Seventy years ago, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay returned to glory, adulation and public immortality, having scaled the world’s highest peak. More often than not, we remember the ones who make it back from the Everest but seldom those who are not returned by the fickle-minded majestic peak. In her excellent, if chilling, article for the BBC, Rachel Nuwer, for instance, writes that the Everest is the final resting ground of more than 200 fallen mountaineers. This year, among the 600 climbers and sherpas who attempted to climb the mountain, 13 perished; another four who have gone missing are presumed to be dead. Their bodies are likely to join the occupants of the world’s highest graveyard. Summer, which is now retreating, is the season when those making the ascent often catch glimpses of dead climbers whose remains have been impeccably preserved in the snow.
There’s an Indian in this graveyard.
Tsewang Paljor had lost his life in an infamous blizzard in 1996 and, Nuwer writes, rests in a cave near the northern side. He has been christened, somewhat controversially, ‘Green Boots’ after the neon footwear he was wearing at the time of his death. “When snow cover is light,” writes Nuwer, “climbers have… to step over Paljor’s extended legs on their way to and from the peak.”
Paljor was not alone — momentarily. In 2006, he was joined by a British mountaineer who, other climbers initially thought, was resting in ‘Green Boots’ cave’. David Sharp died and his body could be retrieved only a year later, leaving Paljor unaccompanied, once again.
Apparently, Paljor has since vanished. Over to Nuwer. “Noel Hanna made this discovery in May 2014, when he was surprised to find not only that Green Boots’ cave was devoid of its familiar resident, but also that many of the bodies on the north side — one stretch of which is sometimes referred to as ‘rainbow ridge,’ for the colourful down suits of its many fallen climbers — seemed to have vanished.”
The circumstances of these disappearances are not clear but Nuwer hints that the involvement of the Chinese, who manage the Everest’s northern side, cannot be ruled out.
There are others who have been left to sleep undisturbed in the Himalayas, their lives and demise serving as testaments to both heroism and heartbreak.
‘Sleeping Beauty’ is among them.
In a poignant piece on deaths on the Everest, Marco Margaritoff writes about her thus: “[Francys Distefano-] Arsentiev wasn’t a climber, though the 40-year-old American was married to one. Her husband was Sergei Arsentiev, who was known as ‘the snow leopard.’ He had scaled the five highest peaks in Russia. Now, she agreed to climb Everest with her husband.
“The expedition saw the pair reach Mount Everest’s peak without using supplemental oxygen. Francys Arsentiev made history by doing so, as she was the first American woman to summit the treacherous colossus without breathing aids…
“Before departing base camp, the Arsentievs had befriended Ian Woodall and Cathy O’Dowd… it was Woodall and O’Dowd who first encountered Francys Arsentiev during her descent, and just before her death.
“Initially, Woodall and O’Dowd thought they’d spotted a freshly frozen body at around 25,000 feet. But when the body began violently spasming, they realized this person was still alive — and that it was their new friend…
“By the time they found her, Arsentiev was already suffering from frostbite. Her skin was hardened and pale, and so wax-like that O’Dowd remembered likening her to Sleeping Beauty.”
Then there’s, of course, the man who wanted to conquer Everest “because it’s there.” George Mallory and his companion, Andrew Irvine, disappeared — in the month of June, in 1924. Mallory’s remains were found 75 years later.
Triumph and, especially, tragedy on treacherous heights haveled commentators to examine —philosophise — the hypnotic pull cast by mountains on the mind. These attempts have identified a mind-boggling range of compulsions that are symptomatic, quite beguilingly, of the great transformations in social, political, and psychological realms. For instance, the goals of the imperial project — expansionism and attendant adventurism, in that order, — were undoubtedly integral to the institutional enthusiasm, especially from the middle of the nineteenth century, for mountaineering expeditions. The Great Trigonometrical Survey, unveiled by the East India Company, succeeded in measuring the heights of the Nanda Devi, the Dhaulagiri and the Kanchenjunga and was, incidentally, led for a few years by the intemperate George Everest. But can this colonial engagement, even though it is said that it was preceded by the tradition of apolitical scientific expeditions, be neatly separated from the knowledge-gathering projects that eventually led to advancements in glaciology, geology, botanics and cartography? Embedded in these scientific/colonial enterprises, in turn, was also an innate, primeval urge: to etch the marks of human — Western, industrial — triumphalism over nature.
Of late, social scientists have come up with compelling evidence that binds the evolution of modern mountaineering in Britain to the search for a new class identity for the bourgeoisie. Most Alpine expeditions in the middle of the nineteenth century, they argue as proof, drew heavily from the English middle and upper classes.
Interestingly, in the post-colonial world, explanations for the collective fascination for these deadly heights began to tilt towards the psychological. Nuwer’s article, for instance, mentions the opinions of several psychologists who underline, among other factors, the pursuit of agency, ‘counterphobia’ — the typical human urge to conquer fear — as well as the evasion of emotional responsibilities as some of the principal reasons that explain the mountaineers’ enchantment with the peaks.
Strikingly, what the personal shares with the political frame, in this context, is the element of anthropogenic industriousness marked by the spirit of constant improvement, forward-movement, and self-advancement that Nietzsche, the man who walked and thought while trekking for miles on the Alps, believed is necessary to guard against the dangers of complacency and stagnation.
Nietzsche’s Übermensch, an idealised human form, was presumably imbued with this spirit of physical as well as intellectual striving. But the Übermensch, the philosopher wrote, is supposed to have another characteristic: the ability to empathise with others. Natural entities and species, it stands to reason, should not be excluded from the Übermensch’s arc of care.
And this is where modern civilisation and its recreational forms, mountaineering among them, have failed both Nietzsche as well as the mountain. A recent global report has predicted that the Hindu Kush is undergoing catastrophic and “largely irreversible” damage and could lose 80% of its glaciers by the turn of this century. The fate of the Everest is not reassuring either: the retreat of the South Col glacier, the highest on the peak, portends not only the deepening imprint of human-induced climate change but also brings in its wake the possibility of the effacement of 200 million people who are dependent on these glacial waters.
Incidentally, climate change, which, scientists believe, would make weather conditions unpredictable and inclement, would, in all probability, make climbing more hazardous. So the body count on the top of the world — emblematic of human industriousness and folly — can only be expected to rise.
Green Boots may not be left alone for long.
uddalak.mukherjee@abp.in
