The folks at Sinister Cinema are known for releasing obscure movies but they're doing something similar with obscure books. I was especially taken by their Lost World-Lost Race Classics series of vintage adventures, mostly novels; that focus on lost worlds or lost civilisations. They include the well-known classics of course, like 'The Lost World', 'She' and 'The Lost Continent', but also a slew of much lesser-known books, a few of which I already had on my shelves but most of which I hadn't even heard of, retrieved from old pulps or century old hardbacks because they haven't seen print since. They're being published by the Armchair Fiction imprint and there are sixty-six already out. I'll therefore put on my pith helmet and go exploring.

'Atlantida' is a great opening volume. It's one that I'd heard of, not least because it's been made into at least ten films, including multiple language versions, often by name directors like Jacques Feyder ('L'Atlantide', 1921), G. W. Pabst ('Die Herrin von Atlantis', 'L'Atlantide' and 'The Mistress of Atlantis', 1932-1933) and Edgar G. Ulmer (Journey beneath the Desert', 1961), but hadn't read. It was originally published in French in 1919, winning the Grand Prize of the French Academy, but was translated into English a year later for serialisation in the pulp magazine 'Adventure'.

Following a reviewer's allegation that Benoit had plagiarised H. Rider Haggard's 1887 novel 'She', there was a lawsuit for libel which the Frenchman lost, though there's no justification for that and Haggard himself was not involved in the case at all. For a start, 'She' hadn't yet been published in French but Benoit didn't speak English. The only real similarity in story is that the main character is a beautiful and possibly immortal woman living in a lost city in Africa, but Benoit actually lived in that continent and based this on French geographical theories, local legends and real people. His two fictional officers are based on real ones and Antinea, the Queen of Atlantis, is based on a Tuareg Queen, Tin Himan, who also claimed to be a descendant of Cleopatra and Marc Antony.

Another difference, which becomes more and more apparent the further into 'Atlantida' you get, is that 'She', if my memory holds, is one man's reminiscence of his own adventure, while this dips so deeply into layers of storytelling that it's sometimes easy to forget who's actually recounting a story. Our narrator, who introduces himself at the outset, is Lt. Olivier Ferrières, but this isn't his adventure. After a brief framing story, he's telling us what Capt. André de Saint-Avit told him. The captain's story often involves him telling the stories of other people and sometimes they venture a further layer deep.

The deepest, I believe, run four layers. There's a point where Emperor Napoloeon Bonaparte tells Count Casimir Bielowsky, Hetman of Jitomir a story, which forms part of a broader story that the count then tells Capt. de Saint-Avit, who passes it on to Lt. Ferrières in turn as part of his own and the lieutenant includes it in this account. There's another when a magician recounts a prophecy to Tanit-Zerga, who passes it on to Capt. de Saint-Avit, who tells Lt. Ferrières, who tells us. Maybe the four layers reaches five at some point but I got confused enough to not jot a note down right.

So, these are very different novels. Ferrières has been a temporary commandant of a French fort, Hassi-Inifel, in what we now know as Algeria, then a French colony in the Saharan desert, but he's being replaced by Capt. de Saint-Avit, who he knew during training at St. Cyr. In between then and now, the latter has gained notoriety for apparently murdering a fellow officer, Capt. Jean-Marie-François Morhange, though he wasn't punished for it. He admits it as well and the background to how and why leads us into the broader story of Antinea and Atlantis and that's this book.

It begins when Capt. de Saint-Avit embarks on a mission for the Ministry of War, accompanied by Capt. Morhange, who's on a different mission for a different ministry. Deep into the desert, they take shelter in a mountain crevice from a torrential storm and discover both a bizarre inscription on a rock face and a drowning Tuareg who knows what it means. It means Antinea, he says, after they've saved his life, and there are similar inscriptions three days to the south. So off they go on a side quest, which ends up with the realisation of who this Tuareg really is, as he's knocking them out with burning hashish. They wake up in a mysterious room, bound but welcomed.

