1. VITTORIO SELLA. Mountains above Lhonak, foot of the La, 1899, Sella number HS 78. 6.6x9" collodion print, printed 1901, mounted on 10x12" heavy brown board. Embossed with Vittorio Sella stamp in lower right of print. Inscribed in black ink mount recto: Mountains above the Lungma Valley. Inscribed in pencil mount verso: 78 / HS 78

2. VITTORIO SELLA. Camp near Gora Chu, Lhonak, 1899, Sella number HS 78. 7.3x9.4" collodion print, printed 1901, mounted on 10x12" heavy brown board. Embossed with Vittorio Sella stamp in lower right of print. Inscribed in black ink mount recto: Camping in the Lungma Valley. Inscribed in pencil mount verso: 79 / HS 79.

In 1899 Vittorio Sella joined Douglas Freshfield on an expedition to Kangchenjunga the third highest peak on planet earth and the most conspicuous of the Himalayan Peaks... Freshfield wrote about this in 1903, "[This is] the first Tour of Kangchenjunga made by Europeans...For almost all my illustrations I have to thank Signor Vittorio Sella, who also accompanied me. He has proved his skill as a mountain photographer in the Alps, in the Caucasus, and in Alaska. But he has never found a nobler or more varied field, or worked with more uniform success, than under the shadow of the highest Himalaya...The Himalayan chain is one thousand five hundred miles long..."

"My object, as I have already said, was to make the tour - to use an Alpine phrase, ' the High-level Tour' - of Kangchenjunga, passing as near the great mountain as might prove to be possible. This circuit had never been accomplished by any European. Sir Joseph Hooker came nearest to it fifty years ago." p. 20 "To get round Kangchenjunga was not, therefore, the only object I set before me. I hoped also to be able to obtain, what the Indian Survey had been too fully employed elsewhere to be able to give geographers, a fairly accurate general delineation of the main glacial features of the group, and some material for comparing them with those of the Alps and the Caucasus. I trusted to be able to ascertain the number and length of the trunk ice- streams, to form an approximate estimate of the amount of ground covered by snow and ice, and to recognize any peculiarities that might distinguish the glaciers of Sikhim [sic] from those of more temperate regions." p. 29

The party of European explorers:
"The field and object of my explorations decided my next care was to secure suitable companions. In my friend Edmund Garwood I found an Alpine climber who had studied the art of travel with Sir Martin Conway in Spitsbergen, had some practice in plane-table surveying, and was also a Professor of Geology and a competent photographer. Signer Vittorio Sella has been known throughout Europe for many years as one of the first of mountain photographers. In the Caucasus and Alaska, he had been singularly successful, both with telephotographic plates and in mountain panoramas taken from great heights. I thought myself fortunate, therefore, when he agreed to the conditions on which I proposed he should join my party. At his particular request I agreed to his bringing his brother. Signer Erminio Sella, to keep him company. Signer V. Sella kindly engaged for me a young Val Tournanche guide, Angelo Maquignaz, one of the family whose name is intimately associated with the Matterhorn. He also brought with him as a photographic assistant, a Piedmontese, named Emile Botta. We sailed, a party of six Europeans, from Marseilles on August 10, 1899." p. 29

What it looks like:
"The variety of expression in the vast landscape was extraordinary. At dawn the lower mountains shone, indistinct in detail, through a veil of amethystine vapour : the damp air converted the naturally green hills of the middle distance into blocks of blue or mauve colour, recalling the background of an old Venetian picture. Soon the sun's shafts, darting into the thousand hollows that lie between the snows and Darjiling, drew the warm, moist air out of their depths in transparent waves. These, as they rose into a colder atmosphere, were condensed and transformed into tall, luminous, sharp-edged columns of cloud, which rose vertically, until, caught by some upper current, they bent and broadened at the top, and finally broke up into detached fragments, which floated away slowly northwards to lodge in the hollows of the snows during the hours of noontide heat." p, 43

Rinsing the native guide:
"At Darjiling Garwood and I had been most hospitably welcomed by the Deputy Commissioner, Mr. Earle, and his wife, who took the greatest interest in our plans. He suggested that we should take with us Rinsing, a native surveyor, and the only man known for certain to have crossed the Jonsong La...To this gentleman, who subsequently became our companion during the whole journey, we chiefly owed its success. He was in fact our leader. Experienced in travel under Mr. White, he was always energetic, helpful, and encouraging, he knew exactly how to meet every difficulty of the road, and to keep our unwieldy following under a firm yet kindly control. His crowning quality and qualification for such a journey was a constitution on which the only effect of an altitude of 20,000 feet was to increase his appetite and consequently his weight. This is a medical experience sufficiently rare to be worthy of special record." p 48

About this area Freshfield wrote: "We turned to our left and soon reached a bridge over the Lhonak river, just above its junction with the Zemu. Its banks were shrouded in a prodigious entanglement of rhododendron thickets, through which we were guided by occasional blazed stems and broken branches. The view from the bridge itself furnished a splendid subject for our photographers. The river was a continuous rapid flowing between walls of glistening verdure. Red rhododendron branches, twisted and writhing, draped with long beards of grey lichen (Usnea harhata) , overhung the leaping foam, and swayed in the cool blast brought down by the icy stream." p. 99
Round Kangchenjunga: A Narrative of Mountain Travel and Exploration, by Douglas Freshfield, London, Edward Arnold 1903

Both prints excellent, minor wear and edge wear. Mounts have corner and edge wear, tape marks on mount verso.