Finally, the Sherpas are heroes of their own story

John Keay has for many years been a key historian and prolific contributor to the romance attaching to the highest mountains on Earth. His latest book is described as a summation of that lifetime’s contribution, offering an overview of the Himālaya – the Sanskrit version (‘Abode of Snow’) that Keay bids us use – both as a physical place and as a realm of intellectual inquiry.

The book opens with a bang. Its first theme is the astonishing mountain-making forces that created the region. Specifically, Keay gives us the prolonged intellectual skirmishes among geologists as they tried to piece together the formative processes. The one who unpicked their genesis was the German scholar Alfred Wegener, who vanished without trace in Greenland while seeking proof for his ideas on continental drift. It would be more than half a century before an understanding of plate tectonics finally brought confirmation of his world-changing theory.

Essentially what Wegener summoned was a vision of India as a land mass, sailing at the speed fingernails grow through the Tethys Sea of the Cretaceous period. By the middle of the Eocene, roughly 40 million years ago, there was an unimaginable cataclysm as the subcontinent, docking with Eurasia, smashed and buckled the Earth’s crust from Afghanistan to Myanmar.

For thousands of years people had pondered the anomaly that a region rising to eight kilometres above sea level contained ubiquitous evidence of marine life. Ancient Hindus had long incorporated fossil ammonites in their religious symbolism and Buddhist women in Ladakh adorned their wedding finery with cowrie shells. Even at Everest’s summit, climbers are confronted with limestone formations fashioned in an ancient seabed.

The opening account of all this is a tour de force of concise exposition. But what becomes increasingly apparent is that Keay’s personal bias is not only for what he calls ‘the human component in Himalayan studies’ but for those parts of it that are largely white, militarily trained and male.