Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio (30 page)
Authors: David Standish
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BOOK: Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio
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Stop him before he describes more!
Afterward, in a private audience, Lyone and White at last get down to it. “The pleasure we aspire to is superior to any physical delight,” she insists. “It is the quintessence of existence. We are willing to pay the price of hopelessness to taste such nectar.” She explains that at one time in its past, Atvatabar experimented with a form of free love, but the result was disastrous: “unbridled license devastated the country.” So the lawmakers reestablished marriage as “the only law suitable to mankind.” But some of these married couples chose to remain celibate, and “for these Egyplosis was founded, for the study and practice of what is really a higher development of human nature and in itself an unquestionable good.” This higher state of celibacy, of course, echoes the practices of many nineteenth-century utopian communities, from the Rappites to the Koreshans.
But White isn’t convinced. “Hopeless love seems to me one of the most disquieting things in life. Its victims, happy and unhappy, resisting passion with regret or yielding with remorse, are ever on the rack of torture.” Is everyone content with their celibate state here? he asks. Just then they hear a terrible commotion, shouts, a woman shrieking. Two twin-souls are brought before Lyone, and the woman of the pair is carrying a beautiful baby. Apparently not everyone. “Did you not think of your lifelong vows of celibacy?” asks Lyone. “We have,” says the youth. “Such vows are a violation of nature. Everything here bids us love, but the artificial system under which we have lived arbitrarily draws a line and says, thus far and no further. Your system may suit disembodied spirits, if such exist, but not beings of flesh and blood. It is an outrage on nature. We desire to leave Egyplosis.” And furthermore, he says, “There are thousands of twin-souls ready to cast off this yoke. They only await a leader to break out in open revolt.”
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!
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
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.”
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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