2 wonderful new books take armchair travelers to the Himalayas

‘A Gentleman of France’ is a classic adventure tale. Two of Keay’s earlier books, “When Men and Mountains Meet” (1977) and “The Gilgit Game” (1979), covered the West’s fascination with, and clashes over, this forbidding mountainous territory during the 19th century. This latest takes up the story with Francis Edward Younghusband’s successful 1904 British incursion into Tibet, but then steps back to dive deep into the area’s geological and cultural past. Keay explains the plate tectonics that created the Himalayan peaks, traces the origins of the Tibetan people and emphasizes the importance of the ancient religion known as Bon, which preceded Buddhism. Subsequent chaptersdiscuss glaciers and glaciation, take readers on a visit to the ultra-sacred Mount Kailash, and describe the work of various Indian, Tibetan and European scholars and explorers.

The bulk of Keay’s book, however, continues his two earlier histories of the region, treating the reader to a series of mini-biographies. For example, we learn about Emily and David Lorimer, who,in the 1920s and ’30s, managed to master “the scriptless Burushaski” spoken in Hunza: “With its seven words for ‘mother,’ its four genders, twenty-eight plural endings, numerous syntactic oddities and subtle meaning shifts, it was the sole surviving relic of India’s pre-Aryan languages.” The explorer and government agent Frederick “Hatter” Bailey — his nickname alludes to the Mad Hatter — so filled his diaries with lists of the animals he had shot that they read like “game-books.” Yet Bailey lived in a compound surrounded by animals and, with his wife, introduced the Lhasa apso terrier into Britain. Keay also tracks the careers of the swashbuckling Swedish explorer Sven Hedin and the highly spiritual Alexandra David-Neel, who in 1924, disguised as a monk, became the first European woman to enter the forbidden city of Lhasa.

Keay closes “Himalaya” with a plea that this “garden of God” deserves all the conservation safeguards that can be devised. Fatland’s “High: A Journey Across the Himalaya Through Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Nepal, and China” reinforces this same message: When she visits the base camp of Mount Everest, she notes that tourist trash and human waste have become both an eyesore and a disposal nightmare. In general, though, Fatland focuses less on the ‘A Gentleman of France’ is a classic adventure tale Transhimalaya’s history and ecology and more on its inhabitants, who are caught in various geographical power struggles, mainly between China and India.