ON TOP OF THE WORLD: Five Women Explorers in Tibet

Early travellers were heroes - brave, imaginative, resourceful, shrewd and bedevilled by a curiosity that would not let them rest long in the confines of society. During the late 1800s, bound by strict Victorian codes of conduct, a small band of astonishing women explorers and travellers burst forth to claim for themselves the adventurous life. Among them were the five dauntless women who are the subject of this book. Three were British, Nina Mazuchelli, Annie Taylor and Isabella Bird Bishop, one American, Fanny Bullock Workman, and one French, Alexandra David-Neel. Each were romantics, restless with a desire to be up and away to unknown places. Of the group three wrote a number of successful books and achieved sufficient fame to be saved from oblivion. Others left only a single diary about the great experience of their lives. Tibet's frontiers stretched 1,600 miles from China to Kashmir and sealed away at 16,000 feet was the forbidden land, the highest country in the world, unchanged by the swirl of history around it. It was the time of great imperialistic manoeuvring dubbed The Great Game, immortalised by Kipling's Kim. To travel to Tibet was to transcend the limitations of gender and these were the first women to gaze at Mount Everest. Annie Taylor, a flame with Christian zeal, made a wild dash over treacherous mountain passes to carry the Word to innocent Tibetans. For Fanny, Tibet offered mountains to climb, glaciers to explore, records to set. Alexandra David-Neel found there a whole life, beginning in a cave in Sikkim where she lived for an entire winter as a hermit and a decade later, at the age of 56, trekked for eight months and 2,000 miles to Lhasa in the disguise of a Tibetan beggar woman to see the residence of the Dalai Lamas. Nina Mazuchelli organised a small expedition, urging the party on when they were lost on a glacier. For inveterate and armchair travellers, their stories can now again be heard. 224pp, illustrated paperback.