by Ed Caesar
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Europeans went to the far corners of the earth to bag peaks. Whymper himself traveled to the Andes, and he twice climbed Chimborazo (20,564 feet) in 1880. Nine years later, Ludwig Purtscheller, an Austrian who was considered to be among the most gifted climbers of his generation, reached the summit of Kilimanjaro (19,341 feet) in East Africa with the German alpinist Hans Meyer. By the latter part of the century, the Himalayas remained the last and greatest unconquered range.
The Himalayas were of geopolitical importance to Britain because India, the engine of its vast imperial wealth, lay immediately to the south of the range. During the nineteenth century, Britain had feared a Russian invasion of India. The contest in Asia between these two mighty powers was known by the British as the Great Game and by Russians as the Tournament of Shadows. (In the battle of the metaphors, at least, Russia crushed Britain.) Everest stood on the border of Nepal, a difficult and autocratic ally of Britain’s, and Tibet, the mountainous and secretive kingdom led by Buddhist god-kings, which acted as a buffer state between the Russian and British Empires.
For large parts of the nineteenth century, British imperial officials, who believed in maps above almost anything else, were determined to discover more about the hidden kingdom of Tibet. To this end, they sent Indian spies in disguise—often as pilgrims—on long exploratory journeys into the mountains. Their goal was primarily to measure things. The unit of surveyor-spies was trained to walk at exactly two thousand paces to the mile.
Simultaneously, English alpinists were exploring the possibilities of the Himalayas. Albert Mummery was a fine but controversial climber who was sometimes castigated for his preference of climbing without guides, which was then considered reckless. Mummery had pioneered many difficult routes in the Alps, and he believed that climbing in the Himalayas would be no more arduous—despite the increased elevation. In 1895, he led the first party to Nanga Parbat, the ninth-highest mountain in the world, which anchors the Himalayan range on its western edge. Mummery struggled in the thin air. He and two Gurkha companions, Ragobir Thapa and Goman Singh, were eventually subsumed by an avalanche. They would be the first of many to die on what became known as the Killer Mountain.
One member of the Nanga Parbat party in 1895 was a British army officer named Charles Bruce—a fabulously outgoing climber, explorer, and raconteur who had grown up in the Welsh hills and developed a lifelong love of alpinism. He was stationed in India as part of the Gurkha regiment and often used his periods of leave to explore the mountain ranges at its edges. Fortunately for him, he had to turn back early on Mummery’s ill-fated 1895 mission to Nanga Parbat, as he was due to join his regiment. Bruce would become one of the central figures in the story of Everest. Wade Davis’s description of Bruce, in his magisterial account of the early Everest expeditions, Into the Silence, is indelible:
He was a man of action and deed, as subtle in movement as an ox. Given to horseplay and crude practical jokes, a brilliant mimic with a voice like a bass drum and a great hissing laugh, he was a figure cut to inspire Kipling: a British officer fiercely loyal to his regiment, paternally protective of his men, fluent in a dozen native tongues, with a limitless appetite for drink, sport, food, and anything Indian. Martin Conway described Bruce’s energy as that “of a steam engine plus a goods train.” As a young man he was so strong that he could, with his arm extended, lift a grown man seated in a chair off the ground to ear level. To keep fit he regularly ran up and down the flanks of the Khyber Pass, carrying his orderly on his back. As a middle-aged colonel he would wrestle six of his men at once. It was said by some that he had slept with the wife of every enlisted man in the force. To his friends he was known as “Bruiser” Bruce; the men of the regiment called him simply Bhalu, the bear, or Burra Sahib, the Big Sahib.
Members of the Alpine Club in London had discussed an attempt on Mount Everest by a British party for at least two decades. The effort was pitched squarely as a matter of national pride. Bruce himself had discussed scaling the mountain as early as 1893. One exploratory mission was proposed for 1907, with a team of British climbers, including Bruce, who would be accompanied by Swiss guides and Gurkha soldiers. But political problems proved insuperable. Despite several entreaties by powerful figures in the British government, the maharaja of Nepal would not grant access from the southerly side of Everest.
