Getting High on the Himalayas

Fallen Giants: Alpine Club in 1865, seven years after A History of Himalayan its foundation, he used the occasion to Mountaineering from the Age denounce its members as Philistines: of Empire to the Age of Extremes Getting High by Maurice Isserman and You have despised nature [and] Stewart Weaver, with maps and on the Himalayas all the deep and sacred sensations peak sketches by Dee Molenaar. of natural scenery. The French Yale University Press, 579 pp., $39.95 Al Alvarez revolutionists made stables of the cathedrals of France; you have Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weav- Fondazione Sella, Biella, Italy made racecourses of the cathe- er’s authoritative history of Himalayan drals of the earth. The Alps mountaineering, Fallen Giants, starts themselves, which your own poets right at the beginning, 45 million years used to love so reverently, you look ago, with the collision of tectonic plates upon as soaped poles in bear gar- that threw up what the authors call dens, which you set yourselves to “the greatest geophysical feature of the climb and slide down again, with earth.” The Andes are the longest of “shrieks of delight.” the planet’s mountain chains, but the Himalaya and its adjacent ranges, the Isserman and Weaver, being finely Karakoram and the Hindu Kush, are tuned to social distinctions and crush- far higher. They contain all fourteen of ing British snobbery, interpret Ruskin’s the world’s peaks over eight thousand diatribe as a matter of class warfare. meters, or 26,247 feet; their northern “His remark dripped with class conde- rampart averages 19,685 feet—some scension,” they say. I wonder. Ruskin five thousand feet higher than the had a talent for vituperation, but his Andes—and they are still growing: “To venom on this occasion had nothing this day India plows into Tibet at the to do with “class condescension” for breakneck speed of five centimeters a the simple reason that, socially, there year and lifts the Himalaya by as much was no difference between him and his as a centimeter.” audience. The members of the Alpine That little detail is characteristic of Club were professional men—scien- the book. Both authors are enthusias- tists, doctors, clergymen, lawyers, sol- tic mountaineers who climb regularly diers, even a few writers—gentlemen in the United States and have gone who could afford to travel to the Alps trekking in the Himalaya, but they and stay there for as long they pleased, climb for pleasure, not for a living. just like Ruskin himself. Away from the hills, they are histori- There were differences between ans—Isserman has written extensively them, of course, but temperament about American communism and the aside, they were differences of nurture, New Left; Weaver’s field is British not nature. Ruskin had been privately imperial history and English liberal- educated at home by tutors, whereas ism—and they bring their professional most of the founding members of the skills and discipline to the subject in Alpine Club had suffered the rigors the form of meticulous research and a of a boarding school education de- painstaking attention to detail. Fallen signed to train the right kind of men Giants is a big book in every sense— to administer the British Empire. A nearly 460 pages of text, eighty-five ‘The grandest of the early Himalayan expeditions, and also the least eccentric’: taste for strenuous exercise, adventure, pages of notes, and a twenty-five-page the camp of Luigi Amadeo, Duke of the Abruzzi, and his team below the west face of K2, and deprivation had been beaten into bibliography—and the authors’ politi- 1909; photograph by Vittorio Sella, ‘one of the greatest of all mountain photographers,’ them along with Greek and Latin, and cal take on the subject makes it unlike from Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver’s Fallen Giants mountaineering was a perfect way of most other mountain histories. satisfying it. “The authentic English- Political historians do not usually axes and arcane gear such as camming were of interest only to those unfor- man,” Leslie Stephen wrote cheerfully, bother with a subject as apolitical and devices and offset nuts. tunate enough to live in them. In the “is one whose delight is to wander all seemingly frivolous as climbing, al- The Victorians were responsible Himalaya, they were holy places, a day among rocks and snow; and to though mountaineering books are now for turning the Alps into what Leslie perpetual reminder of the gods—the come as near breaking his neck as his accumulating as relentlessly as the Hi- Stephens called “the playground of Tibetan name for Everest is Cho- conscience will allow.” For Ruskin, malaya itself. A mere half-century ago, Europe,” but it was an exclusive play- molungma, “Goddess Mother of the art critic