by Wade Davis
Kellas, unable to make the journey, trained one or more of his Sherpa guides in the use of his format camera and dispatched them to Tibet. The results were two panoramic photographs, perfectly exposed, of what is now known as the Rabkar Glacier. Had the anonymous photographers continued just another mile downstream, past the terminal moraine, and had the weather continued to be fair, they would have seen the entire Kangshung Face of Everest, as well as Lhotse and the South Col from a distance of less than ten miles. As it was, they returned to Sikkim to reward Kellas with both detailed information about the route and dramatic evidence, as he put it, that “the scenery of the Mt. Everest group is of a very high order.”
IN LONDON, meanwhile, John Noel had his own designs on Everest. Noel was a soldier by profession, an artist in spirit, a brilliant camera technician by necessity. Born in Devon in 1890, christened with the name Baptist Lucius, he was the third son of the second son of the Earl of Gainsborough. Schooled in Switzerland, he was educated by his father, a historian and army officer who allowed his youngest son to accompany him to postings throughout the empire, from Gibraltar to India and the Far East. His mother was a fine painter, mostly of alpine flowers, and she had encouraged her son to study art at an academy in Florence. His father, however, wanted him to be a soldier, and inevitably, though failing once to secure admission, he entered Sandhurst. Upon graduation, in 1908, he changed his name to John and joined the East Yorkshire Regiment, stationed at the time in Fyzabad, in northern India, a region as remote, ferociously hot, and undesirable as existed on the subcontinent. For Noel it was ideal, as he hoped that service in a distant outpost, where the heat alone would limit military activity, might make him somewhat forgotten and thus free to pursue his main passions, exploration and photography.
Noel’s immediate goal in 1913 was to find a way to reach the approaches to Everest from the east. At the time unaware of the efforts of Kellas, he planned his journey from the writings of Chandra Das, the highly educated Bengali who, posing as a Buddhist scholar, had slipped as a spy into Tibet in 1879 and again in 1881. Like the pundit, Noel would travel in disguise, cloaked in native garb, his hair and face darkened with dye, his pose that of a wandering Muslim from India. As companions he took only three men: a Nepalese Sherpa, an ethnic Tibetan from Darjeeling, and an old native friend from his days rambling in the Garhwal Himalaya. For gear they took no more than could fit in two small tin trunks purchased from the local bazaar, a supply of blankets, and two native tents. Concealed in the trunks were two cameras, instruments for drawing and mapping, a boiling-point thermometer for measuring altitude, a disassembled rifle, a revolver, automatic pistols for the men, and a generous supply of ammunition.
Noel began by heading up the Teesta Valley along the main trail from Gangtok to Lachen, but then, rather than continuing north to the Serpo La and the main crossing into Tibet, he turned west at the village of Thango to follow a tributary of the Teesta to its headwaters and the flank of the Chorten Nyima La, a little-used and formidable pass fully two thousand feet higher than the Serpo La. Unfortunately, once they’d gotten across the pass, with the northern slope of the mountains falling away to the vast Tibetan plateau, “veritably the roof of the world,” as Noel would recall, things became somewhat confused. The party, hoping to avoid settlements or nomadic encampments, headed west, maintaining elevation as they traversed the spurs, ridges, and glacier valleys of the mountainside, until finally being forced by a deep canyon to descend to the level plain. Traveling by night, giving wide berth to villages to avoid the vigilant and dangerous mastiffs, they made their way to the Langbu La, the pass that promised to open the way to the Tashirak Valley and thus to Everest.
When Noel reached the pass he was staggered, as he recalled, “by a magnificent view of towering snow mountains … fantastically corniced with overhanging ridges of ice.” He consulted his map, the only one that existed. It showed the valley of the Tashirak running to the west and meeting the Arun River not far from the confluence of the Kama Chu, the river that drains the east face of Everest and the route that he had hoped to follow to the mountain. What, in fact, lay before him was an entire unknown range of mountains soaring to 23,000 feet barring the way to the west. Then, as he stared at the skyline, the clouds shifted to reveal higher mountains beyond, and among them a “sharp spire peak” with a thousand feet of its summit visible above the crest of the nearer range. From the compass bearing he knew that this was Everest. He remained at the pass for an hour, glassing the western horizon for any sign of an opening that might still lead him to the prize. Then, after his men had finished piling stones for a chorten and stringing prayer flags among the rocks, the party descended the steep grassy slopes to a small village, where they found shelter for the night among the sheep pens in huts plastered with mud and dung.
