Into The Silence

by Wade Davis

  The dak bungalow was a miserable affair, too small for the entire group and without firewood, but at least it was some distance removed from the village. Howard-Bury’s decision to break into the expedition stores did wonders for morale. The men were sick of inadequate rations and local food prepared by the “same abominable cooks.” Mail also lifted the spirits, and Wheeler was astonished to receive letters from his wife posted in Darjeeling only forty-eight hours earlier.

  In the afternoon the dzongpen came by with several officials and a gift of a sheep. “It’s customary,” Wheeler later wrote, “to present a scarf, which is given back when it is time for him to leave. Laid on the table for superiors, handed to equals and put around the neck of inferiors.” In lieu of a khata, Wollaston gave the dzongpen a large cigar, which “he apparently did not appreciate a bit. He looked very sick.”

  The following day Howard-Bury paid a call on the dzongpen, presenting a gift of several new electric torches, the first flashlights, which frightened and then delighted their host. After tea and various pleasantries, Howard-Bury and Heron rode to a monastery Howard-Bury had visited the previous year to give the monks photographs and other presents. He found them in the middle of ritual service, in a dark temple illuminated by hundreds of butter lamps, as they chanted their scriptures. Later, upon their return to Phari, they accepted an invitation from the dzongpen to dine with him the following evening, though few of the men could manage. Kellas, in particular, was very weak, and had not left his bed since arriving with the second group at half past one. Wheeler had spent the morning supervising the pitching of tents. A small troupe of dancers arrived in the late afternoon and put on a modest performance in the courtyard of the bungalow. Dressed in masks and red pantaloons, with crimson tunics hung with tufts of yak hair, they performed, Wheeler wrote, “various meaningless stunts and some ½ cartwheels. One man played the drum, the woman the cymbals. Bury gave them two rupees which pleased them no end.”

  The next morning Howard-Bury took a break and with only the chowkidar as a guide rode through the mist across the plain to reach some small hills, with the hope of finding a good spot from which to photograph Chomolhari. Soon they were above the clouds, looking out across a sea of white, with the sun overhead shining in a brilliant sky. After reaching 16,000 feet on horseback, they scrambled up another 1,500 feet on foot, until they could see directly across to the mountain. The winds were fierce, and after making several exposures, Howard-Bury hurried off the ridge.

  Elated by the outing, he returned to a crisis in Phari. There was a mutiny of sorts among the porters, sparked by the sirdar as a way of diverting attention from himself and his own crimes. Since the start of the expedition he had been shaving the food rations and selling the surplus on the side. He would go, as would the least desirable of the cooks, those given to drink. With better food and rest, both Wheeler and Wollaston recovered somewhat, but not Kellas, who, Howard-Bury reported, “refused food and became very depressed about his condition.”

  Only Bullock, Mallory, Raeburn, and Howard-Bury were fit to join the dzongpen on the night of May 30. It was a fine dinner of small cakes and dried fruit, followed by minced mutton, pasta, and steamed vegetables, all washed down with brandy and strong ginger wine, deeply soothing to the digestion. With the help of interpreters, the dzongpen, who had been born in a small hamlet between Kampa Dzong and Shegar, directly upon their trajectory to Tingri, provided much useful information about the route, the names of settlements and village leaders, the availability of transport, and the quality of forage and water along the track. He also offered to write to his brother, who was acting as his agent in his village, to solicit his aid. Howard-Bury left the dinner deeply impressed by the authority of the Dalai Lama, and grateful to his old friend and colleague Charles Bell, whose combined efforts had so clearly and effectively opened the way to the mountain. A single order from Lhasa had spread like a wave before their path, ensuring that the cooperation upon which everything depended would be forthcoming.

  Wheeler and Heron, meanwhile, busied themselves with the stores, breaking open twenty-one cases to rearrange the contents, which had been shipped sorted by food type, rather than by allotments for various camps. Wheeler, who had expedited dozens of survey parties as a youth in Canada, took charge, repacking the supplies in six lots of two- and three-week stores, “the way it should have been done,” he noted in his diary. He went to bed early, worried about Wollaston, who remained unwell, and especially Kellas, who was “very sick, the usual complaint.” The wind, which normally died down at night, had picked up to a howl, and the air was bitterly cold as he wrote the last lines in his diary and heard Howard-Bury and the others returning to the compound from dinner. Despite the frost, Mallory hesitated before slipping into his tent. It was only in the late evening that he found this new land of Tibet to be beautiful. At dusk, he wrote to Ruth, “this country becomes subdued; shadows soften the hillsides; there is a blending of lines and folds until the last light, so that one comes to bless the absolute bareness, feeling that here is a pure beauty of form, a kind of ultimate harmony.”

