214 NATURAL BEAUTY 



I have been offering for your consideration might 

 be applied. Were it not that the size of the first 

 party will have to be limited on account of transport 

 and supply difficulties, I should greatly like to have 

 a poet or a painter, or anyhow a climber like Mr. 

 Freshfield with a poetic soul, a member of it. For 

 I say quite deliberately and mean quite literally that 

 the geography of Mount Everest and its vicinity 

 will not be complete until it has been painted by 

 some great painter and described by some great 

 poet. Making the most accurate map of it will not 

 be completing our knowledge of it. The map-maker 

 only prepares the way — in some cases for the soldier 

 or the politician or the engineer — in this case for 

 the geologist, the naturalist, and above all for the 

 painter and poet. Until we have a picture and a 

 poem — in prose or verse — of Mount Everest we 

 shall not really know it ; our Geography will be 

 incomplete, and, indeed, will lack its chief essential. 

 The Duke of the Abruzzi, in his expedition to 

 the second highest mountain in the world, took with 

 him the finest mountain photographer there is — 

 Signor Vittorio Sella — and he brought back superb 

 photographs, for he is a true artist with a natural 

 feeling for high mountains. But I have seen the 

 very mountains that he photographed, and when I 

 look at these photographs — the best that man can 

 produce — I almost weep to think how little of the 

 real character of great mountains they communicate 

 to us. The sight of the photographs wrings me with 

 disappointment that it was a photographer and not 

 a painter who went there. Here in Europe are 

 artists by the score painting year after year the same 



