Edgar Rice Burroughs

Tarzan At The Earth's Core Edgar Rice Burroughs

The book opens with Tarzan investigating a party that has intruded on his jungle home, led by a young American inventor named Jason Gridley, who has recently received mysterious messages on a new type of radio. Gridley tells him of a mysterious world within the Earth, and how another American explorer, David Innes, has been captured and is in need of rescue. Gridley proposes that Tarzan co-sponsor an expedition that will use a dirigible to travel via the polar entrance to this world. Gridley is concerned that normal dirigibles need lots of ground support, but Tarzan has a better idea: a friend of his has discovered an incredibly light and strong material that could be used to build pressure vessels that could be pumped down to a vacuum, and provide even more lift than lighter-than-air gasses. (I suspect that this approach would require new physical laws rather than just a new material, but we are reading a book where the Earth is a giant hollow sphere, so let's just accept that and move ahead.) Together, they go to Germany and commission the construction of this craft, which they dub the O-220. They hire a crew that consists of German airmen, an African-American cook, and Filipino stewards. Tarzan enlists ten Waziri warriors from his African homeland to defend the expedition. Oddly, the only person from this crew who displays any personality at all is Robert Jones, the cook, whose bemusement about the strange environment and perpetual noon is presented as a running joke. The others simply serve the plot as required.