Complete and unabridged, with 58 full-page plates by Gustave Doré, David Roberts and Arnold Böcklin. Nicholas Crabbe, a recluse experimenting in Egypt at the end of the nineteenth century, takes an unintended fall backwards through time into the reign of Ptolemy Auletes and finds that he is Odysseus, son of Laertes, now immortal and a king in the East; his account comes down on papyri dug up in the modern world. Rolfe, who called himself Baron Corvo, wrote it with his friend Harry Pirie-Gordon under the names Prospero and Caliban. The prose is deliberately encrusted and the grudges in it are real. Fifty-eight plates of caravans, emigrants and Italian roads, from Verrocchio to De Nittis, follow the wanderer's passage between East and West.