The Last Secrets: The Final Mysteries of Exploration
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.
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“If you wish to know what men seek in this land [the Arctic regions], or why men journey thither in so great danger of their lives, then it is the threefold nature of man that draws him thither. One part of him is emulation and desire of fame, for it is a man's nature to go where there is likelihood of great danger, and to make himself famous thereby. Another part is the desire of knowledge, for it is man's nature to wish to know and see those parts of which he has heard, and to find out whether they are as it was told him or not. The third part is the desire of gain, seeing that men seek after riches in every place where they learn that profit is to be had, even though there is great danger in it." Fridjtof Nansen, citing an old Norse saga””
— John Buchan
“The war had called forth the finest qualities of human nature, and with the advent of peace there seemed a risk of the world slipping back into a dull materialism. Men had begun to ask of everything its cash value, and to cherish, as if it were a virtue, a narrow utilitarian commonsense.””
— John Buchan
“And, indeed, it may well be admitted that the factors which have helped to make the modern world are mainly a desire for fame, a desire for knowledge, and a desire for riches; and woe betide the nation that forgets the first and second of these factors, and loses its soul in concentration upon the last of them.””
— John Buchan
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Buchan, John. The Last Secrets: The Final Mysteries of Exploration. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-last-secrets-the-final-mysteries-of-exploration-47fec345-dc42-4ca3-9d21-85f8b38c77dd.Buchan, J. (n.d.). The Last Secrets: The Final Mysteries of Exploration. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-last-secrets-the-final-mysteries-of-exploration-47fec345-dc42-4ca3-9d21-85f8b38c77ddBuchan, John. The Last Secrets: The Final Mysteries of Exploration. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-last-secrets-the-final-mysteries-of-exploration-47fec345-dc42-4ca3-9d21-85f8b38c77dd.
