On Top of the World: Five Women Explorers in Tibet. Luree Miller. The Mountaineers, Seattle, 1984. 222 pages, black and white photographs, sketches, maps, bibliography. $8.95.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Luree Miller’s book is the variety of styles adopted by these explorers in their travels in and around Tibet. The expeditions of Elizabeth Sarah (Nina) Mazuchelli, Annie Royle Taylor, Isabella Bird Bishop, Fanny Bullock Workman and Alexandra David-Neel—three Britons, one American and one Frenchwoman, respectively—took place between 1872 and 1911. Mazuchelli’s expedition was aonce-in-a-lifetime adventure; Taylor’s expedition was an integral part of her missionary work. Bishop and Workman were adventurers; David-Neel was a scholar and teacher.

Elizabeth Mazuchelli was married to a British Army Chaplain ordered to serve two years in Darjeeling. Inspired by views of the Himalaya, she instigated a grand tour into the “interior.” The two-month expedition took Mazuchelli, her husband and about seventy servants to the Everest region. Here they were turned back by lack of food and snow conditions near Mount Junnoo. As the author puts it, “for all of her adventure spirit, Nina remained a lady.” Unlike the women who followed her, Mazuchelli retained Victorian ladies’ dress, substituting “moccasins” for high-heeled boots. It should be noted that during the journey, she did not walk any extended distances.

Annie Taylor, the second Briton, made her foray into Tibet in September 1892, twenty years after Mazuchelli. As a missionary engaged in Christian works, she enjoyed a freedom Mazuchelli had not. A long-time resident of Asia, she had lived on the Tibetan border for eight years before she attempted to reach the forbidden city of Lhasa. The expedition consisted of Taylor, five Asians and sixteen horses; within a month, it was reduced to Taylor, one companion and two horses. They ran out of food and, in January 1893, when Taylor was arrested only three days’ march from Lhasa, she was too weak to walk. The Tibetan authorities would not permit her to continue and, only after hard bargaining, gave her minimal supplies for the return trip. In April, she left Tibet, having travelled approximately 1300 miles in seven months and ten days.

Isabella Bird Bishop was a famous Victorian traveller. Her nine travel books were all best-sellers. Although she never entered the interior of Tibet, she rode to its edge twice—once from India and once from China; on both occasions she was over sixty. In her earlier travels, through the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains, she had become accustomed to riding horseback astride, using a Mexican saddle, and on her trip through India and Little Tibet she considered her horse, Gyalpo, to be the best member of the expedition. Her style was to travel light and her camping gear was “packed in four small boxes, twenty inches long, twelve inched wide, and twelve inches high.” A professional writer, she kept clear accounts of her adventures. The numerous quotations cited in this book serve as an enticement to read her works in their entirety.

The only American in the book, Fanny Bullock Workman, was introduced to mountaineering by her husband in the White Mountains of New Hampshire in the 1880’s and it was as a mountaineer that she explored Tibet. The Workmans’ many books included an account of a 14,000-mile cycle trek through India, published in 1904. They then became fascinated by the Himalaya and the Karakoram and commenced their climbing expeditions, which they chronicled in five thick books. Workman wrote of herself, “I am not a light weight and am a slow climber.” It was her opinion that women could climb mountains, as she had, without any particular physical training. She set and broke her own world’s altitude records for women. The author states “it was an unremitting struggle throughout her mountaineering and exploring career for Fanny to be taken seriously.” Given the scope of her accomplishments, as described in this book, that is hard to imagine, though undoubtedly true.

Alexandra David-Neel found yet another avenue through which to explore Tibet. An avid reader of texts on Asia, she travelled in India and Ceylon at the turn of the century and was determined to return to the East. That journey, which began in 1911, lasted nearly fourteen years. Having studied with famous Orientalists, learned Sanskrit and become a Buddhist, she returned to India as an accepted scholar. She was also the first Western woman to be granted a private audience with the Dalai Lama, who exhorted her to learn Tibetan, which she did. She travelled to remote monasteries along the Tibet-Sikkim border and visited the famous Tibetan monastery of Tashilhunpo. When she was deported from India for travelling into Tibet without a pass, she then approached through China. At the age of fifty-four, she donned the disguise of a Tibetan beggar woman and completed her pilgrimage to Lhasa, where she spent two months and explored the Potala at length. She purchased numerous books to use as references and, following her return to Europe, published her first book on Tibet when she was fifty-nine; over the next forty years, she would write twenty more. When she was sixty-eight, during World War II, she attempted to return to Tibet and spent six years at Tatsienlu before returning to France through China and India. Her love of Tibet never faded and she was a legendary expert on the country decades before she died in her 101st year.

Luree Miller’s accounts of these five women explorers move quickly and are easy to read. The many references and complete bibliography furnish an interested reader with numerous possibilities for further armchair exploration. Miller documents their travels without passing judgment. There is an inspirational quality to the book, certainly for women, as well as for anyone who wonders what type of adventures others have pursued in a remote quarter of the world even at sixty and seventy years of age.

Barbara J. Euser