At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs

For a moment I was puzzled to account for the thing, until I realized that the reptiles, being deaf, could not have been disturbed by the noise my body made when it hit the water, and that as there is no such thing as time within Pellucidar there was no telling how long I had been beneath the surface. It was a difficult thing to attempt to figure out by earthly standards—this matter of elapsed time—but when I set myself to it I began to realize that I might have been submerged a second or a month or not at all. You have no conception of the strange contradictions and impossibilities which arise when all methods of measuring time, as we know them upon earth, are non-existent.

Let's return to the world of Edgar Rice Burroughs with the first Pellucidar novel, At the Earth's Core, which debuted in 1914 in serial form across four issues of All-Story Weekly.  The cover illustration of that first appearance appeals to readers' interest in women in chains, but such masters as Frank Frazetta, J. Allen St. John and Bob Eggleton have graced many of the book reprints of At the Earth's Core with terrific reptile-centric covers.  In 1976 a very fun film based on the book and starring fan favorites Peter Cushing and Caroline Munro hit the big screen and in 2015 at a thrift store in Iowa I bought a hardcover movie tie-in edition of At the Earth's Core; that is the version of the novel I will be reading today. 

At the Earth's Core has a prolog in which a man who is acquainted with members of the Royal Society tells us that he unexpectedly ran into another white man among Arabs in the African desert; the main text of the novel is the author's recounting of the wild tale related to him by this gentleman, who was astonished to learn his adventure began ten years ago--he thought it was just one year!

This main narrator is David Innes, a native of Connecticut and physical fitness hobbyist who inherited a successful mining business.  Innes is friends with Perry, an old scientist and a religious man who, with Innes' financial backing, developed a superior engine and used it to power a colossal vehicle of his own design, a sort of ship that could bore through rock and earth.  Burroughs, like a legit science fiction writer, comes up with solutions for the problems presented by travelling through dirt and solid rock, like ways to refresh the air in the machine, how to make sure the occupants are seated upright no matter the direction the "iron mole" is travelling, where the earth dug away by the drill nose of the vessel must go, and so on.  Innes is our leading man, who does the fighting and who gets involved in love triangles, while Perry plays the role of comic relief and of wise man--he gets scared and prays and swears when there is danger, and it is he who identifies the exotic fauna they encounter (his hobby is paleontology) and figures stuff out by reading alien documents that providentially fall into his hands.  Much of the plot of At the Earth's Core is driven by Perry's inventions and aspirations; the rest is propelled by Innes' relationships.

The iron mole's test voyage, crewed solely by Innes and Perry, quickly goes awry, neither brainiac Perry nor muscleman Innes  finding himself able to steer the machine.  The iron mole drills downwards for days, carrying our heroes hundreds of miles below the Earth's surface.  Just as the vessel's air supply is about to run out, after digging through bands of rock and ice of radically diverse temperatures, the machine unexpectedly emerges into a region that offers cool fresh air!  Has Innes and Perry's conveyance accidentally been turned round and come back to the surface?

Of course not; the adventurers have emerged in a subterranean world alongside a placid sea, below a sun that forever sits in the center of the sky.  This is Pellucidar, a world on the inner surface of the hollow sphere that is the Earth, somehow held there by a gravity that pulls people away from the center of the planet, where hangs a small sun.  Burroughs puts some real effort into describing this world, most mind-bendingly, the psychological effect of living in a milieu where the sun doesn't move, so there is no sense of time--Burroughs even suggests that there is no such thing as time, that it is an illusion.  Even if this stuff is unconvincing--all the talk of time in At the Earth's Core I personally consider absolute balderdash--it adds texture and additional levels of interest to a story that is, of course, mostly about a guy who meets a princess in an alien world and gets involved in her wars, like most of Burroughs' compositions.  

Almost at once, Innes and Perry are set upon by a huge prehistoric mammal, and only escape destruction thanks to the intervention of some naked monkey-people and their teeming pack of ferocious canines.  These jolly primitives, whom Burroughs describes as having the skin color and facial features of "the Negro of Africa," have no tools or weapons, but they have a village fifty feet above the surface in the branches of trees, as well as a crude arena into which they throw Innes and Perry to be devoured by a hyaenodon.  Before the hyenadon can overpower them, furry gorilla people who have clothes and weapons attack, putting the monkey people and hyaenodon to flight and adding Innes and Perry to their chained line of captive humans.

