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Image: Frontispiece from Upon that Mountain (1943) by Eric Shipton.

Ink: Eric Shipton's thoughts on "Large Expeditions" particularly those of the 1930s to Everest, from Chapter Eight of Upon that Mountain. 

Finally, the disadvantage of large expeditions lay in the fact that the necessity of raising big funds made it difficult to control publicity. The expeditions became invested with a glamour foreign to the fundamental simplicity of the game. It was quite natural that mountaineers should wish to climb the highest peak in the world, or at least be interested in the project. But unfortunately Everest’s supremacy among mountains appealed to the popular imagination of a record-breaking age, and gradually the expeditions began to receive a press publicity out of all proportion to the value of the undertaking, and certainly out of keeping with what used to be regarded as "the best traditions of mountaineering”…

I knew a man with a strong claim for a place on the expedition who said that he wanted to climb Everest so as to make a big name for himself, which would enable him to use his influence in the cause of world peace. A worthy ambition, no doubt, but surely it would have been more profitable to devote his energies to the study of political economy rather than to proving himself a mountaineer with an exceptionally large lung capacity or whatever it is that enables a man to climb to great altitudes. This is one example among many of an extraordinary distortion of values which has its roots in the opening of a short-cut to fame. Were it not so laughable it might well be resented by those who find in mountaineering a deep aesthetic pleasure.

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Image: Everest in winter, by courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure.

Ink: The Magic Mountain (1924) by Thomas Mann, translated by H T Lowe-Porter.

One afternoon in February, the gentlemen arranged an excursion to Monstein, some hour and a half from the village by sleigh. … The cold was severe, the mountains misty. The road, a narrow, railingless shelf between mountain wall and abyss, rose steeply into the fir forests. They disentangled themselves from their wraps and climbed out in front of the little Monstein inn, that called itself a Kurhaus, and went on foot a few steps further to get the view south-west toward the Stulsergrat. The gigantic wall, three thousand metres high, was shrouded in vapours. Only one jagged tooth reared itself heavenward out of the mist — superterrestrial, Valhallan, far and faint and awesomely inaccessible. Hans Castorp admired it immensely, and summoned the others to follow suit. It was he who with due respect dubbed it inaccessible — and afforded Settembrini the chance of saying that this particular rock was considerably frequented. And, in general, that there were few spots where man had not set his foot. That was rather tall talk, retorted Naphta; and mentioned Mount Everest, which to date had icily refused to surrender to man’s importunity, and seemed likely to continue to do so. The humanist was put out. They returned to the Kurhaus, before which stood other unharnessed sleighs beside their own.

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Image: Everest and Makalu at sunset, image by courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure. 

Ink: A Centenary Tribute to the Alpine Club, by Arnold Lunn, published by the Swiss Foundation for Mountain Research (1957).

The Makalu expedition, precisely because it was a model of organisation, lacked drama ... A famous journalist asked the expedition leader Jean Franco hopefully whether there had not been any incidents. “Alas!” replied Franco, “there was no crevasse into which we fell, no avalanche which swept away our camp. At 8,000 metres. we felt as though we were on the summit of Mont Blanc. Nine of us reached the top. Three ascents in three days. You can’t call that a conquest. And we didn’t even have frozen feet.” “Well, then,” said the journalist, “nothing happened.” “But what he did not ask,” comments Franco, “was why nothing happened.”

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Image: Lake at Gokyo Ri, Khumbu District, image by courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure.

Ink: From Ella Maillart, The Land of the Sherpas (1951).

Some bamboo poles indicated the miraculous sin-remitting spring. We quenched our thirst and Topgi filled his gourd with sacred water to take home with him. Only a lake of clear, calm waters can reflect an immutable peak or the infinite heaven, both symbols of perfection. For initiates the lake stands for the world of thought, the mind, which can only apprehend the absolute when it has become clear and calm. Here the fevered mind of Siva, who had drunk the poison of the world, mastered itself at last by concentrating every thought on the peace of this ineffable lake, goal and crown of that inner pilgrimage which alone is the true one.

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Image: The proprietor at Sonam Lodge, Khumbu District, image by courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure. 

Ink: From Ella Maillart, The Land of the Sherpas (1951).

