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| Once a best-selling author, now largely forgotten |
The Lost Continent was first published in serialized form in 1899 and in book form the following year. Hyne was a successful writer of scientific romances and adventure tales whose career spanned the late Victorian era into the l930s. His work is almost entirely forgotten today except for The Lost Continent, a yarn about Atlantis, which has been reprinted several times over the intervening years. It is currently in print from the University of Nebraska and some on-demand publishers.
Review
The Lost Continent opens with that staple of the Victorian fantasy novel, the framing device. You are, after all, about to read a story that stretches credulity to the breaking point, and the author wants to assure you that he didn't just make it up. So he makes up a provenance for the story. In this case, the frame tale is told by an adventurer who accompanied an archeologist named Coppinger on an expedition to the Grand Canary Island off the Atlantic coast of Morocco. There they searched through caves, looking for artifacts of the ancient inhabitants. On the last day of their expedition, the unnamed narrator discovers, in a nearly inaccessible cave, a collection of talc tablets covered with a waxy substance that has Egyptian-looking characters incised into it. Eventually, Coppinger manages to translate the writing and provides a copy to our narrator who, as discover, is authorized to publish it. The tale that follows constitutes the rest of the book.
The narrative written on the tablets is the first-person account of Deucalion, who had been Viceroy of the Atlantean colony of Yucatan for twenty years. At the beginning of the story, however, he is stepping down to be replaced by his successor, Tatho, because Deucalion has been summoned by the new Empress to return to Atlantis proper. Reports about the Empress Phorenice are mixed. She is said to be beautiful and extremely intelligent, having created marvelous new inventions (including, apparently, firearms). But she is also said have come to power by force (rather than as a member of the duly appointed priestly caste), that she claims to be the daughter of a God, and that she is a cruel tyrant.
Deucalion, who is himself a priest and a loyal subject of Atlantis, goes back, not knowing if he has somehow aroused Phorenice's displeasure and may be returning to his own imprisonment or execution. What he discovers instead is that in his twenty years of service his name has become known far and wide. He is renowned throughout Atlantis as an unparalleled military leader and as an administrator of unimpeachable wisdom, humility, and fairness. Phorenice has chosen him to become her husband because she is convinced no other man in the empire is worthy of her.
She is as beautiful as he has been told, and though Deucalion has never had much need of women, he's not displeased with the prospect of becoming her husband and co-ruler of Atlantis. He soon finds, however, that the city-state is rent by unrest and that rebels protest violently at the gates. It is a far cry from the peaceful Atlantis that he knew before. Phorenice intends that Deucalion use his military prowess to crush the rebellions and enforce her iron-fisted rule. He also learns that she has no truck with the old Gods, for whom Deucalion is a pious believer and high-ranking priest and that she intends to declare herself Goddess as well as Empress. The old High Priest Zaemon, whom Deucalion served in the long-ago past, still lives, in exile, and opposes the blasphemous rule that Phorenice has brought to Atlantis.
Zaemon's wife had adopted Phorenice as a child and raised her. Zaemon also has two biological daughters, Ylga and Nais. Though Ylga serves as fanbearer and courtier to Phorenice, she is the first person to warn Deucalion that he should be wary. Nais, meanwhile, is an active member of the opposition. In the course of events, Deucalion falls in love with Nais.
Here come spoilers, so skip the next paragraph if you care about that sort of thing.
Deucalion eventually ends up in open opposition to Phorenice and, because she is too powerful to be easily defeated, spends several years hiding out and trying to survive in the dangerous outlands of the continent of Atlantis where flesh-eating dinosaurs still roam. Zaemon and his fellow priests plot the destruction of Atlantis by means of magical help from the Gods. (Or is it Atlantean technology?) Out of spite and jealousy, Phorenice forces Deucalion to kill Nais (though Deucalion finds a way to merely put her into suspended animation). And in the end... well, you already know what happens to Atlantis. The priests arrange for Deucalion and Nais to escape the sinking of Atlantis in an ark that contains the accumulated history and knowledge of Atlantis written on wax-covered tablets. Deucalion's mission is to carry this knowledge to another part of the world and establish a new Atlantis. But once they have come ashore on what will one day be Grand Canary Island, Deucalion decides that Atlantis' time has come and gone and, in defiance of the priests, wipes out the information on the tablets and writes down his own story instead.
I enjoyed this story a great deal, but then I have a high tolerance for Victorian adventure novels. If 19th century adventure novelists like Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Edwin Arnold, and Eden Phillpotts, or early 20th century fantasy writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard, appeal to you, then I'm pretty sure you'll like The Lost Continent. For those less inclined to enjoy such things, this won't be for you at all. Hyne gives Deucalion a somewhat stiff, archaic voice, but that is clearly intentional; he is, after all, an aristocrat belonging to a lost race. Deucalion, while a sympathetic protagonist, has out-of-date attitudes that feel appropriate for an ancient era -- owning slaves, for instance, is perfectly acceptable. It's difficult to place Hyne's Atlantis in time because, while he mentions places like Yucatan, Egypt, and Europe by name, the lost continent harbors mammoths, plesiosaurs, and dinosaurs among its fauna. Like Conan Doyle's Amazonian plateau in The Lost World, it is truly a region that exists outside of time.
