Harry Escombe is a young apprentice in a civil engineer's office. The firm has received a contract to survey and built a railway line in Peru. Harry is chosen to go, and is informed that if he does well in the work the future for him is pretty bright.

But there is a fly in the ointment. The man in charge of the project is about as nasty as anyone can be: his character is beautifully depicted throughout the book. He makes Harry do a piece of surveying in an unnecessarily dangerous manner, as a result of which he falls down a precipice from which he cannot be rescued, and is therefore written off as dead.

But he was indeed rescued. He was taken to a house where he remained in a coma for some time. Then he is thought to be a re-incarnation of The Inca, and taken by Indians to their own city, where he is worshipped as a god. This could be quite embarrassing if you found yourself in this situation, as you’d be unable to perform miracles, and do the things a deity might be expected to do. However, Harry managed rather well. But eventually he manages to escape from the situation, and to return to his home in England.

Harry Collingwood (1851-1922). Pseudonym of William Joseph Cosens Lancaster, a civil engineer who specialised in seas and harbours.

A PDF of scans and an HTML version of this book are provided. We also provide a plain TEXT version and full instructions for using this to make your own audiobook. To find these click on the PDF, HTML or TXT links on the left.

These transcriptions of books by various nineteenth century authors of instructive books for teenagers, were made during the period 1997 to the present day by Athelstane e-Books. Most of the books are concerned with the sea, but in any case all will give a good idea of life in the nineteenth century, and sometimes earlier than that. This of course includes attitudes prevalent at the time, but frowned upon nowadays.

We used a Hewlett-Packard scanner, a Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner or a Nikkon Coolpix 5700 camera to scan the pages. We then made a pdf which we used to assist with editing the OCRed text.

To make a text version we used TextBridge Pro 98 or ABBYY Finereader 7 or 8 to produce a first draft of the text, and Athelstane software to find misreads and improve the text. We proof-read the chapters, and then made a CD with the book read aloud by either Fonix ISpeak or TextAloud MP3. The last step enables us to hear and correct most of the errors that may have been missed by the other steps, as well as entertaining us during the work of transcription.

The resulting text can be read either here at the Internet Archive or at www.athelstane.co.uk