New York, 1970, 1st edition. 186 pp, illustrations. One of the best books on Nepal. A factually and graphicly rich rendering of 10 million polyglot Nepalese and their 500-mile-long buffer state landlocked between India and Tibet - an ancient brew of intrepid Sherpa mountain guides and fierce fighting Gurkha tribesmen, of a people who moved from the age of the wheel to the age of the airplane with no stops in between. At the same time, this is the fascinating account of three Western visitors who trek across a leech-ridden countryside up the glazed slopes of Everest and, in the process, discover the social patterns and philosophical insights of another world.
Closed to the West throughout most of its ancient, bloody history, Nepal changed but little in the century after the British established their hegemony in that remote and staggeringly beautiful land - an outpost of sturdy people steeped in religious piety and clinging fiercely to their ancestral ways . . . Jeremy Bernstein projects the reader into 'an extremely vivid natural environment, frequently hostile, surrounded by mountains, jungles, wild animals, often plagues, without doctors to cure the sick, without electric lights to illuminate the night. DJ, Fine.
