Devil in the Mountain

"Most of the more serious books on the Andes tend to be tedious anthropological and sociological studies, or else barely comprehensible works of ‘geo-history’. Lamb’s book achieves the truly remarkable feat of making geology fascinating for laymen such as myself. As with The White Rock, it endearingly weaves personal experience into the narrative, making the search for the ‘origins of the Andes’ as gripping as any detective fiction. It gives also a very good insight into the frustrations of working in the Bolivian Andes (notably the country’s volatile political situation), and highlights both the beauty and the bleakness of the Andean environment (one of the villagers whom Lamb meets tells him that, whereas Lamb and his colleagues can leave whenever they want to, he and his family have no escape). But, above all, the book lucidly explains the evolution of geology since scientists first asked themselves how mountains were created. The book completely changed my own view of the Andes. I had simply thought that the 20th-century science of plate tectonics explained all that was necessary about the formation of mountains, and that the Andes were essentially the result of the collision between the Nazca and South American plates. Thanks to Lamb, I began to see the earth’s crust as being fluid rather than solid, and to think of mountains as having a beginning and an end just like human beings. In fact, I was encouraged by him to follow their entire four-and-a-half-thousand-mile length, and to observe them as I would the unfolding of a human life. I started my journey in tropical Venezuela, where the German scientist Humboldt located the life force, and ended in midwinter in the bleak islands off Tierra del Fuego, where Darwin concluded there was no life at all."