Word: tilman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...good book on mountain climbing can give almost any non-climber an attack of armchair vertigo. In The Ascent of Nando. Devi Mountain-Climber Tilman dizzied many a reader with his account of his climb, in 1936, to the summit of India's Nanda Devi (25,660 ft.), the highest mountain ever scaled by man. Last week, while Mountaineer Tilman was on his way to try another climb of Mt. Everest, he dizzied U. S. readers again, in a book that told of his slides, falls and narrow escapes in the mountains of equatorial Africa...
...entirely given over to mountain climbing, Snow on the Equator has chapters on Mr. Tilman's experiences as a coffee planter and on his 3,000-mile bicycle trip from Uganda to the French Cameroons. A British soldier, he won a farm in Kenya in a lottery after the War, ran it for ten years, with intermissions of mountain climbing, big game hunting, gold mining. As a coffee planter he made a classic pact with his partner ("that master and man should not both get drunk on the same day"). He made a trip across Africa by bicycle...
...mountain climbing made his African years memorable. First was the great, squat, "pudding-like" dome of Kilimanjaro, 19,710 feet, in Tanganyika, the highest mountain in Africa. Since the Germans built huts on it during the War, at 8,500 feet and at 11,500 feet, Author Tilman says cavalierly that Kilimanjaro offers ''no climbing difficulties whatsoever." The great jagged tower of Mount Kenya, 17.040 feet, buttressed with ridges and festooned with hanging glaciers, was a far tougher job. On the peak experienced climbers had violent attacks of vomiting, and on the descent Tilman fell 80 feet...
...comprise a world of their own-a weird country of moss, bog, rotting vegetation, and mud, on which flourish grotesque plants that seem to have survived from a past era . . . and make more desirable the fresh purity of the snows which lie beyond." In the mists of Ruwenzori, Mountaineer Tilman admits that he and his companion, Eric Shipton, lost their way, their tempers, and almost their lives-in addition to which he dropped his camera, broke his wrist watch, while Shipton sprained his shoulder hanging onto shrubs on a convex slope...
Matter-of-fact in his approach, making no attempt to conjure up literary terrors, Mountaineer Tilman pictures only two instances in which he was in genuine clanger, ascribes both to carelessness. Of a failure to reach a peak, he says, ''When a party fails to get to the top of a mountain, it is usual ... to have some picturesque excuse." But in his case it was the prosaic and common reason: "inability to go any further...