The Starless Land — Lyle Drew

In the early 1900's, Duncan Pell recently graduated as a Geologist, passing his time by calculating the Earth's magnetic field strength when compared to the suspected mass of the planet. Had no one ever made similar calculations? It appeared not. When he posed the dilemma to Professor Wilson Edwards in London, the colleague couldn't find fault with his calculations or reasoning. Duncan vowed to discover the truth, enlisting the help of an unproven Scottish engineer by the name of Keith Sanders. Keith may have also been young, but he was extremely intelligent, with innovative solutions to problems that had eluded most of humankind in the known, industrial countries. Together, the two men constructed a machine of Keith's design and Duncan's funding, intent on learning the answers to Duncan's questions. How little they realized what adventures lay ahead of them; people from places that knew of the surface world, but not the other way around.
Michael Kent, Duncan's childhood summer friend, also had aspirations of greatness and even achieved them, but his greatness wasn't what he envisioned as a boy. When his parents couldn't afford to send him back to college for his second year, he joined the Navy and applied himself to his trade as a Boatswain's Mate. Michael excelled, climbing quickly through the enlisted ranks before receiving his commission as an Ensign. While a member of the exploration party to Antarctica, his life made another dramatic change when tragedy struck not only the six-man party on the ice, but also his frigate, the USS Flattery. With everyone dead and no way off the barren wasteland, he decided to head in the direction of the South Pole; at least before he died of malnutrition or succumbed to the cold, he hoped to locate it. He found something, but it wasn't what he expected… a land with lush plants, a constant, warm temperature and a sun, but not stars.
Befriended by inhabitants of the concave surface of Earth after straying into a Triceratops' nesting area and receiving near-fatal wounds, Michael became an accepted member of their world. The beings were a collection of human, sub-humans, simian, and reptilian beings and even insects, some native to Earth, others from beyond her; all were friendly, living in peace. Life was everything that he yearned for when he was a boy, no hunger, no poverty and knowledge willingly shared.
Duncan and Keith bored into a cavern, far beneath the surface. There, they discover a remnant of the Atlantean civilization from the end of the Second Age, the city of Telon. Befriended by two Atlantean women, Cagny and Michi, they depart to complete Duncan's mission for answers, but promise to return. The four adventurers learned the answers, but those answers only raised further questions, ones that would mean more to the surface inhabitants than they realized, when they broke into the center of the Earth, into an alien world unknown to his people. Their adventures are many, as they meet the new world's inhabitants, witness creatures believed to be long since extinct and discover technology beyond what they ever imagined. Captured and sentenced to return to their surface world as uninvited intruders, disaster strikes the planet shortly after they are deported… a cataclysm that threatens both of their worlds, perhaps everyone on the planet. The disaster is beyond the technology of the concave surface dwellers, at least at the moment, but not those from the surface. The surface people decide to help, to save Earth, but it came at a dire cost to their tunneler and personal injuries. Now, who would save the people of Telon?