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. I was feeling quite emotional. I knew at that moment that this ship had to be rescued and what an asset she could be. Compelling visions flooded into my mind … links with children’s homes in Puno, where young British volunteers could combine work on the Yavari. She would sail anew, making money out of tourism. There was no question — the old lady had to be saved from the breaker’s yard.

And so continued a saga that became the story of much of an indomitable yet hesitant English lady’s life. It was also the start of a new chapter in the rescue from death of Larken’s adopted steamship, the Yavari. This other English lady had been built in West Ham in 1862, carried in 2,766 mule-compatible pieces up the side of the Andes, and set afloat on the world’s highest lake, Titicaca, in 1870.