Valley of the Flame

Valley of the Flame is a fantasy novel by American writer Henry Kuttner, first published in the March 1946 issue of the magazine Startling Stories under the pseudonym "Keith Hammond".

Medical scientist Brian Raft and his two colleagues Dan Craddock and Bill Merriday are working at a small, newly built health center, researching tropical diseases.

Craddock, despite his medical training, is a superstitious man "with his Welsh ghosts and his shadow-people of the lost centuries", so Raft does not take much notice of him.

One of these newcomers, Thomas Da Fonseca, proves to be a pilot on a mapping expedition whose plane has crashed near the second man's property.

This second man, Paulo da Costa Pereira, is of indeterminate origin; he speaks Portuguese, but in a faulty manner, and carries himself in a kind of confident, haughty, evasive way that annoys Raft.