From April to September 1934, the British mountaineers Bill Tilman and Eric Shipton explored the central Himalayas. They shared extreme hardship and extreme beauty, and managed to survey much of the Nanda Devi sanctuary, an area hitherto terra incognita. As they were returning to Britain, following six months of continuous companionship, Shipton casually suggested to Tilman he might call him “Eric”, instead of “Shipton”. Tilman demurred, Shipton later recalled, “became acutely embarrassed, hung his head and then muttered, ‘It sounds so damned silly...'”.

It's a wonderfully British moment. It's also a wonderfully Himalayan moment. For as Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver show in their magnificent history, the Himalaya region was for a long time a landscape in which individuals acted out the clichés of their respective nations.

When a 1932 German expedition first sighted the peak of Nanga Parbat, they celebrated by singing Dear Homeland, We Greet You, picking edelweiss and eating Bavarian smoked ham. The British lit their briarwood pipes on reaching a new summit, wore tweed hacking jackets and bow ties and lugged cases of vintage Montebello champagne into base camp on the 1924 Everest expedition. Maurice Herzog, leader of the successful 1950 French attempt on Annapurna, approached his mountain existentially (“We were speechless in the face of the tremendous peak whose reality ...so moved us that we couldn't utter a word”), while Edmund Hillary embodied Antipodean informality with his first words after descending from Everest in 1953: “Well, George, we knocked the bastard off!”

Read a certain way, Fallen Giants is a tremendous pageant of colonial ridiculousness: 120 years' worth of western nations striving to prove their manliness against the backdrop of the world's greatest geophysical features. But, as the hint of elegy in the book's title suggests, this isn't quite how Isserman and Weaver play their story. They are more than alert to the absurdities of high-altitude mountaineering (the Duke of Abruzzi lugging 10 iron bedsteads up Alaska's Malaspina glacier, for instance), but they also see the early decades of Himalayan climbing as exemplifying some of the best aspects of human behaviour: fellowship, altruism, good humour in the face of adversity, a spirit of adventure.

The Himalayan era is usually dated from Martin Conway's 1892 expedition to the Baltoro region. Conway, an art historian with a private income, had like all late-Victorian climbers learnt his skills in the Alps. But by the 1880s, the Alps were pretty much done. And so ambitious mountaineers began to prospect elsewhere for challenges: Norway, the Caucasus, the Andes and, eventually, the Himalayas.

So they came, the first climbers, to the “Abode of Snow” (the translation of the Sanskrit Him-alaya): Conway on his pilgrimage of romance to the inner Karakoram; JN Collie, a chemist who had cut his climbing teeth in the Scottish Highlands; and Albert Mummery, a political economist who was also a fine gymnastic rock climber. With hindsight, these early adventures seem both blessed and cursed by naivety. At that time, the effects of extreme altitude were not understood. Ignorance of Himalayan topography meant that even finding one's mountain was an effort. And the basic logistics of portering and supply chains were still being worked out. Inevitably, there were deaths: Mummery disappeared, probably in an avalanche, on August 24, 1895 on Nanga Parbat. “The first mortal tragedy in the history of Himalayan mountaineering”, as the authors have it - and the first of many. Deaths, ghosts and disappearances haunt these pages. “He was not seen again” becomes a refrain, a grim chorus-line to the narrative, as climber after climber, Sherpa after Sherpa dies: by falling, by avalanche, from hypothermia or from altitude sickness.

Perhaps the most gently tragic of these Himalayan dead is Maurice Wilson. Wilson was a Yorkshireman by birth, a salesman by trade, and insane by the age of 30. He became obsessed with the idea that he could ascend mountains through a combination of fasting and prayer. In 1934, after flying an open biplane called Ever Wrest 5,000 miles to Purnia, he began an illegal ascent of Everest. His Sherpas abandoned him at 21,000ft. He climbed on into the teeth of desperate weather and yawning crevasses, and perished of exposure. A year later, a British party found his corpse, and on it his diary. They interred the body and read the diary. Wilson's handwriting became more spidery towards the end, his syntax less assured. But the final entry, for May 31, was written clearly: “Off again, gorgeous day.”

Fallen Giants is only the second history of Himalayan climbing, the first being Kenneth Mason's classic The Abode of Snow (1955). In the half-century since Mason's book, the Himalayan scene has been transformed. Commercial guiding has reshaped greater-range mountaineering: in four days in October 1990, 31 people reached the summit of Everest - more than had climbed it between 1953 and 1970. On the honeypot peaks, in the weather windows of May and September, climbing has become - in the phrase of British climber Peter Boardman - “an experiment in vertically integrated crowd control”.

So the fallen giants of the author's title are the mountains themselves, now all summitted and mapped, but also the early Himalayan climbers. The ideals and ethics of these men have, Isserman and Weaver convincingly argue, been corrupted by late modernity. Large expeditions now involve film rights and sponsorship deals, and, therefore, also blame and recrimination. It is one of the many achievements of this fine book that it combines historical sweep and accuracy with a moral argument. One ends it both persuaded and dismayed by the authors' conclusion that, at least in the world of Himalayan mountaineering, the “brotherhood of the rope” has given way to “the confessional, the confrontational and the commercial”.

Fallen Giants by Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver
Yale £25 pp592

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