15 The First Mountaineers

15

 

The First Mountaineers

 

On a summer’s evening in 1895, a young Welshman, piggy-eyed and burly, sat on a wall in a remote shepherd’s enclosure on the west side of Nanga Parbat, the world’s ninth highest peak, watching the slaughter of a sheep. The Honourable Charles Granville Bruce was a man of gargantuan appetites and having been on the go for more than thirty hours, the young Gurkha officer was ravenous. The night before, spent at 5,800 metres on the south side of the mountain, had been bitterly cold and sleepless. Bruce had travelled to Nanga Parbat in haste; his warm mountaineering clothes were still in his trunk in Kashmir. Not yet recovered from a bout of mumps, he had shivered through the night in a sweater and light flannel suit, one of his puttees wrapped around his middle, legs stuffed in a rucksack. But as the sheep’s liver went on the fire, Charlie Bruce was feeling more like his usual boisterous self. ‘Nothing rejoices me so much as the prospect of food,’ he wrote of that moment, ‘especially under such conditions.’

Forty years later, and a retired brigadier, Bruce was famous as the leader

of the first attempts to climb Everest. To young mountaineers of the 1930s, he was a figure from legend. The Everest climber Raymond Greene, older brother of the novelist Graham, was Bruce’s doctor in his later years and had served in Bruce’s first regiment, the ‘Ox and Bucks’. They were still telling stories about the old general four decades after he left. Bruce’s father, Lord Aberdare, had served as William Gladstone’s home secretary, passing licensing laws making it an offence to be drunk in public. His youngest son met that challenge in spectacular fashion. Bruce once wagered he could run from London to Brighton in a day stopping for a drink at every pub he passed. He could swear without repetition for minutes on end, an ability that left his fellow climber Tom Longstaff ‘transfixed with envy’. His appetite for physical activity in the Alps earned him the nickname the ‘Mad Mountain Machine’.

Bruce is now categorised as supporting cast in the imperial drama of

Everest, a boisterous cartoon of a man, a high-altitude roisterer. He was shrewder than that. His Himalayan career spanned the rich but little known period from the 1890s to the years immediately after the Great War. In the popular imagination, Everest was a step into the unknown, but mountaineering in the Himalaya did not start with Everest. By 1922, leading the first full attempt on Everest, Charlie Bruce had thirty years’ experience of the world’s highest mountains and the challenges peculiar to them: their scale and extreme altitude. There had been decades of thought and debate about the pros and cons on a host of issues: the problems of hypoxia, diet and equipment, the debate over enlisting guides from the Alps or relying on local men, something Bruce favoured. As a soldier stationed in the Himalaya and a member of the Alpine Club, Bruce was in the right place at the right time. As a consequence, he came to know almost all the small cast of unusual characters who set the stage for Everest.

He took up climbing as a young officer in the mid 1880s, when the

ethical framework that underpins mountaineering emerged for the first time in its modern form. Put simply, climbers needed to address a fundamental question: what was mountaineering for? Should it serve some wider, moral or scientific purpose or was it simply an end in itself? The activity had emerged in the late eighteenth century on a wave of Romanticism, scientific enquiry and an adventurous extension to the grand tour. Men, and women too, could make a name for themselves by scrambling up a peak: Victorian ‘selfie’ culture. This self-regard dismayed someone like John Ruskin, who felt the aesthetic glory of mountains was compromised by the antics of tourists. When the Alpine Club was formed in 1857, staking an interest in the world of science, Charles Dickens mocked its pretensions:

the scaling of such heights as the Schreckhorn, the Eiger, and the Matterhorn contributed about as much to the advancement of science as would a club of young gentlemen who should undertake to bestride all the weather-cocks of all the cathedral spires in the United Kingdom.

The scientist John Tyndall, whose work on radiant heat is one of the cornerstones of our understanding of climate science, was also a leading mountaineer, in 1861 making the first ascent of the much-prized Weisshorn, a peak near Zermatt in the Swiss Alps. He was also an early member of the Alpine Club but a year after the Weisshorn, having just become vice president, he resigned his membership, infuriated by a light-hearted paper by the young Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, who joked how science was merely an adjunct to the serious business of mountaineering. After the Matterhorn disaster of 1865, when four men, including the son of the Marquess of Queensbury, fell to their deaths while descending from the summit, the air of disapproval became a storm of protest. It wasn’t just an accident; ‘it was the accident’, in the words of an editor of the Alpine Journal, after which alpinists ‘went about under a sort of dark shade, looked on with scarcely disguised contempt by the world of ordinary travellers’.

The impact on the leader of that Matterhorn climb, Edward Whymper,

was no less profound. Alpinism had, almost by chance, lifted him out of humble social origins, just as science did for John Tyndall. After the Matterhorn, his excitement and energy for mountaineering congealed; he couldn’t see any value in the innovations and developments within the sport that followed his glory years. After the Matterhorn, his adventures were freighted with heavy purposes: scientific expeditions to Greenland and then Peru, where he made the first ascent of Chimborazo. That mountain is still closely associated with Alexander von Humboldt, who was the inspiration for almost every significant figure in nineteenth-century scientific exploration, including Charles Darwin. If mountaineering had a purpose, it surely lay, for Edward Whymper, within the learned and socially prestigious circumference of Humboldt. The bonus, for a man who spent his working life in publishing, was the prospect of a hefty and indispensable book at the end of it.

