Originally published in 1858 at the height of the passion for exotic specimens, this is the story of a young Bavarian botanist, Karl Linden, engaged in a plant-hunting expedition to the stupendous mountains of the Himalayas in Tibet.

It is a vivid early narrative and primary souce, with commentaries on the Himalayas, plant hunting, inspecting cliffs, the Ibex & other fauna, ascent of mountains, aerostatics, and of course the botany and value of the plants they are collecting.

Mayne Reid, a pre-eminent and popular writer, was primarily a novelist (1818-1883) who wrote adventure stories from just before the Civil War until his death in 1883. Reid's career included two periods in the U. S: 1840-49 and 1867-70.

He had emigrated to the United States in his early twenties, reaching New Orleans in January, 1840, where he pursued a varied career as a shopkeeper, overseer of slaves, schoolmaster, and actor, with occasional forays into hunting and Indian warfare.

Reid returned to England in 1849, and embarked upon a successful career as a writer of adventure novels and books for boys He was a close friend of Poe (though their writings were miles apart), played a gallant role in the Mexican War, worked as a journalist and wrote most of his first novel while in the United States.

He was an influence on the young mind of Teddy Roosevelt, as Roosevelt reveals in his Autobiography, while Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in his 1890s essay "Juvenilia" that when young he always kept "Mr. Ballantyne or Captain Mayne Reid at my elbow", Robert Louis Stevenson praised Reid in the Vailima Letters, and J. Frank Dobie has said he, "dared convey real information in his romances.