The White Ladder: Heroes, villains, and the drama of early mountaineering

THE WHITE LADDER: Triumph and Tragedy at the Dawn of Mountaineering

Author: Daniel Light

Publisher: W.W. Norton

Pages: 416  

Price: $32.50

 

By Charles Curkin

 

In 1519, the Spanish conquistador Diego de Ordaz reached the summit of the stratovolcano Popocatépetl during an expedition in Mexico under Hernan Cortés.

 

Approaching the peak, more than 17,000 feet above sea level, the scene shifted from snow and frozen chasms to eruptions of what were described as “great tongues of flame.”

 

Somehow, Ordaz and a small band of compatriots endured the long, gruelling ascent — sickened by the altitude, their backs weighed down by their steel helmets and breastplates — and lived to tell the tale. Not to attain any strategic objective, but rather a more basic desire to conquer the mountain itself.

 

When asked by a reporter why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, George Mallory famously replied: “Because it is there.” In The White Ladder, an engaging and agreeably ornate history of earlier mountaineering, the British author Daniel Light paints a vivid picture of this seemingly innate need and those who first heeded its call.

 

Centuries after the conquistadors, the German climber and scientist Adolph Schlagintweit was gripped by the same yen for peril. In 1854, he embarked with his brothers on an ambitious expedition to study the geography and culture of the Himalayas. An accomplished cartographer, Schlagintweit craved not just glory, but to map what he found. (Glory goes without saying.)

 

The brothers managed to ascend 22,259 feet on Ibi Gamin. Although they didn’t reach the top, they set a precedent for European adventurers of the time, who had rarely ventured so far. Schlagintweit was, in the end, not as lucky as Ordaz. He died during his expedition, not from a fall or avalanche — but by beheading, executed by a warlord in Kashgar (now in Xinjiang, China) after being accused of spying.

 

Oscar Eckenstein, the Jewish-British explorer known for contributions to climbing technology — including the development of better crampons and ice axes — was determined to defeat the Himalayan K2 (short for Karakoram), which the midcentury mountain climber George Bell would later dub the “Savage Mountain.”

 

But, like Schlagintweit, Eckenstein encountered men on his adventures that were as dangerous and unpredictable as the mountains. One was a member of his 1902 expedition on K2: the future occultist Aleister Crowley. He had insisted upon bringing a collection of heavy, vellum-bound poetry books up with him.

 

“I would rather bear physical starvation than intellectual starvation,” Crowley said. This absurd, forceful flare of ego was a bad augur.

 

Adverse weather conditions had kept them confined to their tents, ultimately preventing them from completing their mission. A fever befell Crowley, causing him to experience severe hallucinations. At one point, he drew his revolver, only to have it taken away before he could hurt anyone. By his own account, he savagely beat the party’s Sherpa guides more than once.

 

Another of Eckenstein’s contemporaries, Albert Mummery, a bespectacled Brit who “cut an awkward figure,” didn’t have the look of a serious alpinist. But his appearance belied an extreme intensity. He had grown tired of the European Alps, the highest and most dangerous of which he’d conquered. He thought them “overcrowded,” and, as was the case with most of Light’s heroes, he turned his attention to the Himalayas, a vast unknown at the time. In 1895, he attempted Nanga Parbat, the world’s ninth-highest peak, making it past 20,000 feet before he disappeared. His body was never recovered.

 

Being the first woman to stand atop Koser Gunge, just shy of 21,000 feet above rest of the Karakoram range in Kashmir, wasn’t enough for Fanny Bullock Workman. She and her husband, William Hunter Workman — each one heir to a family fortune — were in perpetual pursuit of verticality. By the turn of the 20th century, Fanny held several high-altitude records for women and had ice-axed her way into the firmament of the world’s greatest climbers. In 1902, she and Hunter climbed the Bhayakara Col, also in Karakoram.

 

There would be no records attained at its 19,260-foot apex. Instead, while the group was descending an ice wall they had climbed earlier in the day, the glacier began to melt. Hunter attributed their safe return to “todesmut,” which in German can be translated as “a total disregard for one’s safety.”

 

What unifies Light’s heroes is that total disregard and a desperate, almost pathological urge to climb for climbing’s sake. One of the earliest primal urges observed in toddlers on a playground is for ascent — to climb the highest point on the jungle gym. Because, why not?

 

Mallory died in 1924 while attempting to summit Everest. His body was discovered in 1999 encased in ice, and it is still there.

 

The reviewer is an editor at Elle Decor magazine and a skiing obsessive.