Professor H. C. Kelston of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine both loves and hates anopheles mosquitoes. Every day he wakes up thinking about the damnable creatures, so perfectly designed by evolution for fecundity. Kelston seeks a better way to end the disease’s reign of terror—by learning to control, and eventually exterminate, the mosquito itself. After expeditions to Egypt, Panama, and Greece, Kelston now trains his angry scientific eye on the British colony of North Rhodesia, in whose Busanga Swamp is said to fester the Mother of Mosquitoes. The investigators prepare to join him on that quest.
