Diary of a Journey Across Tibet Originally published in 1894, this is Captain Hamilton Bower's detailed diary of his travels through Tibet and China before the turn of the century. The book is extemely rare in its original format, and this is the first time it has ever been republished. The book contains a great deal of information for bot hhistorical and geographical interest, along with over 30 illustrations. Excerpt - This book is the plain unvarnished diary kept during my journey across Tibet and China, written often with half-frozen fingers in a tent on the Chang, or by a flickering light in Chinese rest-houses, a chapter on the Country, Religion, Fauna, etc., only having since been added. Contents include: From Simla to the Frontier, Commencement of Exploration, Deserted by our Guides, Meeting with Nomads, In the Neighbourhood of Lhaha, Negotiations with Lhaha Officials, Marching Northwards, Entering Inhabited Country, Country With Stone Houses, Deserted by the Guides, In the Neighbourhood of Chiando, Chiando to Garthok, Garthok to Lithang, Lithang to Ta Chen Lu, Through China back to India, Religion, Country, People, etc. + Full Index. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Obscure Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

For centuries creative people in all fields have had a thinking place - a private retreat where they have worked regularly, hoping to find inspiration. The authors have chosen thirty-one creative people who vaulted from their thinking places to well-deserved fame or international recognition. These special retreats varied from architectural jewels to humble huts to chosen sites in nature itself. George Bernard Shaw's was a simple garden hut with one window and one door - and a turntable underneath. Shaw captured the prevailing sunlight with a push and a turn.
In their journeys, Carolyn and Jack Fleming discovered that many thinking places still seem to exude an atmosphere of creativity. The Flemings have recorded the details of their searches for you, the reader to duplicate - in reality or in imagination. In their travels the authors discovered much little known information, which they have included in sprightly written vignettes. What was Charles Dickens' long kept secret? What beloved figure did Life magazine proclaim "the unofficial president of the United States"? Who received what the U.S. Patent office states is the most valuable patent ever issued? What two leading educators rose from slavery and extreme poverty to world-wide fame? The reader will discover that the thirty-one people selected were as intriguing as they were creative.
Besides descriptive journeys, vignettes and thinking places, the reader will also receive thirty-one instances of lagniappe, a Cajun word for "a little something extra." Read Thinking Places and see what something extra may be in store for you.

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - THIS volume of papers, unconnected as they are, it will be better to read through from the beginning, rather than dip into at random. A certain thread of meaning binds them. Memories of childhood and youth, portraits of those who have gone before us in the battle - taken together, they build up a face that "I have loved long since and lost awhile," the face of what was once myself. This has come by accident; I had no design at first to be autobiographical; I was but led away by the charm of beloved memories and by regret for the irrevocable dead; and when my own young face (which is a face of the dead also) began to appear in the well as by a kind of magic, I was the first to be surprised at the occurrence. My grandfather the pious child, my father the idle eager sentimental youth, I have thus unconsciously exposed. Of their descendant, the person of to-day, I wish to keep the secret: not because I love him better, but because, with him, I am still in a business partner-ship, and cannot divide interests.

Often through ordinary things and ordinary events we glimpse the divine. Living the Sacred Story tells of a seemingly ordinary journey that yielded extraordinary spiritual growth and understanding. From her arrival in Istanbul to her extended sojourn in the Old City of Jerusalem, Bonnie Glassford recounts scenes from an ancient landscape in which people of today live and work. From the perspective of the Ecce Homo Convent in Jerusalem, she encounters Christians, Jews and Muslims living their lives against the rich backdrop of the Holy Land. Living the Sacred Story follows the footsteps of Biblical figures. It combines travel, spirituality, humour, pathos, new insights, personal growth and Biblical reflection. Within an exotic landscape that is the cradle of western civilization, through encounter with the lands described in classical literature and the Bible, and through meeting the people who now live in those lands, the reader becomes aware of a rich inner landscape that we carry around with us. Ultimately the story arrives at the awareness that in the most ordinary events, and the lives of the most ordinary folk, we see the divine.

Travel writing has, for centuries, composed an essential historical record and wide-ranging literary form, reflecting the rich diversity of travel as a social and cultural practice, metaphorical process, and driver of globalization. This interdisciplinary volume brings together anthropologists, literary scholars, social historians, and other scholars to illuminate travel writing in all its forms. With studies ranging from colonial adventurism to the legacies of the Holocaust, The Long Journey offers a unique dual focus on experience and genre as it applies to three key realms: memory and trauma, confrontations with the Other, and the cultivation of cultural perspective.

