Holidaying at the remote Rowe Island, he befriends Oswald Bastable, an ex-soldier stowaway who seems confused and disoriented beyond what could be explained by his opium addiction, and who is tormented by great guilt from an action he performed in his past.

Bastable agrees to tell Moorcock the story, and begins his narrative with his experiences in North East India in 1902, sent as part of a British expedition to deal with Sharan Kang, an Indian high priest at the temple of Teku Benga, a mysterious and seemingly supernaturally powerful region.

Bastable, a fair and honourable man, is outraged by the cruelty, injustice and horror revealed to him, and begins to fight for the oppressed peoples of the world (opposing, amongst others, his former friend in the airship service, Major Enoch Powell).

Wracked with guilt over his part in the destruction of countless millions of innocent lives, and dreading the 'future' of science and imperialism gone mad, Bastable makes his way to the caves of Teku Benga and returns to 1903, but alas, not his own original time.

The assumption that survival of the British Empire as a political entity would entail survival of the airship as the main or only way of travelling by air was taken up by various other alternate British Empires fiction narratives (otherwise considerably different from each other) after Moorcock's 1971 Warlord of the Air, most notably At the Narrow Passage (1973) by Richard C. Meredith, Great Work of Time (1989) by John Crowley, The Two Georges (1995) by Harry Turtledove and Richard Dreyfuss, The Peshawar Lancers (2002) by S. M. Stirling, and Leviathan (2009) by Scott Westerfeld.