The author, a well known scholar, mountain climber and traveller, has compiled the life-stories of a fascinating bundle of some well known and some less known Nineteenth Cenrury European travellers in the Himalaya and Central Asia. We meet the Hungarian grammarian and scholar Csoma de Koros, the Englishman Richmond Shakespear, "Knight Errant in Central Asia" and the famous botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker.Then there are Ashley Eden, whose not so successful forays into Bhutan and Sikkim are well known, as well as the educator William Delafield Arnold who worked mostly in Punjab. And finally we shall meet the Moravian missionaries in Lahoul and Ladakh