The Maracot Deep

Professor Maracot is convinced he has located a trench in the Atlantic deeper than any yet sounded — the abyss that will bear his name. With the young American zoologist Cyrus Headley and the wisecracking Philadelphia mechanic Bill Scanlan, he is lowered in a steel diving-chamber past the last reach of sunlight, into a world of phosphorescent monsters and basalt cliffs that fall sheer into the dark. Then a giant crustacean severs their cable, hurling the chamber into the trench and cutting the three men off from the surface and from any hope of rescue.

They are saved by figures who rise out of the gloom in transparent helmets — the last survivors of Atlantis, who shelter in a great pressurised colony sealed against the crushing sea, keepers of a science and a history older than any on land. Welcomed by their leader Manda, the explorers are shown the terrible night their continent sank, and find a place among a people who have outlived their own world. But the deep holds an older terror still: the Lord of the Dark Face, the ancient evil spirit who led Atlantis to its ruin and works misery upon humanity yet — and who can be cast down only by a power greater than any weapon.

Published in 1929, The Maracot Deep was the last novel Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote. Far from Baker Street, it fuses two of his lifelong passions — the lost-world scientific romance of The Lost World and the Spiritualist faith of his final years — into a single strange and sincere adventure beneath the sea: at once a tale of brave men in the dark and a testament of its author's deepest beliefs.

This edition presents the complete novel in clean, modern typesetting, with an editor's foreword on Doyle's last fiction and its place in his life, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.