Pellucidar ♦ By Edgar Rice Burroughs

David Innes and Abner Perry build a giant mechanical prospector with which they hope to uncover vast mineral deposits far beneath the surface. On the “Iron Mole’s” first trip, however, they discover that their vehicle can’t be steered. Death seems certain, for doesn’t everyone know that the center of the Earth is a molten mass of white-hot magma?

Instead what Innes and Perry discover is that the earth’s crust is only 500 miles thick and that the inner surface is inhabited. This is the land of PELLUCIDAR, a place where dinosaurs roam through the jungles, and where saber-toothed tigers hunt the mastodon and mammoth. A tiny sun, the molten core of the Earth, hangs in the center of the heavens, shedding perpetual daylight upon Pellucidar. Because the sun never sets, because it is always “now”, there is no such thing as time in Pellucidar! Stranger still, because Pellucidar rests on the inner side of the Earth’s crust, there is no horizon. The land curves “upwards”, as if you were standing on the inside of a gigantic bowl.

Humans dwell in Pellucidar as well, stone-age men and women who must fight to survive in this savage world. Even worse, these people have been made slaves of the Mahars, a race of intelligent but sinister reptiles who look upon humans as nothing more than beast of burden or as tasty snacks in one of their ghoulish ceremonies.

The struggle of David Innes and Abner Perry to free humanity from the Mahar tyranny is only the beginning of their adventures in Pellucidar. There are a total of seven books in this exciting series, in which Edgar Rice Burroughs takes you on journeys across savage seas infested with plesiosaurs and other hungry creatures, to mountains where pterodactyls roost, and to lands where every waking moment is a struggle to survive. Even Tarzan visits Pellucidar, taking a ride on a dirigible through “Symmes Hole” at the North Pole. So take a journey, via Iron Mole or dirigible, and discover for yourself the wonders, the terrors, and the excitement of Pellucidar… David Innes and his captive, a member of the reptilian Mahar master race of the interior world of Pellucidar, return from the surface world in the Iron Mole invented by his friend and companion in adventure Abner Perry.

Emerging in Pellucidar at an unknown location, David frees his captive. He names the place Greenwich and uses the technology he has brought to begin the systematic exploration and mapping of the unknown land while searching for his lost companions, Abner, Ghak, and Dian the Beautiful. He soon encounters and befriends a new ally, Ja the Mezop of the island country of Anoroc; later he finds Abner, from whom he learns that in his absence the human revolt against the Mahars has not been going well. In a parlay with the Mahars David bargains for information of his love Dian and his enemy Hooja the Sly One, which his foes agree to supply in return for the book containing the Great Secret of Mahar reproduction that David stole and hid in the previous novel. David undertakes to recover it, only to find that Hooja has been there before him and claimed Dian as his own reward of the Mahars!