dies. All recordings and engravings of the advanced knowledge are either destroyed or now completely uninterpretable, and mankind loses this knowledge again. The novel ends with Dr Simon going back to France, heartbroken, ignoring the cries of war and the world youth's demonstrations. "" "They're here! They're us! They repopulated the world, and they're just as dumb as before, and ready to blow up the house again. Isn't it great? It's man." Publication This novel was first published in 1968 by . It was translated into English by C. L. Markham and a number of companies published The Ice People in the early 1970s. The English edition bears a dedication to Andre Cayatte, with whom Barjavel had worked on film, and who he credits as both the begetter of and the inspiration for the story. Also translated into Afrikaans by Rina Scheiflinger (1971) as "Nag van die tyd" (the Night of time). Inspiration The novel appears to have been inspired by one of the last groundbreaking works of Henry Rider Haggard, When the World Shook (1919). There are several similarities between the stories: a couple that is found in suspended animation with both, female and male, being survivors of ancient lost civilizations that possessed great technological advancements superior to the current stage of our world Both novels fit within the literary genre of Lost World stories. Erle Cox's 1925 novel Out of the Silence has also been cited as a possible influence on Barjavel. Cox's story also deals with the discovery of a sphere preserving the knowledge of a vanished, prehistoric civilization with advanced technology, one man and one woman being preserved in suspended animation; the woman alone is awakened, but dies at the end of the story; the knowledge of the ancient civilization is lost. The novel portrays momentous youth/student protests in both the antediluvian and modern storylines. Barjavel was writing in the context of political unrest, especially among the youth of France, that led to mass protests that year similar to those depicted in the novel, see Protests of 1968 and May 1968 in France. The novel also draws on myths such as the Sleeping Beauty, and the love that lasts beyond death, as in the legend of Tristan and Iseult. See also Gondwana, the real world analog of a fictional continent, Gondawa, in the previous tectonic arrangement of the world 1968 in literature References 1968 French novels