Into The Silence

by Wade Davis

  The route to Kampa Dzong that Morshead would take, due north through Sikkim, was somewhat shorter but, as Younghusband had discovered in 1903, impractical for a large mounted force. It passed for several days along the feverish and sweltering Teesta Valley, where the rainfall was heavy and leeches abounded. For long stretches it was but a narrow trail, carved into rock overhangs above the Teesta and Lachen Rivers, quite unsuitable for mules and horses. With the season already late and monsoon clouds hovering over the plains of Bengal, both approaches to Tibet already promised to be very wet. In Darjeeling, the rains had begun, and not a day went by without torrential downpours. Time was of the essence, Howard-Bury insisted. It was vital to get the expedition across the divide into Tibet as quickly as possible, with the hope that the mountains would block the full force of the monsoon from reaching the Chumbi Valley and the northern approaches to Everest.

  Howard-Bury’s plan called for Morshead and his survey crew to depart Darjeeling on May 13. The main body of the expedition would go by way of the Jelep La, leaving in two parties, each with fifty mules and twenty porters, one group on May 18 and the other on May 19, so as not to overtax the accommodations, the dak bungalows conveniently spaced a day’s march apart all the way through to Gyantse. Wollaston, Wheeler, Mallory, and Howard-Bury would head off first, followed by Raeburn, Kellas, Bullock, and Heron. Until branching off this major north-south artery and heading west to Kampa Dzong, the expedition would remain in ready communication with the outside world. Telephone and telegraph lines ran from Darjeeling to Gyantse, and letters mailed from Phari reached Darjeeling by postal runners in but three days. Morshead’s survey team and both parties of climbers and support staff would rendezvous at Kampa Dzong. From there they would literally walk off the map, following a route that in seven days promised to reach Tingri Dzong, the Tibetan military garrison and trading depot that had long been anticipated as the base for the initial explorations of the northern approaches to the mountain.

  IF THERE WAS one man Howard-Bury could with complete confidence send alone into the unknown, it was Henry Morshead. Born in Cornwall in 1882, and ultimately murdered under mysterious circumstances in the jungles of Burma in 1931, he was a man of action and deed, a true explorer, decisive and contained in temperament, ferociously strong and fit, at five foot nine a pocket Hercules, as one friend described him, hard as nails, utterly indifferent to personal comfort, blessed with an impregnable digestive tract, fully capable of eating anything or nothing, of going without food or even water for days. Trained as a military engineer, with a specialty in topography, mapping, and the design and construction of fortifications, he’d joined the Survey of India in 1906. Thereafter he’d embarked on a decade of extraordinary expeditions, none more dramatic than a series of thrusts up the Brahmaputra from the southern side of the Himalaya to the jungles of northeast Assam and, ultimately, into the heart of the Tsangpo Gorge.

  Neither China nor Britain had been able to garrison the borderlands of the North-East Frontier, which was the reason the six-hundred-mile border, stretching from Bhutan to northern Burma, remained undefined. Between 1858 and 1894 the Raj had made four failed attempts to pacify the region. In every instance the British political officer had been killed by the Abors, a fierce tribal people, notorious for their use of arrows and buried stakes poisoned with aconite paste, deadly venom derived from plants. When, in 1911, yet another political officer had been murdered, the Raj had had enough. With the pacification of the Abors the immediate intent, and the penetration and mapping of the high affluents of the Brahmaputra the strategic goal, the British launched a massive punitive expedition, of which Morshead’s survey detachment was a key component. Two thousand soldiers, mostly Gurkhas, were each dosed with quinine and given in their kit an antidote to aconite poison. They were supported on the march by thirty-five hundred Nagas, sworn enemies of the Abors, each armed with a spear and hoping to return with an enemy head as a trophy. It was an uneven fight: British rifles and Maxim guns against rocks, spears, poisoned stakes, and arrows.

  Once the Abors were subdued, the exploration could begin. Survey teams went up the Dibang, Lohit, and Dihang, all major high tributaries of the Brahmaputra. The conditions were beyond terrible: mountainous slopes of forty degrees covered by dense jungle vegetation, river torrents that fell fifty feet in a mile, unbearable heat and leeches in the lower elevations, while at the heights such cold that men died of frost. “Personally I would give the frontier to the Chinese if they want it,” one officer wrote to his mother. “I have never seen a more awful spot.”

