by Wade Davis
The next day’s march followed the main valley of the muddy Phung Chu through fertile marshlands of stunted willows, valerian, and clematis and then entered a series of conglomerate gorges and open flats thick with buckthorn. Six miles on, the track turned north, away from the river and up a side valley that in time opened onto the most astonishing sight Howard-Bury had yet seen in Tibet. In the distance, isolated amid rich fields of barley that shimmered in the morning light, a castlelike massif rose perhaps 3,000 feet to a sharp pinnacle of a summit. It seemed less a mountain than a feature of fantasy. Nestled on its sheer walls, halfway up the cliffs, a warren of white structures clung like swallows’ nests to the precipice. These buildings, scores of them, were connected by walls and turrets to an imposing fortress much farther up the mountain, from which massive defensive walls rose to the very summit, crowned by a round Gothic-like tower out of which billowed white plumes of smoke. A lacework of prayer flags, strings of banners in red, blue, green, and yellow, hundreds of feet long, decorated every flank of the mountain, as if to animate every rock and link every gesture to the wind and the sky.
As Howard-Bury and the expedition came nearer, they could see at the base of the mountain the whitewashed walls of the town of Shegar, the district capital, gleaming in the sun. Most of the town turned out to greet them. None of the residents had seen a European before. A small tent had been pitched, but the pressing crowds were so bothersome that Howard-Bury retreated behind a wall of stones. There were two dzongpens stationed at Shegar, one secular and the other a monk, but neither appeared. Howard-Bury dispatched Chheten Wangdi to see what was going on. Before long he returned with one of the officials, bearing a basket of eggs as a gift. There had been some kind of mixup, and no formal word had reached Shegar from Lhasa. Initially somewhat suspicious but soon deeply apologetic, the dzongpen led them to a grassy enclosure in the shade of a willow grove, where a festive Chinese tent had been erected for their kitchen. Howard-Bury asked him rather emphatically that drink not be passed to any of the expedition porters. The dzongpen demurred, then stiffened as he saw several of the British strip down to wash. Like all Tibetans, he bathed but once a year, late in the fall, and he was shocked to see men washing themselves in June.
The expedition rested at Shegar for a day. Bullock chased butterflies for two hours and considered climbing a striking limestone mountain to the northwest with the hope of seeing Everest, but instead scrambled up a ridge on the south side of the Phung Chu. Mallory busied himself making preparations for an overnight bivouac. His sights were on Everest, and a mountain between Shegar and Tingri promised excellent views. In his diary Bullock makes little mention of their halt at Shegar, save for the fact that on the night of June 16 “the camp was attacked by a madman … I chased him out of camp with an ice axe and captured his gun rest.” As they later discovered, the culprit was a deranged young man, normally kept by his parents under lock and key on the night of a full moon. By chance he had escaped on the very day the British had arrived.
Howard-Bury, for one, was astonished by what he saw of the monastery and the fortress perched above their camp, silhouetted against the moon. Mallory often condemned him for being closed-minded and narrow in his convictions, but in realms of the spirit Howard-Bury was in fact completely open to the world, and in ways Mallory could never be. Howard-Bury had studied with Sanskrit scholars at Badrinath, sought the wisdom of Theravada teachings among the monks of Indochina, and anointed his body with scented oils and embarked on pilgrimages down the Ganges. Spiritual seeking had inspired the journeys of his youth, and though the war had stolen nearly everything, it had not quelled his fundamental curiosity; if anything, it had enhanced his yearning.
In the morning he went with Morshead to pay a perfunctory call on the dzongpen, who lived modestly in a small house at the base of the track that rose to the fortress and temples. His official residence was in the fort, but he was elderly and the climb was too much for him. Invited to eat the usual fare, sweetmeats and tea, minced meat and noodles spiced with chili, Howard-Bury and Morshead made inquiries about the road to Tingri and asked that word be sent ahead outlining their needs for accommodations, transport, and supplies. But in the moment Howard-Bury’s real interest lay far above them, along the small paths that climbed through the archways leading to the inner sanctum and courtyard of the temple complex.
