Mountains and Men

By Leonard H. Robbins

Mountains and Men, first published in 1931, provides a detailed look at some of the first ascents (and attempted ascents) on the world's highest peaks: Mount Everest, K2, Denali, Aconcagua, Mount Erebus, The Matterhorn, Ruwenzori, and others. Descriptions of the climbers and their routes and equipment are given, as well as the dangers facing each expedition in their attempt to be the first to scale these treacherous mountains. Included are 25 pages of maps and photographs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Nov 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9781839740299

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© Red Kestrel Books 2019, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

MOUNTAINS AND MEN

BY

LEONARD H. ROBBINS

"A banner with the strange device, Excelsior!"

Mountains and Men was originally published in 1931 by Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc., New York.

• • •

To

RUTH, ANTHONY

AND ROME

Author’s Note

WHEN the jungles, the deserts, the polar wastes and the remote islands of our planet have given up their secrets to the explorers, there will still be mystery and wonder upon the untrodden summits of a thousand cloud-hung mountain peaks. A thousand? Yes, thousands. The really good ones are becoming quite well picked over, still there are thousands left, and not all of them are mere knobs, either. An exciting rumor says there may be peaks even greater than Mount Everest; the recent Dyhrenfurth Expedition, looking north from Jonsong Peak, may have seen two of them in a far-away unknown corner of Tibet. Dark hints of a most stimulating sort come also out of Yunnan Province in southern China. The noble pastime of big-mountain collecting has worlds of work yet to do.

Here are stories of some of the finest adventures in the annals of mountain climbing, and here is as gallant a company of men as can well be assembled between book covers. We follow the climbers, by their leave, to all of the continents, not forgetting Antarctica. We go with them to famous heights of Europe, to mysterious mountains of Africa, to the highest peaks of the Americas, and to, or toward, the three highest known summits of Asia and of the world.

Yet the author is abashed to find that he has left out mountaineers as bold as any he has named, and whole mountain ranges, including the Scandinavian. Concerning the superb Southern Alps of New Zealand and Wollaston’s mighty peak in New Guinea there are just two lines. There is little about the paradise of climbers in western Canada, and there is nothing at all on Colorado, Clingman’s Dome, Couching Lion, Chocorua, or the Catskills. What a book! Let it plead in defense that the everlasting hills are many and the climbers—bless them!—legion.

The temptation to make thrillers of these exploits has been studiously resisted. The truth is thrilling enough, and situations essentially dramatic need no dramatizing. The aim has been to show mountaineering as it is; its weeks of drudgery, hardship and disappointment along with its moments of triumph. Mountain books, Sir Martin Conway warns, may play the part of a cogwheel railway: by them the reader reaches the summit without learning much about the mountain. This book will ask the reader to do his bit in the hard work of climbing; and at the risk of being informative and unpopular, it will insist upon pausing to note such extraneous matters as sunsets, leopards, moonrises, yaks, rainbows, lions, primroses and avalanches along the way.

The material of the narratives has been gathered from the accounts of the climbers themselves. There can be no other source, for mountaineers do their work unobserved by stadium crowds and far from the keen eyes of news writers and radio announcers. Even after their best victories they often tell less than groundlings would eagerly hear. Some of the greatest climbers, Dr. Kellas, for example, have left scarcely any record of their toil.

The original reports of mountaineering, the fruit of vast outlays of effort in the field, constitute a library of joyous true adventure as absorbing as any tale produced by nimble imagination in an armchair. May this book send the reader to those greater books to share the enjoyment that earlier readers have found in them.

For permission to relate these stories of daring and endurance the author wishes to make grateful acknowledgment to the following explorers, climbers and publishers:

Mr. Douglas W. Freshfield, author of Round Kangchenjunga and The Explorations of the Caucasus: Longmans, Green & Company (Edward Arnold & Company, London).

Mr. Frank S. Smythe, member and correspondent of the Dyhrenfurth Kangchenjunga Expedition, and author of The Kangchenjunga Adventure: Little, Brown & Company (Victor Gollancz, Inc., London).

Signor Filippo De Filippi, historian of the mountain expeditions of H.R.H the Duke of the Abruzzi, and author of Karakoram and Western Himalaya and Ruwenzori: E. P. Dutton & Company (Constable & Company, London).

Mr. Belmore Browne, author of The Conquest of Mount McKinley: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

Charles Scribner’s Sons, publishers of The Ascent of Denali, by Dr. Hudson Stuck, and of The Highest Andes (Methuen & Company, London), by Edward A. Fitz Gerald.