  Morshead was in his element. In 1911, he spent four months ascending the Lohit, living on rice, dog meat, and beetles, hacking his way through tangles of creepers and toxic plants, threatened by tigers and elephants, in a pestilential climate as humid, he recalled, as a Turkish bath. All this simply to plant the Union Jack in disputed ground, claimed by the Chinese and marked with a single wooden post that identified the spot as the southern limit of the Empire of the Great Pure (Ch’ing) Dynasty.

  By May 1913 he had successfully mapped the entire drainage of the Dibang, tracing the tributary to its source and thus proving that it did not pierce the Himalaya. While exploring its upper reaches, he met some Tibetans from Kham who offered to guide him up the Brahmaputra and into Tibet. Here was an opportunity to solve one of the great puzzles of Himalayan geography, the mystery of the Tsangpo Gorge. In 1884, as we have seen, the pundit Kinthup had proved that the Tsangpo River, flowing east from Kailas along the northern flank of the Himalaya, and the Brahmaputra, coming out of the mountains 12,000 feet lower, in the forests of Assam, were one and the same, but no one believed him. Now, with the Abors quelled and the other affluents of the lower Brahmaputra successfully surveyed, Morshead joined forces with F. M. Bailey to seek a final answer to the mystery.

  Heading into the unknown on May 16, 1913, they crossed two high passes to reach a hamlet called Showa on the upper Dihang, where they were promptly arrested as Chinese spies by Tibetans who had never seen a European. After escaping with their lives, they made a wide circuit north, westward, and then to the south to reach the Tsangpo. They attempted to follow the river downstream to India but found their way blocked by a roaring chasm from which soared mountain walls to 23,000 feet. Returning upriver they reached Tsetang, not far from Lhasa, and, after extensive explorations, arrived back in India via Bhutan in the middle of November, with Morshead having mapped their entire journey. They had confirmed that the river did indeed fall through one of the deepest, longest, and most magnificent gorges on earth, and that, having sliced through the mountains, it turned back on itself in a great bend to run parallel in the opposite direction for sixty miles before heading south again into the forests of Assam. It was this curious and unexpected configuration that allowed for the dramatic drop in elevation, 7,000 feet in less than a hundred miles as the crow flies.

  When, finally, Bailey and Morshead, having covered 1,680 miles on foot, reached India, they were penniless and bedraggled. Bailey recalled their attempts to mollify the Indian police and border guards: “I began to look at Morshead more closely. I had not paid any attention to how he dressed while we were in Tibet. The values there were spiritual not sartorial. But face to face with the police inspector I was forced to admit that sartorially Morshead did not look impressive.”

  F. M. Bailey was himself no slouch. A veteran of the Younghusband invasion, he had been with Ryder and Rawling on the 1904 exploration of the Tsangpo/Brahmaputra headwaters, reaching Kailash and beyond. In 1910 he’d come up with the plan to disguise the Thirteenth Dalai Lama as a postal runner during his escape to India—the only time, he later quipped, that a god incarnate had carried His Majesty’s mails. In 1911 he’d walked 1,715 miles through southeast China, crossing the headwaters of the Mekong and the Salween to approach India from the northeast, through the very jungles of Assam. A brilliant naturalist, he discovered scores of new species, including the legendary Himalayan blue poppy that bears his name. He once
saved his own life by using a butterfly net to self-arrest and thus escape a snow slide as it grew into an avalanche. Seriously wounded three times during the war, in France and Gallipoli, he became a British spy, a master of a dozen disguises, traveling as a Buddhist priest, an Austrian soldier, and an Armenian prisoner of war, and causing the Bolsheviks in Tashkent and Samarkand such grief that he would live with a Soviet bounty on his head for the rest of his days.

  But in Henry Morshead, Bailey found his match. Four days into their Tsangpo expedition, he recorded in his diary, “I had noted another characteristic of Morshead which rather alarmed me. No one can avoid picking up leeches and one cannot stop to remove them while one is on the march. On one occasion I found at a halt that I had 150 leeches on me. Morshead appeared indifferent to them. I thought at the beginning that this indifference might be the residue of his fever; but later I found that this was not the case. When his temperature was indubitably normal, he would stand there covered in leeches and with blood oozing out of his boots, as oblivious as a small child whose face is smeared with jam.” Eventually Bailey came to understand that Morshead simply did not notice impediments of any kind, certainly nothing so trivial as a parasitic leech. Not only was the man utterly fearless, Bailey discovered; he “thought so little about danger that he didn’t realize that there was such a thing as risk.”