He reached there around three, accompanied by Wheeler and Morshead. Entering the dark recesses of the sanctuary he was astonished to see a dozen statues all decorated with turquoise and precious jewels, and behind them an enormous Buddha, fifty feet high and completely covered in gold. Strange figures with demonic grimaces circled the shrine as protector deities. Butter lamps cast shadows and brought a sparkle to the jewels, and provided enough light to the many mirrors to create the illusion that the chamber reached back to infinity, with the limitless potential of the Buddha mind.
The open air of the temple rooftop, where they paused for tea, offered astonishing views of the fields 1,000 feet below and the distant Phung Chu running away to the west. Howard-Bury asked permission to photograph a group of novices, and discovered that none of them had ever seen a camera. Before leaving they had an audience with the head lama, Lingkhor Rinpoche, who had lived at the monastery for sixty-six years. The incarnation of the previous abbot, he was a living Buddha, a bodhisattva who had achieved enlightenment and yet chosen to remain in this earthly realm to help all sentient beings escape the illusions of samsara. At Howard-Bury’s behest, he agreed to have his photograph taken and was escorted outside to the courtyard, where he posed, Howard-Bury later wrote, “dressed in robes of beautiful golden brocades, with priceless silk Chinese hangings arranged behind him while he sat on a raised dais with his dorjee and his bell in front of him, placed upon a finely carved Chinese table.” The fame of this photograph spread, and for the rest of the expedition, Howard-Bury would be besieged by requests for copies, for the man was a living saint and worshipped as a god incarnate.
There was, of course, a complex story to Shegar, only a small part of which Howard-Bury came to understand that day. Situated astride the crossroads of two major trade routes, one running to the north and south, the more prominent arching east to west from central Tibet to Nepal, Shegar Dzong had long been of strategic importance. The fortress had been forged in blood, in conflicts between rival Tibetan kingdoms in the fourteenth century and as recently as the devastating wars with Nepal; a Gurkha army of eight thousand had laid siege to the rock in 1788.
The monastery, by contrast, was said to have been born in prophecy. The story, as told to Howard-Bury, went like this: To the north of Bodhgaya, in India, where the Buddha Shakyamuni attained enlightenment, there was a land of high mountains rising like pillars to the sky. Below the mountains were beautiful lakes, mandalas of turquoise. The snow and ice were stupas of white crystals. The ocher slopes were of gold. In a kingdom, it was said, where autumn was colored with golden flowers and summer meadows had the scent of incense and the hue of turquoise, there would be found the true spiritual paradise, the home of the protector of the Land of the Snows. Among these mountains, the domain of the Chenrezig (or Avalokitesvara), the Bodhisattva of Compassion, there stood a rock in the shape of the Tara, the female essence. The prophecy maintained that one day, kings, monks, and lamas would reside on this pinnacle, and that it would become a great center for learning and the transmission of the dharma.
In the eighth century, when Padma Sambhava brought Buddhism to Tibet, he came upon such a place, inhabited by demonic mountain goddesses. Padma Sambhava tamed their wild natures, converting them to dharma protectors, with the darkest of all becoming transformed into a transcendent figure whose white body was a shimmering crystal. The mountain itself took her form, becoming the seat of the goddess, queen of the dakinis, or sky dancers. Her body became literally the foundation of the monastery, the first temple of which was constructed over her left breast. A white conch shell was buried beneath her vulva, in a secret place out
of which flowed all wisdom and doctrine.
In time the Shining Crystal Monastery at Shegar became a major center of Buddhist scholarship and teachings, attracting learned lamas from throughout Tibet. Though a mythical being and divinity, Padma Sambhava was also an actual person, and his transmission of the Buddhist teachings to Tibet was one of the seminal acts of history. He supervised the construction of the first monastery at Samye, and translated the canon of Buddhist scripture from Sanskrit. He invited Indian scholars to Tibet, and dispatched hundreds of young Tibetans to India to study. After the Islamic invasion of India at the end of the twelfth century, when Muslim persecution over a century led to the slaughter of monks and the destruction of monasteries and libraries, Tibet became the repository of Buddhist dharma. Shegar, located close to the Nepali frontier, was, in part, a sanctuary. The temple, the main hall, and the first Sakya college were completed in the Wood-Ox year of 1385. In 1643, the Water-Sheep year, the Fifth Dalai Lama transformed Shegar into a Gelugpa monastery. For centuries the reputation of the sacred center grew. At Shegar, it was said, the color saffron filled the space between earth and sky with vermilion light, and everywhere holy precepts and wise learning resounded.
