The Secret People

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.