In 1962, with the first Tibetan passport issued by Peking, Stuart and Roma Gelder made the most hazardous flight in the world over the vast ice-bound mountain barrier enclosing the most mysterious country on earth. For five weeks they went wherever they wished. The result of their journeys is this unique book, illustrated with twenty-eight superb colour photographs and fourth black and white photographs, including the first to be taken of the Dalai Lama's exotic private apartments in the fabulous Potala Palace which even his own mother was not permitted to enter.

This book is not only an exciting adventure story, it is one of the great news scoops of this century. Stuart and Roma Gelder are the first westerners to have reached Tibet since the Chinese Communist armies occupied the holy city of Lhasa in 1951. Eight years later, in 1959, the world was shocked by news of rebellion on the roof of the world and the flight of the young God-King., the XIVth Dalai Lama over the Himalayan snows to India. The Communists, he said, were torturing and killing his people in tens of thousands. Children were being forced to shoot their parents. Monks were harnessed to ploughs and buried alive. Ancient and lovely temples were being looted of their sacred an priceless treasures and destroyed. The Dalia Lama's own summer palace in his Jewel Park was blasted to smoking ruin by Communist guns.

We met this old woman walking round a chorten in a country road, saying her devotions with her prayer wheel and her pet puppy trotting at her heels.