The earlier scenes in the Indian concentration camps run by the British reminded me that my mother told me that we, the English, invented such holding camps, and used them as cruelly, if not in such a way as in Germany at that time. The film was equally trying as Brad Pitt doggedly scrambled over ice and stones for the first third of it. I know other prisoners had contributed, but all the same, it seemed fantastical that they could survive on so little. I couldn’t see how their money lasted them two years they must have started out weighed down with possessions and coin. The hardback copy I bought had photos, one in colour, which helped, and once Harrer and Aufschnaiter had arrived at their dreamed of destination, after two years travelling to Lhasa, I felt more involved. I didn’t want to read this, I felt it was history I couldn’t relate to, an area I was not especially interested in, and the writing style was different, diary-like, dry, leadenly slow at first.

One of my favourite books, also written also in the fifties, had the enigmatic sentence in it, spoken by a gloomy character who was bemoaning what the world was coming to, ‘And the Chinese are in Tibet’… I never really understood what that meant until reading this and also watching the film.

Books by heinrich harrer