Into The Silence

by Wade Davis

  The expedition halted for the night at Lingga, a small village surrounded by marshes and ponds, with wild grasses growing alongside tender plantings of new barley. To the south extended the entire flank of the Himalaya, and throughout the day there were periodic sightings of Everest, which, like a lodestone, drew them on. Morshead was off on his own, camped a few miles to the north at a monastery, intent on following the crest of a ridge that paralleled the main valley. From the heights he could scan to both the north and the south, surveying the unknown country before rejoining the party the following night. The journey from Lingga to Tinki Dzong continued thirteen miles across the flat plain, through grasslands and marshes and small ponds crowded with teals, mallards, and bar-headed geese. Vast herds of yaks and sheep reached to the horizons. It was rich land with abundant water, and the day was bucolic, save for the torment of thousands of midges and sand flies, which hovered in clouds over every animal, including each rider.

  The trail to Tinki Dzong led them through a curious belt of sand dunes, some twenty feet high, moving inexorably with the wind the length of the verdant valley. Beyond the dunes, great sheets of water spread to the horizon, shimmering in the afternoon light. Out of the sun, Howard-Bury saw riders approaching. It was the dzongpen of Tinki, mounted on a beautiful white pony, accompanied by several other men. He was a man, Howard-Bury later recalled, of impeccable grace and manners, Chinese in appearance, wearing embroidered silk robes, with a long pigtail and a most curious hat.

  After brief salutations, the dzongpen escorted the British to a glen beside a pond where several tents had been pitched and women waited with refreshments, tea and great vats of frothy barley beer. Beyond the water stood the dilapidated walls of the fort. Above the camp was a small village and a monastery enveloped in a sacred grove of ancient willows. In his more formal welcome, the dzongpen presented Howard-Bury with four sheep and some two hundred eggs, even as he gently admonished the British not to shoot or molest any of the waterfowl, the ducks, terns, and geese that in their thousands dipped and dove in the marshes and ponds of the valley. Some years before, he explained, the Dalai Lama had sent a monk from Lhasa with specific instructions to tame the creatures of Tinki. Since that time all birds had been deemed sacred. That night Howard-Bury was astonished to find bar-headed geese and wild ducks, normally the most skittish of animals, waddling about his tent, squabbling and squawking and scavenging for food, even as he tried to settle down to his correspondence.

  Delays in securing transport obliged Howard-Bury to halt for a day at Tinki. The expedition required ninety animals, but this meant recruiting yaks, ponies, and mules from as many as forty-five families, each convinced that its beasts were being asked to carry the heaviest loads. The solution was to place in a sack an embroidered garter taken from the boot of someone in each family. These were shuffled and then dropped randomly, one by one, as the sirdar moved from load to load. The weight of one’s load became a matter of destiny, and no one could fight karma. Still, it made for slow departures, and it was remarkable that the expedition, after a day of rest and letter writing, managed to get off by 8:00 on the morning of June 11.

  The track took them up the valley behind Tinki, in a slow, gentle rise to a 17,100-foot pass that fell away to the west to the valley of the Yaru. Howard-Bury paused at the summit and, with the weather fair, decided to scramble another 600 feet up the slope. From the rise he saw to the east Tinki and Kampa Dzong and the entire northern flank of the Himalaya reaching more than a hundred miles to Chomolhari. To the south and west unknown ridges still blocked the view to Everest, but he could see that in two days, once they had passed through and around the flank of the Gyangkar Range, the mountain would be unveiled. He plucked a blossom from the ground, a curious white-and-pink flower reminiscent of a daphne, slipped it into the buttonhole of his jacket, and made his way back to his mule and the men waiting for him at the summit of the pass. Only when they had ridden down to the Yaru Chu and found their camp pitched on a grassy flat just below the village of Chushar Nango, with its ruined stone tower and great gatherings of black ravens, did the men tell him that the flower was deadly poisonous and certain at the very least to give him a severe headache.

