In this work the author embarks on a quest for the whereabouts, nature and few surviving traces of a lost civilization that was destroyed long ago and obliterated from human memory long before any of the cultures of historical antiquity rose to prominence. While Hancock does not believe that this civilization was Atlantis, he taps into the same current of human yearning that has made the Atlantis myth such a powerful one, and mixes intellectual adventure with exacting physical exploration of dramatic and sometimes dangerous locations in his pursuit of the tantalizing hints and scraps of evidence that point to a great and unsolved mystery.