Everything you need to understand or teach The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg.
This novel describes the quest of four rebellious college students to find arcane wisdom, an obscure cult, and the secret of immortality, all of which are supposedly located in a secret monastic order in the Arizona desert. Their journey, which starts with their departure from a New England college and proceeds across the North American continent to Arizona, is at times a vivid and almost hallucinatory experience; but it ends tragically with the...