Summary: Baron Trump’s Marvelous Underground Journey

The GIST

Baron Trump’s Marvelous Underground Journey by Ingersoll Lockwood is a children's fantasy from 1893 that sends a pint-sized nobleman with an oversized head, and a dog cleverer than most people, down a hole in northern Russia and into a world within a world. It is the second of Lockwood's Baron Trump books, following an 1890 volume about the same boy and the same dog. Lockwood, born in Ossining, New York, in 1841, was a lawyer as well as a writer, and his story is part tall tale, part early science fiction, part fairy story, with every strange country explained in loving, logical detail.

For more than a century the book sat forgotten. It came back because of a coincidence of names: a boy called Baron Trump, living at Castle Trump, whose adventure begins in Russia. That accident brought modern readers to it, but what they find when they open it is something older and odder, an American cousin of the fantastic voyages that would soon fill the Oz books, where the fun lies in meeting one impossible people after another.

The Story

The tale opens with a portrait. In the town hall at Stettin hangs a painting of a small man with a head too big for his body, in outlandish dress, one hand resting on a dignified dog. Ask who he is and the guide always gives the same answer: the Little Baron. A mock-serious biographical note insists that Baron Wilhelm Heinrich Sebastian von Troomp was a real nobleman of Pomerania, of French Huguenot descent, with a castle crammed with curiosities from every corner of the globe. What follows is offered, with a straight face, as the authenticated record of a child prodigy and his extraordinary dog.

At Castle Trump the young baron's beloved dog, Bulger, has grown miserable, pestered by village mongrels and by kitchen cats that steal his breakfast. One day he vanishes into his master's bedroom and returns, piece by piece, with the travelling costume from their last expedition. The message could not be plainer. As it happens, the baron has been buried in a fifteenth-century manuscript by a Spanish scholar, Don Fum, who argues that the earth is hollow and inhabited and that the way in lies somewhere in northern Russia. As for where exactly, Don Fum offers only a riddle: the people will tell you. The elder baron gives his blessing and invokes the family motto, the boy's mother smothers him in kisses and lets him go, Bulger howls for joy, and the castle bustles with packing.

The road runs through St. Petersburg to the northern Urals, where the baron hires Ivan, a teamster with good horses and a foul temper. Once past the hundred miles he contracted to drive, Ivan turns mutinous, drinking at roadside taverns despite every warning. One morning he tries to tip the wagon over on purpose, and when the boy confronts him he strikes him on the temple with the weighted end of his whip. Bulger goes for his throat, the baron fires a pistol into the man's arm, and then the dog jumps to the driver's seat, takes the reins in his teeth and drives the bolting horses out of reach of Ivan's knife. The peasants who finally stop the runaway wagon stand dumbfounded at the sight of its driver. An old healer named Yuliana, tending the wound, mutters about a bottomless Giants' Well nearby. The people have told him, just as Don Fum promised.

When superstitious villagers chase the old woman off, the baron finds his own way. He frees the local cattle from the yokes that keep them from climbing and follows them up mountain trails they already know, through a fantastically ruined landscape called the Quarries of the Demons. At the well's edge he lowers Bulger terrace by terrace on a tackle and climbs down after him. At the bottom waits a stone pipe, Polyphemus' Funnel, too narrow for his shoulders. Despair lasts only a moment. He ropes his shoulders inward, smears himself with graphite scraped from the walls, ties a heavy rock to his ankles and drops. Halfway down he sticks fast in a threaded stretch of the pipe and has to twist himself through like a human screw, until Bulger tugs him free at the bottom.

Below lies the Marble Highway, a huge polished corridor lit by lizards with flashing tails, and at the end of it the first of the underground nations. Morning arrives here when electric currents set metal traceries in the ceiling glowing, and the white light is so fierce that the baron is handed goggles before he can be presented at court. The Mikkamenkies are transparent: amber bones, colourless blood, and crystal eyes that cloud over the instant their owner tells a lie. Each wears a black fan over the chest to keep the heart, and the feelings in it, private. Their hearts run like clocks and too much happiness wears them out, so the court employs Master Cold Soul, the Court Depressor, to keep everyone from getting too cheerful. Queen Galaxa receives the travellers on a throne of crystal columns and knights Bulger with her golden wand. Then, in a garden where every flower has bleached white for want of sun, a lady-in-waiting tells the baron a secret. She is the true Princess Crystallina, exchanged at birth for a servant's child because a tiny speck was found in her see-through heart, and her mother feared the people would never accept a flawed heir. With the queen's own heart close to its last hours, the baron sets about showing the whole court just how small that speck is, using a magnifying glass fitted into a tube, a silver mirror and a beam of that brilliant white light. He has looked at the speck himself, and it is not the black mark of doom she feared but a tiny reddish fleck, like a single drop of ancestral blood handed down through the ages.