Mr. Geoffrey Winthrop Young, author of On High Hills: E. P. Dutton & Company (Methuen & Company, London).

Senator Hiram Bingham, author of Inca Land: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Captain Albert H. MacCarthy and Mr. H. F. Lambart, of the Mount Logan Expedition of 1925.

D. Appleton & Company, publishers of Hours of Exercise in the Alps, by John Tyndall.

The J. B. Lippincott Company, publishers of The Heart of the Antarctic, by Sir Ernest Shackleton.

John Murray, London, publisher of Scrambles Amongst the Alps, by Edward Whymper.

Mr. Raye R. Platt, of the American Geographical Society.

The Mount Everest Committee.

Longmans, Green & Company (Edward Arnold & Company, London), publishers of Mount Everest: The Reconnaissance: 1921, Mount Everest: The Assault, 1922, and The Fight for Everest: 1924.

Captain John Noel, member and photographer of the Mount Everest expeditions of 1922 and 1924, and author of The Story of Everest: Little, Brown & Company.

Table of Contents

Contents

Author’s Note 4

Table of Contents 6

I. THE CLIMBERS 7

II. Kanchenjunga — DOUGLAS FRESHFIELD’S CIRCUIT 11

III. Kanchenjunga — AT GRIPS WITH THE TITAN 18

IV. K2—Mount Godwin Austen — A BIG-MOUNTAIN HUNTER 25

V. K2—Mount Godwin Austen — KING OF THE KARAKORAM 32

VI. Mount McKinley — THE PARKER-BROWNE ADVENTURE 38

VII. Mount McKinley — THE KNIFE-EDGE RIDGE 43

VIII. Mount McKinley — AN ARCHDEACON’S VACATION 48

IX. Mount McKinley — A THREE-MILE STAIRWAY 52

X. Mount McKinley — THE PIONEERS 56

XI. Aconcagua — CAPSTONE OF THE ANDES 57

XII. Aconcagua — ABOVE ALL AMERICA 62

XIII. Mount Erebus — ANTARCTIC MOUNTAINEERS 66

XIV. Ruwenzori — AN AGE-OLD MYSTERY 72

XV. Coropuna — A CLIMB IN INCA LAND 79

XVI. The Matterhorn — THIS AWFUL MOUNTAIN! 86

XVII. The Matterhorn — VICTORY-AND VENGEANCE 94

XVIII. The Weisshorn — A SCIENTIST’S EXERCISE 101

XIX. The Täschhorn — POET AND PRECIPICE 107

XX. Mount Logan — A WINTRY ORDEAL 112

XXI. Koshtantau — A TRAGEDY OF THE CAUCASUS 118

XXII. Mount Everest — CONTACT 125

XXIII. Mount Everest — STORMING THE HEIGHTS 133

XXIV. Mount Everest — THE HIGHEST CLIMB 139

Illustrations 144

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 167

I. THE CLIMBERS

HIGH on the side of the skyline ridge of a mountain peak a little dark object moves slowly across a patch of snow. Infinitesimal against the huge background of the ridge, it passes the snow and creeps out upon a slope of bare brown rock. The slope is as steep as any roof, and below its icy eaves a precipice falls sheer for thousands of feet.

Another small figure has halted at the first edge of the snow. Since early morning the two have been moving upward together, but now, in mid-afternoon, one goes on alone. Seen through the telescopes of watchers on a glacier far below, they become men; the second man is huddled and bent, as if in mortal distress.

Onward goes the first for two or three paces, crouching to withstand the onslaught of a savage gale, then pauses for a long minute, then goes a few paces more. Less than half a mile ahead of him and a scant nine hundred feet higher a tooth of ice-crusted rock juts into the sky. He gropes toward it, but slowly, all too slowly to make the short remaining distance even in a long day—and this day is swiftly sinking to black and deadly night. The watchers see the first man turn back.

The rock fang in the sky is the summit of Everest, highest mountain in the world. The two men have climbed higher than human beings have ever climbed before. They will return down the mountain and live. Within a few hours two companions of theirs will go perhaps higher on this supreme peak, but the second pair will never come back.

To Lieutenant-Colonel Norton and Dr. Somervell goes the credit for climbing highest of all men living today. Norton, when he turned back, had begun to lose his power of vision; down the last stage of the descent he was carried in other men’s arms. Somervell, had he tried to go another step toward the rock peak, must have suffocated, for his gasping throat had closed. Mallory and Irvine, who afterward may have passed their mark, were seen no more; they perished in ways that no one knows.

Such is the new mountain climbing that tempts man in the ice-locked heart of Asia, and such is man’s response. He has answered the challenge of the Alps, the Caucasus, the African ranges, the Andes and the Rockies, he has taken up the gauntlet of the mountain lords of the Arctic and the Antarctic, and one day he will win to Everest’s highest point, although the day may be far remote. He will not rest content so long as a spot on the surface of the lands of the earth dares him to set foot upon it. The human spirit is like that.

Comfort-loving people sometimes find it hard to understand the mountain climbers. Why should men quit the so-called security of ordinary life and go gladly to suffer cold and heat, hunger and thirst and blinding glare, to endure hardships paralleled only in war, and to defy death on heights where no breathing creature can long live?

Is it hope of fame that lures them upward? There is little fame for mountaineers save within their own small clan. For individual climbers there is even less fame in these new days when men assail mountains by squads and companies, with regiments of helpers to support them; nor is there any great fortune, any new power in human affairs. Then why do they do it?

Ask youth and the idealists. Why does the runner strain his heart to cross the tape a thin fifth of a second ahead of his rival, or the football player plunge headlong for a fall that he knows may break his limbs? Why does the electron hunter turn away the easy rewards of science and toil for the intangible? He might so much more profitably invent a toothpaste! Why do poets follow dreams that will make them no better off in the material prizes of the world, and pillar saints dwell through scorching summer and withering winter on their cheerless towers? Why, while we are asking, do people write books? Explain these singularities of the human spirit, and you can explain the climber’s passion for his mountains.

Excelsior! seems still to many of us a strange device, a mark of queerness—if, indeed, it does not mean merely a form of shredded poplar wood used in packing. Yet the roster of the Excelsior Society contains the names of some of the most sensible members of the most serious professions. John Tyndall was the leading physicist of his day. When he brought the intractable Weisshorn under his heel he was perfectly well acquainted with the laws of gravitation and the behavior of falling bodies. Of the same calling is Professor Parker, who, after surmounting many Canadian peaks, strove for three laborious seasons toward McKinley’s blizzard-lashed summit. Hiram Bingham, the first man to ascend Coropuna, is a historian and a statesman. The most ardent climber among the Belgians is also their king. A noted mountaineer of other days now occupies the Papal throne at Rome. One hears that he turns his eyes often toward the northern horizon, towards his Alps that he visits no more.

Whymper, of the Matterhorn, was an artist, as is Belmore Browne of McKinley. Mummery, of the fearful Grépon and the suicidal Zmutt Ridge, was an eminently practical business man. Somervell is a physician and a missionary, Geoffrey Winthrop Young an educator and a man of letters. Mallory was a schoolmaster, Hudson Stuck a clergyman. The Duke of the Abruzzi is a naval authority. Odell, hero of the last days at Everest, is a geologist. Such men venture upon the world’s great mountains.

Perhaps the best possible answer to our question is the one that General Bruce gave to the gently inquiring Holy Lama at the Rongbuk Monastery below Everest.

We are on a pilgrimage, said Bruce. In my country dwells a sect that worships mountains. We have come a far journey over land and sea to worship the highest mountain.

The aged Tibetan priest could understand that, for he, too, was a spiritual man, and he, in his own way, worshiped the great peak above his cold cloister.

Now and then you may hear a mountaineer explaining to the skeptical valley-goers that climbing is justified in that it serves scientific ends. It teaches us that mountain tops once lay below the sea and made happy homes for prehistoric barnacles. It shows us that the blood corpuscles can accommodate themselves to an atmosphere composed of empty space plus a bit of oxygen in reduced circumstances. Thus a mountaineer will make excuses for his glorious sport in weak moments when the herd instinct gets the upper hand of him.

Similarly, a climbing expedition will never dream of starting out for the other side of the globe without first borrowing a scientist or two from the colleges to lend a look of sobriety to the undertaking. Yonder is a wonderful mountain. If only we had a scientist! Far be it from us to wish to deprive the professors of the fun of going to Everest and Kanchenjunga, where they have as jolly a time on the ice cliffs as the most frolicsome mountaineer. But why assume that the others of the crowd need them for camouflage? Does the gardener seek a pretext for admiring the rose, for seeing in it a symbol of all beauty, mystery, perfection and delight? No more need hillmen apologize for desiring their hills.

Climbing justifies itself. It offers moments of pleasure and pride that linger in memory long after the hole-in-one is forgotten—yes, and the four-pound rainbow trout. On countless mountains of heights to suit all lungs it yields satisfactions that last for a lifetime. Even little mounds like Chocorua and Greylock can make a man feel pleased with himself for the rest of his days. For evidence of the knighthood of the spirit that mountains confer upon men, consult Geoffrey Winthrop Young’s On High Hills and the Everest letters of George Leigh-Mallory. Or read the 121st Psalm; for King David knew, long, long ago.

Much will probably be said in these pages about conquering the mountains. That is because of the lamentable shortage in certain categories of English verbs. We climb a mountain, we ascend, scale, escalade, mount, and surmount it, we go up it, get up it, scramble up it, and work our way up it, and then the blessed Thesaurus breaks down. Thereafter we conquer our mountain, we subdue, overcome, overpower, beat, rout, defeat, vanquish, and tame it. But that is only our talk. A mountain is never conquered.

The Matterhorn in a thundering tantrum is as little tamed as ever it was before people began opening picnic baskets upon its pinnacle. A mountain may grant a privilege; it may allow puny man to have a glimpse of its high, serene outlook over the world, to stand on its capstone close to heaven and there gaze and dream and expand and exult—and chisel his initials in a rock. But it is not conquered. The king in storyland who shared his throne for a day with the shepherd was still a king.

Mallory urged whimsically that no successful climber should ever publish an account of a conquest and thus rob his mountain of its fascination for other men. No doubt there is much to be said for first ascents. Most of us feel, however, that a mountain’s human associations only enhance its appeal. Elbruz without Douglas Freshfield, Everest without Mallory, Aconcagua without Edward Fitz Gerald and Stuart Vines, the Ruwenzori peaks without their Prince of Savoy would be mere masses of rock and ice. But they have been the setting for human drama, and so they gain in interest immeasurably. We love them for their heroes.

Climbing needs no defense; yet if Scriptural sanction for the pastime be demanded, we have it and are proud to bring it forward. Back to a mountaineer all people that on earth do dwell can trace their ancestry, and him they can thank that there is still a human race. His name was Noe, Noakh, or Noah. His climbing technique, while a bit odd, was effective: he combined mountaineering with yachting and floated up with the tide. He was a great man, and should have more monuments than he has. By mountaineers, at least, he is well honored; his Mount Ararat has felt the tread of many distinguished pairs of climbing-boots, among them those of Viscount James Bryce of beloved memory.

Another notable mountain figure of old—to cite only one more of the many that might be summoned—was Moses, the Lawgiver, whose wise meditations among the stormy heights of Sinai produced the Commandments that rule a large part of humanity today.

So we have patriarchs on our side, as well as pontiffs, princes and professors. Confidently we rest our case.

In the same mountain system with Everest is Kanchenjunga, nowadays accounted the second highest of the world’s elevations. The Dyhrenfurth international assault on that fastness of danger was the most important adventure of the year 1930. We in our easy-chairs, with the radiator gurgling or the electric fan purring, with the radio playing, the little new car at our service, the talkies awaiting us, and television coming tomorrow, may doubt that we should have derived the slightest benefit if Dr. Dyhrenfurth had surmounted Kanchenjunga’s topmost ice dome.

But are we sure of that? We might so reason about the ocean flight of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, yet weren’t we thrilled over that exploit for weeks, and better and braver men for it? Aren’t we exhilarated and revitalized when Admiral Byrd flies over the poles? The work of the climbers is likewise socially beneficial. The mountaineers serve a useful purpose, says Sir Francis Young-husband, if only in causing us to lift up our eyes unto the hills, to look up for a moment from the material interests that consume our days and our years.

The adventure spirit merits respect. There would be little comfort, little security for any of us on this savage planet if that spirit of curiosity and courage had not been going, risking, seeking through the ages. Well for us and for the generations after us that it is still alive in the world.

II. Kanchenjunga — DOUGLAS FRESHFIELD’S CIRCUIT

KANCHENJUNGA still defies the climbers. It hurls cliffs of ice down upon them. It beats them back with smothering blizzards in which some of those who escape are frost-crippled for life. It is one of the most terrible mountains, and perhaps the most magnificent. Therefore the longing eyes of men turn to it the more. Some day a gasping, freezing human being will stand upon its snowy poll and be the envied of all mountaineers, but the day is not yet. [Note: There are many perfectly good ways of spelling the name of this mountain. One early authority likes Kinchinjinga. Dr. Paul Bauer’s Bavarian climbers prefer Kangchoudzouga.]

Journey north from Calcutta for 350 miles across the flat plains of Bengal and up to Darjeeling, at the northern edge of British India, and you come to a mountain picture unsurpassed anywhere on this earth. It has Kanchenjunga for its central figure.

Darjeeling clings to a northward pointing spur of the first range of Himalayan foothills. You look steeply down from the spur on its east, north and west sides into the deep river valleys of the wild, strange