HIMALAYA

Robust history of the vast South Asian mountain range and its hold on the imagination.

British mountaineering writer Douglas, who has visited the region more than 40 times, has obviously combed through several libraries’ worth of material on all things related to the Abode of Snow, as the Sanskrit word Himalayas translates. Certainly he has found hitherto obscure connections—for one, the central place of explorers who would later turn out to be Nazis, such as Bruno Beger, a German anthropologist who merrily took skull measurements of the people he encountered and considered the Tibetan aristocracy to demonstrate “evidence of a common Aryan ancestor” and progenitors of the German people. “The murderous racial theories of the Third Reich meant about as much in prewar Lhasa as Hollywood’s version of Shangri-La, or the fertile imaginings of the Theosophists,” writes Douglas. “These were simply orientalist fantasies projected onto the Himalaya.” Many other fantasies come into play in his lucid account, sometimes held by local people—the Dalai Lama two incarnations ago who harbored a dream of making Tibet a pan-Asian stronghold against China—and sometimes by outsiders, such as the Arizona-born flimflam man Theos Bernard, who bothered people with his “intrusive photography” and was murdered. Numerous Europeans came to the Himalayas, Douglas chronicles, in an attempt to spread Christianity to people already steeped in religion, and many of those Europeans came away with an intense interest in Buddhism, hastening its spread globally. Others didn’t quite get the message; Douglas writes dismissively of “the self-absorbed ramblings of Helena Blavatsky,” whose Theosophy was theoretically grounded in Tibetan Buddhism but was instead a garbled mess. Many well-known figures populate these pages, including British administrator and linguist William Jones, who, well before accurate measurements were secured, figured out that the Himalayas were the world’s tallest mountains, “without excepting the Andes.”

A towering addition to any geography or mountaineering buff’s library.