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Mount Kailas - the most sacred mountain in the world. Uncannily symmetrical, this remote and remarkable peak located in the forbidden land of Tibet might have built by superhuman hands. It stands out of a primordial landscape: a horizontally stratified plinth thousands of feet high, crowned with a perfect cone of pure snow.

To Hindus it is the Throne of the great god Shiva. Buddhists associate it with Chakrasamvara, a powerful Tantric deity, and with the sage Milarepa, who fought a magic duel there with a shaman priest in ancient times. To the Bonpo, the followers of the indigenous religion of Tibet, it is the giant crystal on which their founder, Thonpa Shenrab, descended to earth from the skies.

For more than a millennium, Buddhist, Hindu and Bonpa pilgrims have been visiting this Throne of the Gods and performing pious circumabulation around it. John Snelling recounts their difficult and dangerous pilgrimages and analyzes the spiritual significance of Kailas - and of sacred mountains in general. He also retells the tales of the handful of Western travellers who reached Kailas between 1715 and 1949 - an exclusive club of intrepid explorers, mountaineers, big game hunters and officials. Then in 1984 the Chinese so the tales of a new wave of contemporary travellers have in this completely revised and enlarge edition been added to those of their great prec1ursors.