The following morning they continued down to the Tashirak River, which ran south and showed no signs of turning west to meet the Arun. A Nepalese trader encountered on the trail informed them that the confluence with the Arun was two full marches downstream at a crossing known as Hatia, which lay beyond the guarded frontier with Nepal. As Noel pondered his options, the fate of his expedition was decided by the unexpected arrival of a mounted party of six armed men, led by the dzongpen of Tinki, that had ridden 150 miles in three days to intercept the intruders. A heated exchange occurred, as the Tibetans insisted that Noel leave the country. In the end Noel had no choice but to yield. His party was low on food, and the men exhausted and weakened by the clandestine journey. The day before he had had to double their wages just to keep the expedition together. Violence in the moment was a real possibility. Noel feigned indignation, noted the power of the Raj, and demanded the respect due an officer of English birth. The dzongpen would not be moved. Noel feared not for himself but for his companions. He was well aware that the Tibetans who had aided the pundit Chandra Das had been sewn alive into leather bags and thrown into the Brahmaputra River to drown. The following morning, even after Noel had agreed to retire, there was a final altercation, and shots were exchanged from a distance. Reluctantly, a mere forty miles from Everest, Noel retreated to Sikkim.
Once back in London, on leave after five years in India, Noel compared notes with Kellas, who became a friend and mentor. As Noel recalled in his memoir, “In the long gap between my own journey of 1913 and the Everest Expedition of 1921, I talked with Kellas whenever I had a chance about Everest, and he told me many things that have never been made known about his plans and work concerning the mountain. He told me how he got his wonderful photographs of Everest’s glacier from the Tibetan side. He had shown them to geographers, but would tell no one how he obtained the pictures.”
The men often met at Kellas’s chemistry laboratory at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, and one afternoon in 1914, the older man shared his remarkable secret. There were many ways to the mountain, many means of crossing the Arun River and its gorge, the key impediment once a party had traversed the Himalayan divide to reach the slopes that fell away to the Tibetan Plateau. He had publicly outlined several of these approaches in informal discussions with colleagues at both the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society. The route of choice, however, he confided in Noel, was a pass never traversed by Europeans but known to Tibetans; it offered a route through the very mountain range that had barred Noel’s passage at Tashirak. Kharta could be readily reached. The Arun could be crossed on a bridge made of yak-hide rope. Once beyond the river, it was an easy march up the Kharta Chu to the Langma La, the pass that led to the Kama Valley and the eastern approaches to the Kangshung Face of Everest. It was a route used all the time by the herding people of Kharta, who had summer encampments in the high meadows in the very shadow of the summit.
Kellas had worked out an elaborate plan to place reserves of food and supplies at hidden depots in high, uninhabited valleys west of Kangchenjunga. His trusted Sherpas would do the work in secret. He would then enter Tibet unofficially, proceed to Kharta and the Kama Valley, and
assault Everest from the east. It was a plan, Noel recalled, “thought out to the last ounce of food and water.” Kellas asked Noel to join him on the adventure, as soon as the war was finished and both could get away. They would go either before the monsoon in June, or possibly later in the summer, after the worst of it had passed. Perhaps Rawling would come along, or Longstaff, Morshead, Wollaston, Bailey, or Bruce. With such a team, Kellas believed, nothing could keep them from having a serious go at the mountain. Noel, of course, immediately agreed to join. All that was needed was for the war to end; it surely could not go on forever.
