by Wade Davis
For the time being, however, Rawling’s route would carry him away from Everest. Winter was upon them. The temperature dropped with each frost, and the river flowed with great blocks of ice. The grass was dead, the horses hungry, the men weakened by the cold and the westerly winds, which rose to gale force virtually every morning. Such was their haste that when finally, on December 1, they reached the source of the Tsangpo, the marshes northeast of Mount Kailash, and, beyond, the sacred lakes Manasarowar and Rakas Tal, they had but a few days to explore a faint height of land that gives rise to three of the greatest rivers of India: the Indus, Brahmaputra (Tsangpo), and Sutlej.
Like many Europeans who would eventually follow in their wake, they tried, even as they charted the outlines of the major geographical features, to make sense of a place considered holy by millions of people, Buddhist and Hindu alike, a sacred landscape anchored by Kailash, a mountain so revered that to tread on its slopes would condemn the trespasser not only for this life but for a thousand to come. For Hindus, Mount Kailash is the divine seat of the god Shiva and his wife, the goddess Parvati. It is the point where the sacred form of the Ganges, the holiest of all rivers, spills from the heavens and runs invisibly through the silk of Shiva’s hair before slipping into the earth to emerge from the mouth of a glacier, found some 140 miles to the west. For Buddhists, Kailash is the site in legend of the Buddha Chakrasamvara, who sweeps up Shiva and his circle into the embrace of a gentle mandala of bliss. It is famed in history as the place of the great victory of the Tibetan yogi Milarepa, a mystic wanderer of the twelfth century who, through the magical powers that accrue to supreme spiritual purity, flew effortlessly to the summit of the sacred mountain, thus vanquishing his great rival, Naro Bhun Chon, a priest and shaman of the pre-Buddhist Bon religion, and securing forever the Buddhist path in Tibet. It was Milarepa who established homes in the mountains encircling Kailash for the five hundred Buddhist saints who had achieved enlightenment, and whose prayers are still heard by the pilgrims who gain spiritual merit by circumambulating the mountain, through prostrations, one body length at a time.
Rawling knew nothing of this history, but he nevertheless recognized the grandeur and resonance of the mountain. “It is indeed difficult to place before the mental vision a true picture of this most beautiful mountain,” he wrote. “In shape it resembles a cathedral, the roof of which, rising to a ridge in the centre, is otherwise regular in outline and covered in eternal snow … No wonder that this spot is believed to be the home of all the gods, that of the waters of its lake they drink, and that in its unexplored caverns they dwell.”
The expedition moved away from Kailash on December 3 and continued to the northwest, traversing the headwaters of the Sutlej and entering the drainage of the Indus to reach Gartok, where they had been charged by Younghusband with the task of establishing a trading depot. Gartok, a miserable and desolate outpost, did not hold them long. With winter threatening to close the passes to the south, they moved quickly to complete their survey and return to India, crossing back into the basin of the Sutlej by way of the 18,700-foot Ayi La and thence to the Shipki La and the slow descent to Simla, the summer capital of the Raj, which was reached on January 11, 1905, three months and a day from when they’d left Gyantse. The expedition was heralded as a great success. In conditions of extraordinary cold and exposure, with temperatures often as low as sixty degrees of frost, Ryder had surveyed more than forty thousand square miles, a feat of exploration that would win him the Patron’s Medal from the Royal Geographical Society. Rawling’s prize, by contrast, lay waiting in a landscape yet to be achieved. South of the bank of the Brahmaputra, beyond the reach of the Ryder survey, remained one large blank on the map, an area of some thirteen thousand square miles between the river and the northern face of the Himalaya. At the center of this uncharted land, defining the divide between Tibet and Nepal, stood Everest, the sentinel of a rugged knot of mountains that Rawling, by the end of his expedition, knew for certain to be the highest in the world.
