One of the most unusual adventures of the war years has now been written by the man who led it, and weho has the ability to tell his story with the accuracy and vividness that compels teh reader live through it with him.

Felice Benuzzi was a POW in a British camp facing Mount Kenya (over 17,000 feet). The depressing tedium camp life and the fascination of the mountain combined to inspire him with a plan.

He first put the prospect of escaping to climb it to a fellow prisoner who was a professional mountaineer. The expert told him that the idea was mad, that they would need six months training on first-class food and porters to carry equiupment to a base camp. But Benuzzi was not to be put off.

Eventually he got two others to conspire with him, a doctor and a sailor!

Surreptitiously they improvised scant equipment and saved what food they could from their rations. Their only "map" of the mountain was a sketch of it on a label of an OXO tin!

And then they escaped, and went to climb the mountain. The author was ill immediately after the breakout but decided to carry on. The lower reaches of Kenya are jungle and forest infestyed with big game. They were unarmed, and their encounters with animals were some of the most exciting passges in the story. But BNenuzzi writes with a simplicity and a vigour that take you with him every yard of the way. At the foot of te highest peak the sailor was too ill to go any further. and Benuzzi and the doctor went forward to the climax of their adventure.

Their way back, hungry and with practically no food, was as hazardous as the ascent and the tension never relaxes until they at last BREAK into the POW camp from which they had escaped and give themselves up to the British Commandant.

Isn't this the same story line almost form a movie they made a couple of years ago with Bradd Pitt in it called "7 years in Tibet".

BTW Saeed thanks for the new froum for the books I unfortunately don't have that many books as it is difficult to get hold of and very expensive at times when you do walk into them. I do however have two soft cover PHC books that as been signed by Fiona and given to me will scan them and post them up.