by Wade Davis
The following day, May 20, called for an easy march of fourteen miles. The route ran along the most wonderful datura hedges Howard-Bury had ever seen, dense thickets twenty feet in height, decorated with beautiful white trumpet-shaped blossoms eight inches long, phosphorescent in the dusk. But his thoughts were on the mules, which continued to cause trouble. The rain was also a curse, falling in such torrents that oiled waterproofs were rendered useless in minutes.
From Pedong to Rongli, the next stage, was only twelve miles, but the track dropped more than 3,000 feet to the Rishi Chu, where, crossing the Sikkim border, it rose 3,000 feet, along a steep path broken by paving stones and cobbles that made the walking difficult. They lunched at the modest bungalow at Ari and then continued down another 2,000 feet to reach Rongli Bridge, a hot and feverish crossing, where they paused for the night. Howard-Bury again arrived enchanted by the flora: sprays of orchids, a delicate pink-blossomed ground cover, rich plantings of mulberry and walnut, and everywhere in full flower a stunning forest tree with white blooms known locally as chilauni. Wheeler, for his part, nursed a blister the size of a shilling. His stomach was also giving him trouble. One of the mules had died en route of sheer exhaustion, and Wheeler feared that some of the men might follow. Things were so bad with the transport that Howard-Bury was forced to order a stop, instructing the first party to rest for a day at Rongli, while the second group advanced to stay three miles back at Ari.
May 23 dawned in hot sun, and Bullock was out chasing butterflies soon after first light. Down below at Rongli, Wheeler, Mallory, and Wollaston got an early start, and after following the right bank of the Rongli Chu for five miles, through forests of massive hardwoods some forty feet in diameter, they began the steep climb to Sedongchen, a dreary settlement of bamboo huts only nine miles away but perched at 7,000 feet. Of the fifty mules the advance party had led out of Darjeeling, only fourteen were fit to carry, and by the time even these reached Sedongchen, not one remained able to proceed. Howard-Bury had no choice but to send the entire lot back to Darjeeling and find new transport by negotiating on the spot with the wool traders, whose narrow traffic out of the Jelep La and Tibet was a constant flow. Their faces blackened with grease, their long dark hair bound up and tied in red, wearing exquisite earrings of coral and turquoise, they “were full of friendly smiles and greetings,” Howard-Bury recalled, but they drove hard bargains, and the British had few options.
The following day was less a walk than a climb, 5,000 vertical feet up a stone causeway, more a series of steps than a road, that left the jungles and leeches behind and led the men into a fairyland of oaks, magnolias, and silver firs, delicate primroses and flowering rhododendrons of every hue and color, crimson, magenta, mauve, yellow, and white. The weather cleared and the hill ponies and mules hired locally proved more than up to the task. Sure-footed and strong, capable of carrying the heaviest of loads, they relieved Howard-Bury of his greatest immediate concern.
The climbers stayed the night at Gnatong, at 12,000 feet a scattering of stone huts in a hollow on a grassy spur, beyond which every tree had been cut for firewood, leaving the place, Wheeler noted in his diary, “filthy, dry and bleak.” A cemetery of the dead from the 1904 Younghusband invasion did not elevate the spirits. Howard-Bury described the hamlet as “a most depressing place” that owed its existence only to the fact that it was the first British outpost this side of the Jelep La and the Tibetan frontier. With the constant mist and precipitation, two hundred inches a year, the mud was as wretched as anything Howard-Bury had known in France. Still, thanks to the presence of a post office and a telegraph line, he was able to place a call that one would be hard-pressed to make today, over the Jelep La to Yatung, to a “Mr. Isaacs, Mr. Macdonald’s head clerk, to ask him to make arrangements for ponies and mules at Yatung and Phari.”
Howard-Bury then proposed to Mallory and Wheeler that as a cost measure they be prepared to dispense with their Darjeeling saddle ponies immediately after crossing the Jelep La, a move that promised to save a few rupees but did not endear him to either man. Mallory held his tongue, though he vented his feelings in a letter to Ruth written that night: “I felt I should never be at ease with him, and indeed in a sense I never shall be. He is not a tolerant person. He is well informed and opinionated and doesn’t at all like anyone else to know things he doesn’t know. For the sake of peace, I am being very careful not to broach certain subjects of conversation; there are realms that are barred to our entrance altogether.” Mallory further confessed that Raeburn, too, remained a problem. The climbing leader and Howard-Bury were as oil and water, and Raeburn’s personality—critical, unappreciative, defensive, humorless—was already alienating Wheeler and Bullock, not to mention Mallory himself. Such tensions after but a week did not bode well. “Goodbye beautiful wooded Sikkim,” Mallory wrote on May 24, “and welcome—God knows what! We shall see.”
