Scott Ellsworth - The World Beneath Their Feet: Mountaineering, Madness, and the Deadly Race to Summit the Himalayas

D uring the darkening decade of the 1930s, as the winds of war began to gather in the chanceries and defense ministries of central Europe and the Far East, and dictators began to trace lines on maps with their fingers, there was a race like no other. It had no fixed starting point, no single finish line, no referees, and no written rules. And while it would ultimately involve men and women from ten nations, capture front-page headlines around the globe, and claim dozens of lives, its most remarkable feature was that this was a race to a place that no human being had ever been before.

In truth, there werent many such places left.

For the world had already grown perilously small. The North and South Poles had already been conquered. Explorers and scientists, armed with quinine, Colt .32-caliber automatic pistols, and gabardine jackets from Abercrombie & Fitch, had hacked their way into the highlands of New Guinea, uncovered a lost city in Peru, and gazed with awe and wonder upon Alaskas Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. A Frenchman had driven a modified Citren automobile two thousand miles across the Sahara Desert, while a sixteen-year-old ranch hand in New Mexico, mistaking a plume of bats for a funnel of smoke, discovered the most magnificent cave system on Earth.

Even former President Teddy Roosevelt, overweight and nursing an infected leg, had, in 1913 and 1914, ridden a dugout canoe hundreds of miles down the piranha-infested Rio da Dvidathe River of Doubtinto the far reaches of the Amazon basin. And one long day in June 1928, a former Kansas tomboy turned Cosmopolitan editor had flown in a Fokker Trimotor from Newfoundland to Wales, becoming the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an airplane. When she returned home to the United States, Amelia Earhart was given a ticker-tape parade on Broadway and a private audience with President Coolidge in the White House. Even the remotest island in the vast Pacific Ocean had, at one time or another, felt the scrape of a boat keel against its shoreline. There was no place on earth, it seemed, that was beyond the reach of humankind.

Except for one.

Stretching for more than two thousand miles from the Hindu Kush of eastern Afghanistan to the far reaches of western China, the Himalayas are the tallest and mightiest mountain range on the planet. But the tops of its highest peaks, some fourteen in number, all of which stand more than eight thousand meters, or 26,246 feet, high, had never felt the weight of a human being. Mount Everest, of course, was the best known, but the others, like K2, Annapurna, and Kangchenjunga, were equally majestic and foreboding. The southern face of Nanga Parbat, along the edge of Kashmir, shot up nearly ten thousand vertical feetroughly the height of ten Empire State Buildings stacked end to end. Twice as high as the Alps or the Rockies, these were true geographical monsters, behemoths of rock and ice so large that they created their own weather systems.