At the time of the arrival of the British expedition, there were twenty-one colleges at Shegar dedicated to the study of tantra, debating, and metaphysics, with hundreds of monks sitting in spiritual examinations for geshe, the highest of scholastic degrees. The rituals and debates the members of the British expedition witnessed, and the timing of the tea breaks they sat through, had not changed in essence or in practice for nearly four hundred years.
Curiously, only Howard-Bury seems to have recognized the power, meaning, and significance of the place. Bullock and Mallory scarcely noticed. Wheeler wrote to his wife, acknowledging that Shegar was “quite the most picturesque spot we’ve been in.” He found the people to be “infernally curious” and later confessed, “I’m not much good at descriptions I’m afraid, but will send a photo later.”
To be fair, none of them had any context for understanding what they were seeing. Images of Tibetan cruelty and barbarism invoked in the writings of Henry Savage Landor and Perceval Landon near the turn of the century, during Younghusband’s invasion, had for the most part been discredited. Yet Tibet the mystical, as we know it today, had yet to be invented. Walter Evans-Wentz was in Darjeeling in 1919, but his translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead did not appear until 1927. The theosophist and artist Nicholas Roerich did not begin his four-year sojourn in Tibet and India until December 1923, and Heart of Asia, his account of his travels, was published only in 1930. Alexandra David-Neel first visited Sikkim in 1912, but the journey to Lhasa that would gain her international fame did not occur until 1924. Her accounts of flying yogis and lamas with tantric powers did much to influence later publications, such as Lost Horizon, James Hilton’s 1933 fictional account of Shangri-La, the world’s first mass-market paperback best seller. But her books My Journey to Lhasa (1927) and Magic and Mystery in Tibet (1929) came after the early British efforts on Everest. Like the outpouring of war memoirs that ultimately defined our notions of the Lost Generation, the wave of travel accounts celebrating the mystic wonders of Tibet, including the possibility of reincarnation and rebirth, appeared in the late 1920s and early ’30s. The two trends were not unrelated, but both came too late to influence Howard-Bury as he stood before the wonder of Shegar Dzong.
In this void created by the absence of expectation, Howard-Bury simply reported what he saw, and he did so with an open mind and remarkable tolerance. Asked to report on the life and customs of Tibetans in one of his dispatches to the Times, he mentioned that they wore clothes made at home from sheep wool and that their crops of barley and peas thrived at the highest elevations. They did indeed bathe only once a year, simply because of the cold. The women smeared their faces with grease and soot to protect their skin from the weather. The people practiced polyandry, with the wife of the eldest brother also belonging to other brothers, an arrangement that, as Howard-Bury noted, rephrasing the issue with some delicacy, also allowed a woman to be free to have relations with and receive support from more than one man.
The oddest custom, he confessed, concerned the disposal of the dead. A special class of men cut up the bodies and fed each fragment to vultures. “The practice is perfectly clean,” he hastened to add, “for all the scraps disappear very quickly, as after all everything is frozen for six months of the year.” Life on the Tibetan Plateau was not easy, he indicated. Winter cold came with every night, and the heat on summer days was so intense that it “drew all life out of one the moment the sun was up.” But, he added, the people had shown the British the “very greatest kindness. It must be remembered that these Tibetans had never before seen a European, but they were wonderfully hospitable to us.” Such sentiments stood in marked contrast to those of Mallory, who in a petulant moment would famously describe Tibet as “a hateful country inhabited by hateful people.”
