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Laurence Austine Waddell (1854–1938) spent twenty-five years as a medical officer in the colonial Indian Medical Service. Fascinated by the landscapes and cultures of Darjeeling and Tibet, and inspired by reports from British spies surveying the remote Himalayan valleys, Waddell studied local languages, and spent his leisure time researching and writing on Tibetan topics. His books The Buddhism of Tibet (1895) and Lhasa and its Mysteries (1905) are also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection. This 1899 publication, illustrated with photographs and drawings, claims to describe 'the grandest part of the grandest mountains in the world', for the first time since Hooker (whose 1854 Himalayan Journals are also reissued), and anticipates today's trekking industry. Waddell's colourful account of jungles, snakes, glaciers, yaks, dizzying mountain ridges, rickety bamboo bridges, tribal peoples and unfamiliar food aims to 'bring home to the reader a whiff of the bracing breezes of the Himalayas'.
