[7] A London banker named David Musgrave dies prematurely in his mid-fifties, leaving a large fortune to his young wife and small son.

In the course of that work, he meets an impressive man named Jason Delphion, who seems to exist on a level of physical and intellectual development superior to average human beings.

Delphion, an admirer of Musgrave's philanthropic efforts, tells the young Englishman about a hidden country in the remote Himalayas where an ideal and utopian society has evolved.

At the time of the Mughal Empire, a local prince named Timoleon travelled to Europe and brought back knowledge and technology; he led the Ionians in their development of an advanced and deliberately isolated culture.

(Craig's description of the Acropolis of Iolkos, with palaces divided by canals surrounding a "central basin" in which is set a great statue,[8] recalls the Court of Honor at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, the famous "White City.")

Their government is a republic, under an elected archon; the state controls marriage and practices eugenics, and the people generally live to be one hundred years old.

In Craig's arrangement of commercial matters, expenses of interest payments and advertising are nonexistent, and workers own shares in the companies that employ them — traits also found in Bradford Peck's novel The World a Department Store (1900).

In Ionia, all land is owned by the state and leased to businesses and private citizens, as in Byron Brooks's Earth Revisited (1892) and Castello Holford's Aristopia (1895).

[10] Musgrave and Delphion fly to the hidden valley in a craft shaped "like an enormous egg, at least twenty feet long," with portholes around its circumference and larger windows at one end.

Some decades before the time of his visit, an Ionian air fleet reached the North Pole, on an expedition in which half the aircraft, six out of twelve, needed to be abandoned (though their crews were rescued).

At a high elevation in the clear mountain air, Musgrave is overwhelmed by their brilliance, each a blazing "orb of regal splendor," and he is awed by the knowledge that each is a "distant sun.