Caves of Terror

An American agent in India follows a Russian conspiracy into caves under the hills, where a woman who claims to be nine hundred years old keeps a treasure and an army. Mundy had worked in India and East Africa before he wrote, and his intrigue novels are unusually honest about who the empire's servants actually were. The caves are a pulp invention; the politics around them are not. Fifty plates by painters including Vereshchagin and David Roberts follow the caravan roads, hill temples and desert cities of the East that give this tale its ground.