The Undersea Tube

In the 1920s, when the world still believed in the boundless possibilities of engineering, L. Taylor Hansen imagined something breathtaking: an Atlantic tunnel, a train plunging beneath the ocean to connect continents. The story follows the sole survivor of this ambitious Tube, recounting the catastrophic journey that destroyed the train and everything on board. His engineer friend had warned of danger, a crack in the tunnel caused by an earthquake fault, but no one listened. When the disaster comes, it propels the protagonist not into death, but into something stranger: a surreal underground world where a mystical city from deep time exists alongside a child fleeing lava and a mysterious old man. The lines between survival and dream blur. Hansen, writing in the golden age of pulp SF, offers both a rollicking adventure and a warning: what lies beneath the ocean, beneath the earth, beneath our confidence in human ingenuity, may be far older and stranger than we know.