Into The Silence

by Wade Davis

  On both points Younghusband was dead wrong, but his confidence appeared to sway Lord Sinha, who, in the manner of all functionaries, enthusiastically offered a conditional endorsement, with the caveat being that the government of India had to independently back the effort, after fully taking into account the sensibilities of Tibet. It was not the major victory Younghusband had been seeking, but it was enough to encourage him to send a follow-up note to Howard-Bury the next day, instructing him to proceed directly upon arrival in India to Simla to seek a personal interview with the viceroy. The British knew so little of the mountain, its scale and its wrath, that Younghusband naively suggested that permission be sought for a party of only three, “an experienced mountaineer, a surveyor, and one other European,” to scout the mountain and prepare the way for the three climbers who would establish a route to the top the following season.

  AFTER A LONG, hot voyage through the Red Sea, a rough passage from Aden to Bombay, and a surprisingly cool, dust-free rail journey across the plains of India, Howard-Bury arrived at Simla, the summer capital of the Raj, on Monday, July 12, 1920. He did not waste a moment. Three days later, in a letter written from the Hotel Cecil, he informed Younghusband that he had already met with the acting surveyor general, a Colonel Coldstream, and secured his promise to provide the expedition with a team of surveyors, men with climbing experience whose expenses would be paid by the government of India. He then contacted Acting Foreign Secretary Cater, who assured him that relations with Tibet were favorable but nevertheless delicate, hinging as they did on the outcome of a vital decision currently under review by the secretary of state at the India Office at Whitehall. Though the details were vague, they clearly involved a shipment of arms and ammunition anticipated by the Tibetan authorities. Until this issue was resolved, there could be no guarantee, Cater said, of support from either the government of India or the Tibetan authorities.

  Howard-Bury’s next meeting, at the Royal Flying Corps headquarters, was disappointing. The costs of an aerial reconnaissance were prohibitive, and from the existing airfields at Allahabad and Calcutta there was no machine capable of reaching the flanks of Everest. The air force would lend cameras and offer advice, but the suggestion that a temporary base be established closer to the mountain, at Purnea, was dismissed out of hand. This curt rebuke from the flying corps did not please the viceroy, with whom Howard-Bury met on the morning of July 15. Lord Chelmsford was excessively sympathetic and vowed to provide the expedition with every possible support. But again, as he informed Howard-Bury, even his hands were tied. Everything would depend on the outcome of the negotiations currently under way with the Tibetans. The viceroy then made a remark that struck Howard-Bury as curious: he advised him to travel overland to Yatung, in Tibet, to confer there with Charles Bell, the political officer of Sikkim, and to do all that was possible to interest Bell and the Tibetan authorities in the project. Howard-Bury had been told something similar by Basil Gould, the assistant foreign secretary, who had been in Tibet, at Gyantse, in 1913. All roads to Everest appeared to run through Charles Bell, a solitary frontier administrator to whom even the viceroy evidently deferred.

  Five days later, having secured formal permission to cross into Tibet to Yatung, the British trading mart established by the Younghusband Mission in the Chumbi Valley just beyond the frontier with Sikkim, Howard-Bury had a disappointing lunch with Acting Foreign Secretary Cater, who had just received a wire from none other than Charles Bell.

  “Bell says some poet-saint is buried near Everest,” Howard-Bury reported to Younghusband in a letter of July 20, “and that the Tibetans are likely to be very suspicious … I am afraid that Bell is another obstacle and that as long as he is in his present position, he will put every difficulty he can in the way.”

  The full content of Charles Bell’s telegram of July 19 was cited by the viceroy in a wire marked “Secret Mount Everest” and dispatched to the India Office in London on July 24. “Regarding the expeditions to Mount Everest via Tibet in 1921 and 1922,” Bell had written, “there are several sacred places in the vicinity of Mount Everest as Milarepa the Tibetan poet-saint who attained Buddhahood lived there. Tibetans would not like Europeans moving about in those places … The Tibetans 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 … Until the Tibetan question is settled with China these expeditions to Mount Everest should not be allowed.”

