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

by David Standish

  The next day Lyone makes a confession to White. She came to Egyplosis a true believer in ideal love and found it in a chaste, loving connection with a twin-soul. But then he died. Heartbroken, she was elevated to the throne of goddess, but “I continually long for something sweeter yet … at times I know I could forgo even the throne of the gods itself for the pure and intimate love of a counterpart soul.” What would be the punishment for this? White asks. “A shameful death by magnicity. No goddess can seek a lover and live.” And yet, moments later, White can control himself no longer:

  I sprang forward with a cry of joy, falling at the feet of the goddess. I encircled her figure with my arms and held up my face to hers. Her kiss was a blinding whirlwind of flame and tears! Its silence was irresistible entreaty. It dissolved all other interests like fire melting stubborn steel. It was proclamation of war upon Atvatabar! It was the destruction of a unique civilization with all its appurtenances of hopeless love. It was love defying death. Thenceforward we became a new and formidable twin-soul!

  But before they actually declare war, Lyone takes White below to the Infernal Palace to meet the Grand Sorcerer. Twenty thousand twin-souls appear, all carrying wands connected to “fine wires of terrelium.” They commence a “strange dance” beneath a huge statue of a golden dragon, and “a shower of blazing jewels issued from its mouth. There were emeralds, diamonds, sapphires, and rubies flung upon the pavement.” To impress White and amuse Lyone, the sorcerer sets these hard-dancing ecstatic souls to creating an entire island, whose existence can only be maintained “so long as the twin-souls support it by never-ceasing ecstasy.” During this idyll their love grows, but on their return they find they’ve been spied on. But rather than give up White and send him packing back to the surface, Lyone tells the king that she’s seen the light. The whole system they’ve been living by is wrong and rotten. “The true union of souls is not artificial restraint.” When Lyone renounces her throne and calls for religious reform, the king proclaims that the penalty for this is “death on the magnetic scaffold.” White is ordered out of Atvatabar. Not a chance. This means war!

  Of the population of 50 million, 20 million are for Lyone and reform. Soon civil war rages, with casualties on both sides. Just as White’s forces are losing a sea battle, two fighting ships under the flags of the United States and England show up and save the rebels. After a torturous trek through arctic wastes, those fearful sailors who left the ship had spread the word about the existence of the interior world. Bradshaw reproduces a headline from a New York newspaper:

  AN ASTOUNDING DISCOVERY!

  The North Pole Found To Be An Enormous Cavern,

  Leading To A Subterranean World!

  The Earth Proves To Be A Hollow Shell One Thou-

  Sand Miles In Thickness, Lit By An Interior Sun!

  Oceans And Continents, Islands And Cities Spread Upon

  The Roof Of The Interior Sphere!

  Tremendous Possibilities For Science And Commerce!

  The Fabled Realms Of Pluto No Longer A Myth

  Gold! Gold! Beyond The Dreams Of Madness!

  The American and British ships that steam into view and save the day for White’s forces are the first of many rushing to check out the interior world and claim a piece of the pie: “All civilized nations immediately fitted out vessels of discovery … for the benefit of their respective governments.” The blithe imperialism in all of this couldn’t be more blatant. The assumption is that Atvatabar is there to be exploited, no matter what the inhabitants might have to say about it. And there’s a parallel attitude regarding its culture and religion. Lyone is ready to stop being a goddess because she’s so attracted to White, and willing to let her country plunge into bloody civil war, the result of which is an utter wreckage of the value system that had been in place there for centuries. It’s all presented as reform. Six years after Atvatabar was published, the United States marched into Cuba and the Philippines. Certainly the Spanish government in Cuba “had long been corrupt, tyrannical, and cruel,” but intervention in the long Cuban civil war had as much to do with economic considerations and a national spirit of empire building as with altruism.61

  John Uri Lloyd’s Etidorhpa, published in 1895, is easily the weirdest hollow earth novel of all. “To say that it is one of the strangest books of the century is to put it mildly,” wrote a contemporary reviewer in Lloyd’s hometown Cincinnati Enquirer. Another for the Chicago Medical Times gushed that “It excels Bulwer-Lytton’s Coming Race and Jules Verne’s most extreme fancy. It equals Dante in vividness and eccentricity of plot …” The Western Druggist, also published in Chicago, called it “a book like to nothing ever before seen; a book in which are blended, in a harmonious whole, romance, exact science, alchemy, poetry, esoterism, metaphysics, moral teachings and bold speculation.”

