Mysterious Gear: Modernist Mountaineering, Oxygen Rigs, and the Politics of Breath

Abstract One year after the Hillary/Tenzing ascent of Everest, W. H. Auden’s ‘Mountains’ (1954) describes climbers as ‘those unsmiling parties, / Clumping off at dawn in gear their mystery For points up’. By this time, such was likely to include an oxygen rig. Attitudes support human breath ‘on hill’ early twentieth century were fractured and controversial. Oxygen-less attempts associated with fairness a sense sporting, pushing body un-assisted limits on highest peaks became entangled notions masculinity, post-Great War era when younger generations sought challenges that elders had found through conflict. might be one ‘mystery’, but it also brought jarring modernity into atavistic struggles between rock. Mountain literature pre-1953 registers imperfect incorporation supply ‘gear’ poetic context, breathed line, where has not been present. The deployment issues now modernist culture onto mountainside, while debates raged about who got breathe air Himalayas, who—having deployed air-in-a-bottle—might said have climbed them all.