  With the help of the dzongpen, Howard-Bury was able to secure forty donkeys to accompany the expedition all the way to Kampa Dzong. Another forty-four animals—ponies, mules, donkeys, oxen, and yaks—would be changed at every stage. The men would ride mules, all save Kellas, who had to be carried. Wollaston, who had left Darjeeling on May 18 and not seen Kellas until the day before, spoke with him about staying behind in Phari. Kellas insisted that he was fully capable of continuing. He was stoic and, as Mallory later reflected, “very sly about being seen in the act of retiring.” To mask his condition, Kellas had, since leaving Darjeeling, insisted on starting in the morning after the rest of his party. Departing Phari on May 31, however, Kellas reconsidered, his courage at the last moment faltering, and he offered to stay behind. But by then the entire expedition had set out, and all the cooks and porters and supplies were strung out across the wide plain. No one, including Wollaston, the expedition’s physician, seems to have been aware of just how sick Kellas had become. Wheeler’s diary entry for May 31, the day they left Phari, noted simply: “Bought a high Tibetan saddle, a rather swish affair made of silver and sharkskin … Eventually got away about nine. Kellas being carried in a chair by six coolies. It was a raw day.” More attention was paid to Raeburn, who managed to get tossed from his mule twice before leaving Phari, and to two of their cooks, found drunk in the road, than to Alexander Kellas, who was slowly dying.

  FROM PHARI the track rose gradually over eight miles to the Tang La, at 15,600 feet the actual Himalayan divide. Once beyond the pass they would enter the drainage of the Yaru Chu, a major headwater tributary of the Arun, the river that plunges through the Himalaya just to the east of Everest. Their route to Tingri would essentially follow the valley of the Yaru Chu to Kampa Dzong and west as far as the fortress town of Tinki. There they would spur north and west, flanking several mountain massifs and crossing one major pass before dropping back to the Yaru Chu at Shiling, an insignificant way station just above the point where the Yaru comes together with the Phung Chu to form the Arun proper. By following the Phung Chu upstream, again to the west, they would reach their immediate goal, the trading center and garrison of Tingri Dzong.

  Leaving Phari they moved quickly, riding all day in the shadow of Chomolhari, with a bitter south wind blowing at their backs. They passed herds of kiangs, or wild asses, and any number of goas, Tibetan gazelles. Behind them billowed the dark clouds of the advancing monsoon, but to the north and over the Tang La the sky was brilliant and blue. After twenty miles, they stopped for the night at Tuna, where Younghusband had spent several months in the winter of 1903–4. It was nothing more than a cluster of stone huts on a barren, windswept gravel plain. The eight expedition members crammed into a bungalow, and the night was miserable.

  The following morning Kellas appeared to be somewhat improved, and Howard-Bury felt confident leaving the main group and, accompanie
d by only a local villager, setting off across the Tang-pun-sum Plain in search of gazelles. He saw many, though always from a distance, and the elusive creatures never gave him a chance for a shot. But the entire day was blessed by glorious views of Chomolhari and, as always, he took great delight in the flora, cushion plants and a curious trumpet-shaped purple blossom that burst from the sands and carpeted the plain. In the early afternoon he rejoined the track, which ran for several miles along the shores of the Bam Tso, a shallow lake some sixteen miles long and ten miles wide, saturated with minerals and salts. He had never seen a body of water with so many colors, deep blues, purples, greens, and even bright red where certain algae grew. The bungalow at Dochen, thirteen miles from Tuna, stood right on the shore of the lake, which shimmered with the reflections of soaring snowcapped mountains and the slow movement of hundreds of waterfowl, bar-headed geese and Brahminy ducks, terns and wagtails.

