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

by David Standish

  A Mahar in flight, in a drawing by St. John from the first edition of At the Earth’s Core. (© Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.)

  But oddest about them—and telling in regard to Burroughs, whether he intended it or not—is that the Mahars are an all-female society. These reptilian incarnations of evil are all girls! Like the Mizorans, many generations ago the Mahars learned how to procreate without the unnecessary complication of having males around—“a method whereby eggs might be fertilized by chemical means after they were laid.” The implication, however unintentional, is that the twisted evil Mahars are what you get if women are left to their own devices. There’s a definite undercurrent of misogyny here, despite all the praises heaped on noble, pure-as-the-driven-snow Dian the Beautiful (whose characterizing epithet is also revealing in regard to Burroughs’ ideas about women—she’s not Dian the Smart, or Dian the Resourceful, or Dian the Independent).

  The secret of the Mahars’ parthenogenesis is kept in a single book stored in a vault deep beneath Phutra. There’s only one copy, and none of the high-I.Q. Mahars seems to have memorized the formula, which gives Perry an idea. As they wait around in their cell, Perry prays continually and has a flash: “David, if we can escape, and at the same time take with us this great secret, what will we not have accomplished for the human race within Pellucidar!”

  “Why, Perry! You and I may reclaim a whole world! Together we can lead the races of men out of the darkness of ignorance into the light of advancement and civilization. At one step we may carry them from the Age of Stone to the twentieth century.”

  “David, I believe that God sent us here for just that purpose!”

  “You are right, Perry. And while you are teaching them to pray I’ll be teaching them to fight, and between us we’ll make a race of men that will be an honor to us both.”

  Note the grandiosity—they’ll be doing this to honor themselves. Probably just hasty, imprecise writing (at another point Burroughs has a character say he won’t “stand supinely” watching), but also revealing of what’s to come.

  By this time Perry has figured out Pellucidar’s cosmology. Its provenance encompasses hollow earth thinking going all the way back to Edmond Halley. Centrifugal force has caused the hollowness. As the spinning earth cooled, matter was thrown out to the edges, except for a “small superheated core of gaseous matter” that remained in the center as Pellucidar’s never-setting sun. This is a slap in the face of Newtonian physics, of course, since a sun existing in the center of the earth would either burn the whole globe to a cinder, and/or its gravity would cause the hollow sphere to collapse. But it’s both futile and somehow unfair to insist on plausibility in such a mixed bag of fantasy. There is no mention of a polar opening in At the Earth’s Core, but Burroughs uses it in the third book, Tanar of Pellucidar, to explain the presence of the dastardly Korsars, yo-ho-ho descendants of seventeenth-century Spanish pirates who accidentally sailed over the rim into Pellucidar and have been wreaking havoc there ever since. He also uses the polar opening in Tarzan at the Earth’s Core to get Tarzan down there to help rescue David Innes, who’s been captured for about the nineteenth time.

  Since the interior cooled more slowly than the surface, life started later on Pellucidar, making it “younger” than our world—thus all the prehistoric flora and fauna running riot there. The weird twists life has taken on Pellucidar can be explained by alternate evolution. Life forms from different geologic periods exist simultaneously owing to the absence of the cataclysms that have affected life on the surface. Pellucidar has considerably more land; the proportions of ocean to earth are reversed, so that the land area there is three times greater than above, “the strange anomaly of a larger world within a smaller one!” But the greatest anomaly—which Burroughs never successfully explains—is that time doesn’t exist on Pellucidar. Nobody can tell how long anything takes. It’s supposedly because the sun never sets, but why that would make a difference defies explanation, even though Burroughs insists on it again and again, in book after book. Why this was so important to his conception of Pellucidar is a mystery. But it’s his world, and he can do what he wants.

  Toward the end of At the Earth’s Core, after his second escape from the Mahars, while wandering through uncharted territory, Innes comes on a lovely valley that he describes as a “little paradise.” The chapter is titled “The Garden of Eden.” But Eden wouldn’t be complete without an Eve—or a serpent of sorts. Innes comes across a girl standing terrified on a ledge—his long-lost Dian the Beautiful—who’s being attacked by “a giant dragon forty feet in length,” with “gaping jaws” and “claws equipped with terrible talons.” Never a dull moment on Pellucidar. Innes saves her, realizing, finally, that he loves her. Their brief idyll is interrupted by Jubal the Ugly One, who’s been sniffing after Dian from the beginning. In their bloody duel to the death, crafty Innes prevails and has an inspiration in the moment of triumph: “If skill and science could render a comparative pygmy the master of this mighty brute, what could not the brute’s fellows accomplish with the same skill and science. Why all Pellucidar would be at their feet—and I would be their king and Dian their queen.”

  The sociopolitics of Pellucidar from here on are an eccentric amalgam of Arthurian legend, liberal Progressivism, and Teddy Roosevelt–style speak-softly-and-carry-a-big-stick democratic imperialism—an ideological stew representing Burroughs’s own jumbled worldview.

  Innes and Dian make their way back to Sari, her homeland, and in nothing flat everyone agrees to his plan. An intertribal council is called and “the eventual form of government was tentatively agreed upon. Roughly, the various kingdoms were to remain virtually independent, but there was to be one great overlord, or emperor. It was decided that I should be the first of the dynasty of the emperors of Pellucidar.”

  Dian the Beautiful as shown being menaced by Mahars on this 1970s Ace Paperback cover by Frank Frazetta. (© Frank Frazetta)

  His goal? Freedom for enslaved humanity, achieved by the extermination of the Mahars. “How long it would take for the race to become extinct was impossible even to guess; but that this must eventually happen seemed inevitable.”

  And how would this ethically dubious end be achieved? Superior weaponry. Perry has been experimenting with “various destructive engines of war—gunpowder, rifles, cannon and the like” but hasn’t been as successful as he hoped. Still, “we were both assured that the solution of these problems would advance the cause of civilization within Pellucidar thousands of years at a single stroke.”

  In bringing civilization to Pellucidar, they plan to start with guns and genocide.

  Innes will make a return trip to the surface in the iron mole to bring back weapons—along with books on such useful subjects as mining, construction, engineering, and agriculture. An arsenal of information to bring Pellucidar into the twentieth century, for better or worse. Works of literature do not appear on the wish list.

  “What we lack is knowledge,” Perry exclaims. “Let us go back and get that knowledge in the shape of books—then this world will indeed be at our feet.” Yet another revealing slip. For all their supposed humanitarianism, Perry and Innes talk like megalomaniacs.

  Innes plans to take Dian to the surface with him and show her the sights, but Hooja the Sly One, living up to his cognomen, pulls a switch, and Innes finds himself boring headlong upward with a creepy Mahar as a companion, not Dian the Beautiful. The iron mole comes out in the Sahara, and the novel ends with Innes and the bewildered Mahar waiting for someone to find them.

  Nearly two years passed before Burroughs began work on Pellucidar, the second book in the series. Innes returns to Pellucidar in the iron mole with its cargo of guns and knowledge, but the steering still isn’t working right, so when he gets there, he’s lost. More captures, escapes, battles with terrible creatures. Hooja is on a rampage; he has raised a rebel force and has again kidnapped Dian. Innes is paddling away from Hooja’s ships in a small dugout. All seems hopeless, as usual, when the
empire’s new fleet, fifty ships strong, sails onto the scene and defeats Hooja’s inferior forces. Ecstatic, Innes cries, “It was MY navy! Perry had perfected gunpowder and built cannon! It was marvelous!” They cream Hooja’s inferior forces. Plans for the empire shift into high gear and progress, of a sort, strikes poor Pellucidar.

  Like every boy of his time, Burroughs grew up on the medieval romances of Sir Walter Scott, but unlike most, he apparently hadn’t outgrown them by 1915—at the age of forty. Part of his charm, I guess. It seems safe to consider Innes an alter ego for Burroughs, and he indulges in some knights-in-shining-armor dreamin’ here. After the battle, Emperor David’s “fierce warriors nearly came to blows in their efforts to be among the first to kneel before me and kiss my hand. When Ja kneeled at my feet, first to do me homage, I drew from its scabbard at his side the sword of hammered iron that Perry had taught him to fashion. Striking him lightly on the shoulder I created him king of Anoroc. Each captain of the forty-nine other feluccas I made a duke. I left it to Perry to enlighten them as to the value of the honors I had bestowed upon them.”

  Perry updates Innes on the improvements he’s made at Sari. Everyone has joined the cause against the Mahars, but beyond that Perry says, “they are simply ravenous for greater knowledge and for better ways to do things.” They mastered many skills quickly, and “we now have a hundred expert gun-makers. On a little isolated isle we have a great powder-factory. Near the iron-mine, which is on the mainland, is a smelter, and on the eastern shore of Anoroc, a well equipped shipyard.”

  So the Pellucidarians, in a single bound, have leaped into the Industrial Age, and have been introduced to the joys of mines scarring the landscape, factories billowing smoke, and long, tedious work days.

  Innes responds, “It is stupendous, Perry! But still more stupendous is the power that you and I wield in this great world. These people look upon us as little less than supermen. We must give them the best that we have. [You can practically hear the patriotic music begin to swell and see the flag proudly flapping in the breeze.] What we have given them so far has been the worst. We have given them war and the munitions of war. But I look forward to the day [music really swelling now, possibly a visionary tear in his eye] when you and I can build sewing machines instead of battleships, harvesters of crops instead of harvesters of men, plow-shares and telephones, schools and colleges, printing-presses and paper! When our merchant marine shall ply the great Pellucidarian seas, and cargoes of silks and typewriters and books shall forge their ways where only hideous saurians have held sway since time began!”

  But before this grand vision can be realized, first they have to deal with those “haughty reptiles”—the evil Mahars. A council of kings convenes and decides to commence “the great war” against them immediately.

  As Burroughs was writing this in January 1915, the real Great War was spreading like a terrible brushfire on the surface. In 1912–1913 small wars in the Balkans had begun bursting into flames out of seeming spontaneous combustion. Then on June 28, 1914, Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo. By summer’s end, declarations of war flying like dark, dry leaves, country after country found itself involved, and within months the fighting was burning its way through Europe with a ferocity unprecedented in history.

  One might expect to see at least a glimmer of these events in “the great war” against the Mahars; and there is, though not much more, beyond the fact that Burroughs decided to make it part of the story in the first place. The main parallel is that Emperor David quickly gains many allies—nearly all the known tribes of Pellucidar are united for the first time against one enemy. The plan? “It was our intention to march from one Mahar city to another until we had subdued every Mahar nation that menaced the safety of any kingdom of the empire”—starting with Phutra, the Mahar capital.

  The Battle of Phutra is a pretty good one. Burroughs didn’t entirely waste those years in military school and the army. A phalanx of Sagoths and Mahars engages the Empire’s forces outside the city but is “absolutely exterminated; not one remained even as a prisoner.” On to the city and its “subterranean avenues,” where the allies are temporarily stymied—the morally corrupt Mahars are using poison gas. But Perry jury-rigs a few cannon bombs, dumps them down the holes like oversize grenades, and blam! Mahars by the hundreds come streaming out of their underground lair like dazed wasps and, taking wing, flee to the north. After the fall of Phutra, victory follows victory—the Mahars are less tenacious than the Germans. Emperor David’s armies march “from one great buried city to another. At each we were victorious, killing or capturing the Sagoths and driving the Mahars further away.” The menace isn’t eliminated—“their great cities must abound by the hundreds and thousands [in] far-distant lands”—but they’ve at least been forced far from the Empire.

  At the end of Pellucidar, David and Dian settle in to enjoy royal life in their “great palace overlooking the gulf.” Perry is working like a beaver on further “improvements,” laying out a railway line to some rich coalfields he wants to exploit. Sea trade between kingdoms proceeds apace, the profits going “to the betterment of the people—to building factories for the manufacture of agricultural implements, and machinery for the various trades we are gradually teaching the people.”

  Today we have nearly a hundred years of hindsight to wonder about the ultimate value of what Burroughs clearly sees as progress for Pellucidar. As Emperor David sums it up at the novel’s close, “I think that it will not be long before Pellucidar will become as nearly a Utopia as one may expect to find this side of heaven.”

  Burroughs took fourteen years off from writing about Pellucidar, but in 1928–1929, in a burst, he produced Tanar of Pellucidar and Tarzan at the Earth’s Core. Both represented a falling-off from the earlier books. Whatever improbable coherence this inner territory had in the first two begins flying apart in these. Pellucidar increasingly seems less an intact world than an imperfect collection of shards, broken pieces lacking cohesion. Part of this is due to overcomplication. Savage countries, races, and creatures multiply like prehistoric rabbits in Burroughs’s attempts to ever increase the excitement by concocting yet another new kind. As Brian W. Aldiss observes in Billion Year Spree, “Burroughs never knew when enough was enough.” Just among the races, by series end there are Stone Age men, Sagoths (gorilla men), Mahars (brainy evil reptiles), Horibs (lizard or snake men), Ganaks (bison men, humanoid bovines), Gorbuses (humanoid cannibalistic albinos), Coripies (or Buried People; blind underground dwellers with no facial features, large fangs, webbed talons), Beast Men (savage vegetarians with faces somewhere between a sheep and a gorilla), Ape Men (black hairless skins, long tails, tree dwelling), Sabretooth Men, Mezops (copper-colored island dwellers), Korsars (descendants of pirates who accidentally sailed into the polar opening), Yellow Men of the Bronze Age—and I may be leaving some out. The overcomplication diminishes their impact. It is impossible to keep all these creatures and their various domains straight, and it’s arguable whether or not Burroughs managed to do so himself. With all these races always at odds with each other, there’s a growing feeling of fragmentation. Here in the center of the earth there’s no center, as one or the other of these squabbling races takes the stage to provide trouble for our various heroes, and everything else all but disappears from view. In both Tanar and Tarzan at the Earth’s Core, for instance, the evil Mahars, the chief scourge of Pellucidar in the first two novels, are hardly mentioned, even though they were only driven off, not exterminated as Perry had hoped. And the Empire that Perry and Innes have forcibly cobbled together also remains far offstage in these later two novels. Most of Tanar, essentially a rock ’em sock ’em adventure-filled love story between the title character and imperious Stellara, takes place among the Korsars, and in Tarzan at the Earth’s Core, everybody spends most of their time lost in the jungle, fighting off one or another prehistoric monster—which Burroughs multiplies right along with the savage races. Especially
in Tarzan at the Earth’s Core there’s a sameness to the attacks, captures, escapes, followed by more attacks, captures, and escapes—as if Burroughs were operating more on autopilot than not.

  Cover art for Tanar of Pellucidar, the third Pellucidar novel. (© Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.)

  Splendid St. John cover for Tarzan at the Earth’s Core. (© Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.)

  In Tarzan at the Earth’s Core, young Jason Gridley of Tarzana, California, has a special radio that receives signals from Pellucidar. He hears that David Innes has been captured by the Korsars and is being held captive by them, and decides that only Tarzan can free him. Gridley goes to Africa to plead his case, saying that he’s just learned about an opening at the pole that leads to Pellucidar. Tarzan says, hmm, we’ll need a Zeppelin, and just happens to know of an ultralight, ultrastrong metal in nearby mountains that no one else has discovered, so they have a bunch of it mined and go to Germany to construct the airship. As the Zeppelin drops through the polar opening and drifts lower toward Pellucidar’s surface, Tarzan looks approvingly over the landscape and exclaims, “This looks like heaven to me.” As soon as they land, Tarzan decides to take a jungle stroll, and doesn’t reconnect with the others until the book’s end, when almost as an afterthought Innes is sprung from the Korsars’ captivity. Tarzan wasn’t kidding about heaven. Pellucidar is even more unspoiled and primitive than his own jungle at home. And Tarzan loves it:

  In the first flight of his newfound freedom Tarzan was like a boy released from school. Unhampered by the hated vestments of civilization, out of sight of anything that might even remotely remind him of the atrocities with which man scars the face of nature, he filled his lungs with the free air of Pellucidar, leaped into a nearby tree and swung away through the forest, his only concern for the moment the joyousness of exultant vitality and life. On he sped through the primeval forest of Pellucidar. Strange birds, startled by his swift and silent passage, flew screaming from his path, and strange beasts slunk to cover beneath him. But Tarzan did not care; he was not hunting; he was not even searching for the new in this new world. For the moment he was only living.