DAY BY DAY

Waikato Times, Volume 94, Issue 14712, 29 July 1921, Page 4

DAY BY DAY

A cablegram in to-day's issue indicates thai the Mt. Everest The Attack expedition is making on satisfactory progress Kit. Everest, with the preliminary work, despite the rough country and the difficulties of transportation. The message indicates that the surveying parties have mapped out large areas of country which have never before been surveyed. The purpose of this activity is to find the most promising route for the real attack on the mountain next year. It is then thai the real peril of the undertaking will become evident, for the great white peak has many defenders, and avalanches will be amongst, the explorers' greatest perils. Everything in tlie Himalayas is huge in scale, and Itiese falling masses of mountain arc sometimes so stupendous that living tilings half a mile away have been killed by the air disturbance alone. A necessary qualification of the climbers is thus outlined l.iv Sir Francis Young-husband, in his presidential address before ttie Royal Pioographical Society: "They have also lo possess in high degree the capacity for gelling on with one another. At area I heights men get very nervous and irritable.' A!. 10,000 ft Ihey begin to lose patience with one another, and the. higher they climb the, deeper they hale.

A simple calculation will show what at 26.000 ft will be the intensity of their mutual repugnance. Y''t it is at this point that they will have to be closest to each other, and most continually together. In order to economise in baggage, they will have to sleep together In the same sleeping-bag at. night; and by day. owing to the clanger of the mountain slope they will have to be on a rope tied inseparably together. They will be in a highly irritable state, tired to extinction of' one another, each longing for a moment's respite from the other, and yet they will have to disguise their true feelings, keep smiling, and above everything re-main staunch and loyal to each other and to the object of ali their efforts; for a flaw here, dissension at the supreme moment, would ruin the whole expedition."

How many people know that the death mask of Shakespeare Death Mask is for was until lately) of in Germany—to lie Shakespeare, precise, in Darmstadt? The question is prompted by a page in This World of Ours, the latest book of Mr J. H. Curie, a mighty traveller, and a friend of Conrad. ' While Mr Curie was staying in Darmstadt he was asked if he would like to see Shakespeare's death mask, and, assenting,—with some surprise—was taken to the villa of a Dr. Becker, where, he says, "1 stood before a plaster cast which lay on a black velvel cushion. The. mask, which . . . held me magnetised, was that of a smallone might almost say a tiny—head, with a markedly sloping forehead, bald over the forehead, with a sort of Wellingtonnose and a small Imperial. But the forehead! Narrow across the eyes, receding, it yet opened out to a perfect domeV to one which, as you gazed, seemed to suggest immensity. That this relic, was Hie true death mask of Shakespeare I did not doubt. . . ."

The mask was originally taken to Germany from England by a Count of Kessclstadt, a dignitary of the Holy Roman Empire, and a great antiquary. After his death it was lost in the disposal of his collection, hut in the forties of last century' it turned up in a junk shop in Mainz, where it was recognised, and rescued by the grandfather of the present owner.