CHAPTER 3
The Plan of Attack
ON THE EVENING of March 10, 1919, Sir Thomas Hungerford Holdich, then president of the Royal Geographical Society, arrived at Aeolian Hall on New Bond Street and hurried into the foyer, making his way past marbled columns and Venetian doorways, past the large oak-walled showroom crowded with the latest models of pianolas and other musical instruments made by the New York company that owned the building, and entered the concert hall at the rear of the main floor. He was late, and the room already was filled to capacity with fellows and guests of the society. It was the eighth evening meeting of the year, and it promised to be a momentous occasion. In the audience sat the patriarchs of British mountaineering, Douglas Freshfield of Kangchenjunga fame; Percy Farrar, then president of the Alpine Club; and Norman Collie, who had been with Albert Mummery and Charles Bruce on Nanga Parbat in 1895 and was destined to succeed Farrar as president of the club in 1920. Alexander Kellas, who had shared his plans for Everest with John Noel, was also there, as was Sir Francis Younghusband, who had, in fact, quite deliberately orchestrated the entire event with the hope of sparking new interest in an assault on the world’s highest mountain.
Holdich took the stage to make some brief remarks before introducing the guest speaker. As he surveyed the hall, his mind slipped effortlessly to the years before the war. He was seventy-six years old, and the war was just a blur to him. Tibet and Everest he remembered vividly, however. In 1906 he had published Tibet the Mysterious, a book focused on the economic potential of the land, the almost limitless reserves, as he imagined, of wool, silver, musk, copper, lead, iron, and, above all, gold that might well be exploited in the wake of the Younghusband Mission to Lhasa. These resources, he maintained, dwarfed anything that had been found in the Yukon and the frenzy of the Klondike rush of 1898. He had also, in his book, celebrated the exploits of Cecil Rawling and Charles Ryder, and the explorations that had carried them to the source of the Brahmaputra and beyond. As a geographer, he knew that trade was the reason for engagement with Tibet. Still, he felt, as did many of his peers at the RGS, the lingering impulse that had always drawn the British to this highest of mountains. In 1912 an article in the Badminton Magazine had boldly asked why the summit of Everest had yet to be conquered. In the previous century alone, it noted, more than £25 million had been exhausted in the quest for the North Pole. Four hundred men had died and two hundred ships had been lost. And still no serious effort on Everest, hardly a farthing spent, and not a life lost.
On December 19, 1918, barely a month after the Armistice, Holdich had written to Edwin Montagu, Lloyd George’s secretary of state for India, making inquiries about the possibility of launching an expedition toward the mountain. A draft of the letter had circulated the week before and had been edited by Freshfield and endorsed by Farrar. It raised several immediate concerns, problems to be faced and overcome. An oxygen helmet had to be designed that would somehow enrich the attenuated air, and a diet conceived that would mitigate and guard against the expected loss of appetite at extreme altitude. A preliminary expedition had to be launched to a significant yet manageable peak, perhaps a renewed attempt on Kamet, in the Garhwal Himalaya, at 25,643 feet still unclimbed yet known to Bruce and C. F. Meade, Kellas, Longstaff, and Mumm. There issues of oxygen deprivation could be addressed and solutions found. The approach to Everest would come from the north, through Tibet with the practical assistance of the Survey of India, which could be counted upon to produce men for whom the most remote and impossible reaches of the Himalaya were as a playing field. The letter ended with a note of urgency. Should action not be taken, and promptly, the challenge of Everest might well devolve to a foreign party of men who were not subjects of the king. This missive reached the government of India as Dispatch No. 1, received and dated January 17, 1919.
Weeks went by without a response. Clearly, as Younghusband conveyed to Holdich, some prodding was in order. Thus the decision to bring to the podium a relatively unknown man with a unique story to tell: John Noel, the photographer and veteran soldier who had in disguise in 1913 reached Tashirak and the closest approaches to the mountain.
To considerable applause, Noel moved toward the stage. A tall man of twenty-nine, with piercing eyes and delicate features, he placed his hands firmly on either side of the lectern, as if to steady himself before reading his paper. At his instructions the room went dark, leaving him in a small pool of light, silhouetted against a stunning image of a Himalayan landscape projected onto the stage screen from the back of the hall. The projector blinded him for a moment, until his eyes adjusted and he could see the shadowy outline of his audience. The beam of the projector was infused with the smoke of cigars and cigarettes.
