In the late 19th century, the Lost Race/World novel had emerged as a major force with H. Rider Haggard’s She: A History of Adventure and its countless imitators. At the same time, there was a resurgence of speculation about the possible existence of Plato’s Atlantis, stemming from politician and professional heretic Ignatius L. Donnelly’s bestselling Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. To give you some idea of the influence Donnelly’s work once exerted, British Prime Minister William Gladstone proposed using the Royal Navy to search for traces of Atlantis. So perhaps it was inevitable that writers would decide to tell the story of the most famous lost civilization of all.

Atlantis itself had only been featured in a few novels at the time, notably Ann Eliza Smith’s 1886 Atla and A Dweller On Two Planets in 1894, ostensibly by “Phylos the Tibetan” but more likely by Frederick Spencer Oliver. But the definitive Atlantean novel came in 1899, courtesy of an English adventure writer.

Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne was a fairly successful author in his time, writing a popular long-running series about Captain Kettle (which reached the big screen in 1922). He dabbled in science-fiction without making a career of it, ranging from subterranean civilizations (Beneath Your Very Boots) to living dinosaurs (“The Reptile”). But his chief claim to genre fame remains The Lost Continent: The Story of Atlantis.

It opens with a brief framing device of the sort common in early science-fiction, which presents the story as translated from hieroglyphs from waxen sheets discovered on Grand Canary by some visiting Englishmen. Apart from two author’s notes, they are unimportant to the narrative. Our protagonist is Deucalion, the stoic, steadfast true believer in the Atlantis that was. Deucalion is the governor of Yucatan, a notable detail, for Donnelly believed both Egypt and Yucatan to be colonies of Atlantis, as evidenced by the pyramids found in both nations. The fact that the pyramids of the the Old and New Worlds were built millennia apart for differing purposes did not concern him and shall not concern us. He is recalled to Atlantis to face the new Empress, the usurper, tyrant and self-proclaimed goddess: Phorenice. Phorenice is one of the many literary daughters of Haggard’s She-who-must-be-obeyed and one of the most memorable.

“Many a time during my life had I led hunts to kill the mammoth, when a herd of them raided some village or cornland under my charge. I had seen the huge brutes in the wild ground, shaggy, horrid, monstrous; more fierce than even the cave-tiger or the cave-bear; most dangerous beast of all that fight with man for dominion of the earth, save only for a few of the greater lizards. And here was this creature, a giant even amongst mammoths, yet tame as any well-whipped slave, and bearing upon its back a great half-castle of gold, stamped with the outstretched hand, and bedecked with silver snakes. Its murderous tusks were gilded, its hairy neck was garlanded with flowers, and it trod on the procession as though assisting at such pageantry was the beginning and end of its existence. Its tameness seemed a fitting symbol of the masterful strength of this new ruler of Atlantis.
Simultaneously with the mammoth, there came into sight that other and greater wonder, the mammoth’s mistress, the Empress Phorenice. The beast took my eye at first, from its very uncouth hugeness, from its show of savage power restrained; but the lady who sat in the golden half-castle on its lofty back quickly drew away my gaze, and held it immovable from then onwards with an infinite attraction […]
But this woman who sat under the sacred snakes in her golden half-castle on the mammoth’s back, fairly baffled me. Of her thoughts I could read no single syllable. I could see a body slight, supple, and beautifully moulded; in figure rather small. Her face was a most perfect book of cleverness, yet she was fair, too, beyond belief, with hair of a lovely ruddiness, cut short in the new fashion, and bunching on her shoulders. And eyes! Gods! Who could plumb the depths of Phorenice’s eyes, or find in mere tint a trace of their heaven-made colour?”

This beautiful-yet-evil ruler is the novel’s most compelling character. Though she singlehandedly brings about the downfall of Atlantean civilization, even Deucalion must admit in the end, “There is no denying the fascination which Phorenice carried with her.” By her theft of the mystical secrets of the Priestly Clan and the use of “fire-tubes”, she has overthrown the old order. The addition of firearms may seem an unusual detail for Hyne to include, but looking at the work of Donnelly, one finds speculation that the Atlanteans possessed such weapons.

