Down to a Sunless Sea, 1984 novel by Lin Carter

Down to a Sunless Sea (1984), a novel of legendary Mars, by Lin Carter.

Pictured: Paperback original (New York: DAW Books, 1984), 174 p., $2.50. Logo No. 584. "To my friend Robert M. Price, editor of Crypt of Cthulhu." Cover art by Ken W. Kelly. Here’s the promotional piece from the back cover:

Brant's life had been hard after the courts had sent him to the penal colony at Trivium Charontis on Mars. Since working his way to freedom, he had run guns to the High Clan princes, sold them liquor and forbidden tobacco, and peddled narcotics to the soft, timid Earthsider clerks. He had stolen, he had cheated at cards, he had killed a man more than once...

Now fleeing from justice across the ancient dust-oceans of Mars he had no way of knowing that he was running toward the most fantastic adventure any man had ever lived -- toward refuge more absolute than any man had ever dreamed of -- by the banks of secret rivers, in caverns yet unmeasured by man, on the shore of a sea the sun had never seen!

A fragment from English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous poem "Kubla Khan" (1816) is printed opposite the title page:

"... Where Alph the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sunless sea."

Down to a Sunless Sea is the fourth book Lin Carter’s "Mysteries of Mars" series. The other novels are The Man Who Loved Mars (1973), The Valley Where Time Stood Still (1974) and The City Outside the World (1977).