Meldrum Strange has "a way" with him. You need all your tact to get him past the quarreling point; but once that point is left behind there isn't a finer business boss in the universe. He likes to put his ringer on a desk-bell and feel somebody jump in Tibet or Wei-hei-wei or Honolulu. That's Meldrum Strange.
When he sent me from San Francisco, where I was enjoying a vacation, to New York, where he was enjoying business, I took the first train.
"You've been a long time on the way," he remarked, as I walked into his office twenty minutes after the Chicago flyer reached Grand Central Station. "Look at this!" he growled, shoving into my hand a clipping from a Western newspaper.
In 1922, when Talbot Mundy published this novel in the magazine Adventure, its readers voted it best novel of the year. And that's not surprising: Caves of Terror is a fast-paced, riveting tale. Athelstan King (hero of Mundy's early classic King -- of the Khyber Rifles) and burly and down-to-earth American Jeff Ramsden follow the gray mahatma through a series of caves beneath an ancient temple, revealing different levels of wisdom and the limitations and tortures of those stranded at any one level. And at the end of their quest through this Dantean Inferno waits death . . .
