Word: tibet
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...company, was working on an adaptation of Van Doren's biography of Benjamin Franklin the morning he was killed. That morning also, Father-in-law Damrosch got word that Martin Wolfe, another daughter's divorced husband, had died from a fall July 30 while mountain climbing in Tibet...
...Tibet is a windswept highland where the chief drink is buttered tea, the chief fuel is yak dung, and a stuck-out tongue is a friendly greeting. Faith of the 3,000,000 Tibetans-and of other millions throughout the fastnesses of Central Asia-is Lamaism, a theocratic form of Buddhism. Lamaists believe in numerous divine incarnations, chief of them the Dalai Lama, "Buddha of Mercy," who is not only temporal ruler of Tibet but a god. Since the death of Ngawang Lopsang Toupden Gyatso in 1933, Tibet has been ruled by a council of lamas. Last month...
Shangri-La. No orchid hunter is Ronald Kaulback, though he once picked flowers in Tibet with famed Botanist Kingdon Ward, collected many rare plants, insects, snakes on his own 18-month scramble to find the source of Tibet's Black River, the Salween. He never found it, but he traveled some 3,000 miles of unexplored shingle on the freezing-cold roof of the world, earned the Murchison Grant of the Royal Geographical Society for his pains. There were plenty of them. Salween is probably the cheerfullest book ever written of discomforts ranging from intense heat among blood-sucking...
...Canadian-born Explorer Kaulback, Tibet is no hermit kingdom, but a realistic Shangri-La whose glacial rocks, shrewd lamas, innumerable prayer-wheels, odoriferous grime somehow delight his Cambridge-bred soul. He had been to Tibet once before and was glad to get back: "It was good to taste real buttered tea again. ... We ourselves were awash by the time the tents were up. ... That night it was just as it had been two years before. . . horsebells jingling; the howl of a dog; a voice in the distance singing a mournful song; and over everything the smell of wood smoke...
...until winter made the trip impossible. Though he failed to find the source of the Salween, Explorer Kaulback was comforted by the thought that "it still remains to be found by someone." He might be comforted by the further thought that in sharing his nostalgia and making mysterious Tibet as real to Englishmen, and hardly more remote, than the Scottish Highlands, he had written easily the best travel book of the year...