On the Top of the World THE extreme attraction of
mountain climbing (which is nothing less than its connexion with spiritual aspiration) has been a matter of common knowledge since literature began— since the Psalmist exhorted his hearers to lift their eyes to the hills whence eometh our help. On the other hand, there have always been many excellent people who have regarded mountaineers as " a particularly foolish set of desperadoes." George Leigh Mallory, who died on the white summit of Everest, has answered these Philistines in words which must,
we think, persuade at least some of them to believe in the message of the mountains. The climber, he asserts, " gets some good for his soul," which no other form of sport, however spiced with danger, can supply. He compares his emotions to music. " Mountain scenes occupy the same place in our consciousness as remembered melody." But he finds some- thing among the eternal snow which touches him even more deeply than music, " moments of ecstasy-worship and of self- abasement came to him." Nowhere else did the utter insig- nificance of man's bodily presence seem so overwhelming or his aspirations so triumphant. He came back into everyday life, his biographer tells us, with something of the illumination to be found before the altar. A young man of splendid phy- sique and vitality, he was yet sensitive to the cardiac effects of high altitude, and it is not improbable that at the end of his last attempt to conquer the untrodden fastnesses of Everest the sudden joy of achievement put too much strain upon a heart already distressed and he died in the moment of triumph. His personality as here depicted seems to have been a singularly delightful one. Mr. Pye deals in praise, and he makes his hero almost too good to be true, but those who knew Mallory know that his charm could hardly be exagger- ated. The number of his friends and their devotion alone prove the attraction of his character. As a boy he hesitated between the careers of parson and schoolmaster, as a man he chose the school and did not, we gather, find in it his real vocation. His methods were too unconventional and his attitude towards the Public School system too critical. His description of the average " decent little boy " entering a Public School and of the same boy when he leaves it will provoke sad misgivings in the minds of many thoughtful parents. He does not condemn the system, but he deprecates its blind worship. Had he lived he would set up a school on his own lines. Alas! that high adventure claimed him ! Yet his life may well be an inspiration to young England through future ages. His record will stand as the great mountains to which he gave his life.
" The Gods Win " Thibetans shout these words when they feel that they have surmounted some great difficulty.
Their sound echoes from the mountain passes as the pilgrims sit down to rest after a strenuous pull up hill. Mrs. Alexandra David-Ned constantly said them as she journeyed on foot to Lhassa, and with intense fervour when at last she entered " The Forbidden City "—the one white woman who had ever
set foot in it. She and a young Buddhist priest—a Lama— whom she describes as her adopted son, decided to journey together across Thibet on foot disguised as pilgrims. Over mountains and through forests they wandered. When no house was available they slept in the open, soaked by snow and rain. No one suspected that the " aged mother " of the Lama was a European, though her disguise seems to have been rather thin—consisting of a dirty face.
The Lama himself strikes the reader as a most engaging rogue. We are assured that he was an orthodox Buddhist priest, an initiated mystic, but he played the part of a sorcerer to admiration with no more belief in his incantations than an Oxford professor. What with his tricks and the venerable appearance of the " aged " lady for whom he showed so much filial solicitude the ill-assorted pair were seldom at a loss for the necessities of life. They were, as Mrs. David-Neel tells us, able to see into the heart and soul of the Thibetan peasantry whose bed and board they shared as no ordinary travellers could ever have done.
The marvellous physical endurance of the author and the good luck which never failed to deliver her and her adopted son at every fresh crisis in their adventures strain the reader's credulity, but the pictures of Thibetan life are as true as they are vivid, entertaining and sympathetic.
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