 Highbridge, a division of recorded books, presents The Invention of Nature, The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, The Lost Hero of Science, by Andrea Wolf, read by David Drummond. Close your eyes, prick your ears, and from the softest sound to the wildest noise, from the simplest tone to the highest harmony, from the most violent, passionate scream to the gentlest words of sweet reason, it is by nature, who speaks, revealing her being, her power, her life, and her relatedness, so that a blind person, to whom the infinitely visible world is denied, can grasp an infinite vitality in what can be heard. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Prologue They were crawling on hands and knees, along a high, narrow ridge, that was in places only two inches wide. The path, if you could call it that, was layered with sand and loose stones that shifted whenever touched. Down to the left was a steep cliff and crusted with ice that glinted when the sun broke through the thick clouds. The view to the right, with the one-thousand-foot drop, wasn't much better. Here the dark, almost perpendicular walls were covered with rocks that protruded like knife-blades. Alexander von Humboldt and his three companions moved in single file, slowly inching forward, without proper equipment or appropriate clothes. This was a dangerous climb. The icy wind had numbed their hands and feet, melted snow had soaked their thin shoes, and ice-crystals clung to their hair and beards. At seventeen thousand feet above sea level they struggled to breathe in the thin air. As they proceeded, the jagged rocks shredded the soles of their shoes, and their feet began to bleed. It was June 23, 1802, and they were climbing Chimborazo, a beautiful dome-shaped inactive volcano in the Andes, that rose to almost twenty-one thousand feet, some one hundred miles to the south of Quito, in today's Ecuador. Chimborazo was then believed to be the highest mountain in the world. No wonder that their terrified porters had abandoned them at the snowline. The volcano's peak was shrouded in thick fog, but Humboldt had nonetheless pressed on. For the previous three years Alexander von Humboldt had been travelling through Latin America, penetrating deep into lands where few Europeans had ever gone before. Obsessed with scientific observation, the thirty-two-year-old had brought a vast array of the best instruments from Europe. For the ascent of Chimborazo, he