  But the news from the men was not good: Wollaston and Wheeler were still suffering, Raeburn was not well, and there was no chance that Kellas would be able to walk or ride on his own the next morning. He had lost fourteen pounds even before arriving in Darjeeling; now, after a fortnight with no appetite for food, he was withering away. The only moment of levity came with the news that one of the cooks, who had never seen canned food, had placed a tin of fish into boiling water to cook it. When he went to open the can, the contents had exploded all over the kitchen. Word spread through the camp that all of the British stores were explosive, a rumor Howard-Bury did nothing to quell. Henceforth pilfering from the supplies became less of a problem.

  From Dochen the expedition at last departed from the Lhasa road and headed northwest across the 16,500-foot Dug La, a short march of only eleven miles that led to the small and dirty village of Khe. It was a bleak place, Howard-Bury would later recall, haunted by a more illustrious past, for there were several ruins and evidence of an ancient lakeshore long since reduced to dust. “The wind is the curse of the country,” wrote Wheeler, “your face simply goes to bits.” Mallory called it “our great enemy … the dry, dusty unceasing wind … The real problem for comfort now is to get a tent pitched so as to have some shelter when the day’s destination is reached.” They had seen the last of the comfortable government bungalows. The following morning, June 3, dawned bright. Wheeler felt poorly but noted that “a little lead opium improved matters considerably.” Raeburn was still low, but Kellas, mercifully, seemed somewhat better. He was, as Wollaston later reflected, very difficult to read. Though obviously suffering and somewhat humiliated by his weakness, “he endured long marches with wonderful fortitude and was invariably cheerful.”

  The day was hot, and Howard-Bury elected to stop after but ten miles at Kheru, where new transport was to be secured. Some twenty families of nomads were encamped in a small side valley. Expecting the British, they had pitched a black yak-hair tent and welcomed the men with tea and sweets. Wheeler took comfort in the warmth and spent the afternoon curled by the brazier and the yak-dung fire. Howard-Bury went hunting for gazelles. Bullock shot a bar-headed goose. That evening Wheeler invited Heron, Wollaston, and Bury to his tent for cocktails, a fine brandy, and the men later dined on an excellent menu of soup, Bullock’s goose with peas and potatoes, rice pudding, and cocoa. “I enjoyed it thoroughly,” Wheeler wrote, though he would need more opium in the night.

  Saturday, June 4, broke well, with Wheeler much improved and Wollaston fully recovered. It was an easy march of sixteen miles over two high passes to Tatsang, “the falcon’s nest.” Howard-Bury again abandoned the main track to follow the crests of the hills. Kellas, perhaps inspired by the sight of the great peaks of Chomiomo, Pauhunri, and Kanchenjhau, all of which he had climbed, began the day feeling better, and elected to ride a yak. Wheeler and Wollaston rode with him as far as the second pass; there, at 17,100 feet, they left him behind. Kellas was uncomfortable, Wheeler later confessed, but seemed to be fine.

  By good fortune Mallory, Bullock, and Heron had remained behind, riding high onto the ridges to hunt bharal. They had just reached the pass and settled down to lunch when the translator Gyalzen Kazi arrived breathlessly to say that Kellas had collapsed just below the windward side of the pass. Leaving Heron and Mallory to tend to the older man, Bullock rode hard to overtake Wollaston and Wheeler. Wollaston went back and found Kellas utterly incapacitated, shivering in the wind, his lips blue. He gave him hot Bovril, brandy, and milk. There was not much else to be done but to get him to camp. In his diary Wheeler later described the crisis rather casually: “When about 3 miles further on, we heard that Kellas was on top of the pass … so Wollaston went back. Bullock and I came on crossing a barren plain to the Ta-tsang, a tiny village and monastery on top of a rocky bluff. Camp was in a hollow by a nice little stream.” Several porters were sent back with a stretcher. “Goodness knows,” wrote Wheeler, “when they will get him in.” Bullock, meanwhile, went fishing, managing to catch several trout with his butterfly net. Howard-Bury busied himself with the cooks, instructing them how to prepare the meat of a gazelle he had shot that day. The temperature dropped to seventeen degrees Fahrenheit and the streams were frozen by the time Kellas was finally carried into camp.

