Beasts, Men and Gods

A Polish scientist flees the Bolsheviks across Siberia and Mongolia in 1920 and falls in with the mad Baron Ungern-Sternberg, who was at that moment making himself ruler of Mongolia. Ossendowski's account was disbelieved by some and defended by others; the last chapters concern the King of the World beneath the earth. Fifty-eight plates spanning 1560 to 1901, among them Caspar David Friedrich's winter landscapes and mountain scenes, trace the same desolate, visionary terrain this flight across Mongolia crosses.