Farther along the highway, two giant silver candelabra mark the City of Silver, home of the Soodopsies, descendants of metalworkers who over the ages lost sight, hearing and speech. Their guards greet strangers by waving their hands to feel the tremors in the air. Their city is a wonder of hammered walls, carved archways and statues, lit by thousands of gas flames that never go out and that none of them can see. They talk by touch and by raised writing on silver tablets, and they read with their bare feet: street names and poems are raised in silver on the pavement, the best-loved verses worn smooth by generations of grateful soles. The scholar Barrel Brow reads four books at once, two with his hands and two with his feet, and lectures the baron on how absurd it is to bother with sight, hearing and speech. Each night the Soodopsies count themselves, and one night a citizen is missing. The whole blind population joins hands in a great widening ring and sweeps every chamber, and finds nothing. Suspicion falls on the visitor and on the dancing spectre that follows him everywhere, which is how these eyeless people understand his shadow. Barrel Brow advises him to flee, but it takes Bulger's warning and the baron's nerve to find out what is really hiding in a newly opened chamber.

Then comes a voyage down a dark river with fire lizards flickering around the boat. Huge white crabs seize both oars and chain themselves across the stream, claw gripping shell, while Bulger holds the tiller ropes in his teeth and the baron reaches for his pistols. Beyond them lies water that turns colder and colder until the travellers drift into caverns of ice, lit without warmth by sunlight pouring through a vast natural lens of rock crystal. Here live the Koltykwerps, the Cold Bodies, under King Gelidus, who begs his guest not to touch anything with those dangerously hot hands. The Cold Bodies dine on meat quarried from animals frozen in ancient ice ages. Their history is told by Lord Bullibrain, a rare hot-headed citizen who has to be kept in a cell with triple walls of ice: his people once lived in a warm Greenland and were driven underground by the advancing glaciers. The king's daughter, the dimpled fifteen-year-old Princess Schneeboule, who squeals that the baron's thumb has burned her finger, shows the baron her favourite grotto and the creature she calls the Little Man with the Frozen Smile, sitting open-eyed inside a clear block of ice with a collar of gold and silver discs around his neck. The baron cannot rest until he knows what that collar says, and his curiosity, together with Bulger's warm heart, sets the whole frozen kingdom trembling.

What It's Really About

On the surface this is a parade of marvels, and Lockwood's pleasure in invention is the main attraction. Each people is built from one bold idea and then worked out to the last detail: a nation that cannot lie because its eyes give it away, a city that makes beautiful things no one there can see, a kingdom where a fever is a public emergency. The Soodopsies, perfectly content without the senses the baron thinks essential, quietly mock the traveller's certainty that his way of knowing the world is the only one. The speck in the princess's heart is a story about how large a small flaw looks when it is hidden and how small it looks in full light.

Beneath the marvels runs the friendship of a boy and his dog, the warm centre of a book that might otherwise be all cleverness. The baron supplies the learning and the schemes, and Bulger supplies instinct, courage and loyalty, and more than once it is the dog who sees the danger first or finds the way out. The other thread is curiosity itself: the baron is driven by the need to know, and the story both celebrates that hunger and shows what it can cost the people he visits.

A word of caution about what you may have read elsewhere. Some modern descriptions of the book speak of philosophical giants, a land of frozen thoughts and a world of living shadows. The detailed chapter accounts tell a different journey, the one described here, through the transparent folk, the silver city and the kingdom of ice, so it is wise to trust the book itself over the legend that has grown around it.

Readers come to it today for the famous coincidence and stay for the period charm: the ornate Victorian voice, the mock-scholarly seriousness, and a hollow earth imagined before anyone had drawn a border between science fiction and fantasy. Lockwood went on to write a political satire, 1900: or, The Last President, in 1896, and the two works are often read side by side by the curious.

Who Should Read It

Pick this up if you love literary curiosities, old-fashioned fantastic voyages and hollow-earth tales, or if you want to see the book behind the internet legend for yourself. Fans of the Oz stories and of Victorian children's fiction will feel at home with its episodic wandering and its deadpan wonder.