What is different about seeing a wide-shot Everest, the
world’s highest mountain for the first time in The Epic for Everest (1923), to seeing it captured on camera today? To my untrained eye, at least, nothing observable about the mountain has
changed but context here is everything. To see the mountain rear up above the
cameraman as an pure unconquered frontier of our planet feels entirely
different to seeing it now, knowing the mountain is strewn with commercial
expeditions, egos, industrial disputes, rubbish, fixed ropes, corpses, and a
ladder allowing the most difficult climbing to be bypassed.
It’s not just getting to the top and back that matters,
climbers and mountaineers rigorously debate the ‘ethics’ of what they call ‘style of
ascent’. That’s why the climbing community made such a fuss last week when Ueli
Steck climbed the smaller (though fiercely dangerous) Himalaya mountain Annapurna. Not only had he found a new route on the South Face, he’d gone up and down
unroped and alone without supplemental oxygen in one astonishing 28-hour push.
While most modern mountaineers wouldn't object to the
tactics used by Mallory and Irvine on Everest, the footage of the Tibetan
people that the climbers used as porters and passed through en-route to Everest
certainly lacks a different kind of style. The raw Imperialist viewpoint
espoused by the intertitles which seems to barely distinguish Tibetan man from
baby donkey is enough to make anyone squirm, though this patronising tone gives
way in parts to an irrepressible wonder at the ancient monastic civilisation the team passes through in the high valleys of the Himalayas.
One thinks of Steck again, earlier this year the victim of a
horrific
confrontation between the Sherpas and a group of fast and light Alpine
climbers on Everest, possibly exacerbated by the Western team having apparently
outgrown the need for traditional Sherpa support.
The Epic of Everest shows us this mutually exploitative
relationship that shaped 20
th Century Himalayan mountaineering in
its very infancy.
Do we crave and seek adventure in our own lives? What level
of risk do we deem acceptable in pursuing it? For most of us it would fall far,
far below the risks that Mallory and Irvine knowingly and paid for with their
lives. Even today Everest remains, by any scale of human activity, phenomenally
dangerous and yet thousands attempt it, sometimes controversially suppressing
the most basic human instincts to aid ailing climbers to avoid harm or to keep
their own summit dreams alive.
We’ll probably never know if Mallory and Irvine summited
Everest before falling; it seems unlikely. But
The Epic of Everest is a great
chance to see a real frontier of human exploration.
Patrick Stewart
IFI
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