Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/687

Rh be the Bhooteas, for one of the women once carried a grand piano on her back forty-six miles in three days. This is equivalent to saying that a hotel porter would be the best guide on a mountain side. One of the Indian surveyors, Mr. Roberts, said it would be impossible to ascend Kabru, "as no one can avoid the almost certain consequences of an attempt to clamber over sharp ledges of rock and of the yielding of the snow coating that covers over a concealed crevasse." What almost certain consequences clambering over sharp ledges of rock should entail, except, perhaps, barking the climber's shins or tearing his knickerbockers, is a still unsolved riddle, and evidently the Indian Survey has never even heard of using a rope on a glacier.

Then, again, Mr. Graham was attacked about Pandim, a mountain 22,018 feet in height, which the Anglo-Indian press said the natives denied he had ascended. His character for veracity was called in question. The beauty of this attack lay in the fact that he never claimed to have ascended Pandim; on the contrary, he said in his report: "I do not know of any more formidable peak. On the west side it drops sheer, while the other three are guarded by the most extraordinary overhanging glaciers which quite forbid any attempt." Mr. Graham also announced his discovery of two peaks from Kabru, the one a rock peak, the other a snow peak, which seemed higher than Gaurisankar. The Indian Survey taxed this as being no discovery on his part, because the following February a survey party saw peaks which are assumed to be identical with those of Mr. Graham, and which the surveyors thought would prove higher than any mountain yet measured.

Mr. Douglas W. Freshfield, the present secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, aroused by the general foolishness of the Indian Survey, took up the cudgels in behalf of Mr. Graham, and a war on paper resulted in the pretty general acceptance of the reality of his ascent.

Since Mr. W. M. Conway's exploration in the Karakorums, however, the whole question has been reopened, Mr. Edward Whymper, the first climber of the Matterhorn, coming forward especially on account of his disbelief that any one could reach 24,000 feet without extreme suffering from rarefied air. Mr. Graham in his narrative states that neither he nor his Swiss companions "suffered any inconvenience from breathing other than the panting inseparable from any great muscular exertion. Headaches, nausea, bleeding at the nose, temporary loss of sight and hearing, were conspicuous only by their absence; and the only organ perceptibly affected was the heart, whose beatings became very perceptible, quite audible, while the pace was decidedly increased." Mr. Conway, on the contrary, states that "when 18,000 feet had been passed, we found that it was well to look to our