And here things get really weird, because apparently this is Atlantis. It didn't sink into the sea, as per the usual theories; the sea went away to form desert, so the land effectively rose. It's ruled by Antinea, descendant of Neptune, the last of the Atlantides. She's the traditional knockout beauty we come to expect from lost worlds, so much so that everyone who meets her falls in love with her. This happens often enough, courtesy of the Tuareg, that she has a red marble hall with a hundred and twenty niches in the walls, almost half of which contain corpses that have been electroplated with orichalch. Every one of them died of love and that's a fate to which we must assume the two captains will soon succumb, before being placed into the next two empty niches.

As you'll have gathered, the storytelling to get here is complex, but it's powerful, if we're OK with the educated nature of the detail. The core of the story is accessible enough, but it seems like we would get more about of the rest of it if we had strong backgrounds in African desert geography, classical linguistics (one section revolves around transcriptions of Greek into Tifinar) and, most of all, classical history and literature. The numerous classical references make antiquity simply drip off the page but that doesn't mean we get what Benoit is talking about. For instance, when Capt. Morhange tells Saint-Avit about the first time he sees Antinea, he describes the impact like this:

"One could not stand before her without recalling the woman for whom Ephractoeus overcame Atlas, of her for whom Sapor usurped the scepter of Ozymandias, for whom Mamylos subjugated Susa and Tentyris, for whom Antony fled..."

I know some of those characters, Atlas and Antony and Ozymandias, but I couldn't explain any of these apparently pivotal situations and I've never heard of the others. Moments like this remind me of the 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' episode 'Darmok', where Picard struggles to establish communication with the Tamarians, who speak only in allegories that refer to their own culture. Here, Benoit's characters often speak entirely in references to classical history and literature, so, without a better grounding than I have, I'm very much in the same boat. Or, as Dathon might say, 'Picard, meeting the Tamarians.'

To be fair, some of the scenes that revel in literature rank among my favourites here. How am I to resist the enthusiasm of Prof. Etienne le Mesge, a prisoner in Atlantis but a happy one because he is surrounded by books that were either entirely lost in the wider world or which survived only in a fragmentary form. Here, he can read Plato's complete 'Critias of Atlantis', elsewhere thought to be unfinished. Morhange is suitably overwhelmed when le Mesge "opened successively five, ten, twenty cupboards" to show "the remnants of the library of Carthage, enriched by the remnants of the library of Alexandria". So would I be and I don't even speak the languages.

Antinea is a wonderful character, with only vague similarities to Ayesha in 'She'. She has different goals, different tastes and different views on the world. Her red marble hall is unlike anything in 'She' and she doesn't succumb to the same fate. Her magnetic pull remains just as powerful when we end as when we begin, which is why the framing story works as bookends not just introduction. While they pale in comparison, I rather liked the French officers too, more so than some of those perpetual prisoners. I'm not sure why Benoit believed chapter thirteen was needed, because this story is not enhanced by the reminiscences of Count Casimir Bielowsky. Maybe Benoit just needed to cram Napoleon in somewhere and that was the only place that fit.

All in all, this is far less accessible than any of Rider Haggard's works, let alone Conan Doyle's 'The Lost World', but it's just as rich in its exoticism and deeper in its history and mythology. I ought to check out some of those silent adaptations of 'L'Atlantide', especially after suffering through the abysmal 1925 British take on 'She' earlier this year. Oh, and I should learn how to play cut fives too.

Next month in the 'Lost World-Lost Race Classics' series is 'Forgotten Worlds', a 1948 novel in the Burroughs tradition by Lawrence Chandler, a pseudonym for Howard Browne, an American writer and editor I learned about while reading and writing up Richard Wolinsky's 'Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods! Interviews with Science Fiction Legends' in September. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles in the Lost World-Lost Race series click here