HAVING DISPATCHED Rawling’s party from Gyantse, Younghusband and the invasion force hastened south toward India, following the old trade route that his sappers and engineers had transformed into a main trunk road. In a race against winter, the army lost. The blizzards struck savagely on the heights of the Tang La, and then blanketed the advanced columns as they trudged through Phari, at the head of the Chumbi Valley. Snow and glare blinded hundreds of soldiers, and the chaos and disarray reminded at least one officer of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. It was a sad ending to the last of the great imperial adventures, a military campaign a year in duration and for the British essentially bloodless. When Younghusband reached Darjeeling, on October 28, and presented his casualty list, the British wounded numbered but thirty officers and men, the dead just five. The enlisted ranks of native sepoys suffered a total of 145 casualties, killed and wounded, against Tibetan losses in excess of three thousand dead alone.
After nearly a month on sick leave, Younghusband returned to Britain, eager both to silence his critics and to assist those supporters and family members demanding that he be knighted, an honor he would in fact achieve before the end of the year. His ship, SS Mongolia, reached Port Said in the last days of November 1904, where by chance he encountered Lord Curzon, who was heading out to India to begin his second term as viceroy. Curzon was effusive in his praise of the Lhasa adventure, offering his unfailing support with an “overpowering” authority that Younghusband later described in a letter to his wife as “one of the experiences of my lifetime.” Younghusband, for his part, debriefed his friend and mentor not only about the Tibetan mission and its consequences but also about his dream of Everest.
Like Younghusband, Curzon had long had his sights on the mountain. As early as July 9, 1899, just six months after becoming viceroy, he had written Douglas Freshfield, a former president of the Alpine Club, and mentioned his intention to seek permission for an expedition to Everest from the maharaja of Nepal during an upcoming state visit to Kathmandu. Nothing, evidently, came of the effort. But some years later, even as Younghusband was marshaling his force for the invasion, Curzon sent to the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club thirteen photographs taken in the summer of 1903 at Kampa Dzong by J. Hayden, a geologist attached to Younghusband’s party. These were, if anything, more revealing than the images taken by Claude White, for they presented a panorama of the entire northern flank of the Himalaya, from Kangchenjunga through Everest and beyond. Freshfield immediately recognized the significance of Hayden’s photographs, which appeared in the Alpine Journal. The land was treeless, with low ridges rounded off by ice, and across the landscape, he wrote, the “horizontal prevails over the vertical. It is open country.” The photographs left no doubt that Everest could be approached from the north.
Freshfield’s enthusiasm was significant, for at fifty-nine he was one of the most respected geographers in Britain. As a young man he had explored the Caucasus, making the first ascents of Kazbek and Elbrus and later writing the definitive book on the region, Exploration of the Caucasus. Editor of the Alpine Journal from 1872 to 1880, he served both as president of the Alpine Club (1893–95) and, later, as president of the Royal Geographical Society (1914–17), where he broke tradition and, over considerable opposition, insisted that women be accepted as fellows. He was the first explorer to complete a circuit of the base of Kangchenjunga, an expedition that electrified the British public and resulted in a highly regarded book, Round Kangchenjunga, which appeared in 1903, the same year he was awarded the Founder’s Medal by the RGS. His influence in London extended well beyond the mountaineering community, a fact not lost on Curzon.
Frustrated in Tibet, his initiatives increasingly restrained both by public sentiment and government officials in Whitehall, Curzon, like Younghusband, saw in Everest an opportunity for a grand imperial gesture. As early as 1885 an English surgeon, Clinton Dent, had published Above the Snowline, in which he compared an assault on the mountain with the quest t
o reach the poles, a notion certain to appeal to Curzon. A few years later Dent, in an October 1892 article in the journal Nineteenth Century, became the first in print to suggest an attempt on Everest. Having studied the physiology of high-altitude exposure, he was confident that climbers could adapt to oxygen deprivation through acclimatization. “I do not for a moment say that it would be wise to ascend Mount Everest,” Dent cautioned, “but I believe most firmly that it is humanly possible to do so; and, further, I feel sure that even in our time, perhaps, the truth of these views will receive material corroboration.”