After exploring the Arctic, the Himalaya would have been a logical next

step for Whymper, not least because of his strong family ties there. His brother Henry trained as a brewer and then left for India to work at the new Murree Brewery in the Pir Panjal mountains north of Rawalpindi, on the road to Kashmir. Edward had a shareholding in the company, and Henry found jobs in Murree for their brothers Joseph and Samuel. Another brother, Frank, worked for the post office, finishing his career as postmaster general in Mumbai. Joseph later moved to Mussoorie, the hill station where George Everest had built his house, some thirty kilometres north of Dehra Dun and the headquarters of the Indian Survey Department. Here he founded the Crown Brewery, where Samuel also worked for a while, before moving on to do similar work at Naini Tal, within sight of some of the Garhwal’s grandest mountains: Kamet, Trisul and Nanda Devi. All three of these peaks, made available as the East India Company spread north, were early objectives for Himalayan pioneers, but Whymper was not among them. His nephew Robert later said that Whymper had contemplated an attempt on Everest, whose primacy suited his ambition, but such notions were ‘abandoned as far too expensive’. Whymper had little of the romantic in him: an expedition to Chimborazo made more economic sense. Despite building up a large collection of material on India, and despite his sisters travelling there to visit their brothers, Whymper, the most famous climber of his age, never even saw the Himalaya.

For Humboldt himself, the opening up of the Himalaya came too late,

despite his fervent ambition to travel there, and perhaps emulate his attempt on Chimborazo: ‘nothing in my life has filled me with a more intense regret,’ he wrote towards the end of his life, which came in 1859. His ambitions were transferred to the small army of young explorers he supported, an ageing spider at the centre of a web of correspondents feeding him data as he struggled to finish Cosmos, his colossal work on the natural world. In the 1840s, he had helped his friend Joseph Dalton Hooker, using his London contacts to generate financial support for Hooker’s travels in the eastern Himalaya. By the mid 1850s, Kashmir, and the southern approaches to Nanga Parbat, had also come under the control of the East India Company, and it would fall to further protégés of Humboldt to make the first attempt on a significant Himalayan peak just for the sake of it, in the course of a remarkable but ultimately tragic three-year expedition.

Humboldt called them the ‘shamrock’, three – of five – Bavarian

brothers, Hermann, Adolf and Robert Schlagintweit, sons of a Munich ophthalmologist, Joseph Schlagintweit. Hermann was the oldest, born in 1826, but still only in his late 20s when the three of them left for India in 1854. The three had published works on the geography and geology of the Alps and in their Alpine travels come close to making the first ascent of Monte Rosa, second highest mountain in Western Europe. These were mountaineers from alpinism’s Golden Age, the only ones from that era to make it to the Himalaya. They did so with Humboldt’s support and his contacts with the East India Company. Their stated mission was the magnetic survey of India, the earth’s magnetic field being a subject close to Humboldt’s heart. They would bring home with them a vast treasure of geological, zoological and botanical specimens, theories on glaciology, capable watercolours of the mountains, as well as a great deal of ethnographic material, enough to launch their youngest brother, Emil Schlagintweit, on a lifelong career as a Tibet scholar. Charles Darwin later wrote to them seeking knowledge on the breeding patterns of the yak, after the brothers spoke at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Dublin in September 1857.

The brothers travelled widely in the Himalaya, often independently of

each other. In the spring of 1855, Hermann left Calcutta alone, headed for Darjeeling, hoping to follow the Singalila ridge towards Kangchenjunga, a mountain firmly planted in the Western imagination, like the craze for rhododendrons, by Hooker. Adolf and Robert, meanwhile, set off for Kumaon. While Robert waited in the Johar valley, Adolf travelled up the Pindari glacier. Although capable and adventurous travellers, the Schlagintweits were often following in a pioneer’s footsteps: to be reunited with his brother, Adolf made the second crossing of Traill’s Pass, linking the Pindari glacier to the village of Milam – not the first, but no less challenging for that. At Milam they hired the future pundits Nain and Mani Singh before crossing the border into Tibet (disguised as Buddhist pilgrims to escape arrest), to reach Gartok, the trading encampment on the banks of the Indus, the first Europeans to do so since William Moorcroft in 1812. British naturalists had passed through the region more recently, taking advantage of the greater access won with the conclusion of the Sikh Wars; Richard Strachey, brother of Henry and John, for example, after collecting specimens in Kumoan, crossed into Tibet and visited the sacred Lake Manasarovar.

Where Adolf and Robert Schlagintweit were truly innovative was in their

quixotic tilt at a summit on their way back south from Tibet, having been rumbled by the authorities in Gartok and expelled. From above the Sutlej valley, the northern view of Garhwal is dominated by the triangular mass of Kamet, 7,756 metres high, a massif, then commonly known as Ibi Garmin, identified and crudely measured by Strachey in 1848. Adolf and Robert decided to explore this group while returning to India and spent over two weeks camped at 5,200 metres under the mountain. They made one determined attempt on the summit from a camp at around 6,000 metres and reached a point some 800 metres higher. As the twentieth-century mountaineer Charles Meade showed during his own exploration of Kamet, the brothers had in fact been on the wrong mountain, attempting Kamet’s near neighbour, which rises on the other side of what is known as Meade’s Col. Anyone without a map, which didn’t exist in 1855, setting off for Kamet from the north, might make the same mistake. This second peak, known today as Abi Garmin, flattens itself against its higher, southerly neighbour Kamet, merging altogether in the middle of the day. The brothers took a barometric reading to calculate their high point at 6,778 metres, an altitude regarded for many years as a comfortable record. The discovery in 1999 of haunting and well-preserved mummies of Inca child sacrifices left five hundred years before on the summit of Llullaillaco, on the border between Chile and Argentina at an altitude of over 6,700 metres, has prompted a reconsideration of such records. While there is no physical evidence of humans reaching the summit of the higher Andean peak of Aconcagua, 6,961 metres, it’s a distinct possibility. Given that Tibetan yak herders routinely take their animals above 6,000 metres, it’s logical that Andean people reached similar altitudes.

