However, with his advanced means of transport destroyed, he must use other means of travel, such as on the back of "windsteeds", basically large flying cats, as well as by boat or walking. After the enemy destroys his ship and his companions, Rocannon sets out to find their base so that he can alert the League of their presence with the enemy's ansible.
Unbeknown to him and his colleagues, there is a base on the planet of an enemy of the League of All Worlds-a young world named Faraday, which embarked on a career of interstellar war and conquest, and which chose this "primitive" world as the location of a secret base. It was through Rocannon's efforts that the planet had been placed under an 'exploration embargo' in order to protect the native cultures. He later goes on an ethnological mission to her planet, Fomalhaut II. The novel then follows Gaverel Rocannon, an ethnologist who had met Semley at the museum.
Semley descends into the dwarves' tunnels, like Rip van Winkle, from where she makes the flight-and returns after a generation (sixteen years) due to relativistic time dilation. The interstellar society of the League of All Worlds has placed an automated spaceship at the dwarves' disposal, with which Semley travels. In the story, the planet's "dwarves" live underground and have an early industrial society that (unlike industrial societies in Earth's history) doesn't interfere with the less-developed societies on the surface. The story in effect combines the Rip Van Winkle-type fairy tale-where a person goes underground in the company of dwarves or elves, spending an apparently brief time but on emerging finding whole generations had elapsed-with modern science fiction having the same effect through relativity and the time dilation resulting from traveling at near-light velocities.
She returns to find her daughter grown up and her husband dead. A young woman named Semley takes a space voyage from her unnamed, technologically primitive planet to a museum to reclaim a family heirloom, not realizing that, while the trip will be of short duration for her, many years will elapse on her planet. The novel begins with a prologue called "Semley's Necklace", which was first published as a stand-alone story titled "Dowry of the Angyar" in Amazing Stories (September 1964).
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