nd unenterprising.
Contact with them brings home to us what a spirit of daring and high
adventure means to a people. And we are impressed with the
necessity of taking every step possible to create, sustain, and
strengthen this spirit in a people and in the human race generally.
The ascent of Mount Everest, we believe, will be a big step in that
direction.

The actual climbing of this mountain this Society will leave in the
hands of the Alpine Club, who have special experience in mountain
climbing. But the reconnaissance and mapping of the mountain and
its neighbourhood will fitly remain with us. And here we reach the
point where the principles 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 old European
scenes. And there in the Himalaya is the grandest scenery in the
world, and not a painter from Europe ever goes there--except just
on