Even before Rawling and Ryder reached Simla, Curzon laid down the challenge. Everest could and must be scaled and by an exclusively British climbing party. In the spring of 1905, inspired by Rawling’s account of seeing Everest at close quarters, Curzon reached out again to Freshfield: “It has always seemed to me a reproach that with the second highest mountain in the world for the most part in British territory and with the highest in a neighbouring and friendly state, we, the mountaineers and pioneers par excellence of the universe, make no sustained and scientific attempt to climb to the top of either of them.” He was speaking, of course, of Kangchenjunga and Everest. But he went on, cautioning Freshfield that it was now or never:
My time in India will not in any case be very much longer and my successor may not care for such matters. I would be prepared to lend every aid the Government can give to a thoroughly well appointed climbing party, comprised of trained experts with Swiss Guides, that should come out with the set object of climbing one of these mountains. I should not mind asking the Maharaja of Nepal for permission for a party to climb Everest but the Nepalese are very suspicious and he might refuse. Again I do not see how the coolies and supplies could be obtained in such a region. Would you care to interest yourself at all in such an expedition? It occurs to me that it might be done by the Alpine Club and the R.G.S. in combination and you are at liberty to pass on what I have written to the President of either society. I suppose that the months from August to October would be the time. It occurs to me that two years, or possibly three, might be required.
Camps would be instituted and gradually pushed forward until one day the advance camp would be placed on a spot from which a dash could be made for the summit. Coolies could be trained, attempts made on the mountain from different sides, everything leading up to the final denouement. I do not know what such expeditions cost. But it is possible that the Home Societies might pay half if the Government of India paid the other. I have not consulted my colleagues. But I think I could promise this assent to a moiety of 2,500 to 3,000 pounds, i.e., to half of the total expenditure of 5,000–6,000 pounds. Ought we not be able to do this?
Freshfield took this letter to the Alpine Club, which appointed a subcommittee to address the viceroy’s proposal. Serving on that committee, in addition to Freshfield, was Martin Conway, one of the seminal figures in British mountaineering. An art historian and gifted writer drawn to the hills by the sheer beauty and freedom of the heights, he would, more than any other climber, save possibly the Duke of Abruzzi, set the precedent for the large-scale, military-style expeditions infused with national identity that would define Himalayan climbing throughout much of the twentieth century. In 1892 he had traveled into the unknown Karakorum, recognized the impossibility of an assault on K2, and instead scaled a subsidiary ridge of Baltoro Kangri, establishing a height record of 22,600 feet on a feature he named Pioneer Peak.
Conway recognized the immensity of the Himalayan problem for the mountaineer. He was the first to bring Whymper and Mummery tents to the region, the first to use crampons, the first to consider the importance of diet, the threat imposed by altitude, the need for adequate hydration in the searing light and heat of Himalayan exposures. And if he invoked military rhetoric to describe the expeditions—mountains to be assaulted, heights to be conquered, flanks to be attacked—it was, in part, because he was quite literally advancing in the wake of the military. He was able to approach the Karakorum only because the 1891 Hunza-Nagar campaign had brought peace to the region, at least for the moment. His escort included soldiers of the 5th Gurkha Rifles, under the command of the same extraordinary young officer, Charles Bruce, who had protected and guided Younghusband in 1888 during his perilous explorations of the Karakoram. Military pacification of the frontier opened the way for the climbers, and the mountaineers, in turn, elevated their soldier escorts into the rarefied world of the climber.
NO INDIVIDUAL more perfectly personified this symbiosis than Charles Bruce, a man born to be a British soldier, destined to be a climber. His family home was in the hills of Glamorgan, in the Aberdare Valley of South Wales. The land of open moors and rocky crags had been transformed by the industrial revolution into a place of coal pits and iron foundries populated by wiry men who dug from the ground two million tons of coal a year and drank away their earnings in the local public houses. Bruce lumbered into the world in 1866, the last of fourteen children sired by a father who had lived during the reign of George III, the monarch responsible for the loss of the American colonies. As a boy Charlie met Lord Albemarle, who had served under the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, and was regaled with tales of war by his grandfather Sir William Napier, the official historian of the Peninsular Campaign against Napoleon.
