Charles Willard Diffin 3 hr 49 min read

A man named Smith, prospecting for gold in a dead Western volcano, learns to his cost that the life-spark of a fabled race still glows in the black heart of the crater, and a world waits below.

Charles Willard Diffin's 1932 novel is a rousing lost-world and subterranean adventure. Vivid, imaginative golden-age pulp. Read it for a colorful pulp yarn of a descent into a hidden underground realm beneath a Western volcano, an ancient race, deadly perils, and marvels far below the earth, in the wonder-and-peril style of the classic scientifiction magazines.

In its time

Published in 1932, during the 1930s, space opera soars.

Reading it

3 hr 49 min read (a novel-length work, settle in).