CABLE, Mildred; Francesca FRENCH ~ The Gobi Desert

FIRST UK PRINTING. Hodder and Stoughton Limited, London: 1942

8vo., sky blue boards lettered in gilt to spine; complete in the clipped photographic dustwrapper showing a man with two donkeys under an archway; with coloured frontis and numerous other captioned illustrations throughout on glossy paper, both in black and white and full colour; folding map to rear showing Mongolia, China and Northern India; THE BOOK a very good, clean copy, slightly pushed at spine tips and corners, faintly spotted to the fore-edge; THE WRAPPER also very good, a little shelf darkened with rubbing to folds, some nicks, chips and closed tears, particularly around spine; which has some slightly longer creases and closed tears (up to 3cm in length). The wrapper is protected in a removable Brodart archival cover. First UK edition, first printing. After living for more than twenty years in China (where they had worked as protestant missionaries and became known as 'the Trio'), Cable, together with Francesca French and her sister Eva, set out 'Past the Barrier of the Great Wall into the vast and always mysterious waste of Gobi'. This book provides an account of the years in which they traveled, as itinerant missionaries, to many places, including modern-day Silk Road provinces of Gansu, Qinghai, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang. Along the way they visited sacred sites such as the Flame Mountains, Jade Gate, Lake of the Crescent Moon, and Caves of a Thousand Buddhas. They were the first English women to do so. "We found the desert to be unlike anything that we had pictured", she writes, "it had its terrors, but it also had its compensating pleasures; it subjected us to many and prolonged hardships, but it also showed us some unique treasures". Scarce in the dustwrapper.

BINDING: Hardcover
CONDITION: Very Good
JACKET: Very Good