A Bit Of All White

EARLIER this year I read journalist Tom Parfitt's High Caucasus, his telling of therapeutic walking in the Caucasus after being traumatised covering the 2004 Beslan school siege.

I think it may have been there that I got the idea of reading Florence Grove's The Frosty Caucasus - An Account Of A Walk Through Part Of The Range And Of An Ascent Of Elbruz In The Summer Of 1874.

Clumsy title - far-from-clumsy writing

The book, which I got as a reprint, turned out to be entertaining, informative and full of cliffhangers, in more ways than one.

An interesting aspect is that the author refers to fellow mountaineers and travelers by their initials, rather than first names, and uses initials on the cover of the book - perhaps due to his own first name being Florence.

The year 1874 does not seem all that long ago, but, with the benefit of hindsight, some of Grove's views seem quaint, even though he was one of the top mountaineers of his day and a president of London's Alpine Club.

To quote but one example: "It may be taken for granted that no human being could walk to the top of Mount Everest."

That was proved wrong in 1953 by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, and possibly Everest was first ascended even earlier, in 1924, by George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, but they did not live to tell the tale.

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the book and sped through it, which was just as well as at nearly 350 pages it was quite a hefty tome to tote in my backpack.