Sirius in Tibet? Lost Horizon

[canismajorette]

No: HPFGUIDX 85690

CM <templerichmond at e...> wrote:
> > Don't we hear in the first few pages that Sirius has lately been 
> > in Tibet? 

bboy_mn:
> The reference to Sirius being in Tibet came from Kingsly Shacklbolt,
> the Auror in charge of finding Sirius. But Kingsly knows that Sirius
> is indeed living in his old family home in London. So, to keep the
> rest of the Ministy off guard, he say that Sirius is rumored to be 
> in Tibet which is a long way away, and in an area where he doesn't 
> pose any immediate danger to the UK wizard world. 
> 
> However, in previous books we know that Sirius was in hiding outside
> of the UK, and was sending messages using huge colorfull tropical
> birds. My best guess for that would have been Mylasia and Thailand, 
> or possibly central Africa. 
> 
> I don't know enough about the geography and ecology of Tibet to know
> if tropcial birds exist there. 


>From CM:

Yes, I remember now. Tropical birds could live in some of the 
strange valleys way up in the Himalayas. These valleys go so deep 
that they are subtropical. Wasn't this the kind of world described in 
James Hilton's Paradise Lost? It was a hermitage valley in Tibet, 
where people lived very long life spans, and there was no strife, and 
so on. A place idyllic, and tropical, even though embedded way deep 
in the Himalayas, if I correctly recall.
 
Not Paradise Lost! It was Lost Horizon! That's it!  That's the novel 
in which a tropical valley in Tibet is described.  There was film 
made about this some years back.  

Paradise Lost is Milton, a whole different thing!  Deep trouble, in 
fact.

But Lost Horizons describes a world of peace and spiritual 
understanding deep within the Himalayas.  And somehow, by virtue of 
its sheer drop, it manages to get so far down that it becomes 
tropical, with extraordinary flora and fauna, and snow capped peaks 
up above.  So, in literature there does exist such a world from which 
exotic birds might take flight.