Into The Silence

by Wade Davis

  Howard-Bury incorporated the depon’s advice, obscure though it was, into his plan of attack. With the monsoon threatening, and now certain to cross the Himalaya, he elected to scatter his men in search of an approach to Everest to maximize the reach and efficiency of the reconnaissance. Henry Morshead’s first priority would be the exploration and mapping of the upper Phung Chu, with the goal of linking the survey work he and his team had done since leaving Darjeeling into the map of the Tsangpo drainage completed by the Rawling expedition of 1904. Major Wheeler, accompanied by the geologist Dr. Heron, would explore the Ra Chu, surveying and photographing the western approaches to Everest from the Nangpa La and Cho Oyu. One of their primary tasks would be to determine whether the Kyetrak Glacier, at the base of Cho Oyu, might be continuous with some as yet unknown ice field coming off Everest to the west. If so, this might open another avenue to the mountain. The climbing party of Mallory and Bullock, meanwhile, would head south directly for the Rongbuk Chu and the lower flanks and glaciers of Everest itself. Howard-Bury would act as a liaison between all parties, doing double marches whenever necessary, even as he anticipated the second major phase of the expedition, the approach to the mountain from the east. He had gathered from his conversation with the depon that Everest, or Chomolungma, was revered as a place of particular power. He mistook this to mean that the mountain was deemed to be sacred. Everest, in fact, was no more holy than the other mountains, and far less than some. What was sanctified was the land itself, for everywhere they intended to go—west toward Lapche and Rongshar, east toward Rongbuk, eventually around the far side of the mountain to Kharta and the rivers draining its Kangshung Face into the Arun—they would follow the paths of Guru Rinpoche, enter the hidden valleys, and thus tread in the footsteps of the divine.

  MALLORY AND BULLOCK arrived in Tingri at midmorning on June 20, conferred with Howard-Bury, and made immediate plans to leave. Already on the long approach march from Kampa Dzong, Mallory had identified a select group of sixteen Sherpas, equipping each man with climbing boots, an ice ax, and a suit of underwear. He recruited Dukpa, the best of the cooks, and selected a sirdar who was trustworthy and energetic. To communicate with the sirdar, who would be in charge of the men, he had memorized 150 words of Tibetan, which he kept at hand in a small notebook. They would have fifteen yaks as transport, and food and supplies for two weeks—a fortnight that, as Mallory later wrote, would spin out into a month. Their departure was set for June 23.

  With clouds thick over the mountains, Bullock rested on June 21, taking to his tent to read The Three Black Pennys and Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and Other Tales, a book of fairy tales. The following day he rearranged his gear, leaving his pink umbrella and large kit bag behind, along with some souvenirs picked up in the Tingri market that morning: a dagger and two bracelets, purchased for two rupees apiece.

  That afternoon, to the astonishment of all, Sandy Wollaston, the expedition doctor, after an absence of only thirteen days, rejoined the expedition, having safely escorted the invalid Harold Raeburn from Kampa Dzong south across the Himalaya to the mission at Lachen, in Sikkim. It had been a hazardous passage. Crossing the Serpo La in a biting wind, they had been forced to bivouac in the open and had very nearly died of exposure. Leaving Raeburn in the care of the nuns, with instructions to an assistant surgeon that he be evacuated to Gangtok, Wollaston had after but a day of rest set out to regain the Tibetan Plateau, accompanied only by Gyalzen Kazi, the expedition interpreter. To reach Tingri by June 22 they had ridden hard, overnight from Shegar, arriving not a moment too soon. Howard-Bury’s orderly was gravely ill with typhoid fever, as was Wheeler’s man, Asghar Khan.

  With Wollaston in Tingri to care for the sick, Howard-Bury set the plan in motion. Morshead, accompanied by his Indian colleague, Gujjar Singh, went north to explore the headwaters of the Phung Chu. On June 24 Wheeler and Heron would set off for the Kyetrak Glacier and the Nangpa La. Their team would consist of three porters equipped for high altitude, ten others assigned from Morshead’s survey party, and, as Wheeler wrote, in place of Asghar, one “drunken mess cook.” Several of the men hailed from the Khumbu Valley of Nepal, just beyond the pass. They warned Wheeler that the trail would be desperate, and that their eight yaks would have difficulty reaching the divide. Few traders hazarded the climb. Their party would most likely be completely alone, a prospect that secretly delighted Wheeler, who had every intention of crossing the forbidden frontier. “I hope there will be no one in the neighbourhood,” he confided in his diary the day of his departure. “I shall be able to nip into Nepal a bit and see the southern ridges of Everest.”

  MALLORY AND BULLOCK, having recruited the translator Gyalzen Kazi to their party, left Tingri at 7:00 a.m. on Thursday, June 23. Almost right away they ran into difficulties. Their immediate goal was Chöbuk, a small hamlet and monastery on the banks of the Dzakar Chu, close to its confluence with the Rongbuk, the stream they hoped to follow to its source on Everest. Not three miles from Tingri, it became apparent that the local transport was leading them astray, heading south by southwest up the wrong side of the open plain, all with the apparent goal of extending the journey. After an “interminable three-cornered argument,” Mallory and Bullock left Gyalzen to deal with the porters and stormed on, heading east for the base of a great moraine that spread across the entire valley. They paused around two in the afternoon and, with rain threatening, pitched a Mummery tent. For two hours they waited anxiously for a sign of the yaks. Joined finally by Gyalzen and the rest of their party, they climbed 1,000 feet up a steep rise that led across the moraine and down to the banks of a narrow stream, where, in sight of wild gazelles, they camped in a meadow behind a stone shelter, a mile below a bridge that crossed the river at Nazurga. Bullock, cursed all day by a “rotten pony,” took solace in the mail, which had arrived that morning: letters from his wife, along with a box of chocolate and fudge. Mallory found comfort in the fact that he “had foiled the natives, whose aim was to retard our progress.”

