Himal Gold

In 1953, English journalist Graham Peters is sent to Nepal to cover the attempt to conquer Mt Everest. Kathmandu is full of foreigners, including two textile merchants, who upon reading of the successful ascent – and the New Zealander who had “knocked the bastard off” – do some exploring of their own. Unfamiliar with the area, they misread their map and get lost. Stumbling through a valley, they find fragments of wreckage from a crashed plane, a German cargo plane. In hospital they are visited by Peters, who sees their hapless story as a good background piece for his Mt Everest article. During the interview, they describe the wreckage they had found. The article is published around the world, and is of interest to a lot of people, none more so than the German SS officer who led a Tibetan exploration team in 1938. Now living in Argentina, Kraus (aka Richard Smyth) sees this as his opportunity to regain the plundered treasure of Nazi gold that was lost on that fateful flight. Back in England, Peters researches why a German plane may have crashed in Nepal, and begins to uncover the truth. He returns to Nepal to find the wreckage, to right the wrongs of the past, and to expose Nazi atrocities perpetrated in Tibet just prior to WWII.

Many field ornithologists record where and when they identify species of birds, especially when they encounter a species out of its normal range or for the first time. Until now, however, a checklist based on the Sibley-Ahlquist-Monroe classification has not been available. In this book, Burt L. Monroe, Jr., and Charles G. Sibley provide a list of 9,702 living avian species based on their 1990 book Distribution and Taxonomy of Birds of the World and its 1993 Supplement.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1863.

In the first comprehensive history of Himalayan mountaineering in 50 years, the authors offer detailed, original accounts of the most significant climbs since the 1890s, and they compellingly evoke the social and cultural worlds that gave rise to those expeditions.

A tender account - by turns cultural exploration and memoir of a young woman's firsthand experience of change and continuity in one of the worlds most remote regions, through the lens of the horse and "horse culture." At nineteen, Sienna Craig made her first venture deep into Mustang, an ethnically Tibetan area of Nepal, in the rainshadow of the Himalayas. As an equestrian and a buddhing anthropologist, she sought not only to understand what it was like to rely on horses to navigate through the windswept valleys and plains of High Asia, but also to grasp how horses lent meaning to the lives of the Mustangi people. Through living and working with local Tibetan doctors, veterinarians, and other horse experts, as well as the deep friendships she formed, Sienna began to understand the region's history, and the way life in Mustang was being transformed in the face of temendous social, political, and economic shifts. She learned much about herself and her life's course through her year in Mustang - a place that came to feel, for all its foreignness, like home.