Seth Goodman, the professor of anthropology, needs to get away from his demoralizing wife, to accomplish something. His old Air Force buddy, Hodge, the instigator of the search, quite simply wants immortality - at any cost. The photographer Niels is trying to assuage his conscience for having caused his wife's suicide. Bruno, the German mountaineer, craves a glorious death among the snow-covered Nepales peaks rather than prolong an unhappy existence. The English playboy Peter merely seeks a new excitement.

 

In the strange world of the Himalayas, the abode of the gods, the men learn one another's strengths and weaknesses, realizing that each man's survival is in the hands of his colleagues. Pitted man against man, and man against beast, they become as dangerous to each other as their prey is to them. And ceaselessly the elements try to tear them from their frail foothold on life. Search for scientific truth, for love, for life, for death? Or at the last just an instinctive urge to survive, to return to the women waiting for them at the base?

 

Yet behind the striving runs a darker thread, for it becomes apparent that the government sanctioning the expedition has its own reasons - unconnected with natural history - for sending them to Nepal, poised so dangerously on the watershed between two warring ideologies.  Hardcover, Dust Jacket, Near Fine. Neate X 407.