Download or read book The Mammoth Book of Travel in Dangerous Places Antarctic written by John Keay and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2012-06-07 with total page 35 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Farthest South - Ernest Henry Shackleton Born in Ireland, Shackleton joined the merchant navy before being recruited for Captain Scott's 1901 expedition to Antarctica. He was with Scott on his first attempt to reach the South Pole and, though badly shaken by the experience, realized that success was now feasible. In 1907, with a devoted team but little official support, he launched his own expedition. A scientific programme gave it respectability but Shackleton was essentially an adventurer, beguiled alike by the challenge of the unknown and the reward of celebrity. His goal was the Pole, 90 degrees south, and by Christmas 1908 his four-man team were already at 85 degrees. The Pole at Last - Roald Amundsen Amundsen's 1903-6 voyage through North West Passage had heralded a new era in exploration. The route by then was tolerably well known and its environs explored. His vessel was a diminutive fishing smack, his crew a group of Norwegian friends, and his object simply to be the first to have sailed through. He did it because it had not been done and "because it was there". The same applied to his 1911 conquest of the South Pole. Shackleton had shown the way and Amundsen drew the right conclusions. The Pole was not a scientist's playground nor a mystic's dreamland; it was simply a physical challenge. Instead of officers, gentlemen and scientists, he took men who could ski and dogs that could pull; if need be, the former could eat the latter. The only real anxiety was whether they would forestall Scott. In Extremis - Robert Falcon Scott Scott was chosen to lead the 1900-4 British National Antarctic Expedition. Its considerable achievements seemed to vindicate the choice of a naval officer more noted for integrity and courage than any polar experience, and, following Shackleton's near success, in 1910 Scott again sailed south intending to combine a busy scientific programme with a successful bid for the South Pole. On 17 January 1912 he and four others duly reached the Pole, indeed they sighted a real pole and it bore a Norwegian flag; Amundsen had got there 34 days ahead of them. Bitterly disappointed, soon overtaken by scurvy and bad weather, and still dragging sledges laden with geological specimens, they trudged back. The tragedy which then unfolded eclipsed even Amundsen's achievement and won them an immortality beyond the dreams of any explorer.

Download or read book The Mammoth Book of Travel in Dangerous Places Central and South Asia written by John Keay and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2012-06-07 with total page 53 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alarms amongst the Uzbeks - Alexander Burnes Of all the "forbidden" cities (Timbuktu, Mecca, Lhasa, Riyadh and so on) none enjoyed a more fearsome reputation that Bukhara in Uzbekistan. The first British Indian expedition, that of William Moorcroft in 1819-26, had never returned. Moorcroft's disappearance, like that of Livingstone or Franklin, posed a challenge in itself and preyed on the minds of his immediate successors. Heavily disguised and in an atmosphere of intense intrigue, Burnes and Dr James Gerard crossed the Afghan Hindu Kush in 1832 and approached the scenes of Moorcroft's discomfiture. They would both return; and "Bukhara Burnes" would become the most renowned explorer of his day. On the Roof of the World - John Wood In 1937 Alexander Burnes returned to Afghanistan on an official mission. Amongst his subordinates was a ship's lieutenant who, having surveyed the navigational potential of the river Indus, took off on a mid-winter excursion into the unknown Pamirs between China and Turkestan. Improbably, therefore, it was John Wood, a naval officer and the most unassuming of explorers, who became the first to climb into the hospitable mountain heartland of Central Asia and the first to follow to its source the great river Oxus (or Amu Darya.) Exploring Angkhor - Henri Mouhot Born in France, Mouhot spent most of his career in Russia as a teacher and then in the Channel Islands. A philologist by training, he also took up natual history and it was with the support of the Royal Zoological Society that in 1858 he set out for South East Asia. From Siam (Thailand) he penetrated Cambodia and Laos, where he died; but not before reaching unknown Angkhor and becoming the first to record and depict the most extensive and magnificent temple complex in the world. His discovery provided the inspiration for a succession of subsequent French expeditions up the Mekong. Over the Karakorams - Francis Edward Younghusband As leader of the 1904-5 British military expedition to Lhasa and as promoter of the early assaults on Mount Everest, Younghusband came to epitomize Himalayan endeavour. To the mountain he also owed his spiritual conversion from gung-ho solider to founder of the World Congress of Faiths. His initiation came in 1887 when, as the climax to journey from Peking across the Gobi desert, he determines to reach India over the unexplored Mustagh Pass in the Karakorams - "the most difficult and dangerous achievement in these mountains so far" (S.Hedin). Trials in Tibet - Ekai Kawaguchi By the 1890's the capital of "forbidden" Tibet, unseen by a foreigner since Huc's visit, represented the greatest challenge to exploration. Outright adventurers like the dreadful Henry Savage Landor competed with dedicated explorers like Sven Hedin, all succumbed to to a combination of official vigilance and physical hardship. The exception, and the winner in "the race for Lhasa", was a Buddhist monk from Japan whose expedition consisted of himself and two sheep. Ekai Kawaguchi was supposedly a pilgrim seeking religious texts. His faith was genuine and often tested, as during this 1900 excursion into western Tibet; but he is also thought to have been an agent of the British government in India.

