Au pays des sherpas

Ella Maillart

78 pages

Résumé

Closed since the seventeenth century against all contact with the outside world, Nepal, the last independent kingdom of India, in 1949 at last opened its frontiers. In the farthest corner of Nepal, hidden among the mountains, is the land of the Sherpas, those gay and lovable people who recently have found fame in Himalayan climbing expeditions.To this remote land Ella Maillart determined to go as soon as such a journey became possible. She went to see a very individual civilisation before it disintegrated before the forces of modern materialism and to compare the life of these mountain people with that of the mountaineers of the Swiss Alps. She found that, "in order to fully understand the my innermost European core, I had to live in the immensity of Asia, almost at the edge of time and space and far from our particular standards and out irrepressible dynamism".Her magnificent photographs and the perceptive essay which introduces them are in the tradition of her earlier book FORBIDDEN JOURNEY.