  Although Morshead was not a climber—indeed, his 1920 Kamet expedition with Kellas was the only time he had attempted a serious mountain—he had long had Everest on his mind. In May 1914, catching wind that Rawling was planning a reconnaissance in the summer of 1915, with an assault scheduled for 1916, Morshead had immediately offered his services as surveyor and had been accepted. Everest, however, would not be enough. With the enthusiasm of a schoolboy, he’d rushed a note to Bailey: “During the winter of 1915–16 while the rest of the Rawling’s party return to vegetate in Darjeeling before the final attack, you and I could go off and explore the northern border of Bhutan and possibly revisit those Ammon on the Nyala La. Let me know as soon as possible what you think about it.”

  Before Bailey had a chance to reply, war clouds over Europe rendered the issue moot. Morshead, posted to a field company of Royal Engineers, had an active war, as would be expected, crossing the channel in time for the Battle of Loos. Mentioned twice in despatches, recipient of the Distinguished Service Order, he somehow survived the Somme, the Battle of Arras, and Passchendaele. A bout of trench fever sent him back in England, where, dressed in civilian clothes, he was approached on a tram by a member of the white feather brigade, self-appointed guardians who challenged the patriotism of any man found out of uniform. Morshead said nothing. His war ended on September 25, 1918, when, scouting canal crossings near Cambrai, he was severely wounded in the leg by a shell splinter. Carried to the 48th Casualty Clearing Station, he was operated on the following day and evacuated to a hospital at Rouen. By December 1919 he was back in India on active duty on the North-West Frontier with the Waziristan Field Force, an assignment that yielded yet further decorations, the Indian Service Medal with three clasps. No sooner did he return from the North-West Frontier than he was off to climb Kamet with Kellas.

  “I wasn’t long left in peace at Dehra Dun,” he wrote to his old friend Jack Hazard, his second-in-command at the Somme. “Had to dump the wife in a hurry at Rurki and rush off.” Dumping his wife meant that Evie arrived in India for the first time with no money, no friends, and no one waiting for her at the pier. Whatever these men were, sentimental they were not. As Morshead gathered his survey team in Darjeeling on the morning of May 13, they had already mapped twenty-five hundred square miles of Sikkim in the weeks before the rest of the Everest party had even reached the hill station. He saw the task ahead as a technical challenge, an opportunity to complete something that had been initiated years before by men he admired, Rawling, Bailey, and Ryder, and the pundits Hari Ram and Kinthup before them. Leaving his wife behind, along with a four-month-old child, their first, was simply what the job demanded.

  WHEN GEORGE BERNARD SHAW saw a portrait of the 1921 Everest expedition—the men dressed in Norfolk jackets, knickerbockers, and puttees, the geologist Heron in a camel-hair greatcoat, Howard-Bury in Donegal tweed, with matching dark tie and waistcoat, Mallory wrapped in a woolen scarf—he famously quipped that the entire scene resembled a “Connemara picnic surprised by a snowstorm.” There was, indeed, something less than heroic about the first few days as the expedition got under way.

  On May 18 Mallory and Wollaston made their way to Wheeler’s lodgings at the Bellevue around 11:00 a.m., only to find the porters, eighteen of whom had arrived with three mules three hours before, still sorting and arguing about loads. Joined finally by four cooks, an orderly, and an additional forty-seven mules, the party set off, with Mallory, Wheeler, and Wollaston traveling by car. The destination was Pashok, a dak bungalow located on a spur overlooking the confluence of the Ranjit and Teesta rivers, seventeen miles away and 5,000 feet below. A motor road reached six miles beyond Ghoom, and from there the men would walk.

