Still Another Search For Lost Continent

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 16, Issue 28, 4 December 1950, Page 4

Still Another Search For Lost Continent

Unlikely though it may seem, at lbast one man hopes that in the next few months the usually accepted accounts of human history will be upset by the discovery of a lost home of civilisation under the Atlantic. If that happens, it will have sprung from the impact of boring routine on an active mind. Twenty-eight years ago Egerton Sykes, an Englishman, was living in Poland. He could not work up any enthusiasm for the accepted way in which his local community of British “exiles” whiled away their leisure—tennis, bridge and the bar. To escape mentally, since he could not do so physically, he cast around for the remotest topic he could think of. He found it in the age-old quest for Atlantis, the Lost Continent. Under cover of being regarded as an amiable hermit, he delved into its voluminous literature, and built up over the years an unrivalled library on his subject, and a worldwide correspondence with fellowdevotees of the Atlantis cult. In 1939 he judged it wise to leave Poland. So he travelled light, abandoning his Atlantis library to the Germans. But an enthusiasm, once cultivated, is not easily shaken off. Wherever Sykes went during the war—to Cairo, Rome, Naples—he carried on his researches into the problem of Atlantis, the subject of so many speculations and theories. Today he lives in a tall, thin terrace house in a quiet London square, with books and papers about his Lost World climbing floor by floor to the roof. There are some five to six thousand books in his collection, varying from the strict scientific analysis of the evidence to paperbacked volumes naming the counties or provinces of Atlantis one by one. Sykes has most of these books. Authors have been attracted to the theme in some twenty languages. Sykes has books in twelve.