Two iron ladies in the Andes

A long-exposure photograph of the night sky will show you something that you never see, however often you look at the stars: thousands of perfect curves, concentrically arranged around an invisible pinhead. Everything is wheeling slowly about a single point.

A good book or a great adventure, fictional or real, often does the same. There is a fulcrum: a still, quiet centre to the tale. For me, for instance, in Orwell’s Burmese Days, the moment when, walking alone in the forest, John Flory sees a green pigeon, is that centre.

On page 30 of Meriel Larken’s thrilling and moving real-life adventure, one that swishes us across continents, through jungles, up and down mountains, across the high, bleak, freezing plains of the Andean wastes and in and out of the offices of London shipbuilders and Peruvian admirals, you will find that fulcrum: a passage around which all these exotic changes of scene pivot:

We climbed back down to the main deck.