The Child of the Cavern, or The Underground City by Jules Verne

Home sweet coal mine

Jules Verne’s novel Les Indes noires (“The Black Indies”) was published in 1877. It has been published in English under various titles, including The Child of the Cavern, The Underground City, Strange Doings Underground, and Black Diamonds. Unfortunately, some of those English titles reveal more about the plot than they should. This is a science fiction adventure novel about a coal mine, the science in this case being geology.

James Starr was the head engineer at the Aberfoyle Mine near Edinburgh, Scotland. Ten years prior to the start of the novel, that mine was shut down, its resources deemed exhausted. As the story opens, Starr receives a letter from his right-hand man at Aberfoyle, the former overseer Simon Ford. The mysterious message begs Starr to come to Aberfoyle immediately. Although the mine has been inactive for a decade, Ford never left. He lives inside the mine with his wife and 25-year-old son Harry, in a cottage thirty stories beneath the earth. Starr descends into the mine to visit the Fords, and Simon lets him in on his recent amazing discovery. At the end of one of Aberfoyle’s underground passages, Simon has found firedamp (flammable gases) issuing forth from crevices in the rock, a strong indication that a bed of coal exists behind the walls. He speculates that the mine may have some riches left in her yet, in the form of a mother lode of undiscovered coal. Ford and his family may not be the only parties to have made this discovery, however. There is evidence that some mystery person has been wandering in the caverns of Aberfoyle, perhaps with evil intentions.

I’ve always admired the fact that Verne could make a science fiction novel out of just about any field of science. He proved that scientific romances (the 19th-century term for the genre) didn’t have to be about outer space or utopian or dystopian futures. Verne wrote novels about all sorts of scientific phenomena that struck his fancy, from aeronautics (Five Weeks in a Balloon, 1873) to paleontology (Journey to the Center of the Earth, 1867) to oceanography (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1871). I’ve never been fascinated with coal mines, but Verne managed to keep me interested with this subterranean adventure. In fact, he makes coal mines sound like the most wonderful places on earth. All the characters want to live and work in one, so much so that they rarely make trips to the surface. Verne’s books are also known for their geographical content and often educate the reader on exotic locales. In this novel, however, the reader doesn’t really learn a whole lot about Scotland, because so much time is spent underground.

While The Child of the Cavern is grounded in geological fact, this story gets pretty farfetched, even for Verne standards. As previously alluded to, people spend inordinate amounts of time deep underground. God only knows what they’re eating. And don’t get me started on Harfang (a secret better left unrevealed). One must suspend quite a bit of disbelief to enjoy this novel. The plot here is a little like a Scooby Doo mystery, one of the less satisfying ones where the “ghost” unmasks to reveal an unfamiliar character. As is often the case with Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires, there is a sinister villain here, as well as a couple of young lovers eager to get married when the crisis is resolved. This is not one of Verne’s greater works. It’s an obscurity, and probably deserves to be so, but if you can get in touch with your inner twelve-year-old, it is a fun ride.