In 1986 Brian Keenan and John McCarthy were forced to take a journey without maps. For four years they were incarcerated in a Lebanese dungeon. From the blank outlook of a tiny cell, with only each other and a few volumes of an ancient American encyclopedia to sustain them, they resorted to the wide open spaces of their imaginations. To displace the ugly confines of their existence, they envisaged walking in the High Andes and across the wastes of Patagonia.
Five years after their release, Brian and John chose to travel together again to see how the reality of Chile matched their imagination and to revisit their past experiences. Humorous and contemplative, this book is both a testament to a friendship born out of adversity and the story of another journey, which once more found them far from home, in an unfamiliar landscape, but which, this time, allowed them to live by their own rules.
