Athelstan King (hero of Mundy's early classic King -- of the Khyber Rifles) and burly and down-to-earth American Jeff Ramsden follow the gray mahatma through a series of caves beneath an ancient temple, revealing different levels of wisdom and the limitations and tortures of those stranded at any one level. And at the end of their quest through this Dantean Inferno waits death . . .

Author Biography

Talbot Mundy (born William Lancaster Gribbon, 1879 - 1940) was an English-born American writer of adventure fiction. Based for most of his life in the United States, he also wrote under the pseudonym of Walter Galt. Best known as the author of King of the Khyber Rifles and the Jimgrim series, much of his work was published in pulp magazines. During Mundy's career his work was often compared with that of his more commercially successful contemporaries, H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling, unlike their work his adopted an anti-colonialist stance and expressed a positive interest in Asian religion and philosophy. His work has been cited as an influence on a variety of later science-fiction and fantasy writers and he has been the subject of two biographies.