  With every day, and every mile gained, the mountain took on a more powerful resonance. For Mallory it was something visceral. Unlike some of the others, who still suffered from the diet or the lingering effects of dysentery, he only became stronger, his mind more active, as he plotted and anticipated his moves. At Tinki he and Bullock had paraded the porters, selecting the twelve best to begin training for the snows. By night he hammered nails into their boots, cobbles to grip the ice. “My job begins to show like a flower bud soon to open,” he wrote to Ruth from Tinki. “This begins to look like business.” And to Geoffrey Young that same day: “We’re just about to walk off the map—the survey made for the Lhasa expedition. We’ve had one good distant view of Everest from above Kampa Dzong and I’m no believer in the easy north face. I hope we shall see from some 30–40 miles off from some slopes this side of the Arun Valley in the next week or so. Geoffrey, it’s beginning to be exciting.”

  THERE WAS rain in the night, but the morning dawned clear. With another change of transport, their departure was not until 10:00, and then, within a mile and a half of camp, there were further delays as they forded the Yaru Chu, a considerable stream some eighty yards wide and three feet deep. The new yaks, in particular, were very wild, and the plain was soon strewn with equipment and supplies as the stubborn creatures stomped and bolted, shedding their loads.

  The track ran wide and clear for eight miles along the foot of hills rising on the west side of the valley, but then entered a broad wetland, where it disappeared into a score of narrow trails running off in every direction. Waiting at the junction was the headman of Gyangkar Nangpa, their next destination, who turned out to be the brother of the dzongpen of Phari. He guided the expedition to his village, where a feast of dumplings awaited. The women had never seen Europeans but had been told they were monstrously large, and so had prepared fifteen dumplings for every man, to be washed down with soup, chili sauce, and chang, barley beer. “Quite nice but not suitable for the state of stomach,” Wheeler recalled. “The tea is distinctly nasty.” They camped that night in one of the headman’s green fields, protected from the wind by a stone wall. “Crossed the Yaru River today,” he wrote to his wife, Dolly. “We are off the map now and have only an enlargement of the map of Tibet to go on, mostly computed from old explorer’s reports and distinctly sketchy. But it makes it all the more interesting.”

  The following morning Mallory and Bullock were off by seven, riding alone, charged, too, with the excitement of entering uncharted land. They followed the Yaru and soon entered a dramatic gorge where the water cascaded along a deep riverbed, falling perhaps 200 feet in a mile. The dirt track rose for three hours, until a shallow ford led out of a confined draw and onto a wide plain where the Yaru took a turn to the south. Mallory knew that they had reached beyond the Gyangkar Range, the mountains that had blocked his view of Everest from Kampa Dzong. To the south the Yaru ran away to its confluence with the Phung Chu to form the Arun, which flowed south and west, eventually picking up three successive tributaries, the Dzakar, Kharta, and Kama Chu, all flowing off the eastern flanks of Everest before plunging through the Himalaya to Nepal. Two days later Mallory shared his sense of exhilaration in a letter to Ruth:

  As we rode out into this sandy plain to take stock of our surroundings and make out the map, such as it is, I felt somehow a traveler. It was not only that no European had ever been here before us, but we were penetrating a secret: we were looking behind the great barrier running north and south which had been a screen in front of us ever since we turned our eyes westwards from Kampa Dzong. From the most distant viewpoint, it is true, Makalu and Everest had peeped over the top; but for some days now, since the morning of our first day’s march from Kampa Dzong, even the ultimate tops of these great mountains had been invisible.
What were we to see now? Were they really to be revealed to us in their grandeur? We knew them to be somewhere at the end of the Arun Valley as we looked down it. There was nothing to be seen there at present but a bank of cloud.

  Mallory and Bullock decided to tether their horses and scramble up a small peak, hoping for a better view. After an hour of hard climbing, they paused to glass the horizon, as if “some miracle might pierce the veil.” The miracle happened. “Suddenly our eyes caught glint of snow through the clouds,” he wrote to Ruth.