The scale of the Schlagintweits’ work in the Himalaya, in the pattern of

Humboldt, won them many admirers on their return. The fate of Adolf, who disappeared after electing to travel home overland and separately from his brothers, only added spice to their reputation. The Indian authorities, including Richard Strachey’s brother Henry, took great trouble to discover Adolf ’s fate: he had been beheaded without trial in Kashgar, accused of being a Chinese spy. His head was eventually recovered in 1859 by a Kazakh soldier and scholar, Shoqan Walikhanov, inspiration for Rudyard Kipling in his short story ‘The Man Who Would Be King’. While their work was published in important British journals, the multivolume record of their travels was not translated, and the Schlagintweits faded from view in the English-speaking world, their mountaineering exploit a spontaneous adventure hidden behind a forest of academic detail.

In the years after, the Survey of India expanded its work across the

Himalaya and Karakoram, as we have seen, claiming a number of summits along the way, but just as in the Alps or the Caucasus, where military surveyors reached high vantage points, the purpose was information, not sport. The first Himalayan expedition dedicated purely to mountaineering had to wait for another twenty-five years. The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was cited by contemporary alpinists as one explanation for the pause; there were also many exploratory challenges remaining in the Alps in the 1860s. As rail networks robbed the Alps of their wildness, alpinists began visiting more remote ranges, like the Caucasus, which provided a useful laboratory for the Himalaya. With Britain’s grip on India extending deeper into the mountains, access to the Himalaya became easier.

In February 1883, a freshly minted barrister called William Woodman

Graham arrived in Mumbai with the Swiss guide Josef Imboden. It’s somehow appropriate that this progenitor of Himalayan climbing should be such an enigma, a man whose reputation hovers between adventurer, maverick and fraud. Graham’s Alpine experience was deep, despite his years, and yet the Alpine Club had, the previous December, blackballed him. This was surprisingly common at the time, and often personal, but in this case, the vote against was overwhelming. The explanation remains uncertain, but that summer Graham had bagged the first ascent of a dramatic and much prized granite tower above the mountain town of Chamonix called the Dent du Géant. In doing so, he relied on some shameful ironmongery and fixed ropes placed by an Italian team. Graham hadn’t quite shot the fox, but he’d stood on the shoulders of men who had.

Others might have taken it personally, but Graham didn’t hesitate to offer

the Alpine Journal a full account of his Himalayan expedition, which he read to an audience at the Royal Geographical Society. The story he told was impressive, a sustained campaign over several months that saw him start in the Kangchenjunga region north of Darjeeling, move on to Garhwal for the summer and then return to Sikkim in the autumn. His guide Imboden returned after the first leg feverish and homesick, finding the mountains too wintry for climbing. In his place came Emil Boss, proprietor of the Bear Hotel in the Swiss village of Grindelwald, famous for its proximity to the Eiger, with the guide Ulrich Kaufmann. The two men had almost climbed Mount Cook in New Zealand the year before and were a formidable pair. In Garhwal, travelling in the monsoon, they were plagued with leeches, from which a French member of the Alpine Club they picked up on their travels, a Monsieur Décle, fled in horror. The plan was to climb Nanda Devi, highest mountain wholly within India, but after a spirited effort at accessing the formidable Rishiganga Gorge, Graham had to settle for a strong attempt on Dunagiri, reaching a height of almost 7,000 metres, some 150 metres short of the summit, before worsening weather drove him and Boss down. He also claimed a mountain that surveyors had dubbed A21, later known as Changabang. The idea Graham might have climbed this notoriously difficult peak was laughed out of court; it was finally done in 1974, with all the advantages of modern equipment and techniques. It was likely a case of mistaken identity, as Graham tried to square an indifferent map with the country as he experienced it.

Back in Darjeeling, he reunited with his ‘sirdar’, meaning ‘boss’, a

‘sturdy, honest Tibetan’ called Gaga, who had organised his porters that spring, and in early October, from a camp at around 5,600 metres, Graham said he came within ten or twelve metres of the summit of Kabru, one of Kangchenjunga’s mightier neighbours. Kauffman, ‘one of the fastest step-cutters living’, had managed to climb its final steep ice slope only because it was covered with a skin of frozen snow. The summit itself was ‘little more than a pillar of ice’, but too hard and steep to overcome. They were back in camp late in the evening having, on the face of it, come within a hair’s breadth of climbing a peak of 7,412 metres, almost certainly the highest any human had been before.

Graham’s lecture on his experiences to the Royal Geographical Society

was full of incident but laconic; Joseph Hooker, now in his late sixties and in the audience, didn’t much care for this young upstart and challenged Graham’s claim that the altitude hadn’t bothered him much. Hooker was sceptical, having himself been unable to move at such heights without ‘a hoop of iron’ around his heart. Graham also included some sharp observations about the quality of maps being produced by the Survey of India. It pained him, allowing for the hospitality he’d received, ‘but what can I say when we found one whole range omitted, glaciers portrayed where trees of 4 ft. thickness are growing … ’ He had come across another traveller near Nanda Devi who described the map they were both using as ‘beautifully inaccurate’. His fellow climber Emil Boss wasn’t just an hotelier; he was a captain in the Swiss army, which produced maps of Switzerland that were second to none. The day after Graham’s lecture, Boss spoke at the Alpine Club. While the Survey’s latest map of Sikkim was admirable, he said, that of Garhwal was a work of the imagination. There had been a long collaboration between mountaineers and military authorities in the preparation of accurate mountain maps. The offer was there for officers of the Indian Survey Department to come to Switzerland to get some Alpine training. Douglas Freshfield, a leading member of the Alpine Club and one of those alpinists spreading the gospel of mountaineering beyond Europe, then spoke in support of William Henry Johnson, a humbly born surveyor whose idea of a Himalayan Club similar to the Alpine Club had been dismissed by complacent Indian authorities.