  Lloyd’s novel was reviewed in these medical papers because he was a pharmacist who’d made a reputation writing on pharmacological subjects before the publication of Etidorhpa (Aphrodite spelled backwards). “Psychedelics Lloyd must have had contact with include marijuana and opium poppies,” wrote Neal Wilgus in the introduction to a 1976 reprint, “belladonna containing plants such as nightshade, henbane and jimsonweed … ergot, an LSD containing fungus … most likely of all perhaps are the Psilocybe mexicana and other psilocybin producing mushrooms of Mexico which act very much like LSD and mescaline in producing just the kind of ‘head trip’ which Lloyd calls Eternity without Time.” Lloyd appears to have been the Carlos Castaneda of the hollow earth. As a more recent reviewer put it, “Etidorhpa recounts one of the earliest and most intensely evoked hallucinatory journeys in literature.”

  John Uri Lloyd’s Etidorhpa (1895) includes this eyeless humanoid creature that looks like a cross between E.T. and a cave fish.

  The narrator appears at Lloyd’s doorstep as an old bearded man and forces him to listen as he reads the manuscript he’s written. He has violated an occult society’s secret taboo, and his punishment is to be taken on a forced pilgrimage through a vast labyrinth leading down to the earth’s hollow center. He’s transported to a cave opening in Kentucky, where he is met by his guide—a gray-skinned eyeless humanoid creature who looks like a cross between E.T. and a cave fish. But the trip, while physical, is largely spiritual. He’s on his way to personal enlightenment and he is scared—suggestive of a line from Herman Hesse’s Demian: “Nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.”

  Deep in the cavern, they pass through a forest of giant mushrooms and then zoom across a vast lake at nine hundred miles an hour in a metal boat with no seeming means of propulsion. The guide tries to explain that it taps an invisible “energy fluid,” but the narrator doesn’t understand. The lake is contained by a stone wall, beyond which looms “an unfathomable abyss.” Returning from this excursion, they continue downward. Gravity decreases to near zero, and his breathing slows until it stops; still he lives. The narrator is terrified and feels “an uncontrollable, inexpressible desire to flee.” His guide explains that breathing is just a “waste of energy,” that the closer you get to pure spirit it’s not needed. They’re in another mushroom forest. The guide breaks one open, and insists that he drink its “clear, green liquid.”

  As the guide delivers a short history of drunkenness worldwide from the earliest times, they enter a cavern “resonant with voices—shrieks, yells, and maniacal cries commingled.”

  “I stopped and recoiled, for at my very feet I beheld a huge, living human head. ‘What is this?’ I gasped. ‘The fate of a drunkard,’ my guide replied. ‘This was once an intelligent man, but now he has lost his body, and enslaved his soul, in the den of drink.’ Then the monster whispered, ‘Back, back, go thou back!’ … Now I perceived many such heads about us … I felt myself clutched by a powerful hand—a hand as large as that of a man fifty feet in height. I looked about expecting to see a gigantic being, but instead beheld a shrunken pygmy. The whole man seemed but a single hand. Then
from about us, huge hands arose; on all sides they waved in the air. ‘Back, back, go thou back.’ … The amphitheater was fully a thousand feet in diameter, and the floor was literally alive with grotesque beings. Each abnormal part seemed to be created at the expense of the remainder of the body. Here a gigantic forehead rested on a shrunken face and body, and there a pair of enormous feet were walking, seemingly attached to the body of a child, and yet the face was that of a man.” “This is the Drunkard’s Den,” his guide tells him. “These men are lost to themselves and to the world. You must cross this floor. No other passage is known.” He adds, “Taste not their liquor by whatever form or creature presented.” If they offer inducements, he must refuse to drink or he’ll end up one of them.

