100, or so, Arabian Nights

The chronicle of an archaeological expedition to the Rub al Khali desert of Arabia, known as the Empty Quarter, in search a fabled lost city, an Atlantis of the Sands. But the novel is less concerned with lost kingdoms than the ideological quarrels, betrayal, and eventually murder that overcomes the expedition party. At the entre of that dysfunctional company is the expedition leader. Callously call him the 'The Amateur Professor', a prolific liar who deceived himself as much as anybody else, falsifying his academic qualifications, committing multiple acts of fraud to finance his ambition, and concocting an elaborate fictitious history of a desert Atlantis to mislead 49 men into accompanying him on a treasure hunt into the inhospitable interior of the Empty Quarter.

So why follow a man who travelled to the ends of the earth, spent a fortune, and ruined numerous lives, and failed. Because the story is not concerned with lost kingdoms and buried treasure. This tale is a search for something which does not register on the historical record, which leaves no relics to be excavated. Whether El-Dorado or Shangri-La, the Foreigner believed that to dream of Atlantis in this mechanized age is to long for a time when the world was young and untamed, and the lands beyond the town and city were full of gods and monsters, and men lived with eternity in their hearts.

Like the Empty Quarter, the Foreigner was haunted by ghosts of the past. But he did not want to simply go back. He knew the wrong turn he had taken in life and he determined to go back and take the other path, by the only magic that allows it; the written word, to journey through the agony and ecstasy of the life not lived.