Fünf jahrhunderte Triglav, by Julius Kugy. 8vo. ; xi + 378 pages, with 48 full-page illustrations. Graz : Leykam-Verlag, 1938. Price RM. 11.50.

The Triglav is not merely a mountain, it is a kingdom : the realm of Zlatarog, the white chamois, whose golden horns are the key to the serpent-guarded treasurer of the Bogatin.

Kugy’s monumental anthology begins with the early history of the peak, its name and location appearing in boundary delineations of the fifteeth century (1452), and carries on down to the modern ascents of the present day. In 1777, nine years before the conquest of Mont Blanc, attempts were first made to attain its summit. Few mountains have such ancient and impressive history, and out of the dim past of centuries the Triglav assumes majesty before our eyes.

English-speaking readers will be enticed to the original account (A. J. 4, 345) of the first British ascent, following Howard, Tuckett and Christian Lauener in the wandering thither in 1869; and one will read again the pages of Gilbert and Churchill, of whose “Dolomite Mountains” one learns that a German edition, now most rare, was published at Klagenfurt in 1865.

Kugy presents in a vivid panorama the epic of his well-loved peak, monarch of the Julian Alps, the last great eastern mountain as the range subsides in the foothills of the Adriatic. The illustrations do full justice to their theme. Longstaff remarks on the almost Tibetan character of certain valleys and, indeed, the Triglav in new snow, towering through banks of clouds (p. 368), differs only in scale from Everest itself.

J. M. T.