Mythology and Literature
Greek mythology included the Styx, Phlegethon, Acheron, Cocytus, and Lethe as rivers within the Underworld. Dante Alighieri, in his Inferno, included the Acheron, Phlegethon, and Styx as rivers within his subterranean Hell. The river Alph, running "Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea" is central to the poem Kubla Khan, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
The characters in Jules Verne's A Journey to the Centre of the Earth encounter a subterranean river:
"Hans was not mistaken," he said. "What you hear is the rushing of a torrent."
"A torrent?" I exclaimed.
"There can be no doubt; a subterranean river is flowing around us."
Several other novels also feature subterranean rivers. The subterranean rivers of London feature in e.g. the novel "Drowning Man" by Michael Robotham as well as in the novel Thrones, Dominations by Dorothy L. Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh in which a character remarks:
"You can bury them deep under, sir; you can bind them in tunnels, ... but in the end where a river has been, a river will always be."
Read more about this topic: Subterranean Rivers
Famous quotes containing the words mythology and/or literature:
“Love, love, love—all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.”
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