Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit FRIDAY, MAY 27, 1938. MAN AND A MOUNTAIN.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 58, Issue 192, 27 May 1938, Page 4

Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit FRIDAY, MAY 27, 1938. MAN AND A MOUNTAIN.

Another attack on Mount Everest is about to be undertaken after many months of preparation. What is the attraction in summits? Why, to be more precise, should thought of the highest known mountain in the world bring to mortals a desire to have it under foot? To try to answer these questions is to appreciate the meaning of the attacks on Everest. They —all six of them —have lured many volunteers. Even within living memory and with reference to the more familiar Swiss peaks, high summits were regarded with awe, often deemed holy ground, sometimes feared as the abode of unfriendly spirits. The British people, having no lofty mountains of their own, and taught by their long apprenticeship to the sea to face the dangers of exploration with courage, were free from this particular fear. It is largely due to them that Switzerland became "the playground of Europe. Then after the great trigonometrical survey of India in 1852 had revealed the pinnacle of Everest, and ascents of the Matterhorn in the Alps and the high ranges of the Caucasus had been accomplished, it was natural for them to turn to this more exacting venture. In 1893 General C. G. Bruce and Sir Francis Younghusband formulated a plan to explore and, if possible, climb Everest. The rest is a story of Tibetan courtesy and hospitality, of plans laid with grave care, of sustained enthusiasm in spite of setbacks, of heroic courage matching unexampled perils, of failures as splendid in their endurance as any final achievement could have been. So the tale goes —from 1921 and 1922, to 1924, to 1933, to 1936, and now 1938. What if success has lingered? To try and try again with increasing hope, to conduct the campaign with ever closer attention to its call on stamina and skill, to enlist aid from science and to pursue the paths opened by quests pointing the way, this has been magnificent. Something more than a mere experience in mountaineering, something more than a British zest in adventure, Sir Francis Younghusband has said, is in the steadfact campaign—steadfast m spite of the gaps between the years of actual ascents. “The race took pride in seeing how men bravely faced and resolutely overcame one obstacle after another, how with indomitable spirit the climbers stood up against the icy hurricanes and every missile which the mountain would hurl againt them, and how in danger and disaster they would stand by one another and at risk of life itself support one another. And then came slowly into view the real significance of the whole enterprise . . gradually there emerged the figure of Everest as a symbol of the loftiest spiritual height of man’s ambition.