“Attention during the last few years,” he began, “has been focused more and more upon the Himalayas; and now that the poles have been reached it is generally felt that the next and equally important task is the exploration and mapping of Mount Everest. It cannot be long before the culminating summit of the world is visited, and its ridges, valleys and glaciers are mapped and photographed. This would perhaps have already been done, as we know, but for the war and the lamented death of General Rawling. This piece of exploration had been his life’s ambition. May it yet be accomplished in his memory!”
With these words the hall erupted in applause as all those present rose in tribute to the fallen hero. Noel stepped back, slightly shaken by the noise, and then leaned forward and peered into the assembly of fellows. Most wore black, evening dress, formal and reserved. But his eyes were drawn to those in khaki, perhaps thirty or more scattered throughout the audience, soldiers like him who had endured the slaughter, the coughing of the guns, the bones and barbed wire, the white faces of the dead. Only they could possibly know what the vision of Everest had become, at least for him: a sentinel in the sky, a place and destination of hope and redemption, a symbol of continuity in a world gone mad.
CECIL RAWLING had fought throughout the war, at the front, in many of the most horrific engagements. He survived the fighting at Hellfire Corner, the most dangerous point in the Ypres Salient in the summer of 1915, and was present at Hooge, two miles down the Menin Road, on July 30, when the Germans attacked at 3:15 a.m. and sheets of liquid fire swept over the British line. It was the first time British troops were exposed to flamethrowers. Those soldiers not immediately incinerated fought hand to hand throughout the night before abandoning the trench with the dawn. A midmorning counterattack retook some of the lost ground, but at nightfall on the second day the British had to repulse yet another flamethrower attack. Such was the pattern of Rawling’s life in those dark days, so far removed from his visions of Everest and the snow and ice. Even on a quiet day in the Salient, with the lines so close, the artillery so restless, some 300 British men would suffer wounding or death. And these were minor engagements. As Rawling rallied his troops late that summer, he knew that some short distance to the south another battle loomed, the first all-out British assault of the war. It was known among the officers as the Big Push, a desperate attempt to break the German line and return movement and even glory to the battlefield. Failure was inconceivable: with the Germans fighting the Russians in the east, the Allies in France outnumbered their enemy by thirty divisions, at least 300,000 men.
The British, as it happened, were not ready. There was a massive shortage of shells, too few guns, and an appalling dearth of machine gun
s. What was at hand in Artois was chlorine gas, and on September 25, 1915, the British used it for the first time, killing more of their own men than the enemy, as the generals sent the Territorials and what remained of the regular army over the top to attack German positions firmly entrenched among the slag heaps and pit heads of the coal mines of Loos. With officers on horseback, the infantry advanced, ten columns extended in a line, each of more than a thousand men. As the diary of the 15th German Reserve Regiment would record, “Never had the machine gunners such straightforward work to do nor done it so effectively. With barrels burning hot and swimming in oil, they traversed to and fro along the enemy’s ranks unceasingly; one machine gun alone fired 12,500 rounds that afternoon. The men stood on the fire steps, some even on the parapets, and fired triumphantly into the mass of men advancing across the open grassland. As the entire field of fire was covered with the enemy infantry the effect was devastating and they could be seen falling literally in hundreds.”
That night another twenty-two British battalions were raced to the front. Men who had not eaten in sixty hours, whose feet were raw and bloodied, were flung into the line and cast the following day into another storm of shell fire. The Germans could scarcely believe their eyes. Of the 10,000 who attacked in the first wave on the second day, the British lost—killed or wounded—385 officers and 7,861 men. “The massacre,” reported a German battalion commander, “filled every one of us watching with a sense of disgust and nausea.” Such was the carnage that the German soldiers, following the collapse of the fifth and final British assault, on September 26, held their fire in pity and simply watched as the wounded wreckage of the British force crawled or stumbled from the field. In a battle that lasted barely a fortnight, the British would suffer more than 60,000 casualties. Among the dead were the poet Charles Sorley, in whose bloodstained tunic was found the beginnings of a poem that spoke for the “millions of mouthless dead,” and John Kipling, the only son of Rudyard, who after Loos would never again write fiction, or any work of the imagination.