If the criticism was meant to be constructive, the Indian Survey

Department didn’t take it that way. An anonymous correspondent, describing himself as ‘for nearly 30 years a wanderer in the Himalayas’, wrote a damning dismissal of Graham’s claim to have almost climbed Kabru, which was published in the Allahabad newspaper the Pioneer, where Rudyard Kipling would shortly be working. Letters to the paper quickly followed, from the ‘Indian school of mountaineers’, speaking up for the Survey of India and pouring scorn on Graham. If doughty Tibetans and Sherpas at Darjeeling said it was impossible, then so it must be. Graham, they claimed, had probably confused Kabru with Kabur, a foothill on the approach march, a suggestion designed to insult. Freshfield dismantled the Pioneer’s arguments, reiterated that offers of help were well meant and, in a nod to the Great Game, drew unfavourable comparisons between the nanny-like attitudes of the Indian authorities and the cheerful laissez-faire of the Russians. Graham himself remained silent and soon slipped from view. A rumour surfaced that having suffered some kind of financial disaster he had left for America to become, some said, a cowboy. In 1910 he resurfaced as vice consul in the Mexican city of Durango, a blurry face captured in a few faded cuttings from Mexican newspapers, like a character from a Graham Greene novel, the veneer of his position barely concealing what must have been quite a story, and one we will likely never know.

It’s sometimes claimed the mountaineering ‘establishment’ turned its

back on Graham, but this was far from the case. Douglas Freshfield maintained his support, joined by almost all those alpinists who made their way to Sikkim in the years before the Great War. Those mountaineers who did dismiss Graham’s claims usually had a dog in the fight, like William Hunter Workman, husband of the indomitable New England heiress and explorer, Fanny Bullock Workman. His own, rather creaky claim to the world altitude record, set in 1903 in the Karakoram, relied on Graham’s being discounted. One of the few members of the Alpine Club to express doubts about Graham’s climb, in public at least, was the illustrious Sir Martin Conway: art historian, writer and like the Workmans a dedicated self-promoter. Conway also had a claim to the altitude record, having reached 6,904 metres on Baltoro Kangri during his 1892 expedition to the Karakoram. He dismissed Graham’s ascent while promoting his own record in an entry he wrote on mountaineering for the 1908 Encyclopaedia of Sport. Douglas Freshfield, by then an old-stager of Himalayan exploration himself, locked horns with Conway in the pages of the Alpine Journal, and in the 1911 edition Conway recanted.

Perhaps Graham’s most potent detractor was Kenneth Mason, decorated

soldier and celebrated geographer, a Survey of India man to his fingertips and later professor of geography at Oxford. His history of Himalayan exploration and mountaineering, first published in 1955, some seventy years after Graham’s expedition, was the Everest of its type and remains influential even now. Mason’s dismissal of William Woodman Graham from the record books was made with the indulgent patience of a parent removing a precious heirloom from their toddler’s sticky fingers. Mason had been inspired as a boy by the exploratory travels of Francis Younghusband, ‘the last imperial adventurer’, who, in 1893, had cooked up the notion of attempting Everest with Charlie Bruce on a polo field in Chitral. (Or at least, that was the yarn. Younghusband had forgotten all about it when Bruce reminded him decades later. That didn’t stop them using the story in a Daily Telegraph puff piece about Everest: ‘if it brings in another twenty quid to the Expedition funds that is all to the good’.) To Mason, and the long sequence of surveyors before him, mountaineering ought to be well organised, productive and useful. It should advance knowledge and fill libraries with maps and catalogues. Mountaineering was not a game, to be played for its own sake; blanks on the map were there to be filled, not relished.

Mason’s perspective was philosophically different from that of many

mountaineers, reflecting a schism, begun in the 1880s, whose consequences would percolate through to attempts on Everest, even up to its ascent in 1953. At its extreme, these differences became polar opposites. One side put result ahead of method; the other did precisely the reverse: how you climbed was more important than reaching a summit. This alternative view saw mountaineering as its own reward, the game for its own sake, producing a more whimsical and slighter literary output. Some in authority found this self-indulgent, believing that risking your neck required a higher purpose, especially a patriotic one. They preferred large expeditions with heavy financial backing, invested with the prestige of institutions, with purposes beyond mountaineering: scientific and geographical. They delighted in packed lecture halls and weighty books, the sort of expedition to advance a career.

