The Economist USA - 22.02.2020

The EconomistFebruary 22nd 2020 Books & arts 81

1

I

n 1933, whenMaurice Wilson decided to

pilot a single-propeller aeroplane from

London to the Himalayas, crash land on a

14,000-foot glacier and ascend to the sum-

mit of Mount Everest by himself, he did not

reckon on the forbidding challenge of Brit-

ish bureaucracy. After flying more than

5,000 miles (8,050 kilometres), the ama-

teur aviator and mountaineer was denied a

permit to cross Nepali airspace and

grounded in British India. Undeterred,

Wilson secretly slipped across the border

into Tibet on foot, disguised as a Buddhist

monk. The last entry in his diary, found

near his body 2,300 metres below Everest’s

peak, reads: “Off again, gorgeous day.”

Persistently optimistic—and perhaps

completely mad—Wilson shared the deter-

mined idealism of the world’s best moun-

taineers. In his lively new book, “The World

Beneath Their Feet”, Scott Ellsworth pro-

files the single-minded climbers who

scaled the Himalayas’ tallest peaks in the

1930s. With war on the horizon, teams from

Britain, the United States and Germany

raced to plant their national flags on the

“roof of the world”.

By the 1930s high-altitude mountain-

eering had become as much a source of na-

tional prestige as space exploration would

be in the 1960s. “We ought not to treat the

climbing of Mount Everest as a domestic is-

sue,” argued a piece in the LondonMorning

Postin 1936. “It is an issue of National and

Imperial importance.” In Berlin the Reichs-

sportführer demanded the conquest of

Nanga Parbat “for the glory of Germany”;

Nazi officials wondered whether moun-

taineering missions could facilitate high-

altitude aircraft tests over the Himalayas.

The 23 expeditions undertaken between

1931 and 1939 invariably entailed extreme

trials—among them perilous icefalls,

pounding hail and fingers and toes lost to

frostbite. The British Everest expedition of

1933 began with a 300-mile walk from Dar-

jeeling to Base Camp in Tibet, where one

climber felt the cold “must be that of inter-

stellar space”. Not that these efforts were

entirely without luxury. The failed French

Himalayan expedition of 1936 was weighed

down by eight tonnes of supplies, includ-

ing 72 fillettes of champagne and “count-

less” tins of foie gras.

Many of these adventures ended in trag-

edy. Seven climbers and nine porters were

buried by an avalanche during a German

expedition to Nanga Parbat in 1937; it was,

at the time, the worst disaster in the history

of mountaineering. But for those who suc-

ceeded, the payoff was astonishing. “The

horizon surrounded us in one unbroken

ring,” wrote the American climber Terris

Moore in his diary after reaching the sum-

mit of Minya Konka, “and I fancied that I

could see the curvature of the Earth.”

Mr Ellsworth presents a gripping his-

tory, despite the occasional cliché

(“Whether or not mad dogs and English-

men could stay out of the noonday sun

was debatable. But Englishmen...simply

couldn’t keep out of the hills”). He takes

care to describe the experiences and con-

tributions of Nepali sherpas—including a

young man named Tenzing Norgay—who

were hired to support expeditions. Even as

European and American mountaineers re-

lied on their expertise, they typically main-

tained strict divisions between sherpa and

sahib. Sherpas were nearly always allocated

inferior equipment and lodging.

When war broke out in 1939, the moun-

taineers were forced to abandon the Hima-

layas for the front. But the race was merely

on hold. In 1953, after seven failed attempts

by British expeditions, Tenzing and Sir

Edmund Hillary made the first successful

climb to the summit of Everest. From the

mountaintop, Tenzing waved the flag of the

United Nations. “I like to think that our vic-

tory was not only for ourselves”, he reflect-

ed, “but for all men everywhere.” 7

Mountaineering wars

Summit diplomacy

The World Beneath Their Feet.By Scott

Ellsworth.Little, Brown; 416 pages; $30. John

Murray; £25

Race to the top of the world

In the 1930s great-power rivalry played out in the Himalayas

“I

remember itwas so cold and raining

heavily,” recounts Osman Ahmed, “and

somehow in the mountains it was snow-

ing.” It was November 1985, and Mr Ahmed

was making an arduous journey that would

lead to an artistic one. He had been trek-

king across northern Iraq with Kurdish

Peshmerga, to escape Baathist persecution

during the Iran-Iraq war. Unusually for a

militiaman, he refused to carry a weapon

and was armed only with a pencil and a

sketch-book. Making it across the Iranian

border to Tehran, he discovered libraries

replete with images of European art. But

his subsequent efforts to reach Europe

landed him in prison and refugee camps;

reluctantly, he went back to Kurdistan.

It seemed to Mr Ahmed that no one was

documenting the horrors of the conflict.

He remembers his anguish, after returning

to the mountains with the Peshmerga, to

find that no radio station in the region was

covering the destruction of Kurdish settle-

ments. Then in 1988, during the last phase

of Saddam Hussein’s genocidal Anfal cam-

paign, government forces unleashed the

worst-ever chemical-weapons attack on ci-

vilians in the village of Halabja. “If I make it

through this war alive,” Mr Ahmed vowed,

“I will make sure that the whole world

knows about this.”

He has since become one of Kurdistan’s

best-known artists; his pictures, which

memorialise the suffering of his people,

have appeared in galleries across the Mid-

SULAYMANIYAH

An artist memorialises the experiences

of his people

Kurdish art

Remember,

remember