May 29, 2013 will mark the 60th anniversary of the first ascent of Mount Everest by a New Zealand beekeeper and an Indian Sherpa climbing with an expedition financed by Britain. It was an achievement the British Commonwealth gratefully claimed on the eve of the coronation of a new queen. It was another matter that one of the summiteers represented a newly independent nation that had chosen not to accept the British monarch as head of state.
It was a feat not just because two people stood on top of the world's highest mountain for the first time. As Edmund Hillary dryly said, he and Tenzing Norgay were "the first to get to the top and back down to the bottom again". He was reacting to the endless debate over whether George Mallory and Sandy Irvine were the first to summit the 29,029-foot peak in 1924 before they disappeared, speculation that grew more insistent after Mallory's body was discovered on the mountain in 1999.
So it is fitting that a book commemorating the first "complete" climb celebrates other "incredible" ascents. The definition of "incredible", though, may be open to question. The book covers Tom Whittaker, the first man to summit Everest on a prosthetic limb; Erik Weihenmayer, the first blind man to make it to the top; Mir Bahadur Sherchan, the oldest man on the peak; Junko Tabei, the first woman on the summit; and Yuichiro Muira, who skied down Everest and so on. It also chronicles the first ascent without oxygen (by Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler) and the first solo ascent (the peerless Messner again). All of these are certainly incredible triumphs of the human spirit, in the best traditions of the sport.
The book also provides a succinct history of the early expeditions leading up to the 1953 triumph. These were indubitably "incredible" because they, literally, tested new heights man could achieve. But what, an Everester might ask, about the first summit from the perilous Kangshung Face, the first traverse, the first ascent up the South-West Face and so on? No doubt, the lavish all-colour format restricted a full history since that would have easily doubled the size and cost of the book. A fuller timeline at the end of the book may have covered that contingency.
For the generalist, however, this is an engagingly written potted history, complemented by some decent picture selection and display. It is a relief that Nagrath avoids purveying the famous - certainly apocryphal - quote attributed to Mallory that he climbed Everest because "it is there", providing instead his lengthier answer ("It is no use…What we get is sheer joy", echoed by Hillary three decades years later: "…you really climb for the hell of it"). I was disappointed to note no mention of Radhanath Sikdar, the Bengali "computer" who was actually responsible for recording the height of "Peak XV" and a typo that recorded the year Everest was given its name as 1965 instead of 1865.
Coffee-table books are feel-good by nature, and this one is no exception. All the same, it is good that this has not deterred author and publisher from also highlighting the many problems confronting Everest today, not least the egregious commercial expeditions that are a standard feature of the climbing season. These have played a central role in the growing environmental degradation, with each expedition leaving tonnes of garbage.
And then, there's the debasement of mountaineering as a sport. Everest isn't a particularly difficult mountain to climb per se; Annapurna, Nanda Devi and K2, to name a few others, present immeasurably tougher technical challenges. It is the sheer height and the struggle to survive in the "death zone" (above 26,000 feet) that make Everest a serious mountaineer's challenge. Commercial expeditions charging upwards of $70,000 to have rookies "short-roped" to the summit can hardly be called sporting. It was a point Tom Whittaker emphasised when he received his MBE. "I was not …dragged up the mountain by able-bodied guides," he told the queen, "I was the expedition leader and I climbed it on my own merits". The queen instantly understood. "Yes, style is so important, isn't it?" she replied.
The summit fever that grips amateurs and professionals has also weakened the mountaineer's code of safety first. The infamous case of Japanese climbers bypassing dying members of an Indian expedition in 1996 in their haste to make the summit is well documented, including in Jon Krakauer's best-seller Into Thin Air.
Two quibbles. First, maps indicating the main features of the mountain - North Col, South Col, Western Cwm, Khumbu glacier and so on - would have helped the uninitiated. Second, there are two photos of a naked Mallory on the early expeditions. Nothing wrong with that, they highlight the spirit of fun and camaraderie of the pioneers (and, some commentators have suggested, their latent homosexuality). One of these is then reproduced on the back cover. Now, Mallory was blessed with good looks and a magnificent physique, as close-ups of his body lying on the North Face testified. But that, surely, had little to do with the incredible ascents described in this book.
INCREDIBLE ASCENTS TO EVEREST
Sumati Nagrath
Roli Books
223 pages; Rs 1,295