THE FOLLOWING MORNING Wheeler was up at 5:00, but thanks to the refusal of one of the Tibetan sirdars, or camp managers, to get out of bed, the party was delayed until 8:30, by which time mist had veiled every slope and rain was falling in freezing torrents. Wheeler walked to warm up and then rode to the top of the Tuku La (13,300 feet) before following an undulating track to a second summit that slipped away to a miserable place named Kupup, where a ford carried him across a stream flush with rain. He then continued up a steep path through dwarf willows and rhododendrons and over rock and scree to reach, in two and a half miles, the Jelep La—at 14,390 feet the gateway to Tibet. In the rain and clouds, with a biting wind, the pass was no place to linger. Taking little notice of the stone cairns and the prayer flags strung across the heights, he kicked his mule on and toward the green forests of Tibet. Within minutes, as he hurried down a steep and stony path, he emerged out of the mist and rain and saw for the first time in weeks a sky of lapis blue and, in the distance, the white snow summit of Chomolhari soaring to 24,000 feet.
Partly to spite Howard-Bury and partly to test his wind, Mallory had climbed to the Jelep La on foot, and found to his surprise that it was the descent of 5,000 feet from the top of the pass that caused him headache and distress. Bullock, a day behind, also felt ill from the altitude, and went to bed without eating the night before crossing the Jelep La. Both parties had climbed 12,000 feet in three days.
Wheeler, by contrast, was in good form, delighted to be over the divide and beyond the worst of the rain, walking down through forests of pine and silver fir that reminded him of the Canadian Rockies, where he had spent his youth. His father, a brilliant surveyor and cartographer, had founded the Alpine Club of Canada, and Wheeler had begun serious alpine ascents at the age of twelve. From the age of fifteen, he’d spent four months every summer humping loads and exploring the most remote reaches of the cordillera. His skill and prodigious strength came to the attention of Tom Longstaff, who traversed the summit of Mount Assiniboine, also in the Canadian Rockies, with him in 1910, a twenty-one-hour ordeal that Longstaff later described as the hardest climb he had ever done; Oliver Wheeler at twenty impressed him as the toughest and strongest climber he had known. In 1911 Wheeler became the youngest person ever elected to the Alpine Club, his nomination being endorsed by luminaries such as Collie, Mumm, and Longstaff, who had all seen him in action in Canada.
Despite this remarkable record, no one associated with the 1921 expedition thought of Wheeler as a climber. He was designated strictly as a surveyor, his primary duty to get in close to the mountain. While Morshead’s task was to map several thousand square miles of unknown geography, Wheeler’s mission was to map with precision the topography of the immediate environs of Everest itself, two hundred square miles of some of the roughest mountain country in the world. For two months he would be virtually on his own, staying higher and for longer, with more exposure to the wrath of the mountain, than anyone else on the expedition. “He had the hardest and most trying time of all of us,” Howard-Bury later wrote, “and deserves the greatest credit for his work.” Wheeler, not Ma
llory, he might have added, would be the one to find the doorway to the mountain.
The track dropped steeply to the Chumbi, and Wheeler kept up a strong pace, reaching the river bottom by 3:00, and making his way up the right bank of the Amo Chu to the hamlet of Chumbi, where he crossed the river once more and continued to Yatung, arriving at the dak bungalow around 5:30. Only Howard-Bury was ahead of him. They were greeted by a pot of tea with, Wheeler noted in a letter to his wife, “fresh milk and clean sugar—all on a tray!” sent over by Mrs. Macdonald, the wife of the British trade agent. Wheeler was delighted to learn that letters were waiting from his wife, Dolly, posted from Darjeeling as late as May 23; it had taken only two days for the mail to cover a hundred miles. The postal runners, Howard-Bury explained, traveled the route in five-mile relays, working night and day, each runner eventually trotting the entire way. By extending the system, he hoped to maintain regular postal deliveries to the very flank of Everest.
