Mountains And Mountaineers

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31772, 31 August 1968, Page 4

Mountains And Mountaineers

Because It Is There. By Walter Unsworth. Gob lancz. The Mountain World 1966/67. By various authors. Allen and Unwin.

“Because It Is There” owes its title to that greatly overworked quotation from George Mallory in 1922, when he was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest. Just a month ago “Newsweek” wrongly attributed the first appearance of that quotation to Sir Edmund Hillary and the following week a correspondent corrected "Newsweek.”

Exactly the same title was used by George Lowe in his book, published by Cassell in 1960. It is surprising that Gollancz, in 1968, should have seen any merit in the title, when it was never a serious statement by Mallory and it was already in use in a mountaineering book. Walter Unsworth attempted to summarise the achievements of twenty-five mountaineers, who climbed between 1890 and 1940. What men .they were, Walker, Whymper, Mummery, Bruce, Conway, Young, Smythe and the others!

Not all the pages are filled with Idolising these giants. Some of the controversies which shook the Alpine Club for decades are mentioned and something is said of the strange behaviour of Eckenstein and Crowley. The latter, a famous magician/ chased a fellow mountaineer off K2 at pistol point. Another incident, which should have been written about Crowley, occurred on Kangchenjunga in 1905. When he heard the cries of his companions eaught in an avalanche (four were killed), he wrote in his diary: "A mountain accident of this sort is one of the things for which I have no sympathy whatever. Tomorrow I hope to go down to see how things stand.” The treatment of so many great men in this field in just one hundred and forty pages means that each character has little more than a sketch made of his life. Just five pages for the worldly General Bruce or for Frank Smythe means there are omissions of major expeditions and hardly a hint of the characters behind these great names. The book has twelve photographs of mountains all of recent vintage and bearing little relationship with the text There is not one portrait of any of the 25 m_en who are the subjects of the book. “The Mountain World” has made another welcome biannual appearance. It includes twenty articles on the main climbing events of the period

and a very good selection of photographs and maps. One which received much attention was the American expedition of ten men who went to Antarctica in December, 1966, and climbed the three highest peaks in that continent Nepal and much of India are omitted owing to the continued ban on climbing on the northern frontiers. Once again there are no accounts of the numerous Japanese expeditions to many parts of the world.

A welcome addition is a very good account of a Russian expedition, Khan Tengri. What a relief it is to read a straightforward account of a Russian climb without encountering paragraphs on the glorifications of the political system which inspired their enterprise. Chinese mountaineering magazines for the last ten years have been annoying to Western readers for this reason.

The Indian Everest Expedi-

tion of 1965 when nine men reached the summit in four separate groups has many interesting features. To avoid dispute on “who got there first” they joined arm-in-arm twenty feet from the summit. Tenzing’s relatives, resident in Darjeeling at a mountain instruction school, are now called Indians, but the paid employees of the Expedition are “Sherpas.”

Greenland and the Andes are coming into greater prominence as access to them is not as complicated for mountaineering parties as is Nepal, Sikkim, Kashmir or Antarctica. "The Mountain World” concludes with a table of the greatest heights climbed. Between Norton, in 1924 on Everest, and Bourdillon and Evans in 1953, there is no-one shown as having climbed above 28,100 feet. Lambert and Tenzing exceeded that height in 1952.