Lost Civilizations

Until the advent of our "modern" age, every culture on Earth has held a belief in the reality of a subterranean world. These beliefs range from the densely-populated hells of Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity, to the djinn and ifrit-occupied subsurface world of Islamic and pre-Islamic Arab tradition.

The 6th book in a series that first related the Shaver mysteries, experiences, and discoveries to the world.

I discovered Ray Palmer's science fiction magazine, Other Worlds, in 1954, when the science fiction field was collapsing around our ears and poor old Other Worlds was a weak-kneed shadow of its former self.

Legend has it that in 206BC the first Emperor of Unified China, Ch'in Shi
Huangdi, decreed that after his death his body would be clothed in jade and cast adrift in a lake of Mercury. The lake, within a pyramid, was to be protected by an everlasting army.

Xenophon, it must be admitted, is not, like Plato, Thucydides, or Demosthenes, one of the greatest of Greek writers, but there are several considerations which should commend him to the general reader. He is more representative of the type of man whom the ordinary Englishman specially admires and respects, than any other of the Greek authors usually read.

From the oldest records, man's history was preserved in quite complete detail by ancient civilizations in the Indus valley. Their secrets parallel many of the same secrets held by the Jewish Kaballa and other mystical teachings. Perhaps if more would look behind the veil of our past, we'd find the secret to our future.

What do we dwell on? The earth. What part of the earth? The latest formations, of course. We live upon the top of a mighty series of stratified rocks, laid down in the water of ancient seas and lakes, during incalculable ages, said, by geologists, to be from ten to twenty miles in thickness.