8vo. Half-title, 4pp. publisher's ads at end. (Light spotting.) Original pictorial green cloth lettered in gilt and stamped in white, red, and black (light rubbing to spine ends and fore-corners). Provenance: ownership inscription on front free endpaper ("To Lady Aya...from Uncle George, [Windsor, England], 12 July 1957").

FIRST EDITION of this late-Victorian lost-race novel set in the Australian interior, in which the protagonist encounters the remnants of an ancient Lemurian civilization, reflecting the fin-de-siècle fascination with speculative fiction and vanished worlds at the far edges of empire.