  Unfortunately, the car broke down almost immediately, obliging Mallory and Wollaston to ride ponies. Wheeler, an old Asia hand, flagged a rickshaw. Then came the rain. As Howard-Bury, who had stayed behind to see the second party off on May 19 with the intent of then doing a double march to catch up with the vanguard at Kalimpong, wrote to Younghusband, “the monsoon broke properly that night and we had a deluge which has continued ever since.” Actually, it was not the monsoon but what the locals knew as the chhoti barsat, the rains that herald the arrival of the monsoon; it would only get worse. Mallory rode with a sun umbrella in hand, an oiled silk cover on his topee, and a rucksack on his back, humping out of his cycling cape. He looked, as he admitted in a letter to Ruth, ridiculous. But he was delighted to be leaving Darjeeling, “a devastating place—or rather it is a wonderful beautiful place almost incredibly bedeviled by fiends.”

  The track ran from Ghoom along a ridge forested with evergreen oaks and then dropped steeply through tea plantations and copses of tree ferns thirty feet high, with trunks covered in orchids and delicate polypodium and maidenhair ferns. The increasingly humid air left the men dripping with sweat, and the rains never let up, even as they finally approached the bungalow around 6:00 p.m. Perched 2,000 feet above the river, built of wood, with four rooms (one occupied with stores, two by other travelers, with one reserved for the three of them), it looked out over a valley across which could be seen the outline of Kalimpong, their next destination. Their arrival was late and, Wheeler recalled, somewhat chaotic. It poured all night, and “the rain sounded like a great windstorm.”

  Wollaston, nevertheless, was delighted. He had never in his wildest dreams anticipated such luxury, especially after what he had known in Africa and New Guinea. “You just walk in,” he wrote in his amazement, “and find furniture, knives and plates, lamps and oil, even a library of old magazines and novels.” This was not an expedition but a tour, in the inimitable style of the Raj. Each bungalow came staffed with a chowkidar, who provided firewood and milk, and was equipped with cooking utensils and cutlery, beds and even mattresses. A posted notice advised parties of two to travel with three servants: a cook, a bearer, and a sweeper, the latter charged with the duty of cleaning toilets and sweeping the bungalow after use. The addition of a tiffin coolie to prepare picnics and assist the cook was optional but highly recommended. No coolie was to be made to carry more than fifty pounds, and each should be paid, the notice continued, a third the daily cost of a mule. If proceeding to Tibet, the traveler was advised to carry several tins of biscuits, bottles of scented water, and boxes of toilet soap as gifts for high officials, lamas and dzongpens. These were to be presented on a tray by a servant, along with ceremonial khatas, or scarves.

  The following morning was slow, the rain discouraging, and Wheeler elected to walk while Mallory and Wollaston rode. A steep track dropped 2,000 feet in three and a half miles to the Teesta River and then divided, the cart tra
il zigzagging its way ten miles up the mountain while the coolie track, which Wheeler took, rose five miles straight up more than 3,300 feet through dense forests to Kalimpong, a comparatively large settlement with shops, churches, tea gardens, a post office, and a telegraph line. The dak bungalow was large and elegant, six rooms and a veranda with beautiful gardens of roses and scarlet hibiscuses. Wheeler arrived around 3:00 p.m., wrote all afternoon, and then with Mallory, Wollaston, and Howard-Bury, who arrived by mule late in the day, joined a local missionary and his three daughters for dinner. The food was delicious, but not so the drink. “TT!” Wheeler scratched in his diary, his shorthand for “tea toddler.” They were in their beds by ten, after some bad news from Howard-Bury.

  The army mules, which had arrived in Darjeeling fat and sleek, had proved to be completely unfit for work in the heat and the mountains. Six had collapsed on the first day, and several more on the steep climb to Kalimpong. As it was, the expedition was severely underequipped in its transport. Of the 100 animals, 27 were loaded with the personal effects of the muleteers. Under the best of circumstances each could carry no more than 160 pounds, and with only 73 animals available to haul expedition supplies, Howard-Bury had been forced to leave much behind at Government House. Heading into the mountains, they had what was needed for three and a half months. To stay through September, as was their intent, they would have to bring up the remainder of the goods in July or August. If the army mules faltered completely, the expedition would be totally dependent on local transport, and the goodwill of Tibetans who less than a generation before had seen their fathers slaughtered by the British under Younghusband at Guru. The good news, however, was that Howard-Bury had run into David Macdonald, who was acting political agent in Sikkim until Morshead’s old friend F. M. Bailey, recently appointed to the post, could get out from England. Macdonald had immediately telegraphed Yatung and the Tibetan authorities at Phari, instructing that supplies and transport be made available throughout the Chumbi Valley.