Caves of Terror - Talbot Mundy

During Mundy's career his work was often compared with that of his more commercially successful contemporaries, H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling, although unlike their work his adopted an anti-colonialist stance and expressed a positive interest in Eastern religion and philosophy. In 1922, when Talbot Mundy published this novel in the magazine Adventure, its readers voted it best novel of the year. And that's not surprising: Caves of Terror is a fast-paced, riveting tale. 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 .