MAP LEGENDS
In this age of Google Earth, there’s a nostalgic romance surrounding the days when the Himalayas had yet to be fully surveyed, when mountaineering books had titles like Blank on the Map and Conquistadors of the Useless.
Legendary Maps from the Himalayan Club, handsomely quarter-bound in a leatherlike volume from the 1930s, is a celebration of that era.
The book contains sketch maps drawn by intrepid men who set foot on unexplored mountain ranges, who climbed peaks that till then had only been worshipped from distant villages.
These maps and articles have been selected from past editions of the Himalayan Journal, an annual journal that has chronicled mountain adventure since 1929. The editors have picked some historic moments.
The highest hills tell the tallest tales, where triumph meets tragedy. Maurice Herzog retraces his steps from Dhaulagiri to climb Annapurna instead, and pens his book much loved by generations to follow (1950); Tony Streather digs in his iceaxe to stop the fall of seven fellow climbers attempting K2 (1953); Willi Unsoeld and Tom Hornbein traverse Everest from the West ridge to the South (1963); Reinhold Messner traces a vertical line up the Rupal Face of Nanga Parbat, losing his brother Gunther while descending down the Diamirai (1970).
Interesting nuggets like Tilman and Shipton entering the Nanda Devi basin (1934), W.H. Murray’s circumambulation in Garhwal and Kumaon (1950), and Robert Pettigrew’s first ascent of Papsura (1967) shine with attention to detail.
The book unfolds west to east, from Kashmir to Arunachal Pradesh, a seemingly logical sequence for the maps, but it’s a dizzying journey as the accompanying accounts yo-yo in time from 1936 to 1965 to 1930 to 2003 to .... One wonders if a chronological order from 1930 to 2015 might have been smoother. Perhaps, then, the romance of first discovery, and the excitement of filling in yet another blank on the map would have retained their historical progression.
Being early renderings, many of the maps are approximations in scale, and some were corrected by subsequent exploration, but somehow such inadequacies only serve to enhance the aura around that first foray into an untravelled world. What matters to the reader is the fact that these lines were sketched by the hand that held the wooden ice-axe.