John Carter returns to Barsoom after ten years on Earth and lands in the Valley Dor, the paradise every Martian is taught to seek at the end of life - and finds what is actually waiting there. Burroughs wrote straight on from the first book and used this one to take apart a religion invented for the purpose, plant by plant and priest by priest. It closes on the cliff-hanger that made the third book compulsory. Fifty-nine plates by painters including Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church carry the strange light of the Martian paradise through storm clouds, tropical rain and far coasts.