Hammond Innes on climbing mountains
Annapurna South Face Chris Bonnington (Cassell £3.25) Everest: The West Ridge Thomas Hornbein (Allen and Unwin £3.50) We have read it all before, of course. Other mountains. Other climbs. Team personali- ties, preparations, the approach march, and then the blow by blow account of the assault. It never palls the way lone voyages do, and anyway this is a totally different concept, the birth of a new era of Hima- layan mountaineering, the world of the Whillans and the Hastons. Annapurna South Face is Chris Bonnington's account of the great leap forward from the conquering of unclimbed mountains to the cold-blooded choice of the hardest, instead of the easiest, route to the summit of the giants.
In the Alps, the last' of, the major peaks, the Matterhorn, was conquered in 1865, but is was 66 years before the North Face was climbed. In the Himalayas, the summit of Everest was finally achieved by Hunt's British expedition in 1953 and the Chinese conquest of Gosainthan in 1964 marked the equivalent of the 1865 stage in the Alps. Yet only six years later Chris Bonnington's expedition, British again, opted for the Himalayan equivalent of the Eiger's dreaded
North Wall. Annapurna I is the Eiger al- most exactly doubled in height, the North Wall extended beyond what could reason- ably be expected of human endeavour and endurance. Why? Why did they do it?
Bonnington repeats Mallory, of course, adding that this is 'both inadequate and yet all-embracing.' And he goes on:
'We climb for so many reasons: the joy of movement and muscular control up a steep face of rock or ice; the satisfaction of exploring new ground, even up a small rock face on the flanks of a hill- side; and, perhaps even more important, of exploring one's own reactions to new, at times exacting, experience. There is the sheer beauty and grandeur of the mountains, the soothing balm of solitude. And through it all, is the undercurrent of danger; for this is what climbing is all about—staking one's life on one's judg- ment, playing the calculated risk. This doesn't mean going blindly into danger, or seeking hazard for its own sake. The climber gains his satisfaction from going into a potentially dangerous situation but then, through his own skill and ex- perience, rendering it safe.'
This is a clear, down-to-earth, straight- forward, honest answer. And the whole story of preparation and assault is written in the same vein, a model of clear, factual writing. But since this is a climbing exten- sion of the North Wall I am forced to a comparison with Jack Olsen's account of the linked tragedy of the Italian and Ger- man two-man teams he called The Climb up to Hell. Again, since it is Annapurna, one's mind inevitably goes back to the Frenchman Maurice Herzog's reckless as- sault and the book he wrote about it. No good pretending that Annapurna South Face matches the excitement of the one or the writing of the other, but the pictures are quite outstanding. They don't tell the entire story, but the publisher has been lavish here and you can follow the expedition from camp to camp right through to the summit.
This is, in fact, very much a climbers' book and future expeditions seeking the toughest routes up near-impossible faces will be thankful that the author has been so generous of his experience and hard-won knowledge; the appendices are particularly important. The climb itself, though journa- listic enough to carry the ordinary reader, is really a textbook of how this sort of total project is handled—the management of men, the use of ironmongery, the way the whole thing is planned and accom- plished. And only one life lost—by accident and not by any wrong or reckless decision.
It is a a measure of the sort of person Chris Bonnington is that he hands over to Dougal Haston the whole of the chapter covering the final thrust up to the summit, and here you can have writing of an al- together different calibre: 'I'm at 23,000 feet and sane; I hope— though many would question this . . . I am now at Camp V—lung-heaving tired- ness—standing in a crevasse with spind- rift pouring over me . . . The snow was now coming down the gully like a raging highland torrent . . . Going round the traverse into the gully was like entering a special kind of refrigerated hell . . . There isn't really such a thing as rest at 24,000 feet . , . He (Don Whillans) picked a beautiful line to the summit ridge.'
And of the moment of actual achieve- ment—The greatest moment of both our climbing careers and there was only a kind of numbness.'
I have quoted at some length here be- cause this has more of the quality of Maurice Herzog's Annapurna. But clarity, more than the quality of the writing, is what is required to give an overall picture of the complexities of planning and organ- isation involved in an expedition that was 'conceived as a project for a small group of dedicated climbers and finished as some- thing akin to a military operation. This Chris Bonnington achieves most success- fully, so that one is left with respect and admiration, not only for the way in which he handled the . expedition, but for the energy and concentration he has put into the resultant book. It is, as I say, virtually a textbook for future expeditions of this new brand of Himalayan climbing. It is also pretty enthralling reading for the arm- chair mountaineer. Altogether a very re- markable achievement, particularly as he also took no less than 122 rolls of film and the book includes some of the finest pictures ever taken at high altitude.
Publication of another Himalayan book virtually coincides—Thomas Hornbein's Everest: The West Ridge. It covers the American 1963 expedition—`a grand slam' Bonnington calls it. They went up by the West Ridge and then traversed the moun- tain by descending the South Ridge. Why this very slim volume should cost more than the Annapurna book is difficult to under- stand. It adds little to the information given in James Ramsey Ullman's superbly written official account of the expedition—except perhaps to demonstrate that unedited tapes are not a substitute for the hard labour of writing and that recorded speech is often mundane when no attempt is made to recreate the atmosphere and the mood in which the words were spoken. Trying to read this serves to emphasise how very good Chris Bonnington's book is, how very versatile the man himself.
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