When the inventor Perry fires up his burrowing prospector, it runs out of control, plunging him with his young protege into the centre of the earth. There, instead of being destroyed by the molten lava they expect to find, they discover an inner world of bizarre savagery and unearthly beauty. Here mighty dinosaurs still roam alongside beasts never seen in the world above. And to their horror, they find themselves suddenly enslaved in a land where humans are ruled by the reptilian and evilly intelligent Mahars. One of the most profound early influences on the science fiction and fantasy genre, Edgar Rice Burroughs is now most famous for his Tarzan series, although he wrote many tales that have captured the imaginations of generations of readers, including the Martian adventures of the Barsoom sequence, the Pellucidar sequence, of which this volume is the first, and the stories of Carson on Venus.