As a girl, Penelope Chetwode, whose father was Commander~in~Chief in India, had ridden up the valley with her mother, accompanied by ADC's to organise their journey and with servants to look after them at each rest~house. For more than thirty years she had dreamed of returning.

 

In this book she describes how her wish was realised; but this time she had to make her own arrangements, battling with local officials for permits and bookings at rest houses and hiring transport - two mules with their muleteer. The background of her journey, which started in Simla, was a scenic paradise, vying in beauty with the more famous Vale of Kashmir: high mountain passes, steep forested hillsides, river torrents and gorges, isolated villages, fertile river banks and always in the distance snow peaks of the Himalayan ranges.

 

Whenever it was possible, she left the roads and went by mountain tracks, for now the romantic trade routes with leisurely mule~trains which she remembered are dusty highways with army convoys and buses. After reaching the town of Kulu she made a detour up the valley of the River Parbatti to the hot springs of Manikarn and to Khirganga, with its sacred springs and strange sadhu; but Jamlu, the presiding god of Malana, sent a cloud~burst to foil her attempt to reach this mysterious and hidden village.

 

On her travels Penelope Chetwode recalls the scholar administrators, engineers, and traders, whose vast store of knowledge of the district and its history is a sadly neglected heritage, and she gives a picture of the European community that settled in the Kulu Valley. The author stayed with Indian rulers and their families, and to her account of these visits she adds a picture of some of the interesting rulers of the past.

 

But it was the temples of the area, many now only ruins, which were the special purpose of her travels. She is an acknowledged authority both on their architecture and on the gods and goddesses enshrined in them ~ still very much powers to be reckoned with, as she here recounts. As in Two Middle~Aged Ladies in Andalusia, Penelope Chetwode's warmth and en thusiasm are transmitted in her own special style ~ she is concerned with everything she sees and with everyone she meets; she takes the reader with her and keeps him enthralled on her journey to the 'end of the habitable world' and back."

 

Hardcover, some foxing to right pages edges, not on the pages themselves, Dusjt Jacket and book are Fine.