Editeur - Casa editrice

Asia
Himalaya
Ladakh

Anno - Date de Parution

Pagine - Pages

Titolo originale

Lingua - language - langue

Bird (1831-1904) recounts her rugged passage through the Himalayas by horseback and her four-month sojourn amid "the pleasantest of people." Bird's evocative accounts of Tibetan ceremonies, decorations, costumes, and music, along with her vivid descriptions of palaces, temples, and monasteries, offer rare glimpses of a vanished world. 21 black-and-white illustrations by Edward Whimper.

Un estratto:
"The Vale of Kashmir is too well known to require description. It is the 'happy hunting-ground' of the Anglo-Indian sportsman and tourist, the resort of artists and invalids, the home of pashm shawls and exquisitely embroidered fabrics, and the land of Lalla Rookh. Its inhabitants, chiefly Moslems, infamously governed by Hindus, are a feeble race, attracting little interest, valuable to travellers as 'coolies' or porters, and repulsive to them from the mingled cunning and obsequiousness which have been fostered by ages of oppression."

Isabella Lucy Bird (1831-1904) was a celebrated English writer and explorer and the first woman elected as a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. The daughter of an Anglican minister, Bird was often ill as a young woman. When her doctors prescribed the 19th-century cure-all of "a change of air," Bird took advantage of this advice to travel-to Canada, Australia, Hawaii, the American West, Japan, China, Korea, Tibet, Morocco, and the Middle East. Interestingly, rough travel made her well, but her symptoms reappeared at home. She based the travel books that made her famous on letters she wrote to a beloved sister back in Scotland.
She won fame in her own time as surely the most remarkable woman traveller of the nineteenth century. She published nine books about her travels, and her writing is guaranteed to produce a thirst for adventure and travel. She died in Edinburgh in 1904.