Simla Village Tales

Tales collected from ayahs, gardeners and hill people around Simla: the jackal's tricks, the demon in the well, the rani who became a bird. Alice Dracott took them down in the 1900s from the servants of the English station, which is what makes them unlike the Sanskrit collections. The Himalayan versions of familiar stories are the most interesting thing here. Fifty-three plates of travellers, roads and ruins by painters including David Roberts and Vasily Vereshchagin give the hill stories a wider world of journeys to set beside them.