  Lord Chelmsford appended his own concurrence as viceroy: “Until question of the supply of arms and ammunition and other outstanding political matters in regard to Tibet are settled we feel strongly that we cannot approach Tibetan Government on behalf of Society. Bury has arrived here and position has been explained to him.”

  A week later, on July 27, Howard-Bury again wrote to Younghusband: “The entire problem is the failure of either Montagu or Curzon to agree with the Government of India’s request to sell arms to Lhasa.” Then, after asking Younghusband to use his influence to have the matter settled in favor of the government of India’s position, Howard-Bury added, “The more I hear of Bell, the less I fear he will help us. They all say he is a most tiresome man to deal with because he is very slow and cautious and does not make any mistakes.”

  This assessment, as Howard-Bury would himself discover in the ensuing days at Simla, and in his later inquiries in Calcutta, was uncharitable. Charles Bell indeed did not make mistakes; if he was cautious, it was because he knew that upon his watch, the future of Tibet might turn. While his loyalties remained with the British crown, his affection lay with His Holiness the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, who considered Bell his friend and a close and trusted confidant. Younghusband rejected as ludicrous Bell’s concerns about mystic saints and the mountain approaches, arguing in a wire sent from Brussels to the India Office that the “sacred places that Bell talks of could very easily be avoided.” Howard-Bury, for his part, was less dismissive of Tibetan sensitivities and increasingly disinclined to question Bell’s motivations. From conversations with various officials subsequent to his July 27 letter to Younghusband, he had learned enough about Bell’s remarkable background to withhold judgment.

  Born in India and schooled at Winchester and Oxford, Bell had joined the Indian Civil Service in 1891. In 1900 he was posted to Darjeeling, where he became enamored of Tibet. He learned to speak the language fluently, and in time would compile the first Tibetan grammar and dictionary. Appointed acting political officer of Sikkim in 1906, he formally replaced Claude White in 1908 and served until 1918, when he retired to pursue his academic research. Unlike Younghusband, Bailey, O’Connor, and most of the frontier officers of the Indian Civil Service, Bell was not a soldier but a scholar with a deep and sincere interest in the civilization of the Himalaya, an avocation that immediately set him apart from the vast majority of the British in India. His relationship with His Holiness had been forged during the years of the Dalai Lama’s exile in Darjeeling, beginning in 1910. Largely because of Bell, the Tibetans had rallied to the British cause during the war. At the outbreak of war in 1914, the Dalai Lama had raised a thousand men to fight for the British, an offer that was diplomatically declined, though the military unit was kept on call throughout the war even as monasteries throughout Tibet held special religious ceremonies to pray for the success of the British cause. It was his friendship with Charles Bell that led the Dalai Lama to write, “Thus all the people of Tibet and myself have become of one mind, and the British and Tibetans have become one family.” That such sentiments would be expressed less than a generation after the Younghusband invasion and the massacre of the Tibetan army at Guru was in itself remarkable.

  On July 31 Younghusband received word in London from the India Office that the government of India had formally turned down the Everest Committee. He absorbed the news without bitterness and immediately wired Howard-Bury, encouraging him nevertheless to press on into Tibet to meet with Bell, who had at this poin
t emerged as their final hope.

  TO GET TO YATUNG, where Bell at the moment was based, Howard-Bury followed the route taken by the Younghusband invasion, climbing in a day from the tropical forests of Sikkim to the snows of the Jelep La at 14,390 feet, and then beyond to the temperate beauty of the Chumbi Valley. After the leeches and monsoon rains of his long approach march, he found enchantment among the silver firs and rhododendron forests of Tibet, the meadows of clematis, purple iris, and wild strawberries. The precipitous rise in elevation, however, left him exhausted. Ascending the Jelep La, as Bell later wrote, “felt like climbing up a continuous ladder, each step higher than the one before. Up. Up. Up right onto the roof of the world. Your head felt light and your limbs like lead and all that could be heard was the strange laboured breathing of men and mules, with occasional fits of coughing.”

