Morgana Royal is small, fey and enormously rich, and in a shed on the Sicilian shore below her Palazzo d'Oro she has built the White Eagle, a silent air-ship driven by a force that renews itself as it works. Roger Seaton, the English scientist she once turned her back on, is hiding in a hut above a California sanatorium with a discovery of his own, a way to wipe nations off the map from a distance, and he is offering it to an American senator. Morgana flies the White Eagle over the Sahara in search of a city that legend says no traveller has ever reached. Corelli outsold Wells, Kipling and Conan Doyle, and wrote this in 1921, with the war just over and the fear of what science could do very fresh. Fifty-eight plates, among them David Roberts and Jean-Léon Gérôme, carry cathedrals, desert riders and lions that echo the air-ship's flight over the Sahara.