Complete and unabridged, with 49 full-page plates by Thomas Cole, John Martin and Frederic Edwin Church. A hidden kingdom under a mountain, lit by an artificial sun that is beginning to fail — and a king who has bred his people for beauty and disposes of the rest. Harben clerked in a Georgia store until he was thirty and then made the north Georgia hills his subject; Howells called him one of the best American realists, which makes this 1894 scientific romance the odd book on his shelf, and a startling one. Forty-nine plates of mountain painting by Thomas Cole and Edvard Munch, from 1812 to 1928, answer the peaks of this hidden kingdom with the peaks of art.