Jules Verne · 1904 · thriller

Verne's last novel and a stealth sequel to Robur the Conqueror. A federal inspector is sent to find out why a North Carolina mountain is glowing, and ends up chasing a machine that is a car, a boat, a submarine and an aircraft in turn - across America, over Niagara Falls, and into a storm.

1. 1
   Morganton

   A town on the Catawba in North Carolina, from which the flat-topped peak called the Great Eyrie can be seen - and where in the spring of 1903 the people watch pale flames come off the summit and hear noises from inside it.

2. 2
   The Great Eyrie

   Verne built it on Table Rock in Burke County, which he never saw. John Strock of the federal police climbs it twice: the first time he cannot get in at all, and the second he finds an artificial entrance into a hollow workshop.

3. 3
   Washington

   Strock reports back and is given a second, apparently unrelated case - and then receives a letter posted from Morganton warning him off, signed only M.o.W., which is how the two cases become one.

4. 4
   Wisconsin

   A car doing a hundred and twenty miles an hour on a public road, faster than anything then built - the first sighting of the Terror, which is also a boat, also a submarine, and also an aircraft, and changes between them at will.

5. 5
   Lake Erie

   An attempt to arrest the crew ends with one of Strock's men shot and Strock himself tangled in a mooring line and dragged off the shore as the machine escapes - which is how he comes to be aboard it.

6. 6
   Lake Kirdall

   A deep natural lake in Kansas that does not exist, which Verne invented for the submarine sequence - and where the Terror lies hidden between appearances, disguised as an ordinary strange boat.

7. 7
   Niagara

   The chase reaches the falls and the Terror simply rises over them - a machine that cannot be cornered because it can always change what kind of machine it is.

8. 8
   The Great Eyrie

   Robur the Conqueror flies into a storm rather than be taken, and is destroyed by lightning - and the mystery of the mountain turns out to have been a garage all along, which is the joke Verne is making about his own century.