Rio Hamza

A river up to one hundred times wider than the Amazon has recently been discovered. How had no one stumbled upon it yet? How had astronauts not reported a massive serpentine river flowing across the earth?

Easy. The river is underground. It is two and a half miles beneath the Amazon and runs a similar course across South America. The research team, led by Valiya Hamza who lent his name to the river, used thermal analysis in 241 vacated Petrobras oil wells to discover the river. The results are preliminary and the discovery has not been truly authenticated, but all signs (at least the geothermal signs) point to a giant subterranean river flowing through South America.

After reading about Rio Hamza, I immediately thought about H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. I remember some subterranean action in this classic adventure tale. My mind then jumped to a novel I read after seeing my dad reading it: Clive Cussler’s The Mediterranean Caper. I don’t remember much of the Caper, but I remember the intrepid hero Dirk Pitt traveling well beneath the water.

King Solomon’s Mines launched a genre dubbed Lost World fiction. Prominent works within the genre include: Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot, and Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island.

Inevitably, exploration will intensify. Science clarifies, but in its wake removes mystery and wonder. For now, we relish one of those rare moments where mystery trumps proof and we can simply imagine what it must be like on the Rio Hamza 14,000 feet below the Amazon.