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Lot Essay
A RARE ALBUM FROM MUMMERY'S NANGA PARBAT ATTEMPT: THE LAST PHOTOGRAPHS OF MUMMERY.
Albert Frederick Mummery (1855-1895), a brilliant and virtuoso Alpinist, led an expedition to climb Nanga Parbat ('The Naked Mountain') in 1895, the first ever attempt at an 8,000 metre peak. Mummery enlisted his old climbing companions, Norman Collie and Geoffrey Hastings, and they were joined in India by the Hon. Charles Granville Bruce, later leader of the British expeditions to Mount Everest in 1922 and 1924 and elected President of the Alpine Club in 1923, and two Gurkha soldiers.
Following reconaissance of the mountain and a first ascent of Diamarai Peak (5,568m), the team attempted the Diamir face of Nanga Parbat, placing two camps and reaching a high point of c.6,100m. In his account of the expedition, Climbing on the Himalaya and other mountain ranges (1902), Collie wrote, 'The climbing, Mummery admitted, was excessively difficult ... I shall always look upon it as one of his finest climbs. Part of it I know from personal experience, and from Mummery's description of the upper half there must have been some magnificent climbing surrounded by an ice world such as can be seen nowhere'. Descending from 6,100m, Mummery found that their tent and supplies had been carried away by an avalanche, forcing him to abandon further attempts this side and move his focus to the north side of the mountain and the Rakhiot glacier.
Mummery, who was short-sighted and removed his glasses when walking, wished to avoid 'the interminable scrambling over loose stones' on the glacial moraines and chose a more direct passage to the upper Rakhiot glacier via an unexplored northern branch of the Diamir glacier leading to a col at about 6,230m on the ridge between Ganalo Peak and Nanga Parbat. He was accompanied by the two Gurkhas who were, in his words, 'first-rate climbers and good men, but cannot afford the help of a real AC man'. The three men split from their companions on 24 August and were never seen again. The most probable cause of their deaths is an avalanche in the narrow branch glacier, overhung on both sides by sérac-laden walls. Collie wrote later of the destructive power of Himalayan avalanches. 'That which in winter on a Scotch hill would be a slide of snow, and in the Alps an avalanche, becomes amongst these giant peaks an overwhelming cataclysm shaking the solid bases of the hills, and capable with its breath alone of sweeping down forests.'
'In his everyday, non-climbing life A.F. Mummery was a conventional and phlegmatic English businessman, but once he laced up his nailed boots and felt Alpine rock and ice beneath them he became mysteriously transformed into the very incarnation of mountaineering skill and daring. ... A "climber's climber" if ever there was one, he regarded mountains less as a playground than as a laboratory for the development of his craft, welcoming difficulty and hazard for their own stern sake, despising easy successes and the mere gathering of records.' (J.R. Ullman, The Age of Mountaineering, London, 1956, pp. 68-9.) In the concluding paragraph of My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus (1895) Mummery wrote what might have been his own epitaph. [The mountaineer] 'gains a knowledge of himself, a love of all that is most beautiful in nature, and an outlet such as no other sport affords ... gains for which no price is, perhaps, too high. It is true the great ridges sometimes demand their sacrifice, but the mountaineer would hardly forego his worship though he knew himself to be the destined victim.'
The summit of Nanga Parbat was finally reached after a solitary climb by Hermann Buhl in 1953 from the Rakhiot side, following four attempts from that side by German/Austrian parties between 1932 and 1938, during which period ten Europeans and fifteen Sherpas lost their lives.
J. Norman Collie, a distinguished professor of chemistry and keen photographer, started climbing in Skye in 1886 at the age of twenty-seven, later becoming one of the leading pioneers of rock-climbing in Scotland, and making the first ascent of the Tower Ridge of Ben Nevis. He climbed extensively in Britain, the Alps, Norway and Canada, naming Mount Mummery (3,331m) in British Columbia for his friend in 1898, and was elected President of the Alpine Club in 1920.
Albert Frederick Mummery (1855-1895), a brilliant and virtuoso Alpinist, led an expedition to climb Nanga Parbat ('The Naked Mountain') in 1895, the first ever attempt at an 8,000 metre peak. Mummery enlisted his old climbing companions, Norman Collie and Geoffrey Hastings, and they were joined in India by the Hon. Charles Granville Bruce, later leader of the British expeditions to Mount Everest in 1922 and 1924 and elected President of the Alpine Club in 1923, and two Gurkha soldiers.
Following reconaissance of the mountain and a first ascent of Diamarai Peak (5,568m), the team attempted the Diamir face of Nanga Parbat, placing two camps and reaching a high point of c.6,100m. In his account of the expedition, Climbing on the Himalaya and other mountain ranges (1902), Collie wrote, 'The climbing, Mummery admitted, was excessively difficult ... I shall always look upon it as one of his finest climbs. Part of it I know from personal experience, and from Mummery's description of the upper half there must have been some magnificent climbing surrounded by an ice world such as can be seen nowhere'. Descending from 6,100m, Mummery found that their tent and supplies had been carried away by an avalanche, forcing him to abandon further attempts this side and move his focus to the north side of the mountain and the Rakhiot glacier.
Mummery, who was short-sighted and removed his glasses when walking, wished to avoid 'the interminable scrambling over loose stones' on the glacial moraines and chose a more direct passage to the upper Rakhiot glacier via an unexplored northern branch of the Diamir glacier leading to a col at about 6,230m on the ridge between Ganalo Peak and Nanga Parbat. He was accompanied by the two Gurkhas who were, in his words, 'first-rate climbers and good men, but cannot afford the help of a real AC man'. The three men split from their companions on 24 August and were never seen again. The most probable cause of their deaths is an avalanche in the narrow branch glacier, overhung on both sides by sérac-laden walls. Collie wrote later of the destructive power of Himalayan avalanches. 'That which in winter on a Scotch hill would be a slide of snow, and in the Alps an avalanche, becomes amongst these giant peaks an overwhelming cataclysm shaking the solid bases of the hills, and capable with its breath alone of sweeping down forests.'
'In his everyday, non-climbing life A.F. Mummery was a conventional and phlegmatic English businessman, but once he laced up his nailed boots and felt Alpine rock and ice beneath them he became mysteriously transformed into the very incarnation of mountaineering skill and daring. ... A "climber's climber" if ever there was one, he regarded mountains less as a playground than as a laboratory for the development of his craft, welcoming difficulty and hazard for their own stern sake, despising easy successes and the mere gathering of records.' (J.R. Ullman, The Age of Mountaineering, London, 1956, pp. 68-9.) In the concluding paragraph of My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus (1895) Mummery wrote what might have been his own epitaph. [The mountaineer] 'gains a knowledge of himself, a love of all that is most beautiful in nature, and an outlet such as no other sport affords ... gains for which no price is, perhaps, too high. It is true the great ridges sometimes demand their sacrifice, but the mountaineer would hardly forego his worship though he knew himself to be the destined victim.'
The summit of Nanga Parbat was finally reached after a solitary climb by Hermann Buhl in 1953 from the Rakhiot side, following four attempts from that side by German/Austrian parties between 1932 and 1938, during which period ten Europeans and fifteen Sherpas lost their lives.
J. Norman Collie, a distinguished professor of chemistry and keen photographer, started climbing in Skye in 1886 at the age of twenty-seven, later becoming one of the leading pioneers of rock-climbing in Scotland, and making the first ascent of the Tower Ridge of Ben Nevis. He climbed extensively in Britain, the Alps, Norway and Canada, naming Mount Mummery (3,331m) in British Columbia for his friend in 1898, and was elected President of the Alpine Club in 1920.