  By the time Howard-Bury reached Yatung, he felt weak and retired to bed immediately, without dinner. The following day, August 14, he awoke fully restored and spent an idle morning reading his mail and some newspapers that had just arrived. Though it appeared isolated on a map, Yatung was in fact a small but bustling depot through which flowed fully half of the entire trade between Tibet and India, a continuous traffic of yaks and mules bringing wool, salt, musk, and medicinal herbs down from the plateau and tea and manufactured goods up from the foothills and the cities of the Raj. The 175 miles from Gangtok, in Sikkim, to Gyantse, in Tibet, took eleven days at a steady pace, but could be covered by native runners in as little as seventy-two hours. Letters and newspapers from Calcutta could reach Lhasa in ten days. In many ways, communication in 1920 was far better than it would be fifty years later. Since the Younghusband invasion, the British had maintained not only a telegraph line to Gyantse but also a string of eleven dak bungalows, a day’s walk apart, equipped with beds and small tea shops where officials could purchase food and basic supplies, services that were available for Howard-Bury and the later climbing expeditions. Bell’s predecessor, Claude White, had decreed these facilities off-limits to natives for fear that they would be rendered unfit for Europeans, a contemptuous regulation that Bell immediately reversed on becoming political officer.

  Late in the morning Howard-Bury conferred with the British trade agent, David Macdonald, a slight man, barely five feet tall, who had been appointed to the post by Bell in 1909. The son of a Scottish tea planter and a Lepcha mother from Sikkim, Macdonald had been born with the name Dorjee, but grew up fully in the shadow of the British, attending boarding school in Darjeeling and later becoming Christian under the influence of his wife, herself the product of a mixed marriage of English and Nepalese blood. A close friend and confidant of Bell’s, fluent in many tongues, Macdonald had been with the British in Lhasa in 1904 and had briefly acted as Younghusband’s translator during the invasion.

  At noon, Macdonald and Howard-Bury joined Charles Bell for lunch, escorted to his quarters by a Tibetan military band of drums, bugles, and fife playing a rousing rendition of the British national anthem. Bell impressed Howard-Bury as being pleasant and hospitable, but adamant in his views. In a letter to Younghusband, he reported that Bell was particularly concerned that the home government had yet to reply about the question of sending arms to Lhasa: “He told me frankly that he did not care for the idea of an expedition until the whole question of the relations between China, India and Tibet had been settled … At the same time he said that he could ask the Tibetan government today and he was quite certain that they would allow the expedition, but that he did not think that it would be advisable at the present time.”

  Bell permitted Howard-Bury to proceed farther up the Chumbi Valley, on the condition that he not go past Phari, and that once there he say nothing of his proposed expedition to Everest to the local authorities. A request to return to Sikkim via Kampa Dzong was firmly denied as being diplomatically provocative. As Howard-Bury left Yatung on August 15, walking past the European cemetery on the edge of town and climbing the wild slopes of the Amo Chu Gorge, he remained puzzled by this extraordinary figure, a man whose knowledge of the language and culture of Tibet was clearly encyclopedic, who read the classics by night in the original Greek and by day had such fine intuitions concerning the ways of the Buddha, the spirit of the place, that he could decipher and anticipate the most subtle features of etiquette and ceremonial form. It was this sensitivity that so impressed Howard-Bury, who was himself deeply intrigued by all things spiritual and metaphysical. Bell, he had learned, deliberately rode a horse of a color deemed auspicious to Tibetans and arranged his diplomatic business according to the dictates of the Tibetan calendar. When monks remained indoors during the rainy season, for fear of harming the abundant insect life, he cast no judgment. He viewed sky burial not as something morbid, but as a proper and efficient means of diposing of the dead in a land where the ground lay frozen most of the year.

