The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-lytton — Read

It was not for some time, and until, by repeated trances, if they are to / be so called, my mind became better prepared to interchange ideas with / my entertainers, and more fully to comprehend differences of manners / and customs, at first too strange to my experience to be seized by my / reason, that I was enabled to gather the following details respecting / the origin and history of the subterranean population, as portion of one / great family race called the Ana.

According to the earliest traditions, the remote progenitors of the / race had once tenanted a world above the surface of that in which their / descendants dwelt. Myths of that world were still preserved in their / archives, and in those myths were legends of a vaulted dome in which the / lamps were lighted by no human hand. But such legends were considered by / most commentators as allegorical fables. According to these traditions / the earth itself, at the date to which the traditions ascend, was not / indeed in its infancy, but in the throes and travail of transition / from one form of development to another, and subject to many violent / revolutions of nature. By one of such revolutions, that portion of the / upper world inhabited by the ancestors of this race had been subjected / to inundations, not rapid, but gradual and uncontrollable, in which all, / save a scanty remnant, were submerged and perished. Whether this be / a record of our historical and sacred Deluge, or of some earlier one / contended for by geologists, I do not pretend to conjecture; though, / according to the chronology of this people as compared with that of / Newton, it must have been many thousands of years before the time of / Noah. On the other hand, the account of these writers does not harmonise / with the opinions most in vogue among geological authorities, inasmuch / as it places the existence of a human race upon earth at dates long / anterior to that assigned to the terrestrial formation adapted to the / introduction of mammalia. A band of the ill-fated race, thus invaded by / the Flood, had, during the march of the waters, taken refuge in caverns / amidst the loftier rocks, and, wandering through these hollows, they / lost sight of the upper world forever. Indeed, the whole face of the / earth had been changed by this great revulsion; land had been turned / into sea -- sea into land. In the bowels of the inner earth, even now, / I was informed as a positive fact, might be discovered the remains of / human habitation -- habitation not in huts and caverns, but in vast cities / whose ruins attest the civilisation of races which flourished before / the age of Noah, and are not to be classified with those genera to which / philosophy ascribes the use of flint and the ignorance of iron.