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Mountains in My Blood | An Excerpt from Himalaya
Meditations on the Roof of the World It was while I was living in England, in the jostle and drizzle of London, that I remembered the Himalayas at their most vivid. I had grown up amongst those great blue and brown mountains; they had nourished my blood; and though I was separated from them by [...] -
Singapore Dream | An Excerpt from Singapore Dream & Other Adventures
Hermann Hesse’s Southeast Asian Travels In the morning I had chased butterflies on the byways, overgrown with grass and overhung with foliage, that run among the European gardens. In the white heat of noon I returned to the city on foot, and I passed the afternoon walking about, visiting shops, and doing my shopping in [...] -
Hidden Treasure - The Natural Laws of Good Luck
The Natural Laws of Good Luck by Ellen Graf A friend of Ellen Graf, thinking they'd hit it off, suggested that Ellen meet her brother. The catch was, he lived in China, he spoke almost no English, and Ellen would have to travel there to meet him. Thus began one of the most unusual blind [...] -
Hidden Treasure - City of Lingering Splendor
City of Lingering Splendor: A Frank Account of Old Peking's Exotic Pleasures by John Blofeld On a stroll through the streets of Peking in 1934 you might meet beautiful courtesans, Confucian scholars, Tsarist refugees, aging palace eunuchs, teenage opium addicts, Taoist adepts or Buddhist monks. You might even run into Shura, the White-Russian hermaphrodite. The [...]