Skull mountain

 I really thought I was done buying Hardy boys books from eBay, turns out I was wrong. This is the last of the originals that was incompetently scanned from an old book and as my guessing game is off ordered an original version of The Secret Of Skull Mountain. Apart from the scan being terrible it also missed out a few things such as a graphic box when the boys go to the harbourside. Its not, miss half a chapter bad, as it was in Broken Blade. But its bad enough.

As the books go this is one of those that is halfway between a small edit and a complete rewrite of the original. It's still a story about water shortages and sabotage to a reservoir, but there are a few crucial differences in the original than the remake.

For starters there is just a skeleton crew on the mountain rather than a whole team prospecting. The mineral the crooks are after was Bauxite and is now "Cesium" I guess the old version really liked their tin cans as its used to produce Aluminium. Caesium as it properly should be is an absolute nightmare around water (it explodes in contact) can remember an old Thunderf00t vid where he was exploring alkali metals such as this before he went off the deep end into full on Musk derangement syndrome.

The last final difference in the original is that Chief Collig is not a pal of there's, he's jealous of their success and along with Con Riley are an active thorn in their sides. If you're used to the new versions of them being close, then this is quite the eye opener. Oh and Callie gets a job as a clerk to help the boys out. Which was nice.

 Finally you would never get away with treating human remains like that nowadays, a full archaeological survey would  be carried out on the Indian remains up on the hill and the Hermits pranks would be seen as disrespectful. But its the 1940's so what can you do. 

Anyway you can read the original and the remake here. Seeing as I've given away so little of the plot.