27. The Secret People by John Wyndham (written originally under the pseudonym John Beynon)

This is a lovely physical object.  The cover immediately caught my affection, especially the typeface of the title. I love these Coronets.  Unfortunately, it has absolutely nothing to do with the book. It's a stretch to even say The Secret People is science fiction. The story is about a man, Mark,  who has made his fortune by building up his family's shoe company.  He takes a little break to fly around the world in his personal jet (this is the sci-fi part).  He meets lovely Margaret at a resort hotel in Egypt and offers to fly her over the New Sea, a massive project to artificially flood part of the Sahara desert and make it viable for agriculture again.  On their way back, the plane engine blows out and they crash into the lake.  They manage to get to a small island, but when trying to escape are sucked down into the water by a giant whirlpool.

It turns out that underneath the desert is a vast network of underground caves, people by white-skinned pygmies who survive on giant mushroom colonies.  There are also hundreds of other human castaways who have gotten themselves trapped her over the years (and centuries as some people have been born there). The pygmies keep them prisoners in a lowered section where they farm their own mushrooms.  Though the pygmies are small, they far outnumber the castaways.  Because Mark and Margaret had found a scraggly old cat on the island and had brought it with them, when they are confronted by the pygmies, Margaret is not thrown in the prison section, but kept up with the pygmies as the handmaiden to the cat, whom they consider a god.

It goes quite quickly, though with a few overly theoretical dialogues speculating on the pygmies and man and all that.  There is a small team that has been trying to escape and when they are betrayed, it becomes a race to fight off the pygmies while defending the escape tunnel.  This part is really pretty excellent, as the only real material in the caves are stone and giant mushrooms.  The escapers build ramparts and creative weapons out of them while the pygmies become more creative in trying to break through their barrier.  There is a series of attacks and defenses in a giant cave that is a lot of fun.  The ending is quite exciting and made for an enjoyable adventure romp in a strange situation.  It is all tinted with "benign" and thoughtful colonial thinking.  Wyndham is trying to be conscious but the subtext and the way certain characters act and are treated because of their race is a bummer.  The whole idea of flooding the Sahara and the destruction it would do to the people who actually live there is addressed, though in an offhand manner that also reflects the offhand manner in which the pygmies civilization comes to an end. 

Nothing close to this exists in the book,
but nice image!