Last Secrets

In the early years of the twentieth century, the great blanks on the world's map were finally being filled in. John Buchan, himself a man of action who would become Governor General of Canada, tells the stories of nine expeditions that closed the book on Earth's greatest mysteries. Here is the first ascent of the Matterhorn's sister peak, the terrifying beauty of Lhasa's forbidden walls, the failed attempts to crown Everest's summit. Buchan writes with the verve of a man who knew these explorers personally, capturing not just the geography but the feverish hope and sometimes fatal ambition that drove them. The world they mapped was the one that existed before satellites, before instant communication, when reaching a remote peak or hidden city still required extraordinary courage. This is adventure writing at its most immediate, a portrait of an age when the word 'unknown' still held genuine terror and wonder.