Trans-Himalaya: Discoveries and Adventurers in Tibet. Vol. 2 (of 2)

At the turn of the century, the roof of the world remained almost entirely blank on European maps. Sven Hedin set out to change that, and this volume documents his extraordinary journey through the forbidden heart of Tibet between 1906 and 1908. He became the first European to reach the sacred Lake Manasarovar and Mount Kailash, sites that Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims had revered for millennia but that no Western eye had ever accurately recorded. He visited the 9th Panchen Lama in the cloister city of Shigatse and solved one of geography's greatest mysteries: the true sources of the Indus and Brahmaputra rivers. But the book offers more than conquests. Here too is a haunting account of a lama immured in a cave by his own vow of seclusion, a man walled into darkness for years as an act of spiritual devotion. Hedin captures a world on the verge of vanishing, where ancient monasteries clinging to cliffs housed monks whose practices seemed to belong to another age entirely. His surveys and maps would eventually earn a mountain range the name Hedin Range, but his true achievement was preserving, in prose of stark beauty, a portrait of a civilization at the roof of the world.