  (above) The subterranean pilgrim in Etidorhpa visits a mushroom forest (top); and tiny tormented people (bottom).

  Abruptly he’s borne aloft by one of the huge hands and carried to a stone platform in the center of the cavern. Amid the grotesques, a handsome man appears to him, insisting he’s a friend, a deliverer, saying that all the deformities he’s seeing aren’t real, are produced in his imagination by the influence of an evil spirit (his guide), they’re really happy normal people. “They seek to save you from disaster. One hour of experience such as they enjoy is worth a hundred years of the pleasures known to you. After you have partaken of their exquisite joy, I will conduct you back to the earth’s surface whenever you desire to leave us.” Drink this! Tempted, the narrator begins to drink but then dashes the cup on a rock. Suddenly the twisted creatures and the handsome persuader vanish. Slowly they are replaced by beautiful vocal and instrumental music. And “by and by, from the corridors of the cavern, troops of bright female forms floated into view. Never before had I seen such loveliness in human mold.”

  The following scene could have been choreographed by Busby Berkeley on acid.

  Carrying “curious musical instruments and beautiful wands, they produced a scenic effect of rare beauty that the most extravagant dream of fairyland could not surpass. The great hall was clothed in brilliant colors. Flags and streamers fluttered in breezes that also moved the garments of the angelic throng about me.” They begin to dance around him to “music indescribable,” group after group of them, each singing “sweeter songs, more beautiful, and richer in dress than those preceding.” The narrator nearly swoons in ecstasy. “I was rapt, I became a thrill of joy. A single moment of existence such as I experienced, seemed worth an age of any other pleasure.”

  Can he get any higher? Yes. The music ceases and Etidorhpa herself appears. “She stood before me, slender, lithe, symmetrical, radiant. Her face paled the beauty of all who preceded her.” She announces that “love rules the world, and I am the Soul of Love Supreme”—and that he can have her all to himself forever. She and her beautiful minions have appeared to him as a preview of things to come. But first he must undergo a few more trials. “You can not pass into the land of Etidorhpa until you have suffered as only the damned can suffer,” she says, offering him a cup filled with green liquid. Again, he almost drinks but dashes that cup to the floor too. Etidorhpa disappears along with all the chorus girls. The narrator finds himself back on the surface, surrounded by endless desert sand. For days he struggles along in the fiery heat, without food or drink. He’s dying of thirst when he encounters a caravan whose leader offers a lifesaving glass of clear green liquid. “No. I will not drink.” The caravan abruptly vanishes, and a cool, refreshing breeze begins to blow. Soon he is nearly freezing, and days pass without number. He curses God and prays for death. He wishes he’d given in to one of the tempters—but then, no. “I have faith in Etidorhpa, and were it to do over again I would not drink.”

  The magic words! Suddenly he is once again back in the cavern with his guide. It’s all been a brief hallucination, occurring in the moment after he sipped the magic mushroom cocktail. Their journey continues, literally downhill for them and for the reader as well. They get to the end of a shelf of rock overhanging an unfathomable abyss—the enormous hollow center of the earth—and his guide bids the narrator to jump. Are you crazy? he asks. The guide says that here lies Enlightenment, grabs him, and they leap into nothingness. Instead of falling, they seem to float, and after a time they reach the very center, “the Sphere of Rest.” Here the narrator experiences a midair satori. “Perfect rest came over my troubled spirit. All thoughts of former times vanished. The cares of life faded; misery, distress, hatred, envy, jealousy, and unholy passions, were blotted from existence. I had reached the land of Etidorhpa—THE END OF THE EARTH.”

