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