| "In the silver light of the midnight moon the mangroves looked animate..." (from the first line) In a place of wonder and dark conspiracies. two seekers are teenagers Jim Hastings and his friend, Giles Peach. Giles was born with a set of gills along his neck and insatiable appetite for reading. Drawing inspiration from the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Giles is determined to build a Digging Leviathan. Will he reach the center of the earth? Or destroy it in the process?
Annotation:
Two groups of eccentric "gentlemen scientists," one led by the sinister Hilario Frosticos and the other by the possibly insane William Hastings, compete in a race to the center of the Earth, which both groups believe to be hollow. Frosticos's team is building a digging machine propelled by a perpetual motion engine, while Hastings' is hard at work finding a really deep chasm in the ocean floor into which they can descend via a specially built diving bell. And at the heart of both of their plans is Giles Peach, a rather unusual teenager obsessed with the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
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