[1] In March 1912, in the event some called the "Miracle", Europe and parts of Asia and Africa, including its inhabitants, disappear suddenly overnight and are replaced with a slice of an alien planet, a land mass of roughly equal outlines and terrain features, but with a strange new flora and fauna which seem to have followed a different path in evolution.

Lord Kitchener – who, with no World War I breaking out, lives on past 1916 – tries to hold together the remnants of the British Empire and re-settle Britain, though the refounded London is little more than "a raw frontier town".

To that end, he enlists as a photographer in the Finch expedition, which plans to travel up the river that used to be known as the Rhine and penetrate the bizarre new continent's hidden depths as far as possible.

He lands in the middle of the jungle in the midst of nationalistic skirmishes, in which partisans attack and wipe out most of the party of the Finch expedition on the continent that they believe to belong to them.

Law brought an unwanted companion with him, a mysterious twin who seems to have both lived and died on an alternate Earth unchanged by the Miracle.