When the others arrived, Mrs. Macdonald outdid herself, as Wheeler recorded in his diary, by sending over a “topping dinner … white tablecloth and napkins, soup, chops, turkey and vegetables, cold meat and salad, strawberries and cream, biscuits and radishes and coffee, washed down by whiskey and soda and crème de menthe.” The meal was most welcome, for as Mallory wrote to Ruth, “We’ve been living very badly. The substitutes for bread are abominable and our cooks produce nasty messes which are most unappetizing.”
Howard-Bury wisely ordered a day of rest at Yatung, allowing them time to resupply, with purchases of sugar, barley flour, potatoes, and to secure a new set of porters and mules for the climb up the Chumbi and onto the Tibetan Plateau. The latter was “some job,” Wheeler remarked in his diary, and the heated negotiations and arguments he overheard from Howard-Bury’s billet made him glad to be free of the responsibility. Altogether seventeen replacement porters were recruited, along with forty-six mules and four ponies, and this just for the vanguard of the expedition.
The new men all mustered in good time on the morning of May 27 and the party was off, a rather imposing procession, Howard-Bury recalled, with Wollaston and himself on ponies, along with interpreters Gyalzen Kazi and Chheten Wangdi, both mounted, and a small escort from the military garrison, red-coated soldiers of the 73rd Carnatics. Before leaving Yatung, Howard-Bury dispatched a telegram to Younghusband, announcing the arrival of the expedition in Tibet. It reached London just in time to be read at the anniversary dinner of the Royal Geographical Society, where the news was received with an ovation from the assembled fellows.
Joining the expedition for the day was Mr. Isaacs, the head clerk at Yatung, who had kindly agreed to escort Howard-Bury on a visit to two Buddhist monasteries. The track followed the banks of the Amo Chu through a rich valley of wildflowers, yellow barberry, and dwarf rhododendrons, white clematis and delicate orchids, and with every breeze came the scent of wild roses, a fragrance Howard-Bury recalled fondly from his passage the previous year. Three miles from Yatung the valley narrowed, and just beyond the ruins of a defensive wall built by the Chinese, they saw high on the hillside and well away from the trail the Punagang Monastery, a refuge of the ancient Bonpo sect, Isaacs explained. At the prosperous hamlet of Galinka, they paused to visit another temple, newer and belonging to the Gelugpa, or Yellow Hat, sect, the monastic order of the Dalai Lamas. Here Howard-Bury paused before a massive prayer wheel, mounted so that it reached to twice his height and perhaps six feet in diameter. Inside the wheel were inscribed on paper over a million prayers, and with each rotation of the wheel, a bell sounded, indicating that the prayers had ascended into the sky. Om mani padme hum. Hail, the jewel in the lotus. Howard-Bury made a clumsy translation, but he spun the wheel several times and later wrote only partly in jest that he hoped “the many millions of prayers sent up may benefit us.”
From Galinka, the river was broken by a series of dramatic falls, and as the trail climbed through a copse of wild cherry trees, the wind blowing off the water filled the air with white petals. Before long the trail crossed back over the river and rose through a massive boulder field, only to open onto a beautiful grassy plain, the Lingmathang Valley, the remnant of an ancient lake bed, perhaps two miles long and half a mile wide. At the height of a spur overlooking the valley stood the Donka Monastery, where Howard-Bury hoped to see his old friend the Geshe Lama, “a man of very great learning and held in high veneration.” The rinpoche, as it turned out, was away in Lhasa, but the young monks warmly welcomed the British travelers. Howard-Bury marveled to see the 108 volumes of the Kangyur, the written repository of the dharma, and he compared the artistry of the calligraphy to that of the finest illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages. He was then shown the sanctuary of the oracle, who too was away, taking the medicinal waters at the hot springs at Kambu, which Howard-Bury remembered well. The sacred pools were said to be capable of curing each of the 440 diseases suffered by humanity.
The oracle’s throne was golden, his robes crimson, and the ornate headdress he wore when in trance was adorned all around with silver skulls, symbols of the impermanence of life—a notion understood by every man on the expedition. Led out of the sanctuary, lit dimly with butter lamps, to an open veranda for tea, Howard-Bury hesitated as his eyes adjusted to the sunlight. They sat on low benches as a monk presented a tray of agate cups with silver covers. Howard-Bury winced; it was not his first taste of Tibetan tea. Made with butter and salt, it was to the English palate more soup than tea, but decorum dictated that they drink it with pleasure. Howard-Bury never became accustomed to the somewhat rancid flavor, though over the course of the expedition he would drink many hundreds of cups as a gesture of etiquette and protocol.
