For the Audrey Hepburn film of the same title, see Secret People (film). The Secret People (1935) is a science fiction novel by English writer John Wyndham. It is set in 1964, and features a British couple who find themselves held captive by an ancient race of pygmies dwelling beneath the Sahara desert. The novel was written under Wyndham's early pen name, John Beynon. Plot summary The Sahara is being flooded to create a new sea when the protagonist of the novel, Mark Sunnet, crashes his private rocket plane into an island of what is currently little more than a large lake. He soon finds himself and companion Margaret Lawn, and a stray cat that they call Bast, sucked into a cavern in which they are promptly captured by mysterious pygmies. The diet of little people is centred on large fungi. The captives speculate that stories that reached the surface of the little people and their giant mushrooms may have led to the myth of gnomes. Sunnet finds that a tiered community has evolved in the caverns, the pygmies inhabiting a large underground collection of natural and artificial caverns and tunnels, and the captured humans are deliberately isolated in a subsection of the caverns. He is also surprised to learn that family life exists there. "Natives", children of captured humans who were born underground and lived all their lives in the caverns are generally happy with their life and have no wish to escape. By virtue of being accompanied by Bast, the pygmies consider Margaret to be divine and isolate her in a separate area of the caverns. Most of the captured humans wish to escape by trying two different methods. One by tunneling up at an angle to try to break through to the surface and another horizontally in the hope of intersecting a pygmy tunnel or cavern from which to make their way to the surface. The pygmies are distressed, and Sunnet's arrival reveals the reason to the captives. The pygmies fear that the newly-formed Saharan Sea will flood and destroy their environment, annihilating them. Their fear is well-founded, and the waters break through into their world, flooding the entire ecosystem. Sunnet, Margaret, Bast and a handful of others survive. The story finishes with sunburn after years of subterranean life, and with establishing a new company based on the primitive but unique technology that the escapees brought with