  Out of respect for his formal position and the Tibetans he so admired, Bell retained his English dress and bearing, the proper behavior of an objective British officer. Only in this way could he exert authority and influence both in Lhasa and in the highest diplomatic circles of the Raj. Yet his knowledge, unequaled in the Indian Civil Service, gave his words precise and undeniable credence, allowing him, when appropriate, to slice through the most opaque of diplomatic niceties. Of the Chinese he spoke directly of their “tendency to treat the Tibetans as a people far inferior to themselves, and to apply to them methods of oppression at once brutal and stupid.” And without apology or qualification, he accounted for the spiritual authority of His Holiness the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. “An unearthly light,” he wrote, “is believed to issue from his brow when he blesses pilgrims; his back reveals the imprint of Chenrezi; he is known as Kundun, the Presence.” Tibetans had their own explanation for Bell’s cultural sensitivity and genius: they maintained that he had been a Tibetan in a previous lifetime, a high lama who had been reborn in a more powerful nation that he might return to help his people.

  HOWARD- BURY SPENT TEN DAYS exploring the Chumbi Valley, slowly making his way to Phari and just beyond, to the southern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. It was rich land, at least in the lower reaches, with verdant fields of barley, wheat, and potatoes, pear and apple orchards heavy in fruit, wild azaleas and dwarf rhododendrons on the mountain slopes, and roses in such abundance that the entire valley was sweetly scented. The individual farmsteads were charming, the houses with their gently sloping roofs of pine shingles, split in six-foot lengths and held in place by heavy stones, each home draped in prayer flags, each flag a mantra blown to the wind. The men who greeted him, tongues darting out at the end of every phrase as a sign of deference and respect, were generous and welcoming, and the women less shy than those of Sikkim and India. He found that they stared at him quite unabashedly. Bell later showed Howard-Bury a Tibetan book, one of seventy-six in his library, written by Rin-chen Lha-mo; one passage in it summarized a woman’s view of the Western man: “The average European is not good looking according to our ideas. We consider your noses too big, often they stick out like kettle spouts; your ears are too large, like pig’s ears; your eyes blue like children’s marbles; your eye sockets too deep and eyebrows too prominent, too simian.”

  Howard-Bury, like others before him, found Phari to be a miserable place, a windswept hovel built on its own waste with mud streets as open sewers and only the frozen air of morning to offer a respite from the all-pervading stench of human waste. But beyond Phari, the white summit of Chomolhari brightened the sky, and his track carried him up a marshy valley between grassy hills and then across the Kambu La, a 16,000-foot pass that led to a deep, narrow valley literally colored blue with wildflowers, gentians and bluebells, columbine, monkshood, and forget-me-nots. Farther up the valley he came upon a series of nine sacred springs, all sulfur, in one of which bathed a high lama, surrounded by his attendants. They welcomed him warmly, with butter tea and a plate of English biscuits. More food followed, minced mutton and diced vegetables, eggs and macaroni, which Ho
ward-Bury, to the delight of all, attempted to eat with a pair of chopsticks. As they ate, any number of people of the valley, suffering from various afflictions, came before the lama, prostrating themselves three times on the ground, and then, having received his blessing, slowly walked away without turning their back to the master. The lama later accompanied Howard-Bury back to Phari to show him a shorter route. In his red robes and rosary, his oiled hair hanging on long plaits on either side of his brightly decorated saddle, wearing a hat of several tiers and shaped like a pagoda, yellow in color and decorated with Chinese characters and the portrait of a saint, the lama was, as Howard-Bury wrote, “the most picturesque individual I have yet seen.”

  In the last week of August Howard-Bury returned the twenty-eight miles from Phari to Yatung, where he was warmly welcomed by Macdonald, fed vast amounts of food, and even cajoled into playing a tennis match one quiet afternoon. Over two days at Yatung, beginning August 25, he met several times with Charles Bell, encounters that were both intense and revelatory. He noted in his diary, “Bell gave me the whole history of our relations with Tibet since 1904 and said that at the present moment they were in a worse condition than they had been for ten years, thanks to our not keeping our promises. He said that the Chinese are working hard and are gradually regaining their lost influence and that practically it is only the Dalai Lama now that prevents the Chinese from being complete masters again and that he may be poisoned at any time.”