Tibet was the other route, but it was also off-limits. In December 1903, the British had led a bloody invasion all the way to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. Moreover, in 1907, the British government signed the Anglo-Russian Convention, a truce between the two warring parties in the Great Game. By the time the first official Everest mission was proposed, Britain’s India Office did not want to upset anybody in Tibet or Russia, and it barred all forays into Tibet. In the following years, Bruce himself tried to entreat the maharaja of Nepal—to no avail.
Over the next few years, Britain, the greatest seafaring nation on earth, was beaten to both the north and south poles by adventurers from other nations. The conversation in London and in India about Everest—which was sometimes known as the third pole—intensified. There seemed to be no official way to reach the mountain. So, in 1913, joining a long tradition of furtive missions into the Himalayas, two separate parties crossed the Tibetan border to discover more about the range.
Alexander Kellas, a Scottish physiologist and an expert mountaineer who had been the first man to climb many of the highest mountains on the Sikkim-Tibet border, sent Sherpa proxies, armed with a camera, to find the best route to the mountain. His charges, whose names are lost to history, reached so close to Everest that they were able to photograph its eastern flanks.
John Noel, a British officer in the East Yorkshire Regiment, knew nothing of Kellas’s mission at the time. Noel was stationed in northern India. He decided the best plan to get to Everest was in disguise. He stained his face with dye and dressed himself as a Muslim vagrant before crossing into Tibet with three porters—including a Nepali and a Tibetan. The party traveled mostly at night, to avoid detection. But eventually, forty miles from Everest, they were confronted by an armed group of Tibetans, including an important local dzongpen, or leader. Noel was run out of Tibet, and he returned to Darjeeling. In the following months and years, he and Kellas would compare notes on their respective adventures. They decided that there was a viable route to Everest.
In 1914, however, the war intervened, monstrously. Thoughts of mountaineering were mothballed, as the great nations of Europe set about murdering one another’s young men.
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As soon as the war was finished, Britain’s climbers turned once more to Everest. Many of their number had fought on the Western Front. Charles Howard-Bury, an explorer and alpinist who spoke twenty-seven languages and who had also once entered Tibet in disguise, in 1905, had been captured by the Germans during the Spring Offensive of 1918—in the same period in which Maurice Wilson showed such courage at Wytschaete. When he returned from a German prisoner-of-war camp at the end of the conflict, Howard-Bury immediately set about finding a diplomatic solution to the problem of accessing Everest through Tibet.
On a visit to India, Sikkim, and Tibet in 1920, Howard-Bury met with resistance from British diplomats. The area around Chomolungma was considered sacred by the local people. An important poet-saint was buried nearby. The Tibetans saw no reason for a British expedition to trample such holy ground. Moreover, the Tibetans were suspicious of British motives. The viceroy noted, “[They] do not believe that explorations are carried on only in the interests of geographical knowledge and science.… They will suspect that there is something behind what we tell them.”
More important, the British and the Tibetans were at the time negotiating an arms and border treaty, the outcome of which was a higher priority than a mountaineering trip. Relations between Britain and Tibet had improved from a nadir in 1904, but they were still delicate. Colonial administrators did not want to upset the apple cart.
On
his trip to the Indian subcontinent in 1920, Howard-Bury entreated Charles Bell—a polymathic British diplomat who spoke fluent Tibetan, and who had a close personal relationship with the Dalai Lama—to make headway with the Tibetans. Bell was wary of doing so. But, in November 1920, Bell made an unprecedented visit by a Western official to see the Dalai Lama in Lhasa, to negotiate the arms treaty. As part of a complicated deal between Britain and Tibet, which included the sale of ten thousand Lee-Enfield rifles, the divine ruler of Tibet gave Bell permission for a British party to approach Everest. Once the news reached London, the Mount Everest Committee, a group composed of members of the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club, began to assemble a team to travel to the mountain in 1921.
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The first Everest party left England in the spring of 1921, with Howard-Bury as leader. The mission was to be purely exploratory, by necessity. No European had ever reached the foot of Everest. The party would be drawing the map in as they walked. A party of eight British men, including a young and gifted climber and war veteran named George Mallory, and Alexander Kellas—the man who had organized one of the furtive missions into Tibet before the war—trekked to the mountain with teams of porters. Tragically, Kellas died of a heart attack near Kampa Dzong, within days of reaching Everest. From April until August, the remainder of the party explored possible ways to ascend the mountain. Mallory often led the way. The approach the team settled on was via the Rongbuk and East Rongbuk Glaciers, then an ascent of the steep and technically demanding slopes of the North Col, and above that—who knew what obstacles they would find? When the 1921 expedition returned home, the climbers were treated like heroes. Their pictures and maps and stories from Everest amazed the British public.
In 1922, the Mount Everest Committee prepared a team to reach the summit. It was led by the enormous and ebullient Charles Bruce, the Burra Sahib. Mallory was included in the party, as were several other fine alpinists. Two doctors in the group, Arthur Wakefield and Howard Somervell, had been surgeons at the Battle of the Somme, an experience that marked each man deeply. John Noel, the colorful and fast-talking photographer and adventurer who had sneaked into Tibet in 1913, was also in the party. He had spent two years of the war suffering from severe neurasthenic symptoms after surviving a monstrous gas and shell attack on the Ypres Salient in 1915.
Three summit attempts were made in 1922. The first, without oxygen, was begun in late May by Mallory and three other climbers, with the assistance of nine porters. These thirteen men climbed to the North Col—a dangerous section of the mountain, prone to avalanches, where they made a Camp IV, before progressing up the mountain the following morning. The party reached no higher than 26,895 feet. Their last tent, at the new Camp V, was pitched at 24,950 feet. The group was forced to turn back because nightfall was approaching; one climber, Morshead, had also been entirely exhausted and could not continue. The effort was a world record for gained height. The men had learned plenty about the deleterious effects of climbing in an atmosphere with such low temperatures, and such scant oxygen.
The second attempt was made a few days later, with supplementary oxygen. George Finch, an Australian chemist who had strongly advocated for the use of breathing apparatus in summit attempts, led a group on the higher slopes of the mountain. Several members of the expedition disagreed with the use of supplementary oxygen. Not only did it seem unsporting, but it was also horrifyingly evocative of trench warfare. After Finch’s summit attempt, however, there was no doubt that it worked. Finch and Geoffrey Bruce, who was Charles Bruce’s cousin, were able to climb much faster than Mallory’s party. This second group reached 27,315 feet before Bruce became unwell, and Finch decided they needed to turn back. They were seventeen hundred feet below, and less than half a mile distant, from the summit, and they had set another new world record for height gained—a remarkable achievement, not least because it was Geoffrey Bruce’s first-ever climb on a high mountain.
The third attempt was a disaster. Tom Longstaff, the senior medical officer on the expedition team, was an experienced mountaineer. He had treated the men who came back from the first two expeditions, and he was troubled by their condition. In Longstaff’s opinion, no further summit bids should have been made. General Bruce overruled him. Mallory was desperate to reach the summit, and he was by now convinced of the argument for supplementary oxygen. A party of seventeen, including four Englishmen and thirteen porters, began the attempt from Camp III. The plan was for Mallory and Somervell to strike out for the summit on their own, from the top of the North Col, at Camp IV. But while climbing the steep face of the North Col, an avalanche crushed most of the porters, killing seven of them. The Europeans survived. It was the first of many disasters on Everest. The 1922 expedition was over.
