Cruises and Caravans – Ella Maillart (1943)

S$72.00

Cruises and Caravans – Ella Maillart (1943)

S$72.00

The autobiography of the great traveller Ella K. Maillart, who explored the Soviet Muslim regions and Xinjiang, and who lived in India during WW2 to study under spiritual teachers including Ramana Maharshi.

Title: Cruises and Caravans

Author: Ella K. Maillart

Publisher: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1943. 2nd impression.

Condition: Hardcover, no dust jacket. Good. Slight tanning, inscription to back of frontispiece. With black-and-white photographic plates. 161pp., app 9″ by 6″.

SKU: maillart-cruises Categories: , ,

The autobiography of the great traveller Ella K. Maillart, who explored the Soviet Muslim regions and Xinjiang, and who lived in India during WW2 to study under spiritual teachers including Ramana Maharshi.

About Ella Maillart (from Wikipedia):

Ella Maillart (20 February 1903, Geneva – 27 March 1997, Chandolin) was a Swiss adventurer, travel writer and photographer, as well as a sportswoman.

From the 1930s onwards she spent years exploring Muslim republics of the USSR, as well as other parts of Asia, and published a rich series of books which, just as her photographs, are today considered valuable historical testimonies. Her early books were written in French but later she began to write in English. Turkestan Solo describes a journey in 1932 in Soviet Turkestan. Photos from this journey are now displayed in the Ella Maillart wing of the Karakol Historical Museum. In 1934, the French daily Le Petit Parisien sent her to Manchuria to report on the situation under the Japanese occupation. It was there that she met Peter Fleming, a well-known writer and correspondent of The Times, with whom she would team up to cross China from Peking to Srinagar (3,500 miles), much of the route being through hostile desert regions and steep Himalayan passes. The journey started in February 1935 and took seven months to complete, involving travel by train, on lorries, on foot, horse and camelback. Their objective was to ascertain what was happening in Xinjiang (then also known as Sinkiang or Chinese Turkestan) where the Kumul Rebellion had just ended. Maillart and Fleming met the Hui Muslim forces of General Ma Hushan. Ella Maillart later recorded this trek in her book Forbidden Journey, while Peter Fleming’s parallel account is found in his News from Tartary. In 1937 Maillart returned to Asia for Le Petit Parisien to report on Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey, while in 1939 she undertook a trip from Geneva to Kabul by car, in the company of the Swiss writer, Annemarie Schwarzenbach. The Cruel Way is the title of Maillart’s book about this experience, cut short by the outbreak of the second World War.

She spent the war years in the South of India, learning from different teachers about Advaita Vedanta, one of the schools of Hindu philosophy. On her return to Switzerland in 1945, she lived in Geneva and at Chandolin, a mountain village in the Swiss Alps. She continued to ski until late in life and last returned to Tibet in 1986.