The first two decades of the twentieth century witnessed humanity's final push into the unknown. John Buchan, writing with the immediacy of someone who lived through these triumphs, chronicles the resolution of centuries-old geographical obsessions: the Poles finally reached, Everest tantalizingly close, Lhasa revealed to the Western world after being sealed for generations. His account captures something precious and irretrievable, the last moments before our planet held no more secrets, before exploration became science. The Gorges of the Brahmaputra, the Mountains of the Moon, the Holy Cities of Islam, the wild interiors of New Guinea, all fall before this extraordinary burst of human courage and curiosity. Buchan's prose carries the weight of an ending: the age of pure adventure was dying, and he knew it. This is both a definitive historical record and an elegy for the era when the world was still large enough to be conquered.
