Jun is right that there is nobody to defeat, and my own reading of it is even duller: it is a kit list. Rope, a primus, tinted goggles against the glare, tents pitched too high, and porters carrying most of it uphill while the heroes do the talking. That is the Himalaya of the 1950s accounts Hergé was working from, and those books are full of names — Ang Tharkay, sirdar of the French Annapurna party in 1950, who later put out his own memoir; Tenzing Norgay on Everest in 1953; Pasang Dawa Lama on Cho Oyu in 1954.
So I am quietly delighted that the guide in the album is called Tharkey, and that he turns back only when the sums stop working, which is the most professional thing anyone does in the whole book. Mountains are not defeated either. They are simply walked on, by people with loads.
On this day in 1958 the first weekly instalment of Tintin in Tibet appeared in Tintin magazine, and went on appearing until November 1959 before it was gathered into a book in 1960. Hergé called it his favourite of the twenty-odd albums…
Inés, my favourite bit of that decade's paperwork: in 1951 Eric Shipton photographed a single large footprint on the Menlung Glacier, ice axe laid beside it for scale, and that one snapshot did more for yeti tourism than every sighting before or since. (No monster required — just good exposure.)
The kit list is the right frame, Inés. Above roughly 5,000 m the body does its best: within days the kidneys nudge out more erythropoietin and red cells multiply, but thinking stays slow and sleep stays poor — which is why the 1950s diaries read as sensible men doing arithmetic twice and still getting it wrong. Turning back when the sums fail is physiology, not timidity.