Simon Pierse Kangchenjunga: Imagining a Himalayan Mountain School of Art PRESS, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, 2005

Alpine Journal 2006 Vol 111 No 355 Ed. Stephen Goodwin The Alpine Club & The Ernest Press

Kangchenjunga, at 8586m the third highest mountain in the world, has long fascinated not only climbers but travellers, tourists, botanists and plant-hunters, artists and photographers. Lying in Sikkim on the border with Nepal, the mountain is clearly visible from the hill stations of Darjeeling. Indeed it seems to dominate the view from there, drawing all eyes towards it. As such it was the subject of intense scrutiny and speculation long before it was first climbed in 1955. Believed to be the highest mountain in the world until the mid-nineteenth century, it is a distinctive presence; instead of the classical pointed peak of popular imagination the massif instead appears as a massive castellated and crenellated fortress. Such is the difference in height between the peak and the viewpoints in Darjeeling, and the distance between, that the mountain sometimes appears to float above the clouds or mist, a seemingly disembodied and enchanted kingdom. Joe Brown was awestruck when he first sighted it:

‘The sky was steaming with vapours and I could just discern the outline… I was looking at a gigantic unearthly shape, boiling inside a tissue-thin bank of cloud. This was truly an incredible sight. I seemed to be looking up at an angle of 45 degrees at the mountain, yet it was nearly 50 miles away….’

The name means The Five Treasuries of Great Snow, referring to the five principle peaks of the massif. Not only intensely poetic and evocative, it seems particularly appropriate, suggesting not just size and majesty, but something sacred and otherworldly.

Simon Pierse has not set out to write a conventional history of mountaineering on Kangchenjunga  but to attempt something more interesting and ambitious, an account of the ways in which the mountain has been perceived and subsequently depicted in prose, photography, paintings and prints. As he suggests, Kanchenjunga ‘has been a topographical feature to be sketched, mapped and surveyed; it has been seen as an embodiment of the sublime, a picturesque motif, a mountaineering challenge, a peak conquered but left untrodden; and recurrently throughout all of these , a sacred mountain and symbol of the spiritual. Added to all of these is the religious significance of the mountain to the Nepalese and Sikkimese people who live in its shadow, and to whom the mountain is symbolically the residence of a god.’The breadth of his enquiry is thus apparent. This is a potentially enormous subject, given that probably no other Himalayan mountain apart from Everest has attracted such attention over such an extended period, and Pierse navigates his way through a complex and fascinating narrative with admirable clarity and concision.

In the event, Pierse does get sidetracked by the mountaineering history of the mountain, retelling the fascinating stories of the various expeditions; including Sir Douglas Freshfield’s circumnavigation of the massif in 1899, the ill-starred 1905 expedition that included Aleister Crowley, the self-styled ‘Great Beast’, the German expeditions of 1929 and 1931, and the International Expedition of 1930 that included Frank Smythe. While it can seem, as his narrative develops, that his stated purpose has been somewhat lost in the desire to account for the exploration of the area around the mountain and the many different attempts on it prior to 1955, what actually emerges is a realisation of just how important a role mountaineering has played in defining the image of the mountain, especially in the twentieth century. What also becomes apparent is the way that mountaineering and mountain travel are just one aspect of a complex matrix of creativity; plant hunting expeditions yield wonderful topographical paintings, exploration produces ground-breaking and astonishing photography, climbers bring back from high altitude subtly different ways of seeing the world. The question of the degree to which mountaineering might itself be designated an art is a fascinating notion and one that we continue to debate. To a mind conditioned by contemporary art – in particular its conceptual manifestations - Freshfield’s circumnavigation of the massif seems now to recall the carefully structured walks of contemporary artists such as Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, and vice versa; one might suggest parallels between the process of climbing the peak and conceptual projects involving journeys by younger artists such as Pierre Huyghe, who recently travelled to Antarctica, or Tacita Dean. On the mountain decisions about the route are both practical and creative; one yearns not only to create an achievable route to the peak, but one that is also aesthetically pleasing. Climbers are creative people. Climbing is creative.  

I would have welcomed further discussion of such ideas, which lurk in the background of Pierse’s account, for when he does hypothesise his analyses are both interesting and convincing. For example, of the phenomenon of the disembodied mountain, in which the peak hovers above a sea of clouds or mist, he suggests: ‘This, along with Kangchenjunga’s name, which when freely interpreted, can be taken to mean a kind of sacred space, has helped to fix in the imaginations of generations of westerners the idea of the mountain as an ethereal realm, disembodied from the world and periodically revealed in the same manner as a vision.’ Are Himalayan climbers then visionaries, seeking the purity, the sanctity, the cold brightness, of the high altitude world? 

Pierse’s assessments of the value of the images of the mountain he discusses are also convincing. The painter Edward Lear (perhaps better known today as the writer of nonsense verse) visited Darjeeling in 1874 and on his return to Europe produced a series of large oil paintings. These are fascinating and impressive pictures – and possibly the only examples of a major European painter of the nineteenth century working on Himalayan subjects – but Pierse is correct in identifying an awkwardness, a contrivance to them, which one does not seem to find in Lear’s wonderful topographical watercolour sketches, made before the subject. Pierse also rightly praises Vittorio Sella’s exquisite photographs, made during the 1899 circumnavigation with Freshfield, which set an extraordinarily high standard for high mountain photography. Pierse suggests that ‘the term that Sella himself used to describe his rigorous technical and aesthetic standards: la realta severa (severe reality) might also be used to sum up the quality of rare beauty that is found in the images themselves.’ He rightly calls Norman Hardie’s photograph, The Untrodden Summit of Kangchenjunga, 26 May 1955 ‘an outstanding image of mountaineering history.’

Kangchenjunga was, of course, first climbed in 1955 by Charles Evans’ British expedition, and the mountain has continued to occupy a special place in British mountaineering. With Tony Streather, Norman Hardie reached the untrodden summit the day after Band and Brown. That expedition was exemplary in so many ways, not least for the due respect accorded to the beliefs of local people, which meant that Band and Brown stopped short, just twenty feet or so away from the final summit. One wonders how many subsequent ascensionists (almost 200 are listed in the Alpine Journal 2005) have acted with such due care and attention to the culture of the region in which the mountain lies.

Pierse’s book is a valuable addition to the literature of both mountaineering and the art of the mountains. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the position that mountaineering occupies in the interface between culture and nature, and the products of that interface. It serves to remind us that while, as far as the general public goes, Everest has inevitably become the focus of attention, Kangchenjunga is actually a mountain that is absolutely key both to the development of mountaineering in the greater ranges and to the meaning that such places occupy in our imaginations.