A child of privilege, Bruce was sent away to school at five. At Harrow he was revered for establishing a school record by having been thrashed by the headmaster more often and in a shorter period of time than any student in the school’s history. His final transgression involved throwing a pot of geraniums at a highly respected lawyer from the roof of the headmaster’s house. Among other skills acquired at school was his ability to balance a peacock’s feather on the end of his nose, blow it up into the air, and catch it on the tip of the same prow, a trick he earnestly but unsuccessfully attempted to teach a family friend, the archbishop of York.
By family tradition Bruce ought to have attended Sandhurst, but having twice failed to submit his examination papers on time—another record—he ended up in the militia, stationed at York, where for two years he did, as he recalled in his memoir, “minimum work, maximum sports.” In the summer of 1887 he first went to the Alps, where his climbing style and ambitions earned him the nickname MMM, for Mad Mountain Maniac. That same summer he joined the 1st Battalion of the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, the unit in which his grandfather had served in the Napoleonic Wars. A year later he was ordered to India, where he would make his mark with the 5th Gurkha Rifles, stationed at Abbottabad, on the North-West Frontier.
Service in the Indian Army, Bruce soon discovered, was a far cry from the life of ease enjoyed by the patrician officers of the regular home army and militias. The Indian Army was a truly professional force, its officer corps composed of upper-middle-class British men for whom military service was a serious career, its ranks drawn from the finest fighters of a subcontinent, Muslims and Sikhs, Rajputs, Pathans, and Marathas, all volunteers for whom soldiering was a highly honorable calling. Unlike the home army, which by the late nineteenth century had not seen combat since Crimea, the forces in India were well honed by the endless skirmishes and campaigns of the North-West Frontier. These were not trivial encounters. In the Afghan border campaigns of 1897, hundreds were killed, scores of villages put to the torch, and prisoners on both sides slaughtered without mercy. “There is no doubt that we are a very cruel people,” Winston Churchill wrote home from the front. “Severity always,” went the British motto, “justice when possible.”
Warfare suited Bruce. 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 plu
s 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.
Like all field officers, Bruce watched his troops carefully and had strong opinions about the fighting abilities of the various tribal and ethnic groups that made up the army. Neither Brahmans nor untouchables, the highest and lowest castes of India, were any good at war, he maintained. The ethnic Tibetans, by contrast, were too good at it. They stood up to the British, defied authority, and refused to submit to the cardinal rule of the Raj, which forbade any native from hitting a white man, whatever the circumstances of the affront. Tibetans could never be cowed. Pathans and Punjabis made the best soldiers, tough, obedient, subservient, yet never obsequious. But for serious mountain work no one could touch the Gurkhas, the soldiers of Nepal, a polyglot of men and boys recruited from a half-dozen peoples, Gurung, Magar, Tamang, Rai, Limbu, and Sherpa. Bruce had created a unique military unit, the Frontier Scouts, a prototypic counterinsurgency force that specialized in infiltration, ambush, and assassination. The Gurkhas excelled as guerrilla fighters, and Bruce trained them to be mountain soldiers prepared to take the fight aggressively to the enemies of the Raj, the Wazirs, Orakzais, Afridis, and a host of frontier tribes whose villages were to be razed, elders killed, and younger men and women cowed into submission. Younghusband himself had witnessed their prowess in 1888 in the Karakoram, and when, later, talk turned to Everest, both Younghusband and Bruce knew the men to recruit. Their skills in the mountains, nurtured since birth, had been tested in actual battle, in circumstances comparable to if not more perilous than what they might expect to confront on the unexplored flanks of Everest.