 First edition | |
| Author | Lawrence Leonard |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Gavin Rowe |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Science fiction |
| Publisher | Julia MacRae |
Publication date | 1980 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Pages | 224 |
| ISBN | 0-7445-0847-9 |
| OCLC | 59211869 |
The Horn of Mortal Danger is a 1980 novel by British musician Lawrence Leonard. It relates the adventures of a brother and sister as they discover a secret civilisation buried beneath the streets of London. It is a 'classical' children's fantasy.
Simon ("Widgie") and Jen Widgeon are innocently exploring the abandoned Highgate rail tunnel near their home when they discover a hidden gateway halfway along it. Through this, they find their way to a little old-fashioned railway station.[ citation needed ]
At first the tunnels seem deserted. However, as Jen wanders down the tunnel to explore, the Railwaymen emerge and capture Widgie. Jen, in her turn, discovers an underground canal, complete with a little steamboat, which the railway crosses through a retractable bridge. Men emerge from the boat and take her captive.
It quickly becomes apparent that Widgie and Jen have become caught up in an entire underground civilisation, which the North London System had kept secret for centuries from the world above. Two civilisations, in fact, seemingly perpetually at war. The siblings' arrival becomes the catalyst for a climactic battle between the Railwaymen and the Canallers.
Widgie manages to escape and rescues Jen, and the realisation of the threat they pose should they escape aboveground and expose the System forces the Railwaymen and the Canallers to set aside their differences for the time being, to collaborate in an effort to recapture them. In the course of the battle giant rats, kept imprisoned in a blocked-up tunnel, are released and proceed to spread through the whole system. As Widgie and Jen escape into the Post Office Railway, it appears that the entire civilisation is on the verge of disintegration under the assault from the rats.[ citation needed ]
It is worth noting that, seemingly in imitation of The Lord of the Rings (1937 and 1949). Leonard includes appendices relating the aftermath of the story underground, in which the Railwaymen and Canal Folk discuss the joint threats of the children and the rats, and giving a short history of the North London System (and suggesting that similar societies exist beneath many major cities, at least in England). It also includes two short "Interludes", set aboveground, concerning the search for the missing children.[ citation needed ]
Leonard's secondary world is unusual as a result of the fact that it overlaps with the primary one and is separated from it, it seems, through nothing stronger than blind luck. Uniquely among such fantasies, Leonard never employs magic, and indeed seems at pains to explain how his underground System works. There are no women seen underground, nor any apparent means to produce food to support the Undergrounders, but rather than hoping his readers will not notice this (as the children do), he explains very concisely the why and how of this in a throwaway manner near the beginning.
The technology of railways and canals is borrowed from observation of the Aboveground world, but the System is conservative and usually does not adopt new things very quickly. They have no electricity, though the Railway is reportedly looking into the matter. The children finally make their escape through an Observation Shaft, similar to the one they entered through, which leads into the Post Office Railway, and is used to study the operation of electric trains.
In the story, the System had existed for centuries before the Tube, and it is mentioned in the second Appendix that the beginning of construction of the Tube caused the Undergrounders considerable alarm, although tempered by pride that the Abovegrounders were (seemingly) imitating them for a change.
The key clue to the location of the System is the River Fleet, diverted underground in the eighteenth century. It serves as the spine of the canal network and the setting for one of the most dramatic scenes in the book, as both the train (with Widgie on board) and the boat (with Jen) race against time to reach and pass a bridge over it as the river becomes swollen and flooded.
Several locations (King's Cross, Paddington, Camden Lock) are named after real-world locations, and it appears from the map in the book that these are intended to be very near their real-world locations: the System incorporates the area roughly bounded on the surface by Muswell Hill to the north, Tottenham and Islington to the east, Paddington and Oxford Street to the south and Finchley Road to the west. The southern part of this area includes the River Fleet, which drains southwards into the Thames.[ citation needed ]
The Cobble Hill Tunnel is an abandoned Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) tunnel beneath Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, New York City, running through the neighborhoods of Downtown Brooklyn and Cobble Hill. When open, it ran for about 2,517 feet (767 m) between Columbia Street and Boerum Place. It is the oldest railway tunnel beneath a city street in North America that was fully devoted to rail. It is also deemed the oldest subway tunnel in the world by the Guinness Book of World Records.
The Post Office Railway, known since 1987 as Mail Rail, is a 2 ft narrow gauge, driverless underground railway in London that was built by the Post Office with assistance from the Underground Electric Railways Company of London, to transport mail between sorting offices. Inspired by the Chicago Tunnel Company, it opened in 1927 and operated for 76 years until it closed in 2003. A museum within the former railway was opened in September 2017.
