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E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., Published 1962. Hardcover, 96 pp. plus 88 unnumbered pages of plates; 19 cm; first edition in English, American issue; translated from the Italian by Lovett Edwards; illustrated with 60 numbered photographic plates in color and monochrome by Francesca Bonardi, and a full-page route map.
In Very Good condition with a Good dust jacket. Green and red flecked cloth boards, with a white line drawing of a mask on front cover and white lettering on spine. Mild shelf and edge wear. Binding tight. Pages mildly toned. Otherwise unmarked. Gold-toned dust jacket reproduces a photograph of a Nepalese bronze of two crowned figures. Moderate surface and edge wear, with small nicks, short tears and creasing along the edges, and scattered color loss across the front illustration. Toning and soiling to back panel and spine panel. Not price-clipped, front flap reading $5.00. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover. Tucci made eight journeys into Tibet and six into Nepal. This is the popular account of the expedition that carried him from Kathmandu west through Tukcha and Jumla to the Tibetan frontier, into country he found still marked terra incognita. In the Karnali basin he read out inscriptions and chronicles of a Malla dynasty descended from the Khasas, rulers of western Nepal and western Tibet from roughly the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries and quite separate from the Malla kings of the Kathmandu Valley. The scientific findings went to IsMEO as a preliminary report in 1956; here he writes for a general reader, at a moment when, as he puts it, Nepal had only half-opened her gates. Bonardi's plates carry the peoples and the landscape. Contents: Preface; From Kathmandu to Tukcha; Near the Tibetan Frontiers; The Discovery of the Malla; Historical Note on Nepal.