While Mount Pantokrator, on the Island of Corfu in Greece, might be a high mountain whose peak is shrouded in mystery, it will always remain a solitary peak, one to be scaled from any angle, never far from the sea. It is a great mountain, both conspicuous for its height and for its bareness above lush lowlands. Nevertheless, it can be scaled and crossed over.
The Himalayas present a mystery far greater. Each ridge crossed reveals a new peak, and these are only the foothills. They dwarf the mountains of the West. This chain of jagged, icy peaks pierces the very sky and separates the Indian subcontinent from Tibet, a land itself shrouded in mystery.
An inveterate traveler and lover of mountains and their peoples, Thomas K. Shor reveals once again the age-old dichotomy between the philosophies of the West and East. First upon a mountaintop in Greece - the birth place of Western civilization - and then in the high peaks of the Indian Himalayas, he attempts to penetrate the barriers that inhibit our understanding of each philosophy.