That was certainly true for Martin Conway. He was a strong alpinist,

once climbing the Matterhorn from Zermatt and still getting back in time for afternoon tea, but, like most things, climbing eventually bored him. His 1892 expedition to the Karakoram was modelled on Whymper’s Peruvian adventure after the viceroy of India, Lord Lansdowne, suggested he delete the phrase ‘mountaineering party’ from his request for a permit and replace it with ‘a party of exploration’, since ‘mountaineering is a sport and couldn’t be taken official notice of, at any rate in my case’. He took with him Matthias Zurbriggen, the great guide from the Swiss village of Saas-Fee, later hired by William and Fanny Workman, as well as the young Charles Bruce as transport officer, and the fiery socialist Oscar Eckenstein, an exceptional climber, who introduced Conway to crampons, then rather frowned on. Together, Conway, Bruce and Eckenstein explored the Hispar and Biafo glaciers, which together make the longest glacier passage, 120 kilometres, outside the Arctic regions. Eckenstein then left the expedition after one political argument too many, starting an enduring feud. Conway moved on to the Baltoro glacier, where he attempted a peak he dubbed Golden Throne, now known as Baltoro Kangri. Knighted in 1895, ostensibly for his efforts in mapping the Karakoram, he later became Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge and a ‘coalition coupon’ member of parliament in the 1918 general election. When his peerage was announced, Punch carried a cartoon of ‘The Climber’, and Conway weaved an ice axe into his coat of arms. But he never went to the Himalaya again.

‘There are three great Himalayan views familiar to English dwellers in

India’, Bruce wrote. ‘Kangchenjunga from Darjeeling, Nanda Devi and Trisul from Naini Tal, and Nanga Parbat from the Murree hills.’ The contrast between Conway’s expedition in the Karakoram and Fred Mummery’s attempt on Nanga Parbat in the summer of 1895 could not have been starker. This was the first time anyone had tried a mountain of such scale and great height, and it happened almost at the start of Himalayan mountaineering, as though the Wright brothers had set off across the Atlantic a week after Kitty Hawk.

From the Deosai plateau, south-east of the mountain, the impression is

even starker; the south face, rising above the Rupal valley, is a vast white shining wall. One of the first Europeans to view Nanga Parbat was the traveller Godfrey Thomas Vigne, welcomed there in the late 1830s by the raja of Baltistan, Ahmed Shah, as the first Englishman he had met. Vigne’s book, the first comprehensive Western account of the region and an instant classic, described the peak from this angle as ‘the most awful and magnificent sight in all the Himalaya’. The Schlagintweits passed Nanga Parbat on their travels in the mid 1850s, translating its Sanskrit name as ‘naked mountain’, capturing in a watercolour how its powerful bulk dominates Kashmir. Many famous Himalayan peaks are concealed from view by intervening ranges: Nanga Parbat is not one of them. From the banks of the Indus, which flows close by, to its summit is a height gain of seven kilometres.

To call it an expedition is too grand. It was a climbing party, a collection

of friends from the Alps. In camp with Charlie Bruce, watching the sheep being butchered, was the Yorkshireman Geoffrey Hastings, strong, quietly determined, the trusty lieutenant type. He ran a worsted business in Bradford. In the Alps, he was famous for producing welcome delicacies from his rucksack, like bacon or champagne, at the most opportune moments. Having injured his foot a few days before, Hastings spent much of this expedition roaming bandit country trying to buy food. Last into camp were Norman Collie and Fred Mummery. Collie was tall and distinguished, a chemist at University College, London working with his boss, the future Nobel Prizewinner William Ramsay, to discover the noble gases. Some mountaineering contemporaries thought him austere, but students loved him, appreciating his quietly sarcastic wit and profitable racing tips. He had wide-ranging tastes, loved claret, was an expert on Japanese carving and could blow his own glass flasks without removing his pipe from his mouth. In Norway, where he did a great deal of exploratory mountaineering, the combination of pipe and deerstalker meant Collie was often mistaken for Sherlock Holmes.

The mountaineering star of this group was undoubtedly Albert Frederick

Mummery. Approaching his fortieth birthday, Mummery came from Dover where his father owned a tannery and served as mayor. Although his reputation has endured into the twenty-first century, we know little about his early life: family papers were lost in a German bombing raid. We do know he developed a perinatal weakness of the spine and was badly short-sighted. Classed as a sickly child, he was kept at home rather than sent away to school like most of his contemporaries. Bruce had been to Harrow, where he set a record for the number of times he was beaten, Collie to Charterhouse. Mummery never forged the connections they made, or left a paper trail. Generally indifferent to posterity, he was self-conscious about his appearance and hated having his picture taken. Yet Collie did get a snap of Mummery on Nanga Parbat, sitting next to Bruce. Bruce, nicknamed ‘Bruiser’, sits with legs splayed, arms resting on his knees, his neck, swollen with mumps, adding to the general impression of a bulldog in a pith helmet. (‘I think,’ he once wrote, ‘I have run away from every tribe on the Frontier at one time or another.’) Mummery, cunningly, wears two floppy hats, with snow sandwiched between them, a solution to the stifling heat of a Himalayan summer’s day. His thin limbs are gathered to his body like those of a wary spider, thick spectacles balanced on a beaky nose, his chin arrow-shaped, the overall impression that of an attenuated Mr Magoo.

As a sixteen-year-old, on a family holiday to Switzerland, Mummery had

seen the Matterhorn ‘shining in all the calm majesty of a September moon’ and instantly fallen in love. He served a patient apprenticeship, learned his craft and discovered how to cope with the limits of his physical ability. Eight years later, climbing with his guide and great friend Alexander Burgener, he made the first ascent of the Matterhorn’s Zmutt ridge, the first of many important new routes in the Alps that provoked admiration but also jealousy. His first application to the Alpine Club, supported by Douglas Freshfield, was blackballed anonymously at the sly instigation of a Foreign Office civil servant called William Edward Davidson. Mummery was plunged into a spiral of self-doubt and almost quit climbing alogether.