The gorilla-people lead the chained humans past a sea teeming with battling plesiosaurs and icthyosaurs and giant turtles to the city of their masters, the Mahars.  Innes makes friends with a beautiful woman chained next to him, Dian, and she teaches him the language of her tribe.  Also among the captives is Hooja, who covets the beautiful Dian.  When Hooja gets fresh with Dian, Innes punches him out.  According to the custom of the humans of Pellucidar, this makes Dian Innes' property--he is expected to formally take her as a mate or give her her freedom, but Innes doesn't know this idiosyncrasy of local culture yet, and Dian is insulted and gives Innes the silent treatment.

When the party of gorilla men and captives passes through a dark tunnel, Hooja, a deft hand at picking locks, escapes and takes Dian with him.  Now that Dian is gone, another captive explains Pellucidar sexual relationships to Innes, and also helpfully points out that Dian is the princess of her people.

Innes and Perry end up in the city of the Mahars, where humans by the thousands serve as slaves to the dominant race of this inner world.  The Mahars are intelligent pterosaurs up to eight feet long who are deaf and communicate among themselves via some mental power and with lesser races, like the gorilla men, their servant and soldier class, through sign language.  The slavery our heroes endure doesn't involve particularly taxing work or particularly severe surveillance--Innes and Perry are assigned jobs like shelving books and find free time to make swords out of scrap metal that is laying around.  From the Mahar documents he is supposed to be dusting, Perry learns the history of the flying psykers--the current Mahars are all female, having figured out a way to artificially fertilize their eggs and then dispensed with the males.  Innes conceives a scheme to topple the hegemony of these scaly matriarchs and put homo sapiens where he belongs in Pellucidar as on the surface--on top!   

We readers are administered a hearty dose of gore and brutality when, as exemplary punishment for their fellow humans and as entertainment for the Mahars, two disobedient slaves with whom Innes and Perry are not acquainted get thrown into the Mahar's elaborate arena with two huge prehistoric mammals, a gargantuan bovine and a titanic feline.  Chaos erupts when one of these colossi ends up out of the arena and among the audience; Innes seizes this opportunity to sneak out of the underground city and back out into the wider world.  He meets a tribe of human fishermen who have a business relationship with the Mahars; as so often happens in these Burroughs stories, our protagonist ingratiates himself with strangers by helping them fight a monster.  We get an additional helping of horrible gore as this fisherman guides Innes to a Mahar temple, where they watch as the Mahars hypnotize and eat human women and children--because they are hypnotized, these humans do not flinch as their limbs and breasts are eaten off!  Yikes!  Male human slaves are devoured, without benefit of hypnotism, by the low-IQ pterosaurs who serve as the intelligent Mahars' watchdogs and bodyguards.

At the Earth's Core is a something of a peripatetic novel, one in which the narrative, instead of proceeding directly from point A to point B to point C, instead wanders here and there a bit.  The episode of the primitive monkey people, for example, seems to serve little plot purpose, though it is entertaining--why have Innes and Perry captured by the good-natured savages and then captured by the barbaric henchmen of the Mahars, why not just have them get captured first by the gorilla-men?  Similarly, Innes escapes the city of the Mahars, witnesses some horror scenes, and then just goes back to the city.  There is also some foreshadowing that doesn't pay off.  All this "extra" material is fun or otherwise affecting, so doesn't weaken the novel, but on reflection the plot is far from streamlined.

Anyway, Innes decides to return to the city of the Mahars to be with Perry and work on their scheme to overthrow the Mahars and civilize and Christianize the humans of Pellucidar.  When Innes is reunited with the old man, Perry suggests it was only an hour ago that they parted in the arena, while Innes, who has been marching for miles and miles, rowing canoes, fighting monsters, and witnessing atrocities, feels like months have passed.

