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Book review of The World Beneath Their Feet: The British, the Americans and the Nazis and the Race to Summit the Himalayas

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Book cover of The World Beneath Their Feet: The British, the Americans and the Nazis and the Race to Summit the Himalayas
Kanika Datta New Delhi
5 min read Last Updated : Apr 15 2021 | 12:35 AM IST
The resurgence of aggressive nationalism in this age of uber-globalisation 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 Pakistan-occupied 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 most-likely-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.

The World Beneath Their Feet: The British, the Americans and the Nazis and the Race to Summit the Himalayas
Author: Scott Ellsworth 
Publisher: Hachette
Pages:393; Price: Rs 699

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 single-propeller, 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 fresh-faced 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 eight-thousander was France, which under Maurice Herzog, summited Annapurna, the world’s tenth-highest 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.

Topics :NationalismMount EverestMt EverestHimalaya BritainNepalNaziGermanyUnited StatesAmerica

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