Through a land of extremes

By Nicholas Clinch, Elizabeth Clinch

Subjects: Biography, Explorers, Discovery and exploration, Travelers, British, Description and travel

Description: Just a husband and wife traveling with a little dog. Suddenly Teresa asked Willie to give her the Mannlicher. The number two Tibetan lama tried to dash out of the tent but St. George collared him and hauled him back. Teresa handed the rifle to the Tibetan chief, and with tears streaming down her face she ordered him to shoot her, saying she would rather die than go back the way they had come. Teresa and St. George Littledale were not exactly the average Victorian couple. At a time when wives quickly became mothers and men with money concentrated on increasing their wealth, the Littledales pursued a different course. They traveled together through remote regions by horseback, palki, tonga, tarantass, and foot, bringing back plant and animal specimens for museums as well as, very likely, intelligence for the British foreign office. Their journeys took them to within 49 miles of the Forbidden City of Lhasa, closer than any Europeans had been since the city was closed to foreigners. More than once they put their lives at risk. But although St. George presented papers to the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), he did not write books, and the Littledales' story was all but forgotten until a chance mention led Elizabeth and Nicholas Clinch on an exploration of their own. How did a sickly girl from Canada find herself facing down 150 armed men on a lonely 19,000-foot pass in Tibet? How did a boy nicknamed "Lazy" at his British school end up having an Asian sheep named after him? And why did the RGS present a silver collar to a fox terrier named Tanny? In Through the Land of Extremes the Clinches draw on diaries, letters, and half-forgotten archives to create a comprehensive account of the lives and times of an unlikely adventurous couple. - Back cover.