  The following day they crossed at Nazurga and made their way back up and over the moraine, moving south and east across a number of massive spurs until they reached the head of a valley that led to the Lamna La, a 16,200-foot pass that brought them by late afternoon to the village of Zambu, in the valley of the Dzakar Chu. From the heights they had another glimpse of Everest, and could just make out the junction of the northwest and northeast buttresses. The North Face, Bullock noted in his diary that evening, was “very steep, also the West Ridge.” Some of the porters, he added ominously, were already “rather tired.”

  Saturday dawned in intense anticipation as the party turned upstream, toward the confluence with the Rongbuk Chu and a much-anticipated route to the mountain. In little more than an hour they reached Chöbuk, where they paused to unload the pack train. Men and supplies crossed the river by way of a rickety cantilevered bridge. The yaks plunged into the torrent, driven by a barrage of stones and shouts. Once on the right bank of the Rongbuk Chu, it was simply a matter of following the stream to its source. By noon they had entered a narrow gorge, dominated by red limestone cliffs where the rainwater gathered on the rocks and pooled below in lush meadows of yellow asters and primulas, dwarf rhododendrons, and wild roses. It reminded Mallory of the Alps: the hot summer sun, the still air, the fragrance of juniper crushed underfoot. He was sorely tempted to lie down and drift into sleep, for he had seen nothing this green since reaching Tibet. Instead he pushed on, climbing the length of a long valley, once again surrounded on all sides by barren hillsides, monotonous and dreary in the harsh light. On either side of the path were small piles of stones, heaped up by pilgrims.

  The trail rose to a height of land and passed between two white stupas, or shrines, draped in a lacework of red and yellow prayer flags. Each of the porters paused and shouted a salutation to the mountain. Several tossed packets of white papers to the wind, each imprinted with the mantra of Guru Rinpoche, Om mani padme hum, six syllables representing the six realms t
hat must be passed before the whole of samsara is emptied and complete purity embraced through the heart essence of the Buddha. They reached out and touched a rock cairn, as did Mallory and Bullock, who hesitated at the pass to stare south in “sheer astonishment.” They had half expected, Mallory later recalled, to see Everest from the divide, and in the back of their minds had a “host of questions clamoring for an answer. But the sight of it banished every thought. We forgot the stony wastes and regrets for other beauties. We asked no questions and made no comment, but simply looked.”

  Ahead of them stretched one of the most remarkable mountain vistas on earth. The Rongbuk Valley spreading south toward Everest rises in twenty miles but 4,000 feet, and it runs remarkably straight. From even a slight elevation, it appears to be flat, with its massive ice fields seeming to lie prostrate along the valley floor, as if detached from the mountain from which they flow. High ridges on both flanks draw the eye irresistibly to the head of the valley, where the sheer scale of the North Face, towering 10,000 feet, collapses perspective, creating an illusion of both proximity and depth, as if the mountain could be reached in a moment, or never reached at all. “At the end of the valley,” Mallory wrote, “and above the glacier Everest rises not so much a peak as a prodigious mountain mass.”

  In bright sunlight, with not a cloud in view, Mallory wasted not a moment. He was a ridge walker, and with the North Face clearly out of the question, his eyes went immediately to the skyline. He had no idea what lay on the southern side of Everest, but from his vantage on the north, two prominent ridges splayed the mountain. One ran to the west, falling precipitously several thousand feet, first through rock and then continuing for perhaps three miles along an impossible knife edge of ice and snow. The second, by contrast, left the summit pyramid at a more reasonable pitch, dropping perhaps 1,000 feet over half a mile, before continuing at a much steeper angle of descent north and east, again for perhaps three miles.

  This Northeast Arête, or Ridge, was at its lower elevations no less imposing than the West Ridge. But Mallory could see that at just the point higher on the mountain where the slope became manageable, even gentle, a clearly defined shoulder fell away from the ridge to the north. He could not make out its base, which was hidden behind by “a northern wing of mountains” that formed the eastern flank of the Rongbuk Valley to his left. But he surmised correctly that these mountains formed a continuous ridge, perpendicular to the Northeast Ridge, which implied that the shoulder in question dropped to a col, a saddle separating the heights. Reach the col and a route up the shoulder could land a climber beyond the hazards of the Northeast Ridge, with what appeared to be a possible route up the skyline to the summit. It would not be easy. He wrote to Ruth later in the day, “Suffice to say it has the most stupendous ridges and appalling precipices that I have ever seen and all the talk of an easy snow slope is a myth.” Nevertheless, with a single glance, and from a distance of nearly twenty miles, Mallory had identified what would turn out to be the key to the mountain, the North Col, what he later called the “col of our desires.” Now the challenge was to find a way to get to it.

  HOWARD-BURY INTENDED to leave Tingri with Wheeler and Heron on the morning of June 24, but chemicals in the darkroom, fumes given off by the acid hypo, left him “gassed” and incapable of speaking. For two days he remained mute as Wollaston, to the horror of the local people, kept his men busy killing rats, birds, lizards, beetles, and fish for the British Museum. Finally, on the morning of June 26, Howard-Bury headed south to join Wheeler and Heron. Crossing the Tingri Plain, he reached in nine miles the small village of Sharto. Along the way he picked up a new servant, a Tibetan named Poo, a “sensible fellow, very seldom drunk.” Poo turned out to be a splendid cook and would remain at Howard-Bury’s side for the rest of the expedition. That first night, with the wