Science: Expeditions

¶ “Denali” (Home of the Sun) is the Kuskokwim Indians’ name for Alaska’s 20,300-ft. Mt. McKinley, highest point in North America. Few miles distant is the summit of Mt. Foraker, 17,000 ft. high, whose two breastlike peaks the Kuskokwim call “Denali’s Wife.” “Denali” had been climbed to the top but “Denali’s Wife” had not last July when Dr. T. Graham Brown of the University of South Wales & party set up their base camp on the Foraker River. From there the climbers struggled to the ice-clad summit of Mt. Foraker’s north peak, four days later through deep new snowdrifts to the crest of the south peak.

¶ Professor Guenther Oskar Dyhrenfurth of Zurich last week cabled Berlin that his party had made a successful ascent of 25,500-ft. Queen Mary Peak in the Himalayas. The message said that Professor Dyhrenfurth’s wife Hettie accompanied the others to the top, surpassing the women’s mountain climbing record (23,300 ft. up Pinnacle Peak in the Eastern Karakorum Range) established 18 years ago by the late Mrs. Fannie Bullock Workman of Worcester, Mass.

¶ A helmet of ice 100 to 150 ft. thick caps British Columbia’s Mt. Robson, tallest (12,292 ft.) of the Canadian Rockies. From the ice cap’s edge huge fragments occasionally break off and start avalanches. A Bostonian named Henry S. Hall and his Swiss guide had the pluck to defy this danger, the luck to escape it, were last week picking their way down from Mt. Robson’s glittering summit.

¶ On tiny Easter Island, isolated eastern outpost of the Polynesians, a French navy gunboat deposited a hopeful group of investigators headed by Professor Alfred Metraux of Switzerland. Ever since it was first inspected by Europeans on Easter Day, 1722, the island has baffled scientists because of its wooden tablets engraved with pictographs which have not been deciphered, its hundreds of huge busts carved from volcanic ash. Expecting little help from the 250 inhabitants (reduced from 5,000 or 6,000 by emigration and polyandry), the Metraux party will make one more attempt to decode the pictographs, discover who made the statues, how they were transported.

¶ David Lockhart Robertson Lorimer is a British linguist and retired Indian Army officer who has published several scholarly papers on the phonology and syntax of Persian dialects. Last summer Lieut.-Colonel Lorimer left England to spend a year and a half with the Burushu people in the mountainous north corner of India and round out an exhaustive study of their language, customs, origin. Unruly, boisterous, athletic, the 17,600 Burushu are not much like their lackadaisical neighbors of India’s plains and valleys. They speak a queer, syntactically complex language called Burushaski, with no less than four genders. Lieut.-Colonel Lorimer believes himself the only white man with a working knowledge of Burushaski, knows of no other human tongue to which it is related.