Subterranean London refers to a number of subterranean structures that lie beneath London. The city has been occupied by humans for two millennia. Over time, the capital has acquired a vast number of these structures and spaces, often as a result of war and conflict.
Paddington, also known as London Paddington, is a London railway station and London Underground station complex, located on Praed Street in the Paddington area. The site has been the London terminus of services provided by the Great Western Railway and its successors since 1838. Much of the main line station dates from 1854 and was designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. As of the 2022–23 Office of Rail & Road Statistics, it is the second busiest station in the United Kingdom, after London Liverpool Street, with 59.2 million entries and exits.
A tunnel is an underground or undersea passageway. It is dug through surrounding soil, earth or rock, or laid under water, and is usually completely enclosed except for the two portals common at each end, though there may be access and ventilation openings at various points along the length. A pipeline differs significantly from a tunnel, though some recent tunnels have used immersed tube construction techniques rather than traditional tunnel boring methods.
The tunnel rats were American, Australian, New Zealand, and South Vietnamese soldiers who performed underground search and destroy missions during the Vietnam War.
Regent's Canal is a canal across an area just north of central London, England. It provides a link from the Paddington Arm of the Grand Union Canal, 550 yards (500 m) north-west of Paddington Basin in the west, to the Limehouse Basin and the River Thames in east London. The canal is 8.6 miles (13.8 km) long.
Severn Tunnel Junction railway station is a minor station on the western side of the Severn Tunnel in the village of Rogiet, Monmouthshire, Wales. It is 123.5 miles (198.8 km) from London Paddington and lies at the junction of the South Wales Main Line from London and the Gloucester to Newport Line.
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH is a 1971 children's science fiction/fantasy book by Robert C. O'Brien, with illustrations by Zena Bernstein. The novel was published by the Los Angeles publishing house Atheneum Books.
The Cincinnati Subway was a partially completed rapid transit system beneath the streets of Cincinnati, Ohio. Although the system only grew to a little more than 2 miles (3.2 km) in length, its derelict tunnels and stations make up the largest abandoned subway tunnel system in the United States. Construction began in the early 1900s as an upgrade to the Cincinnati streetcar system, but was abandoned due to escalating costs, the collapse of funding amidst political bickering, and the Great Depression during the 1920s and 1930s.
Subterranean fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction, science fiction, or fantasy which focuses on fictional underground settings, sometimes at the center of the Earth or otherwise deep below the surface. The genre is based on, and has in turn influenced, the Hollow Earth theory. The earliest works in the genre were Enlightenment-era philosophical or allegorical works, in which the underground setting was often largely incidental. In the late 19th century, however, more pseudoscientific or proto-science-fictional motifs gained prevalence. Common themes have included a depiction of the underground world as more primitive than the surface, either culturally, technologically or biologically, or in some combination thereof. The former cases usually see the setting used as a venue for sword-and-sorcery fiction, while the latter often features cryptids or creatures extinct on the surface, such as dinosaurs or archaic humans. A less frequent theme has the underground world much more technologically advanced than the surface one, typically either as the refugium of a lost civilization, or as a secret base for space aliens.
Secret passages, also commonly referred to as hidden passages or secret tunnels, are hidden routes used for stealthy travel, escape, or movement of people and goods. They are sometimes inside buildings leading to secret rooms.
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Berlin Potsdamer Platz is a railway station in Berlin. It is completely underground and situated under Potsdamer Platz in central Berlin. Regional and S-Bahn services call at the station, and it is also served by U-Bahn line U2.
The Baker Street and Waterloo Railway (BS&WR), also known as the Bakerloo tube, was a railway company established in 1893 that built a deep-level underground "tube" railway in London. The company struggled to fund the work, and construction did not begin until 1898. In 1900, work was hit by the financial collapse of its parent company, the London & Globe Finance Corporation, through the fraud of Whitaker Wright, its main shareholder. In 1902, the BS&WR became a subsidiary of the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (UERL) controlled by American financier Charles Yerkes. The UERL quickly raised the funds, mainly from foreign investors.
There were a number of proposals to build an underground railway along the Edgware Road in north-west London, England, at the end of the 19th century. Each scheme envisaged building some form of rail tunnel under Edgware Road towards Victoria railway station.
The Acton–Northolt line (ANL), otherwise known as the New North Main Line (NNML), is a railway line in West London, England. Built between 1903 and 1906, it runs from the Great Western Main Line at Old Oak Common TMD to the Chiltern Main Line at South Ruislip, alongside the West Ruislip branch of the London Underground Central line, for a distance of around 11 miles (18 km).
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