  He’s achieved a moment of spiritual awakening. His guide tells him:

  It has been my duty to crush, to overcome by successive lessons your obedience to your dogmatic, materialistic earth philosophy, and bring your mind to comprehend that life on earth’s surface is only a step towards a higher existence, which may, when selfishness is conquered, in a time to come, be gained by mortal man, and while he is in the flesh. The vicissitudes through which you have recently passed should be to you an impressive lesson, but the future holds for you a lesson far more important, the knowledge of spiritual, or mental evolution which men may yet approach; but that I would not presume to indicate now, even to you.

  He stands on the edge of “The Unknown Country”—but cannot reveal what comes next. It would be too mind-blowing for mere mortals. And so ends the novel’s action.

  Etidorhpa is horribly flawed as novels go—I’ve left out the frequent long tedious asides in which Lloyd challenges the writer of the manuscript about seemingly impossible aspects of his story, which he then explains/defends at “scientific” and philosophical length. But it is certainly a landmark departure from the usual hollow earth novels, using the conceit not for mere adventure, or as the device for concocting some new sociopolitical utopia. The utopia it presents, if it can be called that, is purely spiritual—however deeply weird.

  Arguably the most boring hollow earth novel ever, in a couple of respects, is Clement Fezandie’s Through the Earth (1898). Fezandie (1865–1959) was a math teacher in New York City and eventually wrote science fiction for Hugo Gernsback (1884–1967), the pioneering editor who invented sci-fi magazines, starting with Amazing Stories in 1926. Through the Earth qualifies only marginally as a hollow earth novel. It tells of a project to bore a tunnel between New York City and Australia to carry goods and people between the two places, like the world’s longest freight elevator. Most of the book is occupied by an account of the first test ride, essayed by a brave impoverished lad for the prize money of £100 (offered because no one was willing to try it for free). As he plunges through the tube, he relates scientific observations of gravity, temperature, and distance. At the end, the tunnel self-destructs, but the plucky volunteer lives through it, sells his story to a New York newspaper for $100,000, tours the country as a celebrated hero, and marries the inventor’s pretty daughter. Horatio Alger meets the hollow earth. But it’s another example of how writers of every period have used the notion for purposes appropriate to their time. The first attempts at building subways went back to the 1840s in London, where underground railways were first pioneered, but by the turn of the new century a certain mania for subway building was taking place in major cities worldwide. The first practical subway line in the United States was under construction in Boston while Fezandie was writing Through the Earth, as was New York’s (which would officially open in 1904), and it seems likely that Fezandie simply used these as a jumping-off point. Why not a really long one?

  The Secret of the Earth by Charles Beale (1899) features two characters who have invented an airplane that they fly to the North Pole and into a Symmes’ Hole into the interior. They find a paradise that was mankind’s first home and then fly out through the hole in the South Pole. Their airship beats the Wright Brothers by four years, of course, but in the 1890s, trying to come up with one was all the rage with inventors. It’s often forgotten that the Wrights had serious competitors racing with them to develop a
reliable design, and that one incentive was a large cash prize offered by France to the inventor of the first one that really worked—which is to say that the idea of airplanes was, well, in the air at the time Beale’s Secret of the Earth appeared.

  William Alexander Taylor’s Intermere (1901) is like a bad rewrite of Symzonia. It too uses the hollow earth as a vehicle for current ideas. This otherworldly society has solved all earthly problems. It is a perfect democracy—almost. Women are supposedly equal, but their “chosen” role is generally that of housewife, and those who work don’t make as much money as men. They receive five fewer years of education than men do, and they’re not allowed to own real estate. But everybody’s pretty and handsome, nobody’s poor, there’s a four-hour workday, the communities are lovely and idyllic, crops go from planting to harvest in ten days, all marriages are happy and harmonious, and the food is fabulous but nobody has to cook. They have Medocars, Aerocars, and Merocars—autos, airplanes, and ships—which zip silently about at “a rate of speed that makes our limited railway trains seem like lumbering farm wagons.” They are powered by a force derived from electricity, which proves to be the secret behind their social and economic perfection.