  The following day, again reportedly in good spirits, Kellas started off on a litter at 7:00 a.m. The destination was Kampa Dzong, where Henry Morshead and his survey team awaited. To reach there Kellas had to travel twenty-one miles and cross a 17,200-foot pass. Wollaston and Howard-Bury had by this point decided to send him back to Darjeeling at the first opportunity, but for the moment there was no choice but to continue. Howard-Bury saw him off, then paid a visit to a nearby nunnery, where thirty women, their heads shaved and adorned with marvelous wool headdresses, sat quietly in meditation in a small, dark room before dozens of statues of the Buddha, all covered in gauze veils. Silently they spun prayer wheels, some small and others large enough to contain parchment inscribed with half a million prayers.

  After begging leave of the elderly abbess, Howard-Bury, keen to catch up with his men, cantered along a dry and barren valley. He reached Kellas and his small party of porters well before the slow rise to the second pass leading to Kampa Dzong. The invalid seemed quite cheerful, so Howard-Bury continued on at a brisk pace until, reaching the pass, he sighted three Himalayan blue sheep, all large rams. He gave chase and after a mile managed to shoot the grandest of all. Triumphant, he rode down the pass toward Kampa Dzong, across fields of blue-and-white irises, until the valley narrowed to a limestone gorge and he saw, towering 400 feet above him, the silhouette of a great fortress crowning a massive cliff of upturned sedimentary rock. Camped at the base of the fortress, on an exposed grassy flat, were the Indian surveyor Gujjar Singh and Henry Morshead. Wheeler was already there, having pushed on ahead of the others, keen to retrieve his mail, and with much to discuss with Morshead. They found Morshead and Singh to be well, though nearly out of food and impatient, having arrived nine days earlier. They had passed the time checking Colonel Ryder’s triangulation stations of 1904.

  The dzongpen appeared around 4:00 to welcome Howard-Bury and offer gifts to the expedition: five live sheep, a hundred eggs, and a small carpet woven in a workshop within his own fortress. Their cordial formalities had scarcely begun when a man came rushing up to say that Kellas was dead. Wollaston, who had just arrived, could not believe it. Coming down out of the pass, he had received a note indicating that the doctor was well and, after a rest of an hour or two at the pass, would be arriving late in Kampa Dzong. Wollaston rode back immediately to verify the news. He found, to his horror, that his patient had suffered a massive heart attack, undoubtedly brought on by complete exhaustion. “Need I say,” he wrote on June 11 to Younghusband, “that it was a very bitter shock to me and I feel myself very greatly to blame. Had I suspected earlier that he had so little reserve strength he would never have left Phari. But having left that place there was no turning back. I believe now that he should never have left Darjeeling.”

  Of all the men, M
allory was the most shaken by Kellas’s death. “Can you imagine,” he wrote to his good friend David Pye, “anything less like a mountaineering party? It was an arrangement which made me very unhappy and which appalls me now in the light of what has happened—he died without one of us anywhere near him.” He went on, however, to explain, rather weakly, that Kellas had insisted on bringing up the rear. “Well, once one is in front, one doesn’t linger much in dusty places on a windswept plain; and after our first anxieties none of us lingered much for Kellas. After all, there was nothing to be done for him if one did stay to see him, and he didn’t want it.”

  Wheeler recorded the event with a nonchalance that seems shocking to the contemporary reader: “Shortly after arrival we heard that poor old Kellas had died at the pass. He has been getting weaker and weaker and the jolting and height did him in. It is very rough luck and everyone was very much upset. However, it can’t be helped.” The very next lines in his diary read, “It is not so cold here as at Tatsang. A fine evening with good views of Chumyomo [sic], Kanchenjunga and the Lhonak group to the west, a long way across rolling plain.”

  The following morning, June 6, the expedition gathered to bury Kellas on a slope just south of Kampa Dzong, in a place overlooking the broad plains of Tibet and beyond to the great wall of the Himalaya. On the horizon loomed Chomiomo, Pauhunri, and Kanchenjhau, peaks Kellas had known better than any person alive. Farther to the west, perhaps a hundred miles away, partially hidden in the clouds, soared Chomolungma—Everest—the mountain for which he had staked so much. The funeral was, Mallory wrote to Geoffrey Young, “an extraordinarily affecting little ceremony, burying Kellas on a stony hillside. I shan’t easily forget the four boys, his own trained mountain men, children of nature, seated in wonder on a great stone near the grave while Bury read out the passage from I Corinthians.” Stones were gathered for a cairn, and Kellas’s initials were scratched into the memorial.