In 1924, the British assaulted Everest once more. Mallory was again the lynchpin of the climbing group, and again three summit attempts were made. The first two bids were without supplementary oxygen. Both were unsuccessful. But on the third mission, Mallory and his young and handsome climbing companion, Andrew Irvine, took bottles of what the porters called “English air” with them. They reached higher than anybody had ever before climbed, but they did not return. The last person who claimed to have seen Mallory and Irvine was Noel Odell, who believed he saw the two men on top of the Second Step, a 131-foot-high outcrop, from his vantage point at 26,000 feet, through a break in the weather—a sighting whose details have long been questioned. When the surviving members of the 1924 party returned home, however, many people in the climbing community believed that Mallory and Irvine had indeed reached the summit of Everest, then died on the descent. Others proclaimed the feat impossible. The debate over whether Mallory and Irvine reached the summit is still alive today. It is now widely believed that the pair died before they reached the top.
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When the story of the 1924 Everest mission reached home, the heroism of Mallory and Irvine gripped newspaper readers. Wilson, it seems, was no different. He had been in New Zealand, in the middle of a messy divorce, when the expedition had taken place, and perhaps the reports from the time had not struck him as they would eight years later. Now, he was rapt. You imagine him in the Freiburg café, in this vulnerable and receptive moment in his life—after a long fast, and ready to be reborn—reading about the last, folkloric British attempt to climb the mountain in 1924. Everything about the expedition seemed designed to capture the imagination. There was the huge party that had traveled to Tibet, with provisions that included champagne, foie gras, and quail; there were the many travails the party had suffered, including the invaliding through malaria of the great Burra Sahib, Charles Bruce; there was that final, fatal attempt by Mallory and Irvine to reach the summit; there was the national mourning when news of their death reached home; then the thronged memorial service for the climbers at Westminster Abbey, and the vigil in the Albert Hall.
You can’t know exactly which article Wilson read. But the general tone of British articles on this subject was florid. From the time of the first Everest mission in 1921, it had seemed of vital national importance that a British party succeed on the highest mountain on earth. The climbers who traveled to the Himalayas in the 1920s were not viewed as mere sportsmen, but as warriors for an unimpeachable and selfless cause. The obituaries of Mallory and Irvine in 1924 crystallized that view. For instance, in July 1924, Geoffrey Young had lionized his old friend George Mallory in an obituary, writing, “In that final magnificent venture against the unknown, we are thrilled by the knightly purpose, by the evident joyousness of the attempt, as much by the audacity and endurance. It is the burning spirit of chivalrous, youthful adventure, flaming at the close, higher than the highest summit of the known world.”
Wilson had grown up in an age of adventure, an age of conquest. The newspapers of his youth had delighted him with the stories of pioneer polar explorers, pioneer fliers, pioneer climbers. The desire of Western powers, and Britain in particular, to map every inch of the planet, to plant f
lags in remote and desolate places, had seemed like a high and patriotic calling. But the early-twentieth-century desire for adventure also created—and was reflective of—a new way to understand the self. These men—and it was almost always men—found wisdom and enlightenment by testing themselves in the most unforgiving places on earth.
Ernest Shackleton, the polar explorer, was in many ways the father of this generation of adventurer-poets. On May 20, 1916—a week after Maurice Wilson signed his army papers at Belle Vue Barracks—Shackleton had just led two of his men to the relative safety of Husvik Harbour, on South Georgia Island, in the southern Atlantic. He and his party had suffered scarcely believable hardships. First, their vessel, the Endurance, was crushed and trapped in pack ice for a whole winter. When the ice melted sufficiently for lifeboats to escape, the party had evacuated to the uninhabited Elephant Island. Shackleton then led a party in a twenty-two-and-a-half-foot boat called the James Caird across eight hundred miles of the wild Southern Ocean to South Georgia, to try to find a rescuer for his crew, who remained on Elephant Island. Despite storms, and huge seas, the James Caird made it. Finally, Shackleton and two of his men needed to traverse the snowy and mountainous island to reach the whaling station on the north side. Of that final push, which ended at the bottom of a waterfall, Shackleton wrote that he and his men had been stripped down to their essence: