Indiana Jones and the Hollow Earth

by Max McCoy

  "Too bad we won't remember any of this." Sparks frowned.

  "In dreams, Nicholas," Ulla said. "Only in dreams."

  The monks motioned for them to step up onto the altar. Ulla went first, ascending confidently and then spreading her arms. Her hair flowed about her as if she were floating in a pool of water, and then her body began to glitter. Suddenly she was gone.

  Gunnar went next, hesitantly.

  Then Indy motioned for Sparks.

  "Please," Sparks said. "I'd like to go last, if you don't mind."

  "But you will come?" Indy asked.

  "I promise."

  Indy stepped up onto the altar. He felt nothing at first, and then a dreamlike feeling rushed over him, and then there was a sensation of floating. He felt his glittering body leave the altar. He was flying up, passing effortlessly and without fear through miles and miles of rock, toward the warmth of the sun.

  Epilogue

  Indiana Jones woke on his back in the snow. A husky was standing over him, licking his face.

  "What the—"

  He sat up. Then he shook Gunnar and Sparks, who were sleeping next to him. Ulla was already awake. She was sitting in the snow, petting the dog and laughing. There were no footprints around them, not even their own.

  They were on a slope overlooking a town that consisted of a dozen buildings, a glittering blue bay spreading out beyond it. At the near edge of the town was an airfield. They could see the Penguin shining in the sun.

  "Where are we?" Indy asked.

  "Ny Alesund on Spitsbergen Island," Ulla answered. "The northernmost town in the world."

  "How do you know?"

  "That sign on the roof of that hangar says so," Ulla said.

  They pulled Gunnar and Sparks to their feet, then all four of them raced down the slope, the dog trotting happily beside them. The sun was shining brightly, and despite the cold, Indy felt incredibly rested and alive.

  As they neared the airfield the dog ran ahead, barking.

  The commotion brought Clarence to the door of the hangar. He was eating a ham sandwich, and he opened the door to pet the husky and give him a bite. Then he looked up and saw Indy and the others crossing the snow-packed field.

  Clarence shot out of the door, crossed the field like a track star, and grasped Indy in a bear hug.

  "Buddy, I thought I'd never see you again," he gushed. "I felt so guilty after we got back in the air and couldn't find you. We looked, I swear we did."

  "It's okay," Indy said. "Put me down."

  Clarence stepped back and shook his head in wonder. "How did you get here?" he asked.

  Indy looked at the others, and they returned his blank stare.

  "Buddy," he said, "we're not sure."

  "What d'ya mean?"

  "I mean we don't know," Indy said. "We can't remember."

  "Well, you didn't get far in those clothes," Clarence said. "Somebody had to pick you up or something. But if you don't want to tell me, I understand. This big guy probably found you, whoever he is."

  "This is Gunnar," Indy said. "He rescued us on the ice."

  "Well, there you are."

  "No, a lot more happened after that," Indy said. "I remember parts of the last few days, but not all of it. Reingold and his squad are dead, I know that."

  "I don't remember much, either," Sparks said.

  "What about your girlfriend on the Graf?" Clarence asked.

  Indy looked at Clarence and blinked.

  "Alecia is dead," Indy said. "Reingold shot her."

  "I'm sorry."

  "So am I," Indy said.

  "Well, come on in and get warm," Clarence said. "Captain Blessant and Sergeant Bruce are at the trading post, but will they be glad to see you when they get back. And Marcus Brody has been driving us nuts trying to find out what's happened to you."

  "You still have the skull?"

  "Yeah," Clarence said. "And that thing gives me the creeps. I finally stuffed it in a cardboard box because that cloth you had it wrapped in kept coming off somehow."

  "Show it to me," Indy said.

  They entered the hangar, and Clarence brought him the box.

  Indy peered inside to make sure the Crystal Skull was there, but he did not take it out of the box.

  "What are you going to do with it?" Clarence asked.

  "Put it back where I found it," Indy said. "Before it has a chance to ruin somebody else's life."

  Indy put the box down.

  "What're we going to tell Major Markham?" Indy wondered aloud. "What am I going to tell Brody? I'm not sure which parts of what I remember are a dream and what's not."

  "The Edda Shaft was no dream," Ulla said.

  "Well," Indy asked, "do you think you can find it again?"

  "No," Ulla answered.

  "Me neither."

  "In that case," Ulla said sadly, "it's just another story."

  "But you know," Sparks said, "I have the impression that we did something important, like avoiding that final battle that Ulla and Gunnar were talking about."

  "Ragnarok?" Ulla smiled. She looked in turn at each of the now familiar faces around her, and then settled her gaze on Indy. He felt her ice-blue eyes looking through him to something beyond.

  "It can never be avoided," she said. "Only postponed."

  Afterword

  The Conquest of Inner Space

  As fantastic as hollow-earth theories may seem to us now, they were once a subject of serious scientific debate. The reason so much speculation turned out to be dead wrong may be that the interior of the planet has proved so inaccessible—and, more significantly, unobservable.

  Unlike the night sky, which offers clues across the gulf of time and space in the clockworklike movements of stars and planets, the ground resists attempts to probe its secrets by the use of human senses. It was not until the invention of the seismograph in 1897, and the subsequent study of the speed and direction of earthquake shock waves as recorded by a network of seismograph stations around the world, that scientists concluded that the earth was solid.

  Such inaccessibility has made the inner earth as much, if not more, of a challenge to exploration than the nearer reaches of outer space. In 1969, human beings crossed a quarter of a million miles of inhospitable space to walk on the surface of the moon; now, nearly three decades later, we have penetrated only seven and one half miles into the crust of the earth, via a borehole in the Kola Peninsula of Russia.

  Thanks to intense intellectual exploration, scientists now believe they have a pretty good idea of the composition of the inner earth: its crust ranges from two to seventy-five miles thick, followed by 1,800 miles of rocky mantle, all encompassing a core of molten metal, at which the pressure is 3.6 million times that of the earth's surface. Still cooling from the fires of creation, the inner earth releases heat in the form of convection currents that create volcanoes and earthquakes and push the continents slowly apart.

  Worlds Within Worlds

  Hollow-earth theories have had a curious link with the history of polar exploration. From the discovery of the continent of Antarctica to the controversy surrounding Admiral Byrd's cryptic remarks following an overflight of the North Pole, such theories refuse to die.

  Perhaps it is because both regions remained inaccessible for so long, and our imaginations naturally precede us to those places we can't reach; or, it may be an unwillingness to surrender the power and magic of belief to the often dream-shattering rationality of science. After all, it is more fun to dream of lost worlds beneath our feet than crust, mantle, and core.

  And the dreams have been with us longer.

  Just as some of our ancestors looked skyward and imagined explanations for the panoply of lights, others pondered the earth and tried to explain what was below. Although the Western tradition has been to ascribe rather unpleasant qualities to the nether regions—the Greeks imagined Hades as a dismal place populated by the joyless dead, and Christian hell, traditionally located underground, is a place of eterna
l suffering for the damned—to Eastern minds, the depths might harbor utopia. Buddhists in Central Asia, for example, tell of the ancient Kingdom of Agartha (or Agharta), a refuge for the survivors of lost continents. The capital city of this underworld paradise is Shamballah, where the benevolent King of the World keeps watch over the affairs of humanity through his magic mirror. A network of labyrinthine tunnels connected to Tibetan monasteries are traversed by monks who carry his secret messages to the above world.

  In 1692, astronomer Edmond Hailey (of comet fame) told the Royal Society of London that there were no less than three inner earths, each inhabited, and corresponding in size to Mercury, Venus, and Mars. The Aurora Borealis, he said, was the luminous atmosphere from these inner earths seeping from the thin crust over the North Pole.

  A St Louis trading post operator, John Cleves Symmes, declared in 1818 that not only were there five concentric spheres inside the earth, but huge openings at the poles as well. In a "letter to all the world," Symmes claimed the portals would lead to a land that was warm and rich, and he asked for one hundred adventurers to accompany him on an expedition northward from Siberia.

  Despite widespread ridicule, Symmes won a few converts to his theory, including newspaper and magazine writer Jeremiah N. Reynolds. In 1828, Congress authorized a polar expedition to search for the opening to Symmes's interior world, but the expedition met a decade's worth of political delays. Symmes died in 1829 and Reynolds, tired of waiting for the official expedition, joined a seal-hunting expedition for the South Seas. He returned and told stories of a lucrative whaling trade in the direction of the south antipode, and it was this appeal to commerce that finally prompted Congress in 1836 to fund the long-awaited search.

  The Wilkes Expedition, 1838-42, named for commander Charles Wilkes, was the first to team civilian scientists with a naval crew. Although the expedition found no portal, it made a number of important scientific discoveries and surveyed enough coastline to prove that Antarctica was indeed the seventh continent.

  Cyrus Read Teed, a Civil War veteran and herb doctor, contributed a unique twist to both cult religion and pseudoscience in a book he wrote under the pseudonym of Koresh—Hebrew for Cyrus—which claimed that we lived on the inner surface of a hollow sphere. A sun at the center, dividing equally into dark and light areas, gave the illusion of rising and setting. Outside the sphere, Teed said, there was only a great void.

  Teed believed this reductionistic vision of the universe amounted to nothing less than a religious revelation and based a new religion on it, called Koreshanity, and proclaimed himself messiah. He established a church, a college, and in 1894 founded a community near Fort Myers, Florida. When Teed died in 1908, his followers waited in vain for his (self)-prophesied resurrection. His tomb was washed away by a hurricane in 1921, and in the 1960s, the community was turned into the Koreshan State Historic Site.

  Other grist for the hollow-earth mill included a long-dead but well-preserved woolly mammoth, colored snow, and—of course—more fantastic tales. In 1846 a woolly mammoth—an extinct species—was found frozen in the ice in Siberia. The animal was in such a retarded state of decomposition that, in its stomach, its last meal could be identified. For decades the discovery stirred controversy, and some claimed that the animal had not been dead for thousands of years at all, but had simply died in the interior of the earth—where mammoths are plentiful—and drifted to the outside on an ice floe. Some arctic travelers reported seeing snow in various shades of red, green, and even black. Theorists quickly seized on this as evidence that pollen was wafting from a verdant interior world to stain the snow around the portals.

  But more exciting was the publication, in 1908, of a book by Willis George Emerson called The Smoky God, or, a Voyage to the Inner World. It was the story of a ninety-five-year-old Norwegian sailor, Olaf Jansen, who claimed that as a boy he and his father sailed to Franz Josef Land in search of ivory tusks—and, driven off course by a terrible storm, found themselves in an inner world lit by a smoky sun. The pair remained for more than two years among a race of giants who lived in golden cities and feasted like gods. Sadly, on their return to the exterior world through the south polar opening, their sloop was crushed by an iceberg, the father drowned, and the son was rescued by a passing whaler. But why did Jansen wait until the end of his life to tell his tale? When he first described the wonders of the inner world, Jansen said, he was locked away in an insane asylum for twenty-eight years.

  Emerson was not the only writer who was inspired by a vision of a hollow earth. Edgar Allen Poe was so influenced by Symmes's theory—and the championing of it by Reynolds—that he wrote a short story, "Ms. Found in a Bottle," about a ship-swallowing hole at the South Pole. He later took a different approach to the same theme in his longest work of fiction, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Curiously, as Poe lay dying in a Baltimore hospital in 1849, he repeatedly called for Reynolds in his delirium. Although some scholars think he was calling for a family friend, others believe he was asking for the South Seas explorer.

  Jules Verne, the prophetic French science-fiction writer, was almost certainly influenced by Symmes and other nineteenth-century theorists, and the result was one of his most popular novels, Journey to the Center of the Earth, published in 1864. In it, the narrator and his uncle, an eccentric professor, descend into the cone of a volcano in Iceland and follow a trail of clues left by their intrepid predecessor, a sixteenth-century alchemist named Arne Saknussemm. Along the way they find a vast ocean, prehistoric monsters, and the bones of a race of giants. Their adventure, however, fails to fulfill the promise of Verne's title: the intrepid, if fictional, travelers descend less than a hundred miles into the earth.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a Victorian novelist and member of Parliament, imagined an underground civilization of superhumans in The Coming Race, which was published posthumously in 1873.

  Lord Lytton, whose best-known work is the historical novel The Last Days of Pompeii, describes an apparent utopia populated by a race of giants who have mastered a liquid substance called Vril, making them the lords of all forms of matter. The motto of this society of supermen is, "No happiness without order, no order without authority, no authority without unity." Although the novel is clearly a cautionary tale—the narrator recognizes this supposed utopia for what it really is and eventually escapes to warn the world—some groups found comfort in its vision of an advanced authoritarian society. The novel became part of the unofficial canon of turn-of-the-century occult lore.

  In 1933, James Hilton (and later, movie director Frank Capra) offered a variation of the Shamballah myth in Lost Horizon, which told of a paradise of eternal youth and refuge from war called Shangri-la in a hidden valley somewhere in the Himalayas. From 1925 to 1928, a Russian artist named Nicholas Roerich led an expedition that scoured Tibet looking for the real (and allegedly subterranean) Agartha. Although Roerich did not find a physical entrance to the hidden kingdom, he apparently found a spiritual one, which he discussed in his 1930 book, Shamballah: In Search of the New Era. Roerich also produced a number of striking paintings inspired by his Tibetan adventure, became a leading peace activist, and returned to Tibet in 1935 to resume his search.

  Nazis and the Occult

  Pop culture to the contrary, we will probably never know to what extent Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party were influenced by the occult. Much is a matter of interpretation, and what may seem to one person a healthy interest in folklore—a pagan ceremony in celebration of Nordic ancestry, for example—may strike others as a morbid interest in magic.

  There was, however, both a Thule Society and a Luminous Lodge of the Vril, much as described in Indiana Jones and the Hollow Earth. From the Thule Society came the German Workers Party, which Hitler reorganized as the Nazis.

  The Thule group was named for a mythical island in the North Adantic that, in folklore, was the center of an Adantis-like lost civilization. After World War I, the Thule Society evolved as a sort of anti-Communist, anti-Semitic,
nationalist study group. Some of its members were also deeply involved in the occult movement, which had spread from England and the turn-of-the-century Theosophical Society.

  It is often reported that Hitler and other Nazi leaders took seriously hollow-earth theories and reports of secret underground kingdoms. Hitler, so the story goes, dispatched squads to the deepest mines in Europe and to the Himalayas in search of the entrance to Agartha, and at one point during World War II had top German scientists testing Koreshian theories of a concave earth. Such tales have become the apocrypha of World War II, repeated from one popular writer to the next. Even if true, the layers of secondhand information that surround them would make substantiation maddeningly difficult even for the most dedicated of scholars.

  It is uncertain as well whether Hitler was a member of the Thule group—or what he truly believed in regard to the occult—but some leading Nazis, such as Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess, were members. Hess was also a devotee of astrology, but astrology's most potent contribution to World War II was not in predicting the future, but in people's belief that it could. Both the Axis and the Allies used bogus astrological forecasts to influence public opinion at home and abroad.

  Heinrich Himmler, the head of Hitler's secret police, sought to imbue the SS with a mystical pagan tradition better suited to the Middle Ages than the twentieth century. Even if Himmler was not a practitioner of black magic, as some claim, his deeds could hardly be considered any less diabolical: as the chief enforcer of the concentration-camp system, he was ultimately responsible for the executions of eleven million people.

  Also, it is important to remember that not all—or even most—Germans during this period were Nazis. The Nazis existed as a minority party for years before coming to power through a complex chain of events, and even at the height of their power failed to gain as much as fifty percent of the popular vote. Because of the lack of news and information available to people living under a dictatorship, many Germans never knew the extent of human suffering caused by many Nazi policies.