COLOUR FILM OF EVEREST

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 79, Issue 306, 28 December 1936, Page 2

COLOUR FILM OF EVEREST

MEMORABLE SCENES The first instalment of a film, of which the remaining reels are lying beneath the snow on the North Col of Mount Everest, was shown in London recently. It is the record—part plain, part coloured—of the 1936 expedition, taken by Mr. F. S. Smythe. Though the expedition was defeated by the weather, this film of its doings has many special points of interest. It is the first colour record ol the Tibetan plateau and Mount Everest. It includes pictures of the quick rush of dawn sunlight down the mountain, taken from 40 miles away, with the camera still in darkness and the photographer risking frost-bite. There are colour shots of what must surely be one pf the most wonderful gardens in the world, that of the British Resident at Gangtok, in Sil* kim, paradise of flowers; and the first inside pictures of the astonishing monastery of Shekar Dzong, built on a sheer 1200-feet rock face above the road to Everest, and topped by an old fort which grows straight up from the summit of the rock. A full day’s "stalking,” Mr. Smythe explained, went to the making of a sequence showing the wild sheep of Tibet, never before photographed as they climbed chamois-like on a mountain slope, 16,000 ft. up. Still other remarkable photographs (records (he London Morning Post) showed the monsoon clouds, whose arrival ended climbing opportunities, shooting verti-

cally from behind the North Col and then breaking and eddying in all directions a thousand feet after topping the ridge. Yet, in terms of human effort, the .most impressive pictures of all are of the blizzards which deadened hope, and of the soft, thick treacherous snow which killed it—the latter taken as porters and climbers moved in vain transit to the North Col. There could be no clearer proof that, under such conditions, no mountaineers in the world could have climbed Everest.