About the book: 2018 / The goal of many expeditions of the great Russian traveler Nikolai Przhevalsky was the mysterious and inaccessible to Europeans Tibet. But no matter how hard he tried, he could not get to the capital of Tibet, the beautiful and mysterious Lhasa. But the Tibetan monks, at the behest of the Dalai Lama, opened Przhevalsky something more than the gates of an earthly city. They opened the way for him to Shambhala itself. Alas, the great traveler died before he was able to repeat his route and share his knowledge with the Emperor, the only one who could be entrusted with such a secret... In St. Petersburg, the famous antique dealer Boris Archugov disappears under mysterious circumstances. And from the monastery near Smolensk - Przhevalsky’s diaries. What is the connection between these events? And why is an English baronet interested in buying the diaries of a traveler whose discoveries have ceased to be of interest to today’s scientists and military men?.. Just as it is difficult for a free bird to live in a cage, so I cannot get along among “civilization,” where every person is primarily a slave to the conditions of social life . But the vastness of the desert is what I dream about day and night. Give me mountains of gold, I won’t sell my wild freedom for them. N. M. Przhevalsky