THE LAST PHARAOH

by John Latimer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1970

Not even by 1879 was ancient Egypt entirely mummified, and a vestigial culture is visited here without benefit of time machine. But with comparable extravagances: two European students accompany an American zoology professor to Africa in a balloon, searching for possibly still extant dinosaurs; what they find instead, very many mishaps later, is an impossibly still extant dynastic civilization ruled by a century-old Rameses. In the course of their various enslavements in this whip-wielding Pyramid-building world, the 'moderns' meet Rameses who identifies himself as an ex-British scholar, the anonymous first to decipher the Rosetta Stone. On a long-ago expedition, he too discovered the remnant populace--and, megalomaniac that he was, assumed the Pharaohship as actual legatee. . . but there will be no more Pharaohs, he has determined, and he discloses his plan to wipe out the whole hidden valley on his imminent death. Naturally, his unwilling guests think not only of their own escape now, but also of the thousands of unwitting prisoners: inch by graphic inch they plot and execute a daring rescue. If it's hard to envision, it's harder to believe, however imaginative the notion and complete the detail, however flexible the temporality of casting distant-past in recent-past through futuristic prisms. Hieroglyphic pyrotechnics.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Nelson

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1970

Categories: FICTION