Princes Of The Peaks
Sun Herald
Sunday August 24, 2003
The roof of the world turns adventurers into heroes, lures the brave to tragedy and inspires humbling awe.
Mountains Of The Mind: A History Of A Fascination
by Robert Macfarlane is published by Granta Books, $59.95 hardcover.
Mountains, if you will excuse the pun, are in the air again. This renewed fever for eights began in late April with the story of Aron Ralston, a young American climber forced to amputate his arm with a pocketknife after spending five days pinned to a Utah rock face by a 360-kilogram boulder.
That freakish news item was followed, in May, by the 50th anniversary of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's triumph over Everest. Holding court in Kathmandu at a golden jubilee gathering of summiteers, a gruff 84-year-old Hillary was unimpressed by a turn of events that now sees under-experienced, wealthy clients on tours taking them to the top with ease unimaginable in his day. "Just sitting around base camp knocking back cans of beer," he barked, was not something he regarded "as mountaineering!" Concerned
for the future of the mountain and distressed by its commercialisation, Hillary wants to see Everest closed to future expeditions. This contentious notion has yet to reach its, er, peak.
By the time Joe Simpson appeared on Enough Rope With Andrew Denton in June,
a Zeitgeist vibration was clearly under way. Simpson is the author of Touching The Void (1990), the startling memoir of how a friend was forced to cut the rope and let him drop, leaving him for dead in the Peruvian Andes in 1985. But Simpson, with a badly broken leg, managed to crawl out on all fours. Something of a mountaineering existentialist, Simpson had been invited by Denton to retell his story and explain why people keep going "up there". The sound bite was not forthcoming, but you might find answers in Touching The Void and in Simpson's later Dark Shadows Falling, as well as in Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, a recollection of the 1996 Everest expeditions that killed nine climbers.
In the end, though, I'm taking the long way around this literary mountain to suggest Robert Macfarlane's Mountains Of The Mind is the work most likely to give shape to why we keep finding mountains so attractive - from afar as much as close-up. As his subtitle, A History Of A Fascination, implies, "this book tries to plot how ... ways of imagining mountains have altered over time".
A Scotsman with that erudite British ability to talk about anything from quartz to Keats, Macfarlane balances a cultural history of the past 300 years with lyrical evocations of his own climbing experiences and a "speculative recreation" of the three failed, and finally fatal, Himalayan expeditions by the English climber George Mallory in 1921, 1922 and 1924.
Apart from superstitions about mountains as dwelling places for witches and dragons,
it was once "felt that their irregular and gargantuan outlines upset the natural spirit-level of the mind". The idea of a wild landscape had no appeal, and concepts of natural beauty corresponded only to agricultural possibilities. People forced to traverse the Swiss Alps were blindfolded for the journey so the sight of the mountain tops would not terrify them.
Macfarlane skips across the centuries looking at how everything, from the developing science of geology to ideas associated with the romantics and the sublime, drew people away from the civilised and ordered and towards the unpredictable and the wild. Mountains came to promise sights close to the divine, as well as becoming a testing ground for Victorian notions of manliness. Macfarlane also notes how the interests of the British Empire intensified the need to map the Himalayan region and counter Russian influence in Central Asia. Enter George Mallory and the desire to conquer Everest, referred to as "the Third Pole".
It's here Macfarlane hits his stride. The scene of an expeditioner choking to death on the slopes before coughing up what turns out to be a piece of his larynx killed by frostbite is horrifying. The disappearance of Mallory and his climbing partner Andrew Irvine in a swirl of Everest cloud is described with lingering, eerie energy.
Mallory's terse response to why Everest needed climbing was "Because it's there".
It says as much as anything about our motivation, but Macfarlane also shows how we are captive to history, often unconsciously. Small comfort to those left behind. For weeks after Mallory's death, his letters kept arriving to a grief-battered wife. For years, Irvine's mother would leave a light on the porch "so he could find his way back". In 1999, a search party finally found Mallory's body, not far from the peak. His arms were "flung up and out as though he had halted himself as he slid by digging his nails into the rock". The ice had preserved him "like a white marble statue". A frozen Icarus if ever there was one.
Discovered
Ambushed: A War Reporter's
Life On The Line by Ian Stewart is published by ABC Books, $29.95.
Before anyone could move, the bowler-topped rebel spun around on his heels. His AK-47 jumped in his hands; flames belched out of the thin barrel. The window beside Myles exploded as a hail of bullets tore into the side of Joseph's white station wagon. Myles slumped forward onto his camera, blood pouring from his head and chest. For a split second my left side went rigid, and then I slid sideways onto David's shoulder. I groaned as he pushed me to the floor in case the shooter fired again. Suddenly I was no longer a war correspondent; we had become the story.
Rediscovered
One Crowded Hour by Tim Bowden was first published in 1987. This edition was published by Collins in 1988.
It was a bad time to get sick. The war was escalating by the day. Despite President Johnson's injection of half a million troops into South Vietnam, the Viet Cong savaged the Allied forces. The new Visnews office needed to be established and stringer cameramen engaged. And Davis was very sick indeed ... New York Times correspondent Jack Langguth remembers 1.83 metres of bright yellow Davis stretched out on his hospital bed looking like a corn cob, but smiling through his considerable pain.
© 2003 Sun Herald