Daniel Light's "The White Ladder"

Daniel Light has been climbing for twenty years indoors and out. He lives in London, UK.

Light applied the "Page 99 Test" to The White Ladder: Triumph and Tragedy at the Dawn of Mountaineering, his first book, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The White Ladder thrusts us, mid-sentence, into the precipitate retreat of William Woodman Graham, the first European alpinist to climb in High Asia.

Graham is soon licking his wounds back in Darjeeling, where he makes plans to return to the mountains, his mind set on one particular massif in the Garhwal Himalaya:

Nanda Devi, ‘the Bliss-Giving Goddess’, is a mountain steeped in Indian folklore, said to be the last refuge of a beautiful princess who dared to rebuff the advances of a Rohilla prince. The young man did not take rejection well and waged war against her father, the king, defeating him on the battlefield. With no alternative but to run and hide, the princess, Nanda, fled to the highest reaches of the mountain, retreating into the rock itself. Thus, she became the mountain, its Devi, or patron-goddess, and it her eternal sanctuary.

And what a sanctuary. The mountain ‘rises from the centre of two concentric amphitheatres, resembling two horseshoes placed one within the other and touching each other at the toe,’ wrote the English mountaineer Dr Tom Longstaff. ‘The outer amphitheatre, or horseshoe, measures seventy miles in circumference and from its crest rise a dozen peaks of over 20,000 feet, including Trisul and Dunagiri as well as Nanda Devi East.’

Graham arrived in the vicinity of Nanda Devi in July...

William Graham is a pivotal figure within the book, a sportsman who courted controversy by going to the Himalaya 'for no higher purpose' than to climb at a time when, where the British were concerned, the mountains were the preserve of scientists and surveyors.

At this critical moment, when he might easily have lost heart, we find him resolutely determined - one of few characteristics common to the cast of eccentrics who pioneered high-altitude mountaineering on the greater ranges of the world.

Page 99 features another of the book's unsung heroes - the mountain, Nanda Devi. Today the Western world fixates on Mount Everest, so much so that, for a few days each summer, queues form at the summit. Such is 'the pull of the absolute'. In The White Ladder, I have tried to shine a light on some of the other peaks and mountain massifs that shouldered the upward advance of mountaineering's world altitude record, and to tell stories of their own. With its mix of fable and the physical, page 99 attests to the challenge of conjuring dream-like scenes amidst a landscape that must remain clear and comprehensible.

Graham exits page 99 as abruptly as he arrived, as he and his guide and porter advance towards the mountain along 'the course of dramatic river-cut gorge, the Rishi Ganga'. So ends his tidy cameo, in a book that finds one pioneering figure after another testing themself against some of the highest mountains on Earth. Graham, one of the more human - and humanitarian - is a better representative than some of them deserve.

Visit Daniel Light's website.

--Marshal Zeringue