Intimate, exhilarating writings on adventure, meditation, and life in the captivating wildness of the Himalayan Mountains—with contributions from Amitav Ghosh, Mark Twain, Rabindranath Tagore, Peter Matthiessen, and more.

For some, the Himalaya is a frontier against which people test themselves. Others find refuge and tranquility in the mountains, a place where they can seek their true selves, perhaps even God. Over millennia, the mountains have cradled civilization itself and nurtured teeming, irrepressible life. With over thirty essays, this exhilarating anthology offers a dazzling range of voices that reveal accounts of great ascents and descents—from reflecting on a deadly avalanche to searching for a snow leopard and enjoying the simple pleasure of riding a handcar down a railway track. These diverse writings bring to life the spirit of the Himalaya in an unparalleled panorama.

Contributors include:
Amitav Ghosh
Mark Twain
Rabindranath Tagore
Peter Matthiessen
Edmund Hillary
Aleister Crowley
Andrew Harvey
Vicki Mackenzie
Sarat Chandra Das
H. A. Giles (Trans.)
Jahangir
Sven Hedin
Frank S. Smythe
Anil Yadav
Jinasena
Arundhathi Subramaniam
Dharamvir Bharati
Swami Vivekananda
Rahul Sankrityayan
Francis Younghusband
Ruskin Bond
Jemima Diki Sherpa
Kirin Narayan
Jawaharlal Nehru
Abdul Wahid Radhu
Jim Corbett
Bill Aitken
Hridayesh Joshi
Dom Moraes
Manjushree Thapa “This . . . is the Himalaya, where life unfolds in all its grace and terror, revealing as much as it withholds. This anthology attempts to capture some of its complexity and vastness, traveling through time, place, and altitude. Beauty and melancholy, courage and defeat, philosophy and poetry surprise and illuminate us in these pages.”—from the introduction by Namita Gokhale