Download or read book The Mammoth Book of Travel in Dangerous Places written by John Keay and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2010-04-29 with total page 716 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The great explorers were the celebrities of their day - the romance and danger of their daring expeditions captured the public imagination and the world's headlines to an extraordinary degree. Not all of them lived to tell the tale, of course, but those who emerged triumphant from jungle, desert or polar wasteland were hailed as if returning from beyond the grave. Journalists vied for their stories and publishers rushed their first-hand accounts of exciting and dangerous journeys into print for a wide and voracious readership. Acclaimed travel historian John Keay introduces this selection of the best of these first-hand narratives, including those of John Ross and John Franklin, writing about their experiences in the Arctic; Richard Burton's account of his search for the source of the Nile; John Speke on Lake Victoria; David Livingstone and Henry Stanley's adventures in central Africa; Alexander McKenzie's first crossing of America and Meriwether Lewis's encounter with the Shoshonee; Robert Peary and Roald Amundsen's voyages to the poles; and the poignant last words of William Wills in Australia and Robert Scott's In Extremis. Keay includes the experiences of four remarkable twentieth-century explorers: Hiram Bingham on the discovery of Machu Picchu; Wilfred Thesiger on Arabia's Empty Quarter; Edmund Hillary on reaching the summit of Everest; and Harry St John Bridger Philby facing despair and defeat in the Arabian desert.

Download or read book The Mammoth Book of Kaiju written by Sean Wallace and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2016-01-14 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giant monsters whose every roar and footstep shakes the earth, whose simple stroll through a city wreaks havoc: KAIJU! And even though humankind has never really seen such monsters - we tremble at the thought of them and love to shiver as their screen versions make mayhem: the beast from twenty-thousand fathoms, Godzilla demolishing Tokyo, the massive creature in Cloverfield destroying New York, all of Earth warring with the colossal monsters in Pacific Rim. Now, for the first time, a definitive anthology that gathers a wide range of larger-than-life short fiction with creatures that run a gargantuan gamut: the stealthy gabbleduck of Neal Asher's Polity universe; Gary McMahon's huge sea-born terror; An Owomoyela 's incredibly tall alien invaders; Frank Wu's city-razing, eighty-foot-high, fire-breathing lizard; Lavie Tidhar's titanic ship-devouring monstrosity; a really big Midwest US smackdown related by Jeremiah Tolbert . . . and many more mega-monster stories to feed your need for killer kaiju! With an introduction by Robert Hood, co-editor of the groundbreaking, Ditmar Award-winning Daikaiju: Giant Monster Tales and host of Undead Backbrain, the premier website for matters relating to giant monsters.

Download or read book The Mammoth Book of Superstition written by Roy Bainton and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2016-11-10 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rather than providing a dictionary of superstitions, of which there are already numerous excellent, exhaustive and, in many cases, academic works which list superstitions from A to Z, Bainton gives us an entertaining flight over the terrain, landing from time to time in more thought-provoking areas. He offers an overview of humanity's often illogical and irrational persistence in seeking good luck and avoiding misfortune. While Steve Roud's two excellent books - The Penguin Dictionary of Superstitions and his Pocket Guide - and Philippa Waring's 1970 Dictionary concentrate on the British Isles, Bainton casts his net much wider. There are many origins which warrant the full back story, such as Friday the thirteenth and the Knights Templar, or the demonisation of the domestic cat resulting in 'cat holocausts' throughout Europe led by the Popes and the Inquisition. The whole is presented as a comprehensive, entertaining narrative flow, though it is, of course, a book that could be dipped into, and includes a thorough bibliography. Schoenberg, who developed the twelve-tone technique in music, was a notorious triskaidekaphobe. When the title of his opera Moses und Aaron resulted in a title with thirteen letters, he renamed it Moses und Aron. He believed he would die in his seventy-sixth year (7 + 6 = 13) and he was correct; he also died on Friday the thirteenth at thirteen minutes before midnight. As Sigmund Freud wrote, 'Superstition is in large part the expectation of trouble; and a person who has harboured frequent evil wishes against others, but has been brought up to be good and has therefore repressed such wishes into the unconscious, will be especially ready to expect punishment for his unconscious wickedness in the form of trouble threatening him from without.'

Download or read book The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu written by Paula Guran and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than 80 years H. P. Lovecraft has inspired writers of horror and supernatural fiction with his dark vision of humankind's insignificant place in a vast, uncaring cosmos. At the time of his death in 1937, Lovecraft was virtually unknown, but from early cult status his readership expanded exponentially; his nightmarish visions laying down roots in the collective imagination of his readers. Now this master of the macabre is accepted as part of the literary mainstream, as an American author of note, and the impact of his work on modern popular culture - in literature, film, television, music, the graphic arts, gaming and theatre - has been profound. As Stephen King wrote in Danse Macabre, the shadow of H. P. Lovecraft 'underlies almost all of the important horror fiction that has come since.' Today, Lovecraft's themes of cosmic indifference, the utter insignificance of humankind, minds invaded by the alien, and the horrors of history remain not only viable motifs for modern speculative fiction, but are more relevant than ever as we explore the mysteries of a universe in which our planet is infinitesimal. This outstanding anthology of original stories - from both established award-winning authors and exciting new voices - collects tales of cosmic horror inspired by Lovecraft from authors who do not merely imitate, but reimagine, re-energize, and renew the best of his concepts in ways relevant to today's readers, to create fresh new fiction that explores our modern fears and nightmares. From the depths of R'lyeh to the heights of the Mountains of Madness, some of today's best weird fiction writers traverse terrain created by Lovecraft and create new eldritch geographies to explore . . . With stories by: Laird Barron, Nadia Bulkin, Amanda Downum, Ruthanna Emrys, Richard Gavin, Lois H. Gresh, Lisa L. Hannett, Brian Hodge, Caitlín R. Kiernan, John Langan, Yoon Ha Lee, Usman T. Malik, Helen Marshall, Silvia Moreno, Norman Partridge, W. H. Pugmire, Veronica Schanoes, Michael Shea, John Shirley, Simon Strantzas, Sandra McDonald, Damien Angelica Walters, Don Webb, Michael Wehunt and A.C. Wise Praise for the editor: 'For fans of Lovecraftian fiction and well-wrought horror' - Library Journal 'Guran smartly selects stories that evoke the spirit of Lovecraft's work without mimicking its style.' - Publishers Weekly 'It's a pretty impressive line-up, with nary a clunker to be found. . . . You don't have to be a Lovecraft fan to enjoy this anthology... You'll find alienation, inhumanity, desperation, cruelty, insanity, hopelessness and despair, all set against the backdrop of a vast, unknowable universe filled with vile, indifferent monstrosities. You'll also find beauty, hope, redemption, and the struggle for survival. What more can you ask for?' - Tor.com 'I highly recommend this collection... If you have even the slightest interest in contemporary horror fiction, you'll want to try this one on for size!' - BookGuide

Download or read book The Mammoth Book of Travel in Dangerous Places South America written by John Keay and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2012-06-07 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eating Dirt in Venezuela - Alexander von Humboldt Geographer, geologist, naturalist, anthropologist, physician and philosopher, Baron von Humboldt brought to exploration a greater range of enquiry than any contemporary. Also an indomitable traveller, particularly in the Orinoco/Amazon basin (1799-1804), he often invited danger but always in the cause of scientific observation. The interest of his narratives therefore lies primarily in the author's insatiable curiosity and in the erudition that allowed him to generalize from his observations. A classic example is his ever deadpan disquisition on earth-eating. It occurs in the middle of a hair-raising account of descending the Orinoco in Venezuela. Iron Rations in Amazonia - Henry Savage Landor Bar Antarctica, Everest and the Empty Quarter, twentieth-century explorers have largely had to contrive their challenges. Landor went one better and contrived the hazards. From Japan, Korea, Central Asia, Tibet, and Africa he returned, always alone, with ever more improbable claims and ever more extravagant tales. The climax came in 1911 with Across Unknown South America, the sort of book that gave exploration a bad name. His route, irrelevant and seldom "unknown", nevertheless demanded superhuman powers of endurance as when the expedition marched without food for fifteen days. The Discovery of Machu Picchu - Hiram Bingham Just when it seemed as if all the "forbidden cities" had been entered and the "lost civilisations" found, there occurred one of the most sensational discoveries in the history of travel. Hiram Bingham, the son of missionary parents in Hawaii, was a lecturer in Latin American history at Yale and Berkeley who devoted his vocations to retracing the routes of Spanish conquest and trade in Columbia and Peru. He was drawn to the high Andes near Cuzco and to the awesome gorges of the Urubamba River by rumours about the existence there of the lost capital and last retreat of the Incas. Machu Picchu was neither; but it richly rewarded his heroic endeavour in reaching it. After excavation by Bingham in 1912 and 1915, it was revealed as the best preserved of the Inca cities and South America's most impressive site.

Download or read book Voices From the Napoleonic Wars written by Jon E. Lewis and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2015-04-09 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Voices from the Napoleonic Wars reveals in telling detail the harsh lives of soldiers at the turn of the eighteenth century and in the early years of the nineteenth - the poor food and brutal discipline they endured, along with the forced marches and bloody, hand-to-hand combat. Contemporaries were mesmerised by Napoleon, and with good reason: in 1812, he had an unprecedented million men and more under arms. His new model army of volunteers and conscripts at epic battles such as Austerlitz, Salamanca, Borodino, Jena and, of course, Waterloo marked the beginning of modern warfare, the road to the Sommes and Stalingrad. The citizen-in-arms of Napoleon's Grande Armée and other armies of the time gave rise to a distinct body of soldiers' personal memoirs. The personal accounts that Jon E. Lewis has selected from these memoirs, as well as from letters and diaries, include those of Rifleman Harris fighting in the Peninsular Wars, and Captain Alexander Cavalie Mercer of the Royal Horse Artillery at Waterloo. They cover the land campaigns of the French Revolutionary Wars (1739-1802), the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) and the War of 1812 (1812-1815), in North America. This was the age of cavalry charges, of horse-drawn artillery, of muskets and hand-to-hand combat with sabres and bayonets. It was an era in which inspirational leadership and patriotic common cause counted for much at close quarters on chaotic and bloody battlefields. The men who wrote these accounts were directly involved in the sweeping campaigns and climactic battles that set Europe and America alight at the turn of the eighteenth century and in the years that followed. Alongside recollections of the ferocity of hard-fought battles are the equally telling details of the common soldier's daily life - short rations, forced marches in the searing heat of the Iberian summer and the bitter cold of the Russian winter, debilitating illnesses and crippling wounds, looting and the lash, but also the compensations of hard-won comradeship in the face of ever-present death. Collectively, these personal accounts give us the most vivid picture of warfare 200 and more years ago, in the evocative language of those who knew it at first hand - the men and officers of the British, French and American armies. They let us know exactly what it was like to be an infantryman, a cavalryman, an artilleryman of the time.

Download or read book The Mammoth Book of Travel in Dangerous Places Arctic written by John Keay and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2012-06-07 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four Years in the Ice - John Ross Disgraced and dishonored for his report of an imaginary mountain range blocking the most likely access to the North West Passage, in 1829 Ross returned to Canada's frozen archipelago to vindicate his reputation. He rounded the north of Baffin Island and entered what he named the Gulf of Boothia. Here the Victory, his eccentric paddle-steamer, became frozen to the ice. Through three tantalizingly brief summers the expedition tried to find a way out and through four long winters then endured the worst of Arctic conditions in a makeshift camp. In July 1832, with the ship long since abandoned, Ross made what must be their last bid to reach open water. Living off Lichen and Leather - John Franklin In 1845, looking again for the North West Passage, two well-crewed ships under Franklin's command sailed into the Canadian Arctic and were never seen again. There began the most prolonged search ever mounted for an explorer. For Franklin had been lost before and yet had survived. In 1821, returning from an overland reconnaissance of the Arctic coast north of Great Slave Lake, he and Dr. John Richardson, with two Lieutenants and about a dozen voyageurs (mostly French), had run out of food and then been overtaken by the Arctic weather. Franklin's narrative of what is probably the grisliest journey on record omits unpalatable details, like the cannibalism of one of his men, the murder of Lieut. Hood, and Richardson's summary shooting of the murderer; but it well conveys the debility of men forced to survive on leather and lichen (triple de roche) plus that sense of demoralization and disintegration that heralds the demise of an expedition. Adrift on an Arctic Ice Floe - Fridtjof Nansen Norwegian patriot, natural scientist, and Nobel laureate, Nansen caught the world's imagination when he almost reached the North Pole in 1895. The attempt was made on skis from specially reinforced vessel which, driven into the ice, was carried from Siberia towards Greenland. The idea stemmed from his first expedition, an 1888 crossing of Greenland. Then too he had used skis and then too, unwittingly and nearly disastrously, he had taken to the ice. Arrived off Greenland's inhospitable east coast, he had ordered his five-man party to spare their vessel by crossing the off-shore ice floe in rowing boats. A task which he expected to take a few hours turned into an involuntary voyage down the coast of twelve days. The Pole is Mine - Robert Edwin Peary Born in Pennsylvania and latterly a commander in the US navy, Peary had set his sights on claiming the North Pole from childhood. It was not just an obsession but a religion, his manifest destiny. Regardless of cost, hardship, and other men's sensibilities, he would be Peary of the Pole, and the Pole would be American. Critics might carp over the hundreds of dogs that were sacrificed to his ambition, over the chain of supply depots that would have done credit to a military advance, and over the extravagance of Peary's ambition, but success, in 1909, came only after a catalogue of failures; and even then it would be disputed. Under the circumstances his triumphalism is understandable and, however distasteful, not unknown amongst other Polar travelers.