The hardy Sherpas scarcely feel the cold - any more than did the grandparents of our own mountaineers who lived in conditions so primitive that they would appal us. In the highest villages of Switzerland there are still many houses more wretched than those I saw in Nepal. I visited at least fifteen houses in all as I dealt out medicines to people suffering from abscesses, coughs, malaria and dysentery. The size of the rooms varied according to the substance of the owner, but the plan remained the same. My feeling of well-being was probably due to the happy proportions of an interior which exactly fulfils the needs of its inhabitants - as the round yurt does those of the Mongol - and had nothing to do with their degree of cleanliness! Comparison with the rich houses of the Tyrol, the Engadine or the Bemese Oberland would be pointless, but if one recalls the highest villages in the Trentino, the Valais, the Maurienne or the Vanoise, where life is reduced to the bare necessities, it becomes apparent that few mountain people are as well off as these Sherpas. When, a year later in London, I showed my film of Nepal, the colonel of a Gurkha regiment came up to me after the lecture. He spoke of the war in Asia and of the astonishing dignity of Gurkha soldiers in Japanese prisons. "Now I understand," he said. "They had behind them, as a part of their spiritual fibre, this perfect background. Compared with the poorer inhabitants of the overpopulated south, they are real aristocrats."

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Image: The Wetterhorn from Rosenlaui, image by courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure.

Ink: From Johann Peter Eckermann's Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, translated by John Oxenford, George Bell & Sons, London, 1883.

I turned the conversation back to Shakspeare. "When one, to some degree, disengages him from English literature," said I, " and considers him transformed into a German, one cannot fail to look upon his gigantic greatness as a miracle. But if one seeks him in his home, transplants oneself to the soil of his country, and to the atmosphere of the century in which he lived ; further, if one studies his contemporaries, and his immediate successors, and inhales the force wafted to us from Ben Jonson, Massinger, Marlow, and Beaumont and Fletcher, Shakspeare still, indeed, appears a being of the most exalted magnitude ; but still, one arrives at the conviction that many of the wonders of his genius are, in some measure, accessible, and that much is due to the powerfully productive atmosphere of his age and time." 

 "You are perfectly right," returned Goethe. "It is with Shakspeare as with the mountains of Switzerland. Transplant Mont Blanc at once into the large plain of Lüneburg Heath, and we should find no words to express our wonder at its magnitude. Seek it, however, in its gigantic home, go to it over its immense neighbours, the Jungfrau, the Finsteraarhorn, the Eiger, the Wetterhorn, St. Gothard, and Monte Rosa; Mont Blanc will, indeed, still remain a giant, but it will no longer produce in us such amazement."

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Image: View from the summit of Mt Blanc, image by courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure. 

Ink: From Mark Twain's account of climbing Mt Blanc virtually, via a telescope view from Chamonix,  A Tramp Abroad, 1880

 
Presently we all stood together on the summit! What a view was spread out below! Away off under the northwestern horizon rolled the silent billows of the Farnese Oberland, their snowy crests glinting softly in the subdued lights of distance; in the north rose the giant form of the Wobblehorn, draped from peak to shoulder in sable thunder-clouds; beyond him, to the right, stretched the grand processional summits of the Cisalpine Cordillera, drowned in a sensuous haze; to the east loomed the colossal masses of the Yodelhorn, the Fuddelhorn, and the Dinnerhorn, their cloudless summits flashing white and cold in the sun; beyond them shimmered the faint far line of the Ghauts of Jubbelpore and the Aiguilles des Alleghenies; in the south towered the smoking peak of Popocatapetl and the unapproachable altitudes of the peerless Scrabblehorn; in the west-south the stately range of the Himalayas lay dreaming in a purple gloom; and thence all around the curving horizon the eye roved over a troubled sea of sun-kissed Alps, and noted, here and there, the noble proportions and the soaring domes of the Bottlehorn, and the Saddlehorn, and the Shovelhorn, and the Powderhorn, all bathed in the glory of noon and mottled with softly gliding blots, the shadows flung from drifting clouds.

Overcome by the scene, we all raised a triumphant, tremendous shout, in unison. A startled man at my elbow said:

“Confound you, what do you yell like that for, right here in the street?"

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Image: Mountain lake on Rophaien, Canton Uri, Switzerland, image by courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure. 

Ink: From Thomas Carlyle, Sar

tor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh, 1831.

 
Mountains were not new to him; but rarely are Mountains seen in such combined majesty and grace as here. The rocks are of that sort called Primitive by the mineralogists, which always arrange themselves in masses of a rugged, gigantic character; which ruggedness, however, is here tempered by a singular airiness of form, and softness of environment: in a climate favorable to vegetation, the gray cliff, itself covered with lichens, shoots up through a garment of foliage or verdure; and white, bright cottages, tree-shaded, cluster round the everlasting granite. In fine vicissitude, Beauty alternates with Grandeur: you ride through stony hollows, along strait passes, traversed by torrents, overhung by high walls of rock; now winding amid broken shaggy chasms, and huge fragments; now suddenly emerging into some emerald valley, where the streamlet collects itself into a Lake, and man has again found a fair dwelling, and it seems as if Peace had established herself in the bosom of Strength.

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Image: Luis Trenker in the film "Liebesbriefe aus dem Engadin", photo by Ernst Baumann as published in In die Berge! Alpine Fotografie der 1920er und 1930er Jahre, morisel Verlag, 2019.

Ink: From Nick Paumgarten, "Survivor's Guilt in the Mountains", The New Yorker, February 2020 edition.

Mountain climbing is a modern curiosity, a bourgeois indulgence. It consists mostly of relatively well-to-do white people manufacturing danger for themselves. Having been spared war, starvation, mass violence, and oppression, its practitioners travel great distances and endure great sacrifices to test their bodies and minds, encounter beauty, and experience the precariousness of existence and the terror and whatever revelations, fleeting or otherwise, may come of it. Though the whole enterprise may seem crazy or stupid or pointless, to many people it represents a necessary extreme of human endeavor, that combination of excellence and aberrance which propels a sliver of the population to set about going to the moon or writing symphonies, or dropping out entirely, as latter-day hermits and monks.

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Image: Monastery in the Khumbu district, Nepal Himalaya (Photo courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure). 

Ink: From The Eight Mountains, by Paolo Cognetti, translated by Simon Parnell and Erica Segre, Penguin/Vintage

It was an old Nepalese man who told me, afterwards, about the eight mountains. He was carrying a load of hens up the valley below Everest, heading to one of the refuges where they were destined to become chicken curry for tourists: he had a cage on his back which was divided into a dozen separate cells, and the chickens, still alive, were flustered inside them. I had not yet come across a contraption of this kind. I had seen panniers full of chocolate, biscuits, powdered milk, bottles of beer, of whisky and of Coca-Cola, going along the trails of Nepal to cater for the tastes of Westerners, but never a portable henhouse. When I asked the man if I could photograph it he put it down on a low wall, removed from his forehead the band with which he was carrying it and struck a pose, smiling, next to the chickens.

Then while he was getting his breath back we talked for a while. I'd visited the region he came from, which astonished him. He understood that I was not a casual walker, and discovering that I could even string together a few phrases in Nepalese, asked me why I was so interested in the Himalayas. I had a ready answer to that question: I told him that there was a mountain where I had grown up, and to which I was attached, and that it had fostered in me a desire to see the most beautiful mountains in the world.

“Ah,” he said. “I understand. You are doing the tour of the eight mountains.”

“The eight mountains?”

The man picked up a small stick and drew a circle with it on the ground. You could tell he was used to drawing it; he executed it so perfectly. Then, inside the circle he drew a diameter, and then another perpendicular one bisecting the first, and then a third and a fourth through the point of bisection, thus creating a wheel with eight spokes. I thought that if I had drawn that figure myself I would have started with a cross - that it was typical of an Asian to begin with a circle.

“Have you ever seen a drawing like this?“ he asked.

“Yes,” I replied. “In mandalas.”

“That's right,” he said. “We believe that at the centre of the earth there is a tremendously high mountain, Sumeru. Around Sumeru there are eight mountains and eight seas. This is the world for us.”

While he was speaking he drew outside of the wheel a small peak for each spoke, and then a little wave between one peak and the next. Eight mountains and eight seas. Finally, at the centre of the wheel, he drew a crown which I thought might represent the summit of Sumeru. He assessed his work for a moment and shook his head, as if to say that this was a drawing that he had made a thousand times but that of late he had begun to lose his touch a little. Be that as it may, he pointed the stick to the centre and concluded

“We ask: who has learned most, the one who has been to all eight mountains, or the one who has reached the summit of Sumeru?”

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 Image: Excursionists on the Rochefort Arete (Photo courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure). 

Ink: From Mountains with a Difference (1951), by Geoffrey Winthrop Young.

Most mountains have personality. Some of course, like some acquaintances, are forgotten as soon as we have parted from them. But a number I found to possess an individual character, which became the more pronounced and the more attractive, the more often I visited them. These mountains became in all seriousness, friends. I hailed them from afar each year with the glow which greets old friends returning, and every fresh contact discovered new aspects in a well-loved personality. I was happy just to be upon them, to talk with them wordlessly as I climbed through the intimate silence we share only with a friend. If I slept out under their shadow, it was with the confidence we feel at home, where all the outer universe of stars and darkness looks in upon our security with kindness.

The Apennines, I noticed when I lived among them, had this human personality for the artists of the Renaissance. The circle of Florentine hills framed sympathetically, for them, a small domesticated universe, in which all the hierarchy of heaven floated in the most companionable of immortalities. My universe was perhaps a little larger; but the bigger mountains surrounding it had with me the same personal relationship. They were the guardian pillars set about a like kindly earth; and if not within them as at Florence, yet among them and beyond them there lay for me more than a little of the divine. So it may be said that to the Weisshorn or to the Grepon I could return as to a paradise regained. There was no time and no freedom left me, after the war years, to make new mountain friends; there was too little even to revisit all the best of the old.

Once one of them revisited me on its own account, an unusual experience. It was in the invalid years after the war, and I was working in Geneva with Henry Nevinson, most chivalrous of writers and of war colleagues. He had taken me to dine at one of his secret high places, where the view and the food were both, he declared, incomparable. The view at the moment was covered with evening mists; so we sat outside and talked of the mountains, one of his lifelong enthusiasms. I was thinking, as we spoke, how far the great Alps were now removed from me by my handicap; and I looked across, and saw that the view had cleared over all the mountain ranges beyond the Lake, as far as Mont Blanc.

And then, unbelievably clear and near, a great mountain came out of the brightening sky towards us, every feature of glacier and buttress thrown into salience by the level western sunlight now falling upon it. By every map measurement it was whole leagues away, where I had last left it at the far end of the Mer de Glace. And yet, it was undoubtedly the Grandes Jorasses, a very old friend; and the shoulder which it was conspicuously thrusting forward into my sight was the castle on the summit-ridge to which, since I had seen it, my own name had been given. Nevinson shared to the full in the pleasure of the surprise; and indeed the astonishing nearness and brilliance of the mountain's approach had something of the friendly shock with which we see a familiar face smiling at us out of a crowd of strangers in a foreign land.

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Image: Alpinist N. on the Wellenkuppe (Photo courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure). 

Ink: From Mountains with a Difference (1951), by Geoffrey Winthrop Young.

But whom does not the alchemy of mountaineering melt into his essential gold?- whenever there is gold in him. There have been cases, I know, to show that a man may climb, and climb and prove a villain. But he will have climbed from vanity in his own prowess, and not from love of mountains, and the truth in him will soon out. Even in those first years, when it as still easy to know, or know the name and the performance of everyone climbing in our country, here and there appeared those whom I called the 'three year' men, men who flashed into climbing for its sensation and its acrobatics, and from vanity. They soon exhausted the sensation; sometimes they killed themselves; and in any case they disappeared once more from our ken. But the majority of those who were first drawn to the hills and their novel adventure were men of character and often of outstanding ability. These men, tested as comrades by mountain danger, difficulty and fatigue built our great mountaineering tradition.

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Image: View of the Hörnli Ridge (Photo courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure). 

Ink: From The cross of the Matterhorn, being Project Hyakumeizan's centennial translation of La Croix du Cervin (1919) by Charles Gos.

On the Zermatt side yawns the terrifying abyss, its sheer drop streaked with snowy edges, glazed with patches of shimmering ice, and plated with blackened walls. The cliff falls away, steepens, curves downwards and drops into nothingness. The pallid gleam, far below, is the glacier onto which Whymper’s unfortunate companions tumbled, shattered in every limb. Further off, and to the right, are discerned the tawny chalets of Zmutt and, lower still, the village of Zermatt straddling the Visp, with its smudges of building activity. No other summit in the Alps, perhaps in the world, gives such a chilling sensation of emptiness as does the Matterhorn. In its splendid isolation, the peak simply stands there, seeming to touch the sky, like some great reef engulfed and battered by the void....

Face à Zermatt, dévale le monstrueux abîme: à pic formidable, tacheté de franges neigeuses, poli de plaques glacées miroitantes et barbelé de murs noircis. La pente file, se raidit, arque son échine et s'éclipse, c'est le vide... puis, le glacier d'une blancheur candide, où roulèrent, fracassés, les infortunés compagnons de Whymper. Plus bas, en ligne droite, on distingue les chalets bronzés de Z'mutt, et plus bas encore, Zermatt, à cheval sur la Viège, avec ses pâtés de constructions... Nulle cime dans les Alpes entières — dans le monde peut-être ! — ne donne autant que celle du Cervin la frissonnante sensation du vide. Dans son splendide isolement, la pyramide du mont est là, comme un écueil géant cerné par la mer, cernée, elle, par le vide, battue par le vide béant de tous côtés, et sem- ble toucher le ciel....

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Image: The crags of the Matterhorn during the storm, midnight, August 10th, 1863, woodcut by Edward Whymper, from Scrambles among the Alps in the years 1860-69.

Ink: Account of a storm on the Matterhorn, as told by mountain guide Fredy Biner to Kurt Lauber, in Matterhorn, Bergführer erzählen: Gipfelgeschichten gesammelt von Kurt Lauber, Droemer HC, 2015.

Three Japanese had been overtaken on the Zmutt Ridge by a thunderstorm, and one had fallen, breaking his hip. So the trio had to be brought down the mountain. When the first thunderstorm had gone by, Leo lmesch and I flew off with Sigi Stangier as pilot and a rescue assistant. Before that, the mountain guides Bruno Jelk and Ludwig "Lutschi" lmboden had already been brought to the accident site. Because of the powerful downdrafts, we had to get out of the helicopter as it hovered below the Zmuttgrat’s snow ridge, as Sigi could not fly it any higher up. The next thunderstorm was now coming up from the southwest. Leo suggested leaving our ice-axes here and said "If you have any gold teeth, they’ll be blown right out of your mouth today!" And as he climbed, he sent up a quick prayer: "God save us and the other punters."

We climbed up through the towers on the ridge and joined the others further up. Bruno Jelk and "Lutschi" had already put the casualty on the rope, and we took the other two between us and followed them. Now we were in the middle of the storm. Heavy snowfall and downpours alternated, strong gusts of wind did their utmost. Huge bolts of ball lightning, up to 50 meters across, exploded with deafening thunderclaps right next to us. Every time they did that, blocks of rock started rolling, and it reeked of sulphur. Again and again, the static kept building up in the air, which felt as if a cat was biting the back your neck.

Leo took the lead back through the towers, with me belaying him. Then one of his crampons came loose. He came back to fix it. At that moment, there was another explosion, even more powerful. Just where we’d been before, two man-high boulders slowly tilted out of the ridge. They would have taken us with them down the west face. So God did save us punters. Below, from the snow ridge, Sigi was able to fly first the casualties and then ourselves back to the village.

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Image: View from the Italian Ridge (Photo courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure). 

Ink: From The cross of the Matterhorn, being Project Hyakumeizan's centennial translation of La Croix du Cervin (1919) by Charles Gos.

Icy stalactites bristle from the black walls of the Zmutt face. Lilac-tinted mists drift, as if nonchalantly, along the streaked and stained cliffs, and through the deep-cut gullies where the stones go whistling down. The glacier gleams pallidly from the abyssal depths. What brings you here is the void that lurks in the shadow of the mighty cliffs, the void that watches you, enfolds you and follows your every step. The void that you cannot see, sense or hear, the void you adore, the void that does you in ...

Des stalactites de glace cuirassent les noires murailles des précipices de Z'mutt. Au long des parois, rongées de taches, et par les ravins découpés où les pierres dégringolent en sifflant, des brumes, finement nuancées de teintes lilas, flottent nonchalantes. Du gouffre sombre monte la blancheur du glacier. Et le vide, embusqué à l'ombre des puissants escarpements, est là qui vous attire, vous guette, vous enveloppe et vous suit. Le vide qu'on ne voit pas, qu'on ne connaît pas, qu'on n'entend pas, le vide qu'on aime et qui tue...

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Image: Alpine flowers in the Haut Val de Bagnes, Valaisian Alps, Switzerland. 

Ink: Slightly abridged from W E Bowman's The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956), republished in 2001 by Vintage, with an introduction by Bill Bryson:

The journey to the Rum Doodle massif was uneventful ..The steepness of the valleys was such that the vegetation ranged from tropical to arctic within the distance of a mile, and our botanists were in their element. I am no naturalist myself, but I tried to show·an intelligent interest in the work of the others, encouraging them to come to me with their discoveries. I am indebted to them for what small knowledge I possess in this field. 

The lower slopes were gay with Facetia and Persiflage, just then at their best, and the nostrils were continually assailed with the disturbing smell of Rodentia. Nostalgia, which flourishes everywhere but at home, was plentiful, as was the universal Wantonia. Higher up, dark belts of Suspicia and Melancholia gave place to the last grassy slopes below the snow line, where nothing was seen growing but an occasional solitary Excentricular, or old-fashioned Manspride.

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Image: Mountaineers carrying kanjiki (traditional Japanese snowshoes) climb Dainichi-yama, Fukui Prefecture. 

Ink: Tanka by Monk Saigyō (1118-1190), the all-terrain poet of the Heian era (translation by William Lafleur, Awesome Nightfall: the Life, Times and Poetry of Saigyō):

Arachiyama
sakashiku kudaru
tani mo naku
kajiki no michi o
tsukuru shirayuki

So steep and dangerous
is Mount Arachi that there's
no path down the valley
till one is made for snowshoes
by white snow fallen over all.

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Image: Mountain birch grove on Yake-dake, photo by Alpine Light & Structure

Ink: From the poem "Mountain woods" by Takamura Kōtarō, translated by Hiroaki Sato:

The framework of Japan, not any other country,
 exists sternly in mountain woods. 
Our country's reason for being in the world
must be based on this framework. 
Maple branches are burning in the hearth. 
Today I talked with a charcoal burner about dairy farming. 
May rain falls ceaselessly, 
in the quiet village which has finished rice-planting 
cuckoos are making chordal dots. 
The past is remote, and so is the future.

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Image: Mt Fuji from Lake Kawaguchi, woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi

Ink: Translating Mt Fuji, from Sanshirō by Natsume Soseki

Sanshirō had completely forgotten about Mount Fuji. When he recalled the Mount Fuji he had first seen from the train window, having had his attention called to it by Professor Hirota, it had indeed looked noble. There was no way to compare it with the chaotic jumble of the world inside his head now, and he was ashamed of himself for having let that first impression slip away. Just then Hirota flung a rather strange question at him.

"Have you ever tried to translate Mount Fuji?"

"To translate it... ?"

"It's fascinating how, whenever you translate nature, it's always transformed into something human. Noble, great or heroic.”

Sanshirō now understood what he meant by translate.

"You always get a word related to human character. For those poor souls who can't translate into such words, nature hasn't the slightest influence on them when it comes to character.”

Thinking there was more to come, Sanshirō listened quietly. But Hirota cut himself off at that point.

Somewhat related post: Mountains of character

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Image: "Pollinger breaks through", photo by Edward Whymper, from Whymper’s Scrambles with a Camera, edited by Peter Berg, former Hon. Archivist of the Alpine Club

Ink: Poem by I A Richards, the literary critic and alpinist, to his wife, Dorothy Pilley

Recall the Epicoun:

Night, welling up so soon,

Near sank us in soft snow.

At the stiff-frozen dawn,

When Time had ceased to flow,

- The glacier ledge our unmade bed -

I hear you through your yawn:

"Leaping crevasses in the dark,

That's how to live!" you said.

No room in that to hedge:

A razor's edge of a remark