In the 1880s, during this mountain furlough, he developed what was

clearly an original intellectual life. His friends, highly regarded academics like Collie, thought Mummery an incisive thinker. He had, according to Martin Conway, ‘the same original, unfettered freshness of mind, with which he approached a mountain’. His great passion, beyond mountains, was economics. Many climbing historians have judged this aspect of Mummery’s life as an interesting aside. In fact, his ideas were more than merely interesting: they were influential. With John Atkinson Hobson, he co-authored a treatise on the negative impact of under-consumption, The Physiology of Industry, a work that influenced John Maynard Keynes. Mummery wasn’t Hobson’s sounding board; it was Mummery who convinced Hobson of the dangers of austerity. (There’s no evidence Mummery shared Hobson’s antisemitism.)

Mummery’s fascination with unpicking complex human behaviour

extended to mountaineering. When he returned to the mountains, he applied his curious mind to unravelling his sport’s multifaceted appeal. No one before Mummery, in his book My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus, had articulated so shrewdly how the sport’s core principles might best be practised. While equipment and knowledge have developed exponentially since Mummery’s era, leading modern climbers still draw on these ideals. Reinhold Messner, the first person to climb Everest alone and without bottled oxygen, with his own deep relationship with Nanga Parbat, the place where his brother Günther died and where he did his hardest climb, once described Fred Mummery as perhaps the most important climber in history.

Mummery’s key insight was the importance of self-reliance, ‘the great

truth’ of alpinists ‘trusting exclusively to their own skill and knowledge’. He stopped climbing with guides and refused those aids that diminished the challenge. He upended the status quo, climbing difficult routes with women, to the annoyance of more conservative elements in the Alpine Club. ‘The essence of the sport,’ Mummery wrote, ‘lies not in ascending a peak, but in struggling with and overcoming difficulties.’ Theodolites bored him. Large-scale expeditions didn’t interest Mummery either; he turned down the offer of going to the Karakoram with Martin Conway. Climbing was supposed to be fun: ‘unmixed play’ is Mummery’s phrase. One of his friends wrote: ‘He was always happy on a mountain, and that is what made him such a delightful companion.’ It’s not surprising that a hard-bitten professional like Edward Whymper, for whom climbing was business, despised him. Davidson, Mummery’s Foreign Office nemesis, was equally dismissive, writing to Whymper:

I don’t fancy either that Mummery can spare the time or the money requisite for success in such a difficult and distant field of exploration and therefore do not anticipate any results of importance from it.

Mummery chose Nanga Parbat for its size and accessibility; he and his friends didn’t have the time or funds for a longer campaign. He wrote to Bruce, already an expert in Himalayan travel, to supply a couple of Gurkhas, strong lads to support the climbers in their efforts, ‘who can speak English and the native lingo’. Then, in his good-natured, spur-of-the-moment way, he invited Bruce along when they met in Kashmir. There were no learned institutions offering grants or commercial sponsorship. They were simply on holiday. The letters Mummery sent to his wife – ‘I think we are bound to have the summit,’ he told her, ‘as it is merely a matter of steady training to get our wind in order’ – are full of his breezy optimism, prompting the charge of naïvety from historians. Yet that was the point for Mummery: to find out things that weren’t known, and test limits so far not reached. There was no point being disheartened.

The team, however, was undoubtedly depleted. Hastings was injured.

Collie was ill. Bruce had recovered from his mumps, but his leave was over and he was obliged to return to his regiment. Undaunted, Mummery made a final attempt with one of Bruce’s Gurkhas, Raghubir Thapa, climbing a series of difficult pillars of rock in the middle of Nanga Parbat’s colossal Diamir face. They reached over 6,000 metres before Raghubir called a halt. When in 1939, an Austrian party that included one of the first people to climb the Eiger’s famous north face, Heinrich Harrer, tried the same route, they found a piece of firewood at the top of the first rock rib Mummery climbed. They described the climbing as continuously difficult; Mummery had not set an altitude record on Nanga Parbat but he and Raghubir had done the hardest climbing achieved in the Himalaya for decades to come.

A few days later, while Collie and Hastings took the long way round with

the bulk of the expedition’s equipment, Mummery set off to find a short cut to the Rakhiot valley, below Nanga Parbat’s northern flank, the only face of the mountain they hadn’t yet seen. With him went the two Gurkhas, Raghubir and Goman Singh. They never arrived and were never seen again, most likely buried in an avalanche. Mummery had reassured Collie that he wouldn’t risk anything for the sake of a pass, but he had risked everything – and lost. These were the first climbing deaths in the Himalaya; it was grimly prophetic that two Asian men suborned into the enterprise should be among the casualties. Douglas Freshfield told the Alpine Club: Mummery’s ‘untimely death is a grievous loss to the Club’. Edward Whymper underlined these words in his copy of the Alpine Journal and wrote in the margin: ‘I do not agree.’ There were difficulties with the Indian authorities after the expedition and Geoffrey Hastings felt obliged to resign from the Alpine Club. Norman Collie never went to the Himalaya again. In 1929, an English army officer who crossed the Mazeno pass, as Mummery had done, met an old man from the nearby village of Chilas who remembered the impressive feats of the English ‘lat’, or lord, a distant echo of an enterprise years ahead of its time. Whatever Whymper thought, it would be Mummery’s legacy, and not his, that inspired the future.