Download or read book The Mammoth Book of Travel in Dangerous Places North America written by John Keay and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2012-06-07 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Crossing of America - Alexander Mackenzie "Endowed by nature with an acquisitive mind and an enterprising spirit", Mackenzie, a Scot engaged in the Canadian fur trade, resolved, as he out it "to test the practicability of penetrating across the continent of America". In 1789 he followed a river (the Mackenzie) to the sea; but it turned out to be the Arctic Ocean. He tried again in 1793 and duly reached the Pacific at Queen Charlotte Sound in what is now British Columbia. Although this was his first recorded overland crossing of the continent, Mackenzie was not given to trumpeting his achievement. In his narrative it passes without celebration and very nearly without mention. Meeting the Shoshonee - Meriwether Lewis As Thomas Jefferson's personal secretary, Lewis was chosen to lead the US government's 1804-5 expedition to explore (and to establish US interests) from Mississippi to the Pacific. Travelling up the Missouri river to the continental divide in Montana, Lewis left the main party under his colleague William Clark, and scouted ahead. With everything now dependant on securing the goodwill of the formidable Shoshonee, he showed admirable caution; but the issue was eventually decided by a fortuitous reunion between the Indian wife of one of his men and her long-lost brethren.

Download or read book My Last Continent written by Midge Raymond and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-06-21 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It is only at the end of the world--among the glacial mountains, cleaving icebergs, and frigid waters of Antarctica--where Deb Gardner and Keller Sullivan feel at home. For the few blissful weeks they spend each year studying the habits of emperor and Adaelie penguins, Deb and Keller can escape the frustrations and sorrows of their separate lives and find solace in their work and in each other. But Antarctica, like their fleeting romance, is tenuous, imperiled by the world to the north"--Dust jacket flap.

Download or read book The Mammoth Book of Travel in Dangerous Places Siberia and Alaska written by John Keay and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2012-06-07 with total page 23 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stranded on Bering Island - Georg Wilhelm Steller As physician and scientific know-all on Vitus Bering's 1741 voyage, Steller shared its triumphs, including landing the first Europeans in Alaska. He also shared its disasters. Returning across the north Pacific to Russian Kamchatka, the crew was stricken with scurvy and the vessel grounded. Bering and half his men would die; the others barely survived nine months of Arctic exposure. They owed much to the German-born Steller whose response to each crisis was invariably right, although no less irksome for being so. The Walk to Moscow - John Dundas Cochrane A naval officer made redundant by the end of the Napoleonic wars, Cochrane offered his services to African exploration. They were declined. He then hit on the idea of making the first solo journey round the world on foot. Heading east, he left Dieppe in 1820 and after some scarcely credible Siberian excursions, reached the Pacific opposite Alaska. There the enterprise foundered when he fell for, and married, a doe-eyed Kamchatkan teenager. In this breathless account of the stages between St. Petersburg and Moscow, the greatest ever "pedestrian traveller" betrays both his extraordinary stamina and his emotional vulnerability.

Download or read book Travels in Siberia written by Ian Frazier and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2010-10-12 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Dazzling Russian travelogue from the bestselling author of Great Plains In his astonishing new work, Ian Frazier, one of our greatest and most entertaining storytellers, trains his perceptive, generous eye on Siberia, the storied expanse of Asiatic Russia whose grim renown is but one explanation among hundreds for the region's fascinating, enduring appeal. In Travels in Siberia, Frazier reveals Siberia's role in history—its science, economics, and politics—with great passion and enthusiasm, ensuring that we'll never think about it in the same way again. With great empathy and epic sweep, Frazier tells the stories of Siberia's most famous exiles, from the well-known—Dostoyevsky, Lenin (twice), Stalin (numerous times)—to the lesser known (like Natalie Lopukhin, banished by the empress for copying her dresses) to those who experienced unimaginable suffering in Siberian camps under the Soviet regime, forever immortalized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. Travels in Siberia is also a unique chronicle of Russia since the end of the Soviet Union, a personal account of adventures among Russian friends and acquaintances, and, above all, a unique, captivating, totally Frazierian take on what he calls the "amazingness" of Russia—a country that, for all its tragic history, somehow still manages to be funny. Travels in Siberia will undoubtedly take its place as one of the twenty-first century's indispensable contributions to the travel-writing genre.

