Excerpted from The Armchair Mountaineer Edited by David Reuther and John Thorn

I seem to distinguish two sorts of climber, those who take a high line about climbing and those who take no particular line at all. It is depressing to think how little I understand either, and I can hardly believe that the second sort are such fools as I imagine. Perhaps the distinction has no reality; it may be that it is only a question of attitude. Still, even as an attitude, the position of the first sort of climber strikes a less violent shock of discord with mere reason. Climbing for them means something more than a common amusement, and more than other forms of athletic pursuit mean to other men; it has a recognized importance in life. If you could deprive them of it they would be conscious of a definite degradation, a loss of virtue. For those who take the high line about it, climbing may be one of the modern ways of salvation, along with slumming, statistics, and other forms of culture, and more complete than any of these. They have an arrogance with regard to this hobby never equaled even by a little king among grouse killers. It never, for instance, presents itself to them as comparable with field sports. They assume an unmeasured superiority. And yet—they give no explanation.

I am myself one of the arrogant sort, and may serve well for example, because I happen also to be a sportsman. It is not intended that any inference as to my habits should follow from this premise. You may easily be a sportsman though you have never walked with a gun under your arm, nor bestrid a tall horse in your pink. I am a sportsman simply because men say that I am; it would be impossible to convince them of the contrary, and it's no use complaining; and, once I have humbly accepted my fate and settled down in this way of life, I am proud to show, if I can, how I deserve the title. Though a sportsman may be guiltless of sporting deeds, one who has acquired the sporting reputation will show cause in kind if he may. Now, it is abundantly clear that any expedition on the high Alps is of a sporting nature; it is almost aggressively sporting. And yet it would never occur to me to prove my title by any reference to mountaineering in the Alps, nor would it occur to any other climber of the arrogant sort who may also be a sportsman. We set climbing on a pedestal above the common recreations of men. We hold it apart and label it as something that has a special value.

This, though it passes with all too little comment, is a plain act of rebellion. It is a serious deviation from the normal standard of rightness and wrongness, and if we were to succeed in establishing our value for mountaineering we should upset the whole order of society, just as completely as it would be upset if a sufficient number of people who claimed to be enlightened were to eat eggs with knives and regard with disdain the poor folk who ate them with spoons.

	George Leigh Mallory (1886-1924) Mallory wrote far less than he was written about, but something of the romantic hold this man had on the climbing fraternity may be understood from his essay"The Mountaineer as Artist" excerpted here. Written for The Climbers' Club Journal in 1914, it expresses with grace and force his belief that, in climbing, man confronts the sublime as in no other sport. That pursuit of the sublime—sensed most profoundly at the interface between life and death—led Mallory to mount three expeditions to the highest point on Earth. The last of these, in 1924, may have culminated in an ascent of Everest, but even the discovery of Mallory's body on Everest's Northeast Ridge in May, 1999, has yet to yield an answer to one of mountaineering's biggest mysteries: did Mallory and his partner, Irvine, fall on the way up—or on the way down?

But there is a propriety of behaviour for rebels as for others. Society can at least expect of rebels that they explain themselves....

Climbers who, like myself, take the high line have much to explain, and it is time they set about it. Notoriously they endanger their lives. With what object? If only for some physical pleasure, to enjoy certain movements of the body and to experience the zest of emulation, then it is not worthwhile. Climbers are only a particularly foolish set of desperadoes; they are on the same plane with hunters, and many degrees less reasonable. The only defense for mountaineering puts it on a higher plane than mere physical sensation. It is asserted that the climber experiences higher emotions; he gets some good for his soul. His opponent may well feel skeptical about this argument. He, too, may claim to consider his soul's good when he can take a holiday. Probably it is true of anyone who spends a well-earned fortnight in healthy enjoyment at the seaside that he comes back a better, that is to say, a more virtuous man than he went. How are the climber's joys worth more than the seaside? What are these higher emotions to which he refers so elusively? And if they really are so valuable, is there no safer way of reaching them? Do mountaineers consider these questions and answer them again and again from fresh experience, or are they content with some magic certainty born of comparative ignorance long ago?

It would be a wholesome tonic, perhaps, more often to meet an adversary who argued on these lines. In practice I find that few men ever want to discuss mountaineering seriously. I suppose they imagine that a discussion with me would be unprofitable; and I must confess that if anyone does open the question my impulse is to put him off. I can assume a vague disdain for civilization, and I can make phrases about beautiful surroundings, and puff them out, as one who has a secret and does not care to reveal it because no one would understand—phrases which refer to the divine riot of Nature in her ecstasy of making mountains.

Thus I appeal to the effect of mountain scenery upon my aesthetic sensibility. But, even if I can communicate by words a true feeling, I have explained nothing. Aesthetic delight is vitally connected with our performance, but it neither explains nor excuses it. No one for a moment dreams that our apparently willful proceedings are determined merely by our desire to see what is beautiful. The mountain railway could cater for such desires. By providing viewpoints at a number of stations, and by concealing all signs of its own mechanism, it might be so completely organized that all the aesthetic joys of the mountaineer should be offered to its intrepid ticket holders. It would achieve this object with a comparatively small expenditure of time, and would even have, one might suppose, a decisive advantage by affording to all lovers of the mountains the opportunity of sharing their emotions with a large and varied multitude of their fellow men. And yet the idea of associating this mechanism with a snow mountain is the abomination of every species of mountaineer. To him it appears as a kind of rape. The fact that he so regards it indicates the emphasis with which he rejects the crude aesthetic reasons as his central defense.

I suppose that, in the opinion of many people who have opportunities of judging, mountaineers have no ground for claiming for their pursuit a superiority as regards the natural beauties that attend it. And certainly many huntsmen would resent their making any such claim. We cannot, therefore, remove mountaineering from the plane of hunting by a composite representation of its merits—by asserting that physical and aesthetic joys are blent for us and not for others....