Langdon St. Ives, explorer, scientist, naturalist, and family man rarely has a restful day.. adventure befalls him and a colorful cast of characters around every seemingly innocent turn. In this chronicle, St. Ives descends beneath the quicksand of Morecambe Bay into a dark, unknown corner of the ocean littered with human bones and the castaway detritus of humanity in search of a strange, possible alien machine. Madness at the Explorers Club in London and the disappearance of St. Ives's wife Alice leads him to the underground lair of evil genius Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, who has undertaken to set the entirety of London into a lunatic frenzy. A simple excursion to the West Indies is interrupted by bloodthirsty pirates whose depredations pale before the fury of the pagan god that erupts from beneath the blue waters of the Caribbean Sea. An inexplicable cataract of water falling from a cloudless sky sets into motion a ballooning adventure in which St. Ives disappears through a hole in the sky. And on a holiday in London, St. Ives investigates the insidious patent medicine salesman Diogenes, whose pills awaken strange longings and eons-old memories of man's ascent from the fishes.