Download or read book The Mammoth Book of Travel in Dangerous Places Arabia written by John Keay and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2012-06-07 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Escape from Riyadh - William Gifford Palgrave A scholar and a solider, a Jesuit and a Jew, a French spy and a British ambassador- Palgrave was a man of contradictions, all of them highly compromised when in 1862-3, fortified by Pius IX's blessing and Napoleon III's cash, he attempted the first west- east crossing of the Arabian peninsular. To steely nerves and a genius for disguise he owed his eventual success; but not before both were sorely tested when, as a Syrian doctor, he became the first European to enter Riyadh. The desert capital of the fanatical Wahabis, dangerous for an infidel at the best of times, was then doubly so as the sons of the ageing King Feisal intrigued for power. Desert Days - Charles Montagu Doughty During two years (1875-7) wandering in Central Arabia Doughty broke little new ground; dependant on desert charity, his achievement was simply to have survived. Yet his book, Arabia Deserta, was instantly recognized as a classic. Its eccentric prose proves well suited to that minute observation and experience of Bedouin life which was Doughty's main contribution to exploration. T.E. Lawrence called it "a bible of a kind"; both syntax and subject matter have biblical resonances, as in this description of a day's march, or rahla.

Download or read book Blind Descent written by James M. Tabor and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2011-02-15 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Heart-stopping and relentlessly gripping. Tabor takes us on an odyssey into unfathomable worlds beneath us, and into the hearts of rare explorers who will do anything to get there first.”—Robert Kurson, author of ShadowDivers In 2004, two great scientist-explorers attempted to find the bottom of the world. American Bill Stone took on the vast, deadly Cheve Cave in southern Mexico. Ukrainian Alexander Klimchouk targeted Krubera, a freezing nightmare of a supercave in the war-torn former Soviet republic of Georgia. Both men spent months almost two vertical miles deep, contending with thousand-foot drops, raging whitewater rivers, monstrous waterfalls, mile-long belly crawls, and the psychological horrors produced by weeks in absolute darkness, beyond all hope of rescue. Based on his unprecedented access to logs and journals as well as hours of personal interviews, James Tabor has crafted a thrilling exploration of man’s timeless urge to discover—and of two extraordinary men whose pursuit of greatness led them to the heights of triumph and the depths of tragedy. Blind Descent is an unforgettable addition to the classic literature of true-life adventure, and a testament to human survival and endurance. “Holds the reader to his seat, containing dangers aplenty with deadly falls, killer microbes, sudden burial, asphyxiation, claustrophobia, anxiety, and hallucinations far underneath the ground in a lightless world. Using a pulse-pounding narrative, this is tense real-life adventure pitting two master cavers mirroring the cold war with very uncommonly high stakes.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A fascinating and informative introduction to the sport of cave diving, as well as a dramatic portrayal of a significant man-vs.-nature conflict. . . . What counts is Tabor’s knack for maximizing dramatic potential, while also managing to be informative and attentive to the major personalities associated with the most important cave explorations of the last two decades.”—Kirkus Reviews Includes a 16-pg black and white insert

Download or read book South with Endurance written by Frank Hurley and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2001 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive collection of Frank Hurley's amazing photos from Shackleton's Antarctic expedition is the first book to reproduce all the surviving expedition photos, some of which have never been published. Over 450 photos.

Download or read book The Home of the Blizzard Being the Story of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition 1911 1914 written by Douglas Mawson and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2010-01-08 with total page 697 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mawson turned down an invitation to join Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova Expedition in 1910; Australian geologist Griffith Taylor went instead. Dawson chose to lead his own expedition, the Australian Antarctic Expedition, to King George V Land and Adelie Land, the sector of the Antarctic continent immediately south of Australia, which at the time was almost entirely unexplored. The objectives were to carry out geographical exploration and scientific studies, including visiting the South Magnetic Pole.