Mallory and Bullock left Shegar with half a dozen porters at 7:00 on the morning of June 18, equipped with only a pair of Mummery tents, blankets, and modest supplies for the men. Their plan was to establish a fly camp for two nights, south of the Phung Chu, with the goal of climbing as high as possible to obtain a closer view of the Everest massif. “Everest had become something more than a fantastic vision,” Mallory explained to Ruth. “One began to know it as a peak with its individual form; the problem of its great ridges and glaciers began to take shape, and to haunt the mind presenting itself at odd moments and leading to definite planes. Where can one go for another view, to unveil a little more of the great mystery? From this day that question has always been present.”
With Bullock distracted by his spirited pony, they reached the Phung Chu, but they mistook it for a side stream. Still seeking the main river, they followed an insignificant affluent into a side valley and then doubled back, fording deep streams, their porters waist-deep in water, only to find themselves, after seven hours, back on the south side of the Phung Chu just five miles from Shegar on the road they ought to have followed in the first place. Mallory, in particular, was a wet mess. He had lost his mackintosh cape, soaked his field glasses, and reduced his hat to a pulp. The two men were not an impressive sight when first seen by Howard-Bury and the rest of the party, which, because of various delays, had not left Shegar until noon. Wheeler reported the incident with a single line in his diary. “Mallory and Bullock had started around 7 am and at 2:30 Howard-Bury met them. They had forded the river pretty well up to their necks after completely losing themselves!”
Bullock and Mallory swallowed their embarrassment and continued south, up a valley that led to the town of Pang La, where they made their camp at 14,300 feet. The next day they were up before light. Setting off at 4:30, they walked steadily for nearly two hours, reaching a high pass that offered an astonishing view of the entire Everest group, from Makalu all the way west to a series of unknown summits, all towering, it seemed, to heights of 26,000 feet or more. Everything they could see lay unexplored. To the west some twelve miles beyond Everest, the Nangpa La led to Nepal and the Solu Khumbu, the homeland of the Sherpas. Soaring above the pass was Cho Oyu, at 26,906 feet the world’s sixth-highest summit. Moving along the horizon toward Everest, Gyachung Kang stood at 25,990, itself taller by 3,000 feet than any mountain in the Americas. Everest (29,035 feet) loomed over all, but was shadowed by Lhotse (27,890 feet) and, to the east, Chomo Lonzo (25,604 feet) and its sister summit, Makalu (27,765 feet). These appeared less as separate mountains than elements of a whole, a massive wall of ice and rock that stretched in a curve some forty miles before the ridge fell away into the great gorge of the Arun, which cut through the range to the east. Although Mallory and Bullock did not know it at the time, in the fifteen minutes they had at the summit of the Pang La before the clouds rolled in and blanketed the horizon, they were looking at four of the six tallest mountains on earth. Even the cols that separated the summits—and from wher
e the real climbing would begin—stood 10,000 feet higher than Mont Blanc, the tallest mountain in Europe and the highest point Mallory had ever achieved as a climber.
Humbled and inspired, quivering with the daunting task ahead, they headed down the Pang La, returning to camp at 8:00 a.m., and were on their way again within the hour, riding through hot sun and then a small hailstorm, passing the village of Tsakor to reach the meadows of Memong in early afternoon. The following day they were off at 6 a.m. and, leaving the porters behind, pressed ahead across the great plains of the Phung Chu to reach Tingri by midmorning.
The main party, meanwhile, had pushed along the direct road from Shegar, camping the first night at Tsakor. The pack train did not appear until long after dark, and the entire team slept in a large kitchen tent kindly provided by the local yak herders. The following day they got an early start and moved at an easy pace across the expanding valley of the Phung Chu, which ran wide between shallow banks. In another month the rains would obliterate any sense of a river and water would flood the entire breadth of the valley. The marshes and fields were already sodden, and there were scores of wading birds, egrets and black-necked cranes. The flies and midges were dreadful. Howard-Bury had just covered his mouth with a kerchief when he saw the most arresting of sights: a solitary man, well in the distance, who seemed to be stumbling repeatedly, only to regain his feet with the predictability of a metronome. He would then stand erect for a moment, only to stumble once more. As they came closer Howard-Bury recognized the man as Mongolian. He wore layers of sodden wool and both his hands and his knees were wrapped in filthy rags. His hair was matted, his face black with grease, and his forehead shone where the grease seemed to have been rubbed away.