The Kingdom Beyond the Waves
Professor Amelia Harsh hunts the lost city of Camlantis in the deadly lake-jungles of Liongeli.
About this book
Professor Amelia Harsh believes the floating city of Camlantis was real. The academic establishment thinks she is a crank. A reclusive industrialist agrees with her, and is willing to bankroll the expedition that proves it. He should not have been so willing.
Disgraced, broke and out of patience, Professor Harsh accepts the offer she should not have accepted. The expedition will go up the great river Shedarkshe into Liongeli — the equatorial jungle that has eaten every expedition before it — and follow a chain of evidence to the place where Camlantis fell. Her u-boat captain is Commodore Jared Black, the cycle's most reliable malcontent, blackmailed into the job and loudly furious about it.
What Camlantis was, and why it fell, and who is still interested in the answer, turn out to be much larger questions than archaeology. The expedition will run head-on into the daggish — the insect collective that rules the deep jungle — and into a confrontation with the ideology that built Camlantis in the first place.
It opens up the southern half of the world. Liongeli, the daggish, the river-states, the deep history of the Camlantean utopia, and Commodore Black's standing in the recurring cast all start here. Hunt's Camlantean material becomes a major part of the cycle's mythology.
- you love The Lost World and King Solomon's Mines read in a more modern key;
- you enjoyed Indiana Jones at full speed, with sharper politics;
- you want a stand-alone adventure that also enriches a bigger universe.