`Shrieks from one of the parties we left behind us informed us that a man had fallen into a hole and was in the process of being hauled out . . . Excitable novices are a nuisance on a mountain, especially when they are led, as in this case, by bad guides . . ."
Whatever about excitable novices, excitable armchair enthusiasts wouldn't have cut much ice with Sir Martin Conway. The late 19th century art critic, writer and explorer, who pioneered climbs in the Himalayas, the Andes and Tierra del Fuego lived at a time when men were men, high mountains were virgin territory and, in the best military lexicon, ripe for "assault", "conquest" and "subjugation".
The first man on record to complete a crossing of the Alps, which he did in 1894, Conway had a few more stars to his credit. He was the author of the first modern climbing guide, the Zermatt Pocket Book published in 1881. He was a president of both the Alpine Club and the Alpine Ski Club at the turn of the century and one wonders what he would have thought of some of his fellow contributors to Distant Mountains, a new and lavish Discovery Channel publication.
Take W. H. Murray, for instance, who died three years ago after a lifetime inspiring a generation. Born in 1913, Murray spent most of his life in the Scottish highlands, with one dramatic interlude; his classic, Mountaineering in Scotland, published in 1947, was written while he was a prisoner of war.
Yet, in his candid account of how he first took to the hills at the age of 21, the "confirmed pavement dweller" describes with great humour his "sudden awareness" of the freedom that such landscape can offer. He had overheard a mountaineer describing a weekend visit to An Teallach in Ross-shire, and dormant exploratory instincts were aroused.
He hiked it out to one of the few mountains he knew by name in his native heath, the Cobbler at Arrochar. Had he been "entering the sanctuary of Nanda Devi", he couldn't have felt more excited, he writes.
Having made it to the Cobbler corrie, he admits to pure intoxication. "And at once I proceeded to do all those wicked things so rightly denounced by grey-bearded gentlemen sitting at office desks in remote cities," he confesses. "I climbed steep snowslopes by myself. Without an ice-axe or nailed boots, without map, compass, or warm and windproof clothing, and, what is worse, without a companion, I kicked steps into the hard snow, going quite fast and gaily, until near the top I stopped and looked down.
"The corrie floor was now far below me and black boulders projected out of the snow. If I slid off, nothing would stop me until I hit something. I went on with exaggerated caution until I breasted the ridge between the centre and south peaks . . ."
He made it to the summit - "nothing but bare rock and boundless space and a bright cloud sailing" - and it was, he admits, his "Garden of Eden stage of purest innocence". For "it was not till later, when I plucked my apple in search of knowledge, that I read in textbooks, Man must not go alone on mountains". And - echoes of Sir Martin Conway - certainly not as "a bootless novice". That one's eye should be drawn to such text, illustrated with stunning photographs, might be interpreted as a slur on the work of John Cleare, who takes the main credit on this publication. After all, why bother wasting time on haunting images of Shivling, the 21,467-foot peak in the Garhwal Himalaya, when one can wallow in Jim Perrin's descriptions of the area?
But, then, it is not just the Cow's Mouth - the snout of the Gangotri, one of the Himalayas' largest glaciers - to which Perrin confines himself. The Manchester-born rock climber, writer, journalist and broadcaster, who knows this island's uplands only too well, has often been credited with transforming what some might class as a particular form of sports journalism into pure literature.
He has to be one of the finest travel writers in the English language. Take this introduction to Delhi: "The cacophonous manic jive of traffic on its main thoroughfares; the abject accepting plight of the dispossessed at every road margin . . ." And, then, in several sentences, he has plucked the reader, already showing signs of stress, and borne him or her up to the more tranquil Varanasi, where "trees are backlit in turquoise" and "a gibbous moon climbs over the Ganga, its silvered path marked in textures of glisten and ripple".
Those irresistibly drawn to high places are fortunate to have the benefit of such interpretation, and the 11-essay compilation will attract a wider audience for this genre. Cleare has a 40-year career in climbing behind him, but is more popularly known for film work such as The Eiger Sanction, starring Clint Eastwood; he also puts pen to paper himself.
Unfortunately, there is no Irish input - fine if altitude is the yardstick by which the selected landscapes are judged, but not so if literary merit is the qualification, given the published works of the Wicklow-based climber, writer and broadcaster, Dermot Somers.
Joining Cleare on this magical trek from the Scottish Western Isles to Arizona and the Peruvian Andes, and beyond to the Asian peaks, are such celebrated names as Mike Banks, Kurt Diemberger, Nicholas Crane and H. W. Tilman, the Kenyan planter, explorer, mountaineer, sailor and writer, whom Perrin once described affectionately as the tramp in the closing stages of a Chaplin film, setting off down the road for pastures new.
Perrin has a lovely, if apocryphal, story of Tilman which has a particular resonance in a world corralled and packaged by satellite media, such as the Discovery Channel; in an essay 22 years ago, he tells how the adventurer stumbled across the base camp of an expedition in Patagonia. Tilman was not amused. "I thought this was one corner of the Earth, damn it, where I could have hoped to be alone . . ."
Distant Mountains: Encounters with the World's Greatest Mountains, with photography by John Cleare, is published this month by the Discovery Channel at £25 sterling.