An American's liner is torpedoed in the Channel in 1916; he and the girl he pulls from the water are picked up by a tug, the tug is rammed by the same U-boat, and the survivors seize the submarine and its crew. Sabotage sends them south, off every chart, to Caprona — a walled island where every stage of evolution is still alive, and where the creatures come nearer to human the further north you go. Burroughs wrote it while the war it begins with was still on, and the manuscript reaches the reader in a thermos flask, which is the only ordinary thing about it. Fifty-nine plates of moonlit sea and North Sea fishing boats by Joseph Heard and Ivan Aivazovsky carry the story's dark water from the Channel to the uncharted shore.
