by his father that same year for low grades and was forcibly relocated to the Michigan Military Academy north of Detroit, where he remained for five years. In 1896, he joined the army, but soon found himself bored stiff at the Arizona fort where he was stationed and began writing to his father, begging him to get him out. Special discharge papers signed by the secretary of war arrived early in 1897.

  Years of upheaval followed. His brother Harry owned a cattle ranch in Idaho, and Burroughs’s first job after leaving the army was as a cowboy, helping his brother drive a herd of starving Mexican cattle from Nogales to Kansas City. By summer he had enrolled as a student at Chicago’s Art Institute, but it didn’t last. Early in 1898, with things heating up in Cuba, Burroughs wrote Teddy Roosevelt offering to join his Rough Riders—but was rejected. By June of that year he’d open
ed a stationery shop in Pocatello, Idaho, but he was back to cowboying with his brother the following spring, and then landed in Chicago again in June as treasurer of his father’s American Battery Company—the distillery burned down in 1885, and his father, resilient, had shifted to supplying the nascent automobile industry.

  Burroughs married Emma, his longtime sweetheart, in 1900, and stayed with dad’s battery company for three more years—but then a roller-coaster ride of jobs followed. By then he was beginning to do some writing and cartooning, but hadn’t figured out how to make a living at it. He joined his brother Harry in an Idaho gold dredging operation in 1903, but that went bust in less than a year. On to Salt Lake City, where he became a railroad policeman for a time, and then it was back to Chicago. There, for the next seven years, poor Burroughs tried everything he could think of to support Emma and his growing family: high-rise timekeeper, door-to-door book salesman, lightbulb salesman, accountant, manager of the stenographic department at Sears, partner in his own short-lived advertising agency, office manager for a firm selling a supposed cure for alcoholism called Alcola, and a sales agent for a pencil sharpener company. This last job involved monitoring ads in pulp magazines—but Burroughs found himself more interested in reading the stories in these magazines than the ads he was supposed to be tracking. And the lightbulb lit. I can do this! In 1911, as the company was heading under, using the backs of letterhead stationery from his former failed businesses, Burroughs began handwriting what became Under the Moons of Mars, featuring John Carter, the first of his invincible heroes. He sent it out, and in August came a letter of acceptance from the editor of All-Story. Though Burroughs was still writing in his spare time—or stealing time from his latest job, working for brother Coleman’s stationery manufacturing company on West Kinzie Street, Chicago—by December 1911, he’d started writing Tarzan of the Apes, which he also sold to All-Story (for $700).

  He began work on the first of his Pellucidar novels in 1912 while the manuscript of Tarzan of the Apes was still making the rounds of book publishers, collecting rejection slip after rejection slip as it went. His working title was “The Inner World.” All-Story ran it serially in four issues starting on April 4, 1914. It didn’t appear as a book until 1922, when A. C. McClurg, Burroughs’s publisher for many years, brought it out with a wonderful cover, both menacing and sexy, by J. Allen St. John, the best illustrator of Burroughs’s early work.

  The first edition of At the Earth’s Core (1922) was illustrated by J. Allen St. John; the cover shows David Innes rescuing Dian the Beautiful. (© Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.)

  His hollow earth story’s most obvious debt was to Jules Verne’s novel A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864). Another likely influence was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, which was a best seller in 1912. In Doyle’s novel, the lost world, discovered by British explorers, lay not in the hollow earth but on a vast plateau surrounded by cliffs rising above the South American jungle, isolated for eons, unchanged since the Jurassic Period. This remote, unapproachable tableland was crawling with prehistoric life—huge, scary dinosaurs in particular. The clashing prehistoric reptiles in Verne’s Journey played only a minor part in the novel overall. As we’ve seen, dinosaurs had captured the popular imagination ever since their “invention” in the early nineteenth century and the coining of the term by Sir Richard Owen in 1841. Life-size reconstructions featured at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London (and the splashy formal dinner thrown by sculptor/promoter Waterhouse Hawkins inside a half-constructed Iguanodon) cemented popular interest, which Verne drew on for his prehistoric novel.

  In 1884 the discovery of a fossil herd of articulated Iguanodon skeletons in a Belgian coal mine further heightened dinosaurmania, as did the 1886 publication of Le monde avant la creation del ’homme, by Camille Flammarion (1842–1925), which pictured an Iguanodon rampaging in the streets of Paris—the precursor to all those Godzilla movies. In the late 1890s, the New York Museum of Natural History bought famed dinosaur hunter Edward Drinker Cope’s collection and commenced creating dramatic displays that were enthusiastically attended. Dinosaurs hadn’t been used much in literature except by Verne, and then only in a minor role. In The Lost World they take center stage for the first time. Although Verne was the first to use them in fiction, the real origins of our ongoing pop cult love affair with dinosaurs—which reached an apotheosis of sorts in the Jurassic Park movies—can be traced to Doyle’s novel, which remains so popular that an adventure series based on it ran for several years on television starting in 1999. While The Lost World was still on top of the best-seller lists, Burroughs was casting around for a new writing project. He seems to have combined Verne’s hollow earth premise with Doyle’s teeming prehistoric world, adding quite a few brainstorms of his own.