and lover of mountain land- mountain climbing was still a minor- ground for a limited few. One hundred World”—and their summits were for- scapes, such frivolity was barbaric. ity pastime for an eccentric few who and fifty years later, the Himalaya is bidden to mere mortals. In Europe, Snobbery, of course, figured large took pleasure in doing things the hard in danger of becoming the playground superstitious Alpine peasants believed in “the intensely status-conscious eyes way, in steep places and bad weather, of the developed world. As of Au- mountaintops were the abodes of of the Raj,” far larger, in fact, than the and were willing to risk injuring them- gust 1, 2008, 2,090 people have stood witches, devils, and dragons. Lowland- mountains themselves, especially in selves in the process. Since risk and the on the top of Everest. Both the South ers and people of sense chose to ignore the first half of the nineteenth century, adrenalin high that went with it were Col route that took John Hunt’s 1953 the peaks, dismissing them as mere when no sensible person dreamed of an essential part of its appeal, climbing expedition six weeks to pioneer and inconveniences—“considerable protu- climbing them for pleasure. For Vic- was regarded as a questionable, slightly the North Col route on which George berances,” Dr. Johnson called them— torian empire builders, the Himalaya antisocial activity. As a result, climb- Leigh Mallory and Andrew Irvine died put there to make life difficult for the was important as a natural frontier, ers wrote about where they had been in 1924 have been climbed from base civilized traveler. and mapping and measuring it was a and what they had done, but they wrote camp to summit, solo and without oxy- According to Isserman and Weaver, handy way of laying claim to the ter- mostly for other climbers and a rela- gen, in less than seventeen hours. The the general change in European atti- ritory. Hence the Great Trigonometri- tively limited audience of armchair ad- mountain has also been climbed by a tudes toward mountains began around cal Survey, George Everest’s 750-mile venturers who preferred to be thrilled, blind man, a teenager, and a sixty-four- the middle of the eighteenth century “grid-iron” of triangulated calculations or to suffer, by proxy. year-old; it has been descended by ski- with the Gothic revival, the cult of the of the heights and positions of all the Not anymore. In the years since ers and snowboarders, floated down by picturesque, and Edmund Burke’s peaks. Like every other Himalayan 1953, when Edmund Hillary and Tenz- paragliders, and flown over by balloon- enterprise, taking the measurements ing Norgay first reached the summit of ists. The problem with Everest is no aesthetic distinction between the was a bone-wearying business, involv- Everest, mountaineering, rock climb- longer how to get up it but how to dis- Beautiful—the regular, the propor- ing hardship, brute labor, cold, hunger, ing, and mountain tourism—aka trek- pose of the junk—the hundreds of used tioned, the visually predictable— and exhaustion, as well as technical king—have been transformed into a oxygen cylinders and tons of human ex- and the Sublime—the dramatic, skill in using heavy equipment such as mainstream leisure activity, indulged crement and waste food—that litters its the unexpected, the awe inspir- sight poles, which they lugged to the in by millions. Books about it figure flanks. In his official history of Everest, ing—[which] thus provided . a 15,000-to-20,000-foot summits. in the best-seller lists and its needs are George Band, who was the youngest ready vocabulary for the novel ex- The survey was a triumph of dogged- serviced by a thriving industry with member of the 1953 expedition, calls it perience of mountain wonder. ness over adversity and also a major an annual global turnover reckoned “the world’s highest garbage dump.” step in establishing the boundaries of in billions: travel agents, commercial For aesthetes, appreciating the beauty the Raj. While the work was in prog- guiding outfits, and specialist manu- of the Alps was altogether differ- ress, the cartographers either numbered facturers of everything from outdoor Before the Victorians reinvented ent from climbing them. When John the peaks or used the local names. clothing, rucksacks, and tents to ice them as a form of recreation, mountains Ruskin was invited to lecture to the When all the measurements had been July 2, 2009 27 calculated and the maps had been wickedest man in the world” by pulling indisputable sovereign of the region,” War mentality; in laying siege to drawn, Peak XV was established as a gun on a fellow climber.* according to the expedition’s chroni- Everest in this way, the 1922 expe- the highest of them all.

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