When the World Shook

by H. Rider Haggard Narrated by Michael Page

Overview

When three adventurers, Bastin, Bickley, and Arbuthnot, are marooned on a South Sea island, they discover an ancient crystal sepulchre. Inside are two Atlanteans who have been in a state of suspended animation for 250,000 years! One of the awakened sleepers, Lord Oro, is the last of the Sons of Wisdom, a superior race who'd relied on their advanced technology to subjugate the planet's lesser peoples. The other Atlantean is Oro's daughter, Yva, heiress the title of Queen of the Earth. Unimpressed with the state of the world in the early 20th century, Oro sets out to do what he's apparently done once before: use a colossal gyroscope to drown the planet, and restart the course of human history.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"If this is pulp fiction it's high pulp: a Wagnerian opera of an adventure tale, a B-movie humanist apocalypse and chivalric romance." - Lydia Millet

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175731409
Publisher:	Dreamscape Media
Publication date:	11/19/2013
Edition description:	Unabridged
Age Range:	12 - 17 Years

Read an Excerpt

Think of them! The unmeasured space of blackness threaded by those globes of ghastly incandescence that now hung a while and now shot upwards, downwards, across, apparently without origin or end, like a stream of meteors that had gone mad. Then the travelling mountain, two thousand feet in height, or more, with its enormous saucer-like rim painted round with bands of lurid red and blue, and about its grinding foot the tulip bloom of emitted flame. Then the fierce-faced Oro at his post, his hand upon the rod, waiting, remorseless, to drown half of this great world, with the lovely Yva standing calm-eyed like a saint in hell and watching me above the edge of the shield which such a saint might bear to turn aside the fiery darts of the wicked. And lastly we three men flattened terror-stricken, against the wall.

Nightmare! Imagination! No, these pale before that scene which it was given to our human eyes to witness.

And all the while, bending, bowing towards us — away from us — making obeisance to the path in front as though in greeting, to the path behind as though in farewell; instinct with a horrible life, with a hideous and gigantic grace, that titanic Terror whirled onwards to the mark of fate.

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