In a small medieval palace on Kathmandu's Durbar Square lives Nepal's famous Living Goddess - a child as young as three who is chosen from a caste of Buddhist goldsmiths to watch over the country and protect its people. To Nepalis she is the embodiment of Devi (the universal goddess) and for centuries their Hindu kings have sought her blessing to legitimize their rule. Legends swirl about her, for the facts are shrouded in secrecy and closely guarded by dynasties of priests and caretakers. How come a Buddhist girl is worshipped by autocratic Hindu rulers? Are the initiation rituals as macabre as they are rumoured to be? And what fate awaits the Living Goddesses when they attain puberty and are dismissed from their role? Weaving together myth, religious belief, modern history and court gossip, Isabella Tree takes us on a compelling and fascinating journey to the esoteric, hidden heart of Nepal. Through her unprecedented access to the many layers of Nepalese society, she is able to put the country's troubled modern history in the context of the complex spiritual beliefs and practices that inform the role of the little girl at its centre. Deeply felt, emotionally engaged and written after over a decade of travel and research, The Living Goddess is a compassionate and illuminating enquiry into this reclusive Himalayan country - a revelation.

With the help of a Maratha nobleman, Mark Shand buys an elephant named Tara and rides her over six hundred miles across India to the Sonepur Mela, the world's oldest elephant market. From Bhim, a drink-racked mahout, Shand learned to ride and care for her. From his friend Aditya Patankar he learned Indian ways. And with Tara, his new companion, he fell in love. "Travels on my Elephant" is the story of their epic journey across India, from packed highways to dusty back roads where communities were unchanged for millennia. It is also a memorable, touching account of Tara's transformation from scrawny beggar elephant to star attraction, and of the romance that developed between her and her owner Mark Shand. For what began as an adventurous whim has developed, decades later, into a life of campaigning to provide vital migratory corridors for these magnificent creatures whose habitat is under constant assault from man.

All over the world there are places that became famous forever because something extraordinary happened there by chance. Beautifully illustrated and carefully researched Fame By Chance covers 380 such places with new insights and facts that are amusing, surprising and sometimes controversial. Foreword by Peter Ackroyd. All over the world there are places that became famous forever by chance - battles briefly waged, scenes of triumph and disater, sites of murder and intrigue, centres of influential creativity and noted mythical places from books and film. How and why did; Angora, Tabasco, Duffel and Fray Bentos give us products good and bad; Kohima's tennis court save India; Storyville's 269 brothels helped it to create jaz; Botany Bay never saw any British convicts; Tay Bridge was a disaster avoided by Marx and Engels; 'OK' stands for a farmhouse; Ferrari chose the 'Prancing Horse of Maranello'; Kyoto was saved from Hiroshoma's terrible fate; The British built the Great Hedge of India; With 432 pages beautifully illustrated and carefully researched Fame By Chance covers 380 such places with new insights and facts that are amusing, surprising and sometimes controversial.

Mike and Barbara Bivona have danced their way around the world, embracing the colorful rhythms of each country and culture in their travels. Now, Mike, the author of Dancing Around the World with Mike and Barbara Bivona, returns to share more of their globe-trotting adventures in part one of a new travel memoir series. While cruising the islands, they witnessed lava flowing into the surf off the shores of Hawaii and danced on a nightclub floor that once saw the white-uniformed officers of the warships anchored at the naval station in Pearl Harbor. Mike describes the thrill and challenge of learning the intricate steps of the Argentine tango in Buenos Aires and, more importantly, absorbing its proper attitude from master dancers. The brimstone fumes wreathing the slopes of Mt. Vesuvius transported them back in time, as the frozen bodies of the unlucky residents of Pompeii and Herculaneum-as well as the evidence of Romans' lively erotic imagination left on walls and sculptured into clay-inspired numerous colorful conversations. Mike and Barbara's shared passion for art and history has led them to seek out the haunts of other lovers of adventure-Columbus, Ponce de Leon, General Custer, circus impresario John Ringling, and the elderly jazz musicians in New Orleans. Part memoir and part travelogue, this volume offers you a trip around the world with the Bivonas-without ever leaving your chair.

'Paris provides constant stimulation; the city remains a fabulous animal, volatile, individualist and alive with its history and possibilities.' For his new cityscapes N.P.James made an artistic investigation of Paris, walking through the various districts of Opera, St.Lazare, Republic, Montmartre, Montparnasse, Le Marais, St. Denis and St.Germain. His sketchbook records aspects of the streets, buildings, courtyards and monuments, in a web of small pencil drawings, which underpinned the paintings. Colour photographs, notes and observations of the historic and fabled city accompany the studies.

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - FOR nearly ten years my health had been declining; and for some while before I set forth upon my voyage, I believed I was come to the afterpiece of life, and had only the nurse and undertaker to expect. It was suggested that I should try the South Seas; and I was not unwilling to visit like a ghost, and be carried like a bale, among scenes that had attracted me in youth and health. I chartered accordingly Dr. Merrit's schooner yacht, the CASCO, seventy-four tons register; sailed from San Francisco towards the end of June 1888, visited the eastern islands, and was left early the next year at Honolulu. Hence, lacking courage to return to my old life of the house and sick-room, I set forth to leeward in a trading schooner, the EQUATOR, of a little over seventy tons, spent four months among the atolls (low coral islands) of the Gilbert group, and reached Samoa towards the close of '89. By that time gratitude and habit were beginning to attach me to the islands; I had gained a competency of strength; I had made friends; I had learned new interests; the time of my voyages had passed like days in fairyland; and I decided to remain. I began to prepare these pages at sea, on a third cruise, in the trading steamer JANET NICOLL. If more days are granted me, they shall be passed where I have found life most pleasant and man most interesting; the axes of my black boys are already clearing the foundations of my future house; and I must learn to address readers from the uttermost parts of the sea.

