Author Description

Man has always been intrigued by the lands of legend. From the beginning of recorded history, travellers have enthralled those who stayed close to home with stories of distant places and people. Lands Beyond is a sort of geography of those lands of the imagination which figured in the tall tales of travellers and poets. Some, like lost Atlantis and El Dorado, remained beyond the horizon, while others turned out to be disappointing facts. The first and most famous of these lands beyond was Atlantis, which Plato described as having disappeared years before he wrote about it. For the Greeks Atlantis lay to the West, beyond the Pillars of Hercules. But for the Romans, who knew the geography of the entire Mediterranean and that of western Europe, the lands beyond were to the East. There dwelt the men with heads beneath their shoulders rather than the giants of the earlier stories with one eye in the middle of their foreheads. Although modern man has settled for people with the normal number of eyes and location of head, many superstitions and beliefs have carried over into the modern world. Lands Beyond is the story of all these places: Atlantis, the countries of the Odyssey, the lands of Sinbad and Prester John, the search for El Dorado and for Terra Australis, and the land in the Western Ocean where the dead ships go. Lands Beyond is a fascinating expedition into the unknown.