  The landscape, ecology, and cosmology of Pellucidar are delightfully wacky and definitely all-American, starting with the way mining magnate David Innes and inventor Abner Perry got there: in an experimental mining machine run amok. Perry has invented an “iron mole,” a “mechanical subterranean prospector” consisting of “a steel cylinder a hundred feet long, and jointed so that it may turn and twist through solid rock if need be. At one end is a mighty revolving drill.” It’s a sort of segmented steam locomotive with a huge Roto-Rooter attached to the front. Burroughs may well have been inspired to create this curious device based on his gold mining days, and also by reading the Chicago Tribune comics page. Dale R. Broadhurst says in an article in ERBzine,

  A likely source for the “Iron Mole” may be found in 1910 issues of the Sunday Chicago Tribune, where cartoonist M. L. Wells chronicled in color his “Old Opie Dilldock’s Stories.” In one of these 1910 illustrated Sunday full-pages, Opie plans a trip to the south pole and constructs an “earth borer” in his secret workshop, in order to make the trip there by way of a straight line through the Earth. Utilizing a hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell for power, the ingenious inventor propels his contraption to “the center of the earth.” There he discovers strange intelligent beings … one of which he takes with him on his return to the planet’s surface. While I doubt very much that Edgar Rice Burroughs sat down with a pile of “Opie Dilldock’s Stories,” in order to write out his 1913 “Inner World” adventure, some story elements from this set of locally published cartoons may well have entered into the would-be author’s inner fantasies, and from there flowed out onto his pages of fiction, probably more by happenstance than through his conscious design.63

  Innes and Perry have built this machine not to advance knowledge and exploration, but to extend the frontiers of coal mining beyond those of mortal men—and make tons of money while they’re at it. But on its trial run, the steering freezes and the damn thing won’t stop—commencing to bore its way like crazy straight for the center of the earth.

  After tearing through five hundred miles of rock, the iron mole pops out in sunny, tropical Pellucidar. “Together we stepped out to stand in silent contemplation of a landscape at once weird and beautiful.” But in nothing flat, “there came the most thunderous, awe-inspiring roar that ever had fallen upon my ears.” It’s a colossal bearlike creature the size of an elephant—a dyryth—and it’s after them. But it’s distracted by the sudden appearance of a wolf pack a hundred strong, quickly followed by their masters, black “manlike creatures” with dracula teeth and long, slender tails, “grotesque parodies on humanity.” These are but one of several races of varying intelligence inhabiting Pellucidar. They capture Innes and Perry and race through the treetops to their arboreal bough-village high in the trees.

  Pellucidar is a busy, complicated place. As the ERBzine puts it, “The land teems with plant and animal life. A veritable melting pot where animals of nearly all the geological periods of the outer crust exist simultaneously. The land’s races are just as varied as its animal life.” Burroughs seems to have adopted the kitchen sink theory of the hollow earth, throwing in everything he can think of. More is more.

  Innes and Perry escape from the
tree creatures only to be captured by another vaguely hominid species called the Sagoths. They look like gorillas and are slave masters to yet another species—Stone Age humans. Innes and Perry are added to the chain gang and get to know a few of the enslaved humans—Ghak the Hairy One, Hooja the Sly One, and Dian the Beautiful. They’re on a forced march to the village of the evil Mahars.

  The dominant species on Pellucidar, the Mahars are a master race of super-intelligent lizards. They “are great reptiles, some six or eight feet in length, with long narrow heads and great round eyes. Their beaklike mouths are lined with sharp, white fangs, and the backs of their huge lizard bodies are serrated into bony ridges from their necks to the end of their long tails, while from the fore feet membranous wings, which are attached to their bodies just in front of the hind legs, protrude at an angle of 45 degrees toward the rear, ending in sharp points several feet above their bodies.”

  Voiceless and unable to hear, the Mahars “communicate by means of a sixth sense which is cognizant of a fourth dimension.” Whatever that may mean. Their capital is an underground city called Phutra, where they’re served by the gorilla-like Sagoths and keep crowds of humans as cattle, since the Mahars consider human flesh quite a delicacy. They enjoy watching Roman-style combat in their great amphitheater between vicious beasts and lowly humans, on whom they also perform “scientific” experiments à la Joseph Mengele. A really nasty bunch, the Mahars, sort of like brainy flying Komodo dragons with Nazi proclivities.