Zaemon, leader of the Priestly Clan, delivers a blistering Old Testament-style denunciation of Phorenice and her rule, promising the destruction of Atlantis if she continues to defy the will of the High Gods. The stage is thus set for a three-way battle of wills and magic between Deucalion, Phorenice and Zaemon.

One of Hyne’s great pieces of invention is a savage, Roman-style circus with naked prisoners pitted unarmed against sabertooths, where he introduces the heroine of the novel, Nais:

“My heart glowed as I watched her. She picked a bone from the litter on the pavement and beat off its head by blows against the wall. Then with her teeth she fashioned the point to further sharpness. I could see her teeth glisten white in the moonrays as she bit with them.
The huge cave-tigers, which stood as high as her head as they walked, came nearer to her in their prowlings, yet obviously neglected her. This was part of their accustomed scheme of torment, and the woman knew it well. There was something intolerable in their noiseless, ceaseless paddings over the pavement. I could see the prisoner’s breast heave as she watched them. A terror such as that would have made many a victim sick and helpless.
But this one was bolder than I had thought. She did not wait for a spring: she made the first attack herself. When the she-tiger made its stroll towards her, and was in the act of turning, she flung herself into a sudden leap, striking viciously at its eye with her sharpened bone. A roar from the onlookers acknowledged the stroke. The cave-tiger’s eye remained undarkened, but the puny weapon had dealt it a smart flesh wound, and with a great bellow of surprise and pain it scampered away to gain space for a rush and a spring.”

Imagine the cover Frank Frazetta could have made from that!

The remaining plot is a whirlwind of sieges, dinosaur fights and sorcery, culminating in the final apocalyptic destruction of Atlantis:

“The drowning of the great continent that had been spread out below filled the eye. Ocean roared upon it with still more furious waves. The plains and the level lands were foaming lakes. The great city of Atlantis had vanished eternally. The mountains alone kept their heads above the flood, and spewed out rocks, and steam, and boiling stone, or burst when the waters reached them and created great whirlpools of surging sea, and twisted trees, and bubbling mud.
In the space of a few breaths every living creature that dwelt in the lower grounds had been smothered by the waters, save for a few who huddled in a pair of galleys that were driven oarless inland, over what had once been black forest and hunting land for the beasts. And even as I watched, these too were swallowed up by the horrid turmoil of the sea, and nothing but the sea beasts, and those of the greater lizards which can live in such outrageous waters, could have survived even that state of the destruction. Indeed, none but those men who had now found standing-ground on the upper slopes of the Sacred Mountain survived, and it was plain that their span was short, for the great mass of the continent sank deeper and more deep every minute before our aching eyes, beneath the boiling inrush of the seas.”

Names like “Zaemon” and “Phorenice” and “Tarca” all sound like they might have belonged to a civilization that influenced the ancient world. The use of prehistoric wildlife, from dinosaurs to mammoths to giant birds, lends it the air of antiquity. But possibly the greatest achievement is that Hyne makes Atlantis feel like a real place instead of a neverland, with a history, fashions and religion.

And all this in under 300 pages, to boot.

Even L. Sprague de Camp, a man who could be relied upon to find clouds within every silver lining, found few flaws with the novel in his non-fictional Lost Continents, citing only “the author’s weakness for plesiosaurs and other anachronistic Mesozoic reptiles” as a fault. Personally, I think a weakness for plesiosaurs is no vice.

While the work is public domain now it’s still not as well-known as it should be. Look at any publisher’s PD classic collection and it’s mostly the same thirty or so novels over and over, with what little SF/F content largely represented by the same couple of works by H. G. Wells and Jules Verne.

The classics canon could benefit from a few more plesiosaurs.