Down a Hollow to a Cavern by Nigel Roth

If I told you that I sailed this week on the Sea of Mirovia, on my way to the southern tip of the land of Rodinia, having first traversed the endless plains of Laurentia and Ur, and rode the tide across the Poseidon Ocean, you’d probably think I was trying to emulate CS Lewis or JRR Tolkien, and describe a world of magic and wonder from a dark period of prehistory where humans were mere twinkles in the unfamiliar stars.

If, on the other hand, I told you I once made a journey from the Kioram, down through Egyplosis and Tanje, past the lands of Mylosis and Calnogor, and finally to Hilar in the great expanses of Atvatabar, you might think I was recalling the antics of Bruce Chatwin or Paul Theroux, traipsing through the outer reaches of Patagonia with an attitude, or paddling the Oceanic Islands in a bucket, respectively.

And of course, you’d be justified in thinking that both of these journeys were impossible.

The first because I would've had to have lived billions of years ago on our then youthful and atmospherically-challenged planet Earth, and I just don’t look old enough for that, and, the second because I would’ve had to have agreed with the thinking of the greatest geophysicist, mathematician, meteorologist, and physicist the world has ever produced, the brilliant Astronomer-Royal Edmond Halley, who determined the size of the Solar System, proved Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion were correct, and worked out the complex return cycle of the comet that now bears his name, that the Earth was actually hollow.

Yes, hollow.

Of course, Clive Staples Lewis also thought hard and long about a hollow Earth, but only as a tantalising potential sidetrack for Prince Rillian, who almost decided to visit the Really Deep Realm, which lay six-thousand feet underground, while escaping the Fall of the Underland and that mind-bending Silver Chair, but only in his fantasy world of Narnia, where the Lady of the Green Kirtle held sway.

And, while many cultures have tales of the land beneath, from the Greek Hades