*

It’s widely held that the Nanga Parbat catastrophe turned mountaineers against the lightweight style of Himalayan expedition, certainly until the 1930s. That simply isn’t true. Lightweight ventures continued without pause alongside larger, more expensive ‘national’ expeditions, with as much if not greater success. Of these less formal ventures, historians have been drawn, moth-like, to the more garish flames that lit up Himalayan expeditions after Mummery’s, like that of Aleister Crowley, the self-styled ‘wickedest man in the world’ and a good friend of Oscar Eckenstein. They climbed together in the Alps, and Crowley was even proposed as a member of the Alpine Club, nominated by Norman Collie, who liked a joke, and Sir Martin Conway, whose support is simply baffling. His application disappeared before a vote was held, and in later years Crowley roundly mocked the Alpine Club, complacent and conservative in comparison to a man like Eckenstein. He and Crowley put together an attempt on K2 in 1902, which included the talented Austrian Heinrich Pfannl. Although some useful exploration was done, and the mountain attempted, the expedition was ill fated. Eckenstein was briefly arrested as a spy, possibly at the instigation of Conway, while Crowley brandished his pistol at another expedition member, forcing him to quit. A second expedition, to Kangchenjunga in 1905, destroyed Crowley’s reputation as a mountaineer. There was an argument at 6,400 metres over whether to camp or retreat late in the day. Among those who foolishly chose the latter option, three local men died in an avalanche. Crowley, meanwhile, remained in his tent sipping tea, technically correct in his judgment, but callously indifferent to the fate of his companions. In 1923, when Raoul Loveday, an Oxford friend of Raymond Greene’s, died at Crowley’s occult ‘anti-monastery’ on Sicily, Greene went there to track Crowley down for an explanation, finding a corpulent, peevish man; he thought him rather silly. Greene expected exciting stories of drugs and sex; all Crowley wanted to discuss was rock climbing.

The contrast between Crowley and Eckenstein’s expedition and that of

Prince Luigi Amedeo di Savoia-Aosta, Duke of the Abruzzi, could not have been greater. Abruzzi, grandson of the first king of Italy, had immense wealth and had used it in lavishly funded expeditions to Mount St Elias, on the border of Alaska and the Yukon, the Arctic and the Ruwenzori. The hallmark of these expeditions was their scale, and Abruzzi’s attempt on K2 in 1909 was no exception; it began an enduring fascination with K2 in Italy that reached its climax with the first ascent in 1954. Abruzzi brought with him seven Italian guides and porters, the guides all having Himalayan experience, six tonnes of equipment requiring five hundred local porters, all of which allowed his team to spend months in the field. ‘What Whymper and Conway had shaped,’ wrote the mountaineering historian Walt Unsworth, ‘the Duke brought to perfection.’ Abruzzi’s team made a spirited effort on what would become the route of first ascent, the south-east ridge, known more commonly as the Abruzzi spur, reaching 6,710 metres; his deep pockets meant the expedition was beautifully recorded. Doctor and researcher Filippo de Filippi, who worked in London during the Great War, wrote the official account, moving hurriedly past Eckenstein’s earlier attempt, but catching the almost incomprehensible scale of the Karakoram, ‘so vast that one cannot get an impression of the whole at any one moment; the eye can take in only single portions.’ Luckily for Abruzzi, he had with him an exceptional eye, that of Vittorio Sella, who had been round Kangchenjunga with Douglas Freshfield as well as travelling with Abruzzi on his other expeditions. Sella remains one of the very best mountain photographers in history, capturing images that recorded the architectural structure of the mountains but also something ineffable, something of their spiritual power. His photographs would inform and inspire generations of mountaineers to come. Nor was Sella the only Italian photographing the Himalaya; the Piedmontese climber Mario Piacenza made the first ascent of the Kashmiri 7,000-metre peak Kun in 1913, in the same year touring Sikkim with his camera. But Sella was the master.

While Abruzzi was on K2 with his expensive pantechnicon, a very

different kind of venture was unfolding eighty kilometres to the south-east. Three English mountain explorers crossed the Saltoro Pass for the first time and looked down on what would become known as the Siachen glacier, Siachen meaning ‘abundance of roses’, for which the Saltoro region is famous. Given the continuing and bloody high-altitude conflict between India and Pakistan for this glacier, it’s a melancholy name, but likely the invention of one of those Englishmen, Tom Longstaff, whose piratical red beard became a common sight in the Himalaya in the years before the Great War. Longstaff was the son of Llewellyn Longstaff, a wealthy businessman who paid for the Discovery, the boat Robert Falcon Scott and his crew sailed to Antarctica. Free of the need to work and inspired by William Graham, Longstaff dedicated himself to mountain exploration, explaining that his medical degree was simply a way to make himself more useful on expeditions. A dedicated botanist, he taught himself a working knowledge of the languages he would need and often travelled only in the company of locals.

Longstaff ’s approach was the antithesis of Abruzzi’s. His first expedition

to the Himalaya lasted six months, to start with exploring and climbing in Garhwal, attempting Nanda Devi East and Nanda Kot with the brothers Alexis and Henri Brocherel, mountain guides from Courmayeur, on the Italian side of Mont Blanc. Then he took advantage of an invitation from Charles Sherring, deputy commissioner at Almora, to join him on a journey through Tibet, near the north-west corner of Nepal, including a daring attempt on Gurla Mandhata, the mountain that towers above the southern shore of the lake Manasarovar.

We were like Cortez, [he wrote,] seeing the Pacific for the first time; for no other eyes had seen these peaks from such a height spread as a continuous range.

He and the Brocherels reached 7,300 metres before turning back. All this he accomplished on a budget of less than a hundred pounds. Longstaff would be the inspiration for the famous names of lightweight mountaineering from the 1930s: Eric Shipton and H W Tilman chief among them.

