A daring escape

Originally published in 1953, this gripping tale is listed on National Geographic Adventure magazine website as one of the 100 greatest adventure books of all time.

A wartime tale of prisoners and an alpine escape, the book evokes sagas such as Slavomir Rawicz’s “The Long Walk.” This time the setting is equatorial Africa, and prisoners flee to the mountains as an epic diversion rather than a true escape.

The author, an Italian mountain climber stuck in a British prisoner of war camp, was imprisoned in Ethiopia after Italian colonial control was lost to the British in 1941. The former diplomat, who died in 1988, writes in the old style, reciting verbatim lists of equipment and logs from other expeditions.

Benuzzi struggles with the routine of prison life and has a hard time convincing his fellows to climb 17,000-foot Mt. Kenya, a series of jagged peaks and glaciers. It doesn’t help that lying between the camp and mountain is a forest known for killer rhinoceros, elephants and the occasional lion.

At last, luck and continued confinement deliver two willing men, and with aid from others they fashion ice axes and crampons from scrap metal. Halfway through the book, their adventure begins.

-- Emmett Berg