{UAH} NO PICNIC ON MOUNT KENYA by Felice Benuzzi

NO PICNIC ON MOUNT KENYA by Felice Benuzzi

• Written by  Mick Herron
• Published in Books

01Jan
2017

The most famous justification for climbing a mountain is, of course, 'because it's there'. After months of captivity as a prisoner of war during WWII, Felice Benuzzi was so bored – 'People in prison camps do not live

They only vegetate' – that even a near-suicidal endeavour seemed preferable to continued internment. Mount Kenya was visible from a corner of the barracks in which he was imprisoned, and having caught sight of it, Benuzzi found that 'life took on another rhythm, because it had a purpose'.

His decision to escape the camp and reach the mountain's summit, without proper supplies and equipment, was madness, an experienced climber informed him, and he thus chose for companions those he deemed 'extraordinarily lucky' or 'mad as a hatter'. Escaping wasn't the hard part: 'With European sentries, the plan we adopted of marching out of the camp gate at midday would never have worked.'

Once in the wild, he and his two companions found themselves with only an ice axe for protection in a country where people came to shoot big game, but the exhilaration they felt at being free propelled them through dangers both real and imagined, until they reached the mountain itself. A review is no place to reveal what happened thereafter, but Benuzzi completes his tale with a postscript in which he 'reveals the depths of [his] ignorance': a potted history of Mount Kenya, and the rather more professional expeditions to have made an assault on its peaks. In the literature of mountaineering there's probably never been an account quite like this one, or an escapade quite so thrillingly lunatic. Written in a jaunty style that befits such a madcap adventure, Benuzzi's book is a true one-off.             

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Gwokto La'Kitgum

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"Even a small dog can piss on a tall building" Jim Hightower

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