The Green Goddess

An aeroplane carrying three English travellers — a doctor, an army officer and the officer's wife — comes down in Rukh, a Himalayan kingdom whose cultivated, charming Rajah has three brothers awaiting execution in British India and a goddess who expects a sacrifice. William Archer was London's most feared drama critic and the translator who brought Ibsen to the English stage; late in life he wrote one melodrama of his own, The Green Goddess, which was a hit in New York and London, and Louise Jordan Miln turned it into this novel. Fifty-seven plates of Himalayan peaks, deodars and palace lakes by painters including Marianne North and Samuel Bourne carry the reader into the mountains where the Rajah holds his captives.