Departing the monastery, they dropped into a draw, then enjoyed a gallop across the open plain until the valley narrowed and the path again ran through forests of birch and larch, juniper, spruce, silver fir, and mountain ash. Crisscrossing the stream, climbing more steeply into a narrow gorge, after twelve miles the route reached Gausta; the name means, in Tibetan, “meadow of joy.” It was not a hamlet, simply a post for the dak mail runners, with a small two-room bungalow, several mud hovels, and a single tea shop, all at 12,000 feet in the middle of an enormous gorge. For Wollaston and Wheeler there was little joy to be found, as both were ill. Wheeler took to his bed immediately and skipped dinner—which had, at any rate, little appeal. He did manage to write to his wife, beseeching her to send chocolate. What the expedition has, he noted, “will not compete with my appetite … [Mallory] says he eats ¼ pound of chocolate a day while climbing and I agree. One must have sweet stuff.”
It rained throughout the night, but the morning dawned bright, with fresh snow within 1,500 feet of the bungalow. Howard-Bury ate wild goose eggs for breakfast and took delight all morning in the vegetation, plants that were new to him, a pale iris and a pink viburnum, a large yellow-belled honeysuckle, several unusual rhododendrons, and beautiful specimens of Bailey’s blue poppy. Wheeler, for his part, ate nothing but was able to travel. His diary suggests that the day was damp and cold, with heavy rain as they trudged the sixteen miles to Phari, climbing from 12,000 to 14,300 feet. Wheeler rode Howard-Bury’s mount for part of the way, then took Wollaston’s, before walking the last easy miles with Mallory. Four miles out, in a gentle landscape of rolling downs soft underfoot, they saw for the first time the fortress at Phari and, beyond, the ice peak of Chomolhari, the Mountain of the Goddess, looming in a brilliant blue sky. They could see the impact of the wind on the summit, the fresh snow being blasted into the air, and felt no small sense of trepidation. As Mallory would later write to Ruth, “Chomolhari, rising abruptly out of the plain to more than 9000 ft above us, was certainly a very tremendous sight, astounding and magnificent; but in broad daylight, however much one may be interested by its prodigious cliffs, one is not charmed—one remains cold and rather horrified.” They all knew that Everest reached another 5,000 feet into the heavens.
In the shadow of the mountain lay the village of Phar
i, its name Tibetan for “the hill made glorious.” It was hard for the British to imagine a more inappropriate moniker for a settlement literally buried in its own filth. Situated at 14,300 feet on a broad, flat desert of stone, all barren rock and gray horizons, exposed to constant winds, with only sod houses for shelter and yak dung to fuel fires against the bitter cold, it was, Mallory wrote, “the most incredibly dirty warren that can be imagined.” In streets fouled with waste, mangy dogs fought over dried carcasses, while open-air shops displayed hanging racks of rancid meat and cheese, and children with matted hair begged for food, their eyes bloodshot and their faces dark with grease.
The expedition had no choice but to linger, if only to allow time for the following party to catch up and have a day of rest. From Phari the real challenge of transport began, for there remained but one stage before they would turn west toward Kampa Dzong and away from the main route between Darjeeling and Lhasa. Howard-Bury needed a few days both to hire new men and animals and to renew his acquaintance with the dzongpen, the governor of the district, without whose cooperation they could not proceed. What’s more, the expedition rather desperately needed to regroup. They were only eleven days and 122 miles removed from Darjeeling, but as Mallory wrote home:
I suppose no one who could judge us fairly as a party would give much for our chances of getting up Mt Everest. The hardships such as they have been so far have not left us scathedless [sic]. Dr. Kellas arrived at Phari suffering from enteritis and though he is somewhat better now has been carried from there on some form of litter. Wheeler has constantly been suffering more or less from indigestion and has been sufficiently bad these past two days to make it a real difficulty to come on. Raeburn seems frail. All have been more or less upset inside at different times. However Heron, Howard-Bury and myself are all very fit and Bullock and Wollaston seem likely to survive.