  “A whole group of mountains,” Mallory later recalled,

  began to appear in gigantic fragments. Mountain shapes are often fantastic seen through a mist. These were like the wildest creation of a dream. A preposterous triangular lump rose out of the depths; its edge came leaping up at an angle of about 70 degrees and ended nowhere. To its left a black serrated crest was hanging in the sky incredibly. Gradually, very gradually, we saw the great mountainsides and glaciers and arêtes, now one fragment now another through the floating rifts, until far higher in the sky than imagination had dared to suggest the white summit of Everest appeared. And in this series of partial glimpses we had seen a whole; we were able to piece together the fragments, interpret the dream. However much might remain to be understood, the centre had a clear meaning as one mountain’s shape, the shape of Everest.

  “We saw not only the summit,” he told Ruth, “but the whole of the east face, no less than four groups of peaks which form its northward continuations, immense and quite unknown peaks, perhaps 1,500 feet lower than Everest itself and very nearly connected to it to the southeast, and finally two most notable cols to the left and right, dividing the great mountain from its neighbours.

  “It was a gradually clearing view. The dark clouds were brightly lit, but still a great band lay across the face of Everest when we turned at last to go down and catch up [with] our train of coolies and donkeys, which we had observed crossing the plain to the west.”

  The main body of the expedition did not have quite so inspiring a day. In the morning Wheeler, still sick, shifted to a diet of porridge, soup, eggs, and milk pudding. There had been yet another change of transport, with the usual arguments and shouting, the headman collecting the boot garters and tossing them down, the loads flung over the wooden saddles and bound with yak-hair rope. The dzongpen’s brother guided the procession through the Yaru Gorge as far as the small village of Rongkong. Three miles beyond, the track divided, with the left fork following the Yaru south toward its confluence with the Phung Chu. Bidding farewell to its escort, the expedition took the right fork, which rose through sandy, gorse-covered hills to a wide plain of shifting dunes and quicksand. The wind came up, as it always did in the afternoon, only it grew to galelike intensity. Violent sandstorms swept the valley, reducing the visibility to nil.

  Howard-Bury contemplated a halt, but the guides insisted that the wind would make the crossing easier by blowing dry sand over the wet. So they started off, Howard-Bury recalled, “dressed as though for a gas attack, with goggles over the eyes and with mouth and nose covered with handkerchiefs and mufflers.” Gusts off the dunes rendered everyone mute, making it impossible to hear the shouts of the porters, scattered by the storm and completely disoriented. Howard-Bury rode back and managed to rally them with a strict order to stay within sight of the man ahead and behind. The passage took on an almost hallucinogenic quality. The wind muffled the senses. There was no horizon, and no sense of sky save a brown haze filtering the sun. Spindrifts of dust and sand blew over the ground, making it impossible even to see the hooves of one’s mule, let alone another rider. In places the ground quivered and shook and the mules lunged in panic for solid footing. The men clung to their saddles, facedown and bent into the wind. Eventually it became impossible to continue. Howard-Bury ordered a halt, and the men made camp in a howling gale among the sand dunes.

  Mallory and Bullock did not fully escape the storm, but by the time they reached camp, the worst of it had passed, and in the falling light, Mallory recalled, a remarkable scene was unveiled: “The wind was blowing the sand as we followed up the party, and all the landscape to leeward was like a wriggling nightmare of watered silk. We found them on a little green bank rising from the dry plain, where by some miracle is a spring of water. Our friends were shuddering in their tents; but the wind dropped towards sunset, and they came out. We walked 200 yards or so to a little eminence, and there to the south was Everest absolutely clear and glorious.”

  Mallory was up early the next morning, unable to sleep, obsessed by what he had seen of the mountain. Wheeler spied him walking over the dunes, just after dawn, still clad in pajamas and bedroom slippers.

