Out of Time's Abyss

The third and strangest of the Caspak books: an Englishman carried off by a winged creature to a city of the dead, where the Wieroo keep human women and their own history in painted skulls. Burroughs solved the puzzle he had set in the first two volumes here, and named the trick of the island in the last chapter. It is his only book that is closer to nightmare than to adventure, and the rescue arrives too late to make it comfortable. Fifty-four plates of painting, from John Martin's ruined and celestial cities to moonlit streets, run through this third Caspak volume like the dead city's own painted history.