“Who was this extraordinary woman, Queen over a people apparently as extraordinary as herself, and reigning amidst the vestiges of a lost civilisation? And what was the meaning of this story of the Fire that gave unending life?”
She, by H. Rider Haggard
There was a moment at Machu Picchu in the Andes Mountains where I was able to wander away from our organized tour and just walk alone amongst the ancient stone walls. Just me, the breeze, and the views of the blue-green mountains all around. I imagined being one of the residents six hundred years earlier, walking those paths each morning to carry out their daily duties and looking out over the Sacred Valley the way that I was doing.
It’s one of my favourite memories from that trip, that sense of reaching back in time to connect with someone perhaps standing in the very same spot centuries ago.
We see the remnants of former civilizations and wish we could look through a time tunnel to see what life there was really like. There’s a lot we can extrapolate from what’s still standing and any anthropological finds – if they haven’t been looted. So no matter what we do, we can only speculate what those times were. It’s tantalizing, just out of reach, as if there was a curtain we could pull back and see for ourselves.
Imagine if we could find that curtain, or, even better, be there in person. What if there was a civilization still out there, but lost from the history books?
That’s the very premise of a slew of Lost World stories that were popular in the 1800s and early 1900s, when real explorers were bringing fascinating information about ancient Egypt and other cultures to Europe and North America, but most of the world was still ‘dark’, undiscovered. What else might be out there?
Dinosaurs still alive? The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1912). Daily Gazette reporter Edward Malone wants an assignment to impress his girlfriend, and joins the expedition of notorious explorer Professor Challenger to South America. The team finds a remote plateau in the Amazon basin where a number of prehistoric animals still survive, along with an isolated Indigenous tribe battling a tribe of vicious ape-like creatures.
Fabulous fabled mines full of treasure? King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard (1885). Adventurer Alan Quartermain is approached by Sir Henry Curtis and his friend Captain Good to help them find Sir Henry’s brother, who’s disappeared while searching in the unexplored interior of southern Africa for the legendary mines of biblical King Solomon.
A spiritual paradise where people live forever? Lost Horizon by James Hilton (1933). In the time of the British Raj in India, a revolution necessitates that the residents of Baskul be evacuated. They fly out on the Maharajah of Chandrapur’s plane which is hijacked and flown to Tibet. The plane crashes in the mountains, but before dying, the Tibetan pilot tells the survivors to seek shelter in the hidden city of Shangri-La.
All of the real discoveries in the world at the time fired the imagination of writers. Lost Horizon is the most philosophical of the many resulting tales, but they’re all wonderfully romantic adventures into what might be.
My introduction to these Lost World stories came through the classic movies made around them. The 1959 Journey to the Center of the Earth movie is one of my all-time favourites to this day. My dad and I used to watch it on Sunday afternoons any time it aired on television.
But it didn’t make me want to follow in Professor Lindenbrook’s footsteps. The movie that sunk its hooks in deep was She (1965). It was made with great style by Hammer Films, and follows the novel reasonably closely.
In 1918, Professor Holly, young Leo Vincey and their orderly/valet Job are hanging about in Palestine after receiving honourable discharges from the British Army. They meet a local woman named Ustane, who intrigues them enough to set out into the desert of central-east Africa in search of the lost city of Kuma, following a map that’s given to Leo. (In the novel, the city is called Kor.) Leo also has visions of a beautiful woman beckoning him on, even as they become lost and near death.
Eventually they find Ustane in her desert village, where her father rules a lost tribe called the Amahagger, who guard the entrance to the kingdom of ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’: the magnificent and cruel Ayesha.
Holly and Leo discover that Leo is the incarnation of Kallikrates, the long-lost lover of Ayesha, whom she murdered twenty centuries before for being unfaithful. She’s kept herself alive through a strange phenomenon called the Eternal Flame, and wants Leo to join her in immortality.
I won’t spoil the rest for you, but it’s a terrific adventure with plenty of rich mysterious-desert atmosphere. Ayesha is imperious and enthralling – even stoic Holly, played suavely by Peter Cushing, falls for her. The character of Leo Vincey is, in the novel, incredibly handsome, and Hammer cast John Richardson in that role.
For the part of Ayesha, they needed someone special, and chose tall and statuesque Ursula Andress. Dressing her in gorgeous Grecian-style gowns and gold jewelry, cinematographer Harry Waxman also used special lighting to enhance the effect. Interestingly, though they loved her somewhat ‘exotic’ look, they didn’t like her Swiss-German accent, and had her lines dubbed by the same woman who did it for the movie Dr. No. Monica Van Der Syl mimicked a slight Swiss accent so that audiences didn’t suspect anything.
The desert scenes were filmed on location in the Negev, giving the movie a sweeping adventure tone and authenticity that captured that of Haggard’s novel.
Sir Henry Rider Haggard was an English writer who was considered a pioneer of the Lost World genre. After failing his army entrance exam, he was sent to a private school in London to prepare for the entrance exam for the British Foreign Office. During that time, he encountered people interested in the study of psychic phenomena. In 1875, Haggard’s father sent him to the southern part of Africa, where he served in various positions.
Eventually returning to England in 1882, Haggard published a book on the political situation in South Africa, then several unsuccessful novels. But in 1885 he put out King Solomon’s Mines, which was enormously popular, and still is – numerous movie versions have been made, and the character of Alan Quartermain was even used in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The story of She, with 83 million copies sold by 1965, is one of the best-selling books in history.
The romance of a civilization long disappeared from common knowledge, but still accessible if one only knows how to find it, is irresistible. H. Rider Haggard parlayed his knowledge of exotic locations, and an imagination that wondered what might be in the places still unexplored, into a very successful writing career.
Now, there aren’t many unexplored frontiers left on our world to use as a setting. An author might have to revisit Jules Verne’s concept in Journey to the Centre of the Earth, or come up with some form of aquatic civilization hiding in one of the deep ocean trenches.
Still, an intriguing thought.
Our fascination with Lost Worlds hasn’t waned – how many different movie versions of all of the above-mentioned tales have come over the years. There’ve been suggestions that this genre now has to move out into space, and certainly the series Stargate SG-1 played with that a fair bit.
But I still love the old stuff, sprung from the days when not all the maps had been filled in yet. How about you?