Mountain Chronicles Continued
My Alpine Album. By F. S. Smythe. (A. and C. Black. I2S. 6d.)
AMONG climbers Mr. Chapman has the reputation of being a bit cracked; his decisions are sudden, and once they are made he throws himself at his objective with a desperate determination that nothing less than his own skill and endurance could justify. Certainly, in spite of his well-meaning attempts to find a steady occupation and to subordinate exploration and mountaineering to it, his biography, as he records it in this book, seems to describe not so much a life as the wild and erratic career of a rapidly projected ball ricochetting round a bagatelle board. Readers of Northern Lights and Lhasa: The Holy City know that Mr. Chapman can write well; and although he explains that the war prevented him from revising his manuscript, there is very little to complain about in the present book. There are stories of climbing at home and in the Alps (including his motor-bike smash at 50 m.p.h. on his way back from the Meije: "I managed to catch the boat at Havre that night "), then expeditions to Iceland and Greenland, and attempts on Simvu (unsuccessful), Chomolhari and other Himalayan peaks. The six horrible days of his descent from Chomolhari (24,000 feet), with the porter Pasang dazed and exhausted, are particularly well told: perhaps the record of his vivid dreams in the tiny sodden tent on that immense crevassed ice-slope are more revealing than the details of the climb itself. General Bruce was not far wrong in calling that descent the Eighth Wonder of the World.
But Mr. Chapman has eyes for other things than ice and rock : his book is crammed with deep-purple primula Royalei, saffron rhododendrons, azalea and blue poppies; burrhal, marmots, mouse-hares and invisible snow-leopards scamper across his pages; and the air is thick with lammergeiers, horned larks, snow- cock, rose-finches and Tibetan redstarts. As for the villages, they are "dirt, dirt, grease, smoke, misery, but good mutton," as Thomas Manning said when he looked in at Phari in at t. Mr. Chapman is a careful chronicler (but the Inaccessible Pinnacle is on Sgurr Dearg, not Sgurr nan Gillean), he has written a thoroughly good book of its kind, and his illustrations are numerous, varied and often dramatic.
Mr. Smythe's Alpine Album is the fourth of his picture-books,
and it is his third publication this year. The pictures (some ot, which have appeared in his other books) range from the Gross Glockner to Mont Blanc, and from winter scenes near Zermatt to the clean simplicity of Swiss domestic architecture. There is a general introduction headed "The Alpme Year," and there ale notes on each picture. "This is all I know about Bern without looking it up," implies a neat criticism of some other books Perhaps Mr. Smythe's American friend was not the first to say that he would stick to terra firma in future, "more firmer an'ti less terror," but on the whole Mr. Smythe avoids chestnuts and clichés, and his book is a good substitute for Blodig's Alpine
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