Climb to the Lost World

London: Hodder & Stoughton, October 1974. Hardcover. Near Fine book in a Very Good- jacket. First Edition. Black paper over boards with bright gilt titles to spine. Unmarked. Spine straight and sound, tail bumped. Jacket clipped with chipping and several one inch closed tears, mostly along hinges, spine faded. Not from a library. No remainder mark.

This is an expedition book. Mount Roraima, at the border of Guyana, Venezuela, and Brazil, is a tepui--a table-top mountain. One of the oldest geologic formations on Earth it is Arthur Conan Doyle's "Lost World". Roraima's 25-square-mile summit rises abruptly from the surrounding jungles 5000 feet below and is bounded on all sides by sheer towering cliffs. Sir Walter Raleigh described Roraima during his 1595 expedition, but it took nearly three centuries before the first European found a path to Roraima's summit. Nine decades after that, in 1973, another team of Europeans conquered Roraima's Grand Prow, a sheer overhanging sandstone wall on the Guyana side of the mountain, carpeted with scorpions and tarantulas and drenched in torrential rains. Just reaching the foot of the Prow required an epic trek through jungle, slime forest, and swamp all infested with yet more scorpions, some of the world's most venomous snakes, bird-eating tarantulas, and vampire bats. MacInnes' dry humor and perceptive observations of his companions, flora and fauna relay the story of this first ascent with passion and in true explorer style.