The Mahars interrogate Innes, the strangest slave they have ever owned--no escaped slave has ever returned of his own volition, and no human has ever claimed to be from another world.  The psychic matriarchal feminist rhamphorynchusoids determine Innes must be lying about being from some outer surface world and sentence him to live vivisection--the Mahars may not have invented the bow and arrow or discovered electricity, but they are skilled biologists and eugenicists.  Innes, in chains, watches as the Mahars vivisect a shrieking living man, but luckily contrives to escape before being put on the operating table himself.  

Innes and Perry then put into operation their plan to destroy the Mahars--two natives, Hooja, who has been recaptured by the Mahars, and a another guy, have joined their crusade.  Innes slays four Mahars (three of whom were asleep when he launched his attack) and the men skin them and don their scaly hides as a disguise.  They steal the only copy of the formula for the fertilization chemicals the Mahars use to reproduce without male participation, and manage to sneak out of the city.

For months--maybe years!--the four men march across Pellucidar, overcoming obstacles and fighting off monsters.  The gorilla-men of the Mahars are on their trail, and catch up to them just before the fugitive slaves reach a human tribe.  The party splits up, the treacherous Hooja sneaking off and Innes going it alone in a successful effort to divert the gorilla-men away from poor old Perry and the hulking native who has to carry the Yankee inventor.  Innes has good fortune--a huge cave bear ambushes and massacres the entire company of gorilla-men.

Perry and his native companion escape to a human settlement, but Innes gets lost amid mountains and canyons and does not reunite with them for some time.  By chance he runs into Dian, the beauty who has been incessantly on his mind since her escape from the slave raiding party, just as she is being attacked by a pterosaur.  Innes kills the flying reptile and then has to contend with Jubal the Ugly One, a seven-foot tall he-man who has been after Dian, and whom she has been avoiding, the whole of her postpubescent life.  More horror material from Burroughs--Jubal is a famous fighter of monsters, and his body bears testimony to his many battles; the flesh of one side of his face, including an eye, is missing, the bones of his skull exposed.  Having defeated this brute, Innes still has to figure out how to win the heart of Dian, who keeps saying she hates him.  Of course, she really loves him, and when he gets frustrated enough to throw aside his civilized gentlemanliness and just grab her and kiss her against her (apparent, performative and false) will, she melts in his arms.  

Dian is keen on Innes' plan to unite the human tribes and teach them how to make bows and maybe even gunpowder and firearms and exterminate the Mahars and their gorilla-men.  The two lovers seek out Perry and begin to put the plan into action; Dian's tribe is one of the first to join the human coalition, of which Innes is declared Emperor!  But our heroes find that producing gunpowder is more difficult than anticipated, so Innes takes the iron mole back to the surface to get the science books that will spell it out for them.  But the iron mole again proves impossible to steer and Innes ends up in the Sahara instead of New England.

As the novel ends the author of the prolog has again taken up the narrative.  He tells us Innes has collected the books and other equipment he wants to bring back to Pellucidar with him, but doesn't know if Innes has made it back to Perry and Dian down in Pellucidar.  Like the first Barsoom book, the first Pellucidar book ends on a cliffhanger!

At the Earth's Core is a quite good adventure story with plenty of science fiction elements that speculate on how you might get to the Earth's core, what a society of deaf feminist monsters might be like, how the lack of a view of the sky might affect you psychologically, the nature of time, etc.  Of course the plot relies on wacky coincidences and at its center has a guy meeting and falling in love with a princess, as do so many Burroughs plots, so if that gets on your nerves I can't recommend At the Earth's Core to you.  But let's consider some ways At the Earth's Core may be different from other ERB classics.  I think the fight scenes in At The Earth's Core are a little more believable than many of those that take pace on Barsoom and in Tarzan's Africa--Innes doesn't single-handedly outfight huge animals or hordes of men all the time like John Carter and Lord Greystoke do.  The novel also has a sort of horror or grand guignol flavor to it, thanks to the fact that people and animals are forever getting mangled and dismembered.

I really enjoyed At the Earth's Core and look forward to our next journey down to Pellucidar.  There are five or six more Pellucidar books, so I suspect we have plenty of mutilation and musing about the nature of Time ahead of us.  But first we'll have a blog post addressing one of our bread and butter topics here at MPorcius Fiction Log.