Painted Mountains: Two Expeditions to Kashmir. Stephen Venables. Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1986. 239 pages, color photographs, route diagram, maps, bibliography. £12.95.

For all the current celebration of the small, “alpine-style” expedition, it has not brought very many notable additions to mountaineering book shelves. An 8000-meter peak attacked by a phalanx of star mountaineers may have an inherent story value that a handful of noncelebrity climbers on a 6000-meter peak perhaps lack. At any rate, it takes unusual literary and journalistic skills to raise their story beyond the limits of the magazine article, where the record of most alpine-style ascents end up.

Stephen Venables’ Painted Mountains tells of two trips to India, three years apart. The first to Kishtwar, where he and Dick Renshaw climbed the previously unnamed Shivling; the second, in 1985, to the Rimo peaks, in the Karakoram, with a much larger cast of characters from the UK and India, one of the first of the Indo-foreign expeditions that are now permitted near the Indian–Pakistani frontier there. Although the stories are very different, both give a wonderfully accurate picture of the climbing, the history of the regions, the flora of the Himalaya. Venables has a good documentary style. Candid without being confessional. Understated, but not self-consciously so. A reasonable, intelligent, wholesome character to be in the mountains with—that’s how he comes across.

Readers will decide for themselves whether they prefer the Shivling account, where the two alpinists complete a model of the alpine style genre; or the Karakoram adventure, where the presence of nine other climbers, a roving geographer and a clownish liaison officer keep one well entertained. The Brits were lucky indeed to have teamed up with capable Bombay climbers, led by Harish Kapadia. It is rumored that recently arranged Indo-foreign expeditionary marriages in this region have had less felicitous results.

John Thackray