ONES COMPANY- A Journey to China By PETER FLEMING. Originally published in 1934. FOREWORD: THIS book is a superficial account of an unsensational journey. My Warning to the Reader justifies, I think, its superficiality. It is easy to be dogmatic at a distance, and I dare say 1 could have made my half-baked conclusions on the major issues of the Far Eastern situation sound con vincing But it is one thing to bore your readers, another to mislead themj I did not like to run the risk of doing both. I have therefore kept the major Issues in the back ground The book describes in some detail what I saw and what I did, and in considerably less detail what most other travellers have also seen and done. If it has any value at all, it is the light which it throws on the processes of travel amateur travel - in parts of the interior which, though not remote, are seldom visited, On two occasions, I admit, I have attempted seriously to assess a politico-military situation, but only a because I thought 1 knew more about those particular situations than anyone else, and because if they had not been explained certain sections of the book would have made nonsense. For the rest, I make no claim to be directly instructive. One cannot, it is true, travel through a country without finding out something about it and the reader, following vicariously In my footsteps, may perhaps learn a little. But not much I owe debts of gratitude to more people than can con veniently be named, people of all degrees and many nation alities. He who befriends a traveller is not easily forgotten, and I am very grateful indeed to everyone who helped me on a long journey. PETER FLEMING . London, 1934. Contents include: PART I MANCHUKUO FACE I BOYS WILL BE BOYS 19 i j II INTO RUSSIA 24 r III THE MIRAGE OF MOSCOW 29 1 IV DRAMA 37 J V TRANS-SIBERIAN EXPRESS 44 P VI FLOREAT MONGOLIA 2 VII CRASH 59 VJIII HARBIN 67 IX PXJ YI 72 f X WINGS OVER MUKDEN 82 to XI GEISHA PARTY 92 XII JEHOL 102 XIII PRAYERS 108 XIV AN AFTERNOON WITH THE GODS 114 Q XV GARRISON TOWN I2O T XVI REUNION IN CHINCHOW 125 XVII PAX JAPONICA 129 XVIII FLYING COLUMNJ 134 XEB THE FIRST DAY S MARCH 140 XX GETTING WARMER 146

The imperial road to Italy goes from Munich across the Tyrol, through Innsbruck and Bozen to Verona, over the mountains. Here the great processions passed as the emperors went South, or came home again from rosy Italy to their own Germany. And how much has that old imperial vanity clung to the German soul? Did not the German kings inherit the empire of bygone Rome? It was not a very real empire, perhaps, but the sound was high and splendid. Maybe a certain Grossenwahn is inherent in the German nature. If only nations would realize that they have certain natural characteristics, if only they could understand and agree to each other's particular nature, how much simpler it would all be. The imperial procession no longer crosses the mountains, going South. That is almost forgotten, the road has almost passed out of mind. But still it is there, and its signs are standing. The crucifixes are there, not mere attributes of the road, yet still having something to do with it. The imperial processions, blessed by the Pope and accompanied by the great bishops, must have planted the holy idol like a new plant among the mountains, there where it multiplied and grew according to the soil, and the race that received it. . . .

A Walk on the Wild Side charts the authors journey from Hampshire to the Scottish Highlands and eventually to one of the largest districts in Scotland and the least densely populated area of the British Isles. The book tells the stories surrounding the wildlife encountered in and around his home and throughout the beautiful and remote area of Sutherland in the northern Highlands of Scotland. Discover its unique landscape containing every conceivable habitat and the associated wildlife that abounds within. From the estuaries and mixed woodland along the narrow eastern seaboard to the wild and rugged interior of mountain and moor. From the secret coves and stunning sea cliffs of the north to Handa Island off the west coast with its sea stacks full of nesting birds and marauding skuas patrolling the skies above the hill lochans. Each chapter captures these diverse habitats and the birds, mammals and wild flowers that live within their confines. The magnificent golden eagle, the spectacular osprey, the haunting red and black throated divers, the secretive pine marten and otter - all of these are brought to life through the exploits of one man and his intimate knowledge of the area.

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - MONDAY. - It was, if I remember rightly, five o'clock when we were all signalled to be present at the Ferry Depot of the railroad. An emigrant ship had arrived at New York on the Saturday night, another on the Sunday morning, our own on Sunday afternoon, a fourth early on Monday; and as there is no emigrant train on Sunday a great part of the passengers from these four ships was concentrated on the train by which I was to travel. There was a babel of bewildered men, women, and children. The wretched little booking-office, and the baggage-room, which was not much larger, were crowded thick with emigrants, and were heavy and rank with the atmosphere of dripping clothes. Open carts full of bedding stood by the half-hour in the rain. The officials loaded each other with recriminations. A bearded, mildewed little man, whom I take to have been an emigrant agent, was all over the place, his mouth full of brimstone, blustering and interfering. It was plain that the whole system, if system there was, had utterly broken down under the strain of so many passengers.