Sixteen years after they left the caves of Kôr, Holly and Leo follow a vision to the mountains of Central Asia, to a monastery above a plain and a veiled Hesea who rules the Mountain of Fire. Haggard went to South Africa at nineteen as a colonial official and helped raise the Union Jack over the Transvaal; readers waited nineteen years for this sequel, and he gave them a colder and stranger book than the one they asked for.