The Everlasting Hills, by J. Waller. 8 vo.; 190 pages, with 64 plates and 4 sketch-maps. London: Blackwood & Sons, 1939. Price 15s.

“I have become a great believer in luck ; it seems to me that the mountains are kinder to those who cannot be expected to know their dangers.” So writes twenty-eight-year-old James Waller in The Everlasting Hills despite his own evidence to the contrary. Again and again this British army officer in India tells us that “the route was swept by avalanches,” or “if he had slipped I knew I couldn’t hold him; and he touches lightly on the accident to his Masherbrum expedition, from which four men returned with hands and feet mutilated by frostbite.

Waller evidently learned to climb in the Himalayas, where he found at once the thrill of guideless climbing and of mountaineering expeditions. With no technical training he set out to learn by himself. He did. At least he learned a lot about special Himalayan problems, about food and transport and weather. From his early attempts on Thayiwas Peak (15,928 ft.), which he later climbed, and subsequent attempts on Nun (23,410 ft.) and Saltoro Kangri (25,400 ft.), he learned that he could use more knowledge of technique. Accordingly he spent a summer in the Alps with a first-class guide. The good weather of that summer and the ease of recognized ascents behind a guide gave him a somewhat contemptuous attitude toward alpine climbing. On his return to India in 1936 he “saw no reason why a party of complete novices should not undertake Alpine type climbs in the Himalayas.” The phrase is vague, of course, but lives might easily be lost by those following his advice.

In the summer of 1937 Waller made an attempt on Machoi Peak with native support alone. He says he then had a theory that a single European with native carriers could do better on a big peak than a group of Europeans. His experiences made him change his mind, and in 1938 he secretly organized an expedition to Masherbrum (25,660 ft.) in the Karakoram. This group included five experienced British mountaineers, five Sherpas and two local villagers. Two of the climbers, Harrison and Hodgkin, successfully reached a point only 600 ft. below the summit, and with better luck apparently would have reached it. However, a series of accidents, when a tent was buried by a small avalanche and then two climbers were forced to bivouac in a crevasse during a storm, caused such frostbite that the attack was given up. Four men in all were frostbitten, two of them so badly that they lost most of their fingers and toes.

The book has superb pictures, as well as an unusual attitude toward Himalayan climbing and climbing in general. Waller takes pains to emphasize that the Himalayan climber is not a special sort of superman. Far from it. But neither is a tyro climber one who can be turned loose in big mountains without warning. The dangers of big mountains must be fairly estimated. This Waller does not do. He takes great pains to show truthfully that climbing is possible for large numbers of people. He does not show that safe climbing depends little on luck and much on experience.