  AS THE EXPEDITION moved west, leaving the crescent sands and heading up the valley of the Phung Chu, only Wheeler, who was better but still weak for lack of food, stayed with the pack animals. Howard-Bury left the main party and climbed 3,000 feet up a spur dominating the valley from the north and was rewarded with an astonishing panorama of some 250 miles from beyond Chomolhari, in the east, to the summit of Gosainthan, in the west. Everest, at dead center, seemed to tower over the world. He sat down and remained there for five hours, enjoying the hot sun, simply staring at the mountain. At one point he noticed Morshead and several men far below, making their way quickly up the slope. Howard-Bury smiled to recall the night at Chushar when Bullock and Mallory had returned to camp exhausted, having spent but a day trying to keep up with the veteran surveyor. The three of them had climbed 1,000 feet up a ridge until, played out, the other two paused to rest. They had stared in amazement, they’d later reported to Howard-Bury, as Morshead stormed another 1,500 vertical feet up the mountain without stopping. There was no one stronger or fitter on the expedition. Howard-Bury had known from that moment that if and when an assault on Everest could be launched this year, Morshead would be among the climbers.

  After exchanging pleasantries with Morshead and his companions, for they had not seen each other in several days, Howard-Bury left the survey team to its work and made his way off the mountain and headed west to catch up with the transport. There was an infestation of rinderpest in the valley, and only donkeys had been available. He wondered about the loads and how the diminutive animals had fared.

  While Howard-Bury had climbed high to gaze upon Everest from the northern spur, Mallory and Bullock had set off in quite another direction, hoping to gain a different perspective on the mountain approaches. Abandoning camp early, they backtracked toward the Arun, fording the Phung Chu just above the confluence. Although Bullock crossed without incident, Mallory led his horse into a deep channel and was nearly swept away. The skittish ponies refused the steep sand that rose directly away from the river, but after some searching the men found a cleft in the cliffs that led onto the plain. From there they rode up the most prominent mountain on the west side of the river. Tethering their ponies on a broad spur a thousand feet above the valley, they scrambled up scree for another 2,000 feet to the north summit, an elevation of 17,650 as measured by their aneroid altimeter. Clouds obscured the peaks to the west, but Everest itself was visible, as was the dramatic summit of Makalu, just to the east. Both Mallory and Bullock felt again a peculiar sense of elation and foreboding. They simply had no reference points in their experience for mountains of such a scale. No one did. Heading for the summit of Everest in 1921 was as exotic as heading for the surface of the Moon.

  They took photographs but did not linger. They had climbed 3,650 feet, and had not started until 4:00 p.m. Partly because the hour was late, and partly to test their wind, Mallory and Bullock ran down the mountain, reaching their ponies in thirty minutes. Darkness was coming on by the time they once again crossed the Phung Chu and caught up with the expedition at an old Chinese rest house at Trangso Chumbab, just across the river from the village of Chukor. For Bullock it was a cold ride, as he was wet to the knees from the river.

  Morning found them in a rich valley, with the prospect of an easy march along the right ban
k of the Phung Chu seventeen miles northwest to the village of Kyishong. Howard-Bury did not keep to the road, but crossed a broad plain to explore a side valley, as always taking delight in the flora: a new black clematis, several species of broom, a meadow carpeted with wild yellow roses. He shot a gazelle, and later bagged a partridge and several hares. For a time he rested by a spring, taking notes for Wollaston of the birds that came to drink: blackbirds, rock doves, and Brahminy ducks, all surprisingly tame.

  In the early afternoon the weather, hot and sultry that morning, suddenly changed as dark thunderclouds rolled over the mountains. Great sheets of hail pounded the ground, laying flat the barley and wild grasses, and blanketing the valley in white. The monsoon had broken, and by morning there would be snow on the hills. As he hurried on, dropping back into the main valley, he came upon a sacred monument, four large white chortens built as the corners of a square, at the center of which stood a stupa, a larger structure. To Tibetans, chortens and stupas are symbolic mountains, ritual daggers used to suppress darkness and plant the Buddhist mandala upon the earth. Howard-Bury would later learn that a demon lay beneath the largest of the structures, and that the four others helped hold the demon down, crushed by the weight of the millions of prayers buried in their stone.