Longstaff ’s great year in the Himalaya was 1907, the fiftieth anniversary

of the Alpine Club’s formation. He had hoped to join a reconnaissance of Everest, with Charles Bruce and the publisher Arnold Mumm, enjoying, like Younghusband, the patronage of Lord Curzon. Alas, the secretary of state for India Lord Morley disapproved of Curzon in general and Younghusband’s invasion of Tibet in particular, and vetoed the enterprise. Instead, the three men hired the two Brocherel brothers, Alexis and Henri, and travelled to Garhwal, where they failed, as Graham had done, to find a way through the Rishiganga gorge to Nanda Devi. With the Gurkha Karbir Budhathoki, Longstaff and the Brocherels did, however, climb Trisul, which was, for a few years at least, the highest mountain yet climbed, at 7,120 metres. On the day he reached the summit, Longstaff had managed to climb 1,800 metres from his top camp, a prodigious act of stamina.

In Sikkim that same year, two twenty-year-old Norwegian students, Carl

Wilhelm Rubenson and Ingvald Monrad-Aas, came close to reaching the summit of Kabru, just as Graham claimed to have done in 1883. Rubenson had some climbing experience, his partner Monrad-Aas none whatsoever. The energy of youth was enough, but strong autumn winds turned them back short of the top. When they outlined their experiences to the Alpine Club in London, they expressed their admiration for their Sherpa ‘coolies’, using the term of the era, who had supported them so well. Taking careful note was a thin man, ‘stooping and narrow chested’, according to the Everest climber George Mallory, his appearance ‘made grotesque by veritable gig-lamps of spectacles and a long pointed moustache’. His name was Alexander Kellas, and he contributed more than anyone before the Great War to our understanding of human physiology at altitude.

That Kellas remains unsung is not surprising. Like Mummery, he wasn’t

overly concerned about posterity, not for himself anyway. Unlike Mummery, he was shy, essentially a loner, and published little on his own account. He could write that ‘mountaineering, in its widest adaptation, is the most philosophical sport in the world’, and leave almost no trace of his own. He was born in Aberdeen in 1868; there are clues in his childhood to some underlying psychological illness that would trouble him most in his last years with auditory, paranoiac hallucinations. Perhaps it’s not surprising that he lived alone. He trained as a chemist and worked in the same laboratory as Norman Collie, but he was never a leading climber as Collie was, let alone Mummery. He was considered reliable rather than inspired at work and, feeling thwarted, took a job lecturing medical students at Middlesex Hospital. His mountain experience accreted slowly and then suddenly burst into flame when he travelled to Sikkim in 1907, the same year as Rubenson and Monrad-Aas. He took with him two Swiss guides, but on subsequent expeditions, and there were several, he took Sherpas instead, the Tibetan ethnic group who had arrived as migrants in the high mountains of eastern Nepal, including the Everest region of Khumbu, centuries earlier. Often climbing without a European partner, Kellas developed a deep affection for his Sherpa friends, equipped them well and became fascinated not only by their physiology but their culture too. If Kellas was not the first to admire the Sherpas, he became their most influential advocate. The biologist J B S Haldane knew Kellas, who was a friend of his father, J S Haldane, like Kellas another great self-experimenter. Haldane junior told a high-altitude symposium in Darjeeling in 1962:

some people hear voices at high altitudes. Dr Kellas also heard them at sea level … He said that in the mountains, when no other Europeans were there, he answered these voices, and his Sherpas had great confidence in a man who had long conversations with spirits at night.

He remained always sympathetic to local sensibilities, arguing publicly that Everest should be known by its local name: Chomolungma.

Alec Kellas’s greatest mountaineering achievement was his ascent in

1911 of Pauhunri in Sikkim. By then, he knew this stretch of the Himalaya as well as the hills of his native Scotland, having travelled back and forth across it several times in much the same way as the locals did, without a trace of the pomp or comfort imported with larger expeditions. Thanks to an error by the Survey of India, he never knew Pauhunri’s true height was 7,128 metres, a few metres higher than Trisul, meaning Kellas and not Longstaff once held the altitude record. The omission is almost irrelevant: it was his ideas that made Kellas a true pioneer. He recorded and measured as much as he could, trained local men as photographers and sent them to Everest. The use of guides was, he argued, unethical. He theorised about rates of ascent. Kellas believed that a human without supplementary oxygen could only climb three hundred feet (ninety metres) an hour near the summit of Everest, a figure largely proven when Reinhold Messner finally managed the feat in 1978. Arthur Hinks, the dry and often irritable secretary of the Mount Everest Committee wrote to Kellas: ‘no one perhaps in the world combines your enterprise as a mountaineer and your knowledge of physiology’.

As his researches deepened, he became increasingly obsessive and

unstable, as though he knew his time was short. He quit his job to focus on Everest. His final winter and spring were spent in frenzied activity, to the extent that when, in the summer of 1921, he joined a reconnaissance expedition in advance of the first attempt on Everest, he was already exhausted. The expedition’s food was poorly managed and several in the team came down with stomach problems that proved fatal for Kellas, who died on the high Tibetan plateau with none of his teammates near him. The expedition’s leader, the austere and disagreeable soldier Charles Howard-Bury, wrote: ‘It does not pay to send middle-aged men out to this country.’ John Noel, who filmed the 1924 expedition, when George Mallory was lost, had shared with Kellas the dream of reaching Everest. The British might have had a chance, he wrote, with ‘the combination of Kellas’ Himalayan knowledge and Mallory’s dash’. It was Mallory’s dash that would achieve immortality; the useful intelligence and open-mindedness of Alexander Kellas would slide from view.

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