Heights of nationalism
The resurgence of aggressive nationalism in this age of uberglobalisation has never been more evident than in the competition among nations for Covid-19 drugs and vaccines. But in the heyday of European empires nationalism found potent expression in an extreme adventure sport — exploration. By the early 20th century, only the Himalayas, the world’s highest mountain range with 14 peaks soaring over 8,000 metres (26,246 feet), remained out of reach. The World Beneath Their Feet is the story of how the superpower of the day, Britain, the rising one, America, and the aspirational one, Nazi Germany, focused their competitive attentions on summiting the key peaks.
Inevitably it was Mount Everest that attracted most attention, but each nation focused on one or two of the eight thousanders, Achttausender in German. For the British, it was Everest. For the Americans, it was K2, the world’s second highest mountain now in Pakistanoccupied Kashmir, and for the Germans it was Kanchenjunga and Nanga Parbat. There were French, Swiss and Italian mountaineers who attempted to summit these peaks as well, but Scott Ellsworth overlooks them in the interests of a good narrative.
As he writes, “In its heart center, the saga of the Great Himalayan Race is a story about dreamers and dreams, hard work and determination and of never, ever giving up. For as they scraped up against the stars, these overlooked heroes remind us of what mere human beings, armed with courage, tenacity, training, experience and resolve can accomplish in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.” A life coach couldn’t have put it better.
Except that most of the protagonists of this book story are unlikely to make successful executives, being quirky characters, often failures by conventional societal standards. There is, for instance, the cult hero Eric Shipton, whose tragically unsuccessful expeditions to Everest paved the way for future summiteers. “The orphaned son of a tea planter, as child Eric Shipton wouldn’t have made anyone’s mostlikely-to succeed list. Dyslexic and a flop at organised sport….” His mother eventually put him into a school for children with learning disabilities where, ironically, he developed his passion for climbing. Later in the Himalayas, his climbing technique became legendary, and his breakthrough into the Nanda Devi sanctuary via the perilous Rishi Ganga gorge in 1934 remains a feat of mountaineering apart from underlining his championship of the small-scale expedition as opposed to the huge and generously provisioned expeditions that were the norm.
Then there was Maurice Wilson, who emerged from the hell-fires of World War I’s Western Front to embrace an extreme form of Hindu mysticism and an unshakeable desire to climb Mount Everest alone, flying across the continents from England in a singlepropeller, open cockpit aircraft to the Nepal border in 1934. This was a feat in itself but Wilson actually made good on his resolve to tackle Everest alone. A year later, his body, dressed in only grey flannel trousers, shirt and Fairisle pullover, was found between 5,000 and 7,000 metres on the North Face.
From Paul Bauer, the committed Nazi who led expeditions to Kanchenjunga and Nanga Parbat, Heinrich Himmler’s crackpot expedition to the Himalayas in search of the original Aryans to the freshfaced American college boys making a perilous journey through China to climb Minya Konka, a mountain reputedly higher than Everest (it turned out to be below 8,000 meters), Mr Ellsworth has written a page-turner that is well contextualised against the politics and culture of the day. But given his focus on the eight-thousanders and the details with which he describes the key expeditions, his history is curiously incomplete. The first nation to summit an eightthousander was France, which under Maurice Herzog, summited Annapurna, the world’s tenthhighest mountain. But Mr Ellsworth accords it only a few paragraphs, suggesting that the French were helped by modern equipment, good weather and a large Sherpa team. But most eight-thousanders were summited in the post-war years in this manner, using large support teams and equipment based on technology developed in the war years. Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay made the first summit of Everest using oxygen cylinders modified from the ones fighter pilots used in World War II. Unlike Everest, Annapurna remains one of the technically most challenging mountains — the fatality level is 1:3. Herzog lost his fingers and toes in the attempt and dictated from his hospital bed a riveting best-selling account of the climb that I remember devouring as a teenager.
Most of all, Mr Ellsworth has allowed his unabashed admiration for these intrepid adventurers to overwhelm the deleterious environmental consequences of this nationalism. Everest today is crowded by tourists who leave tonnes of refuse, making it the world’s highest garbage dump, with the ecology of the lower approaches increasingly threatened by the passage of too many humans. Mountaineering expeditions unconsciously deploy violent terms — conquest, assault— that Mr Ellsworth frequently uses too. Man’s egoism may have conquered the world’s highest peaks, but that effort has amounted to a giant assault on nature. It is a pity Mr Ellsworth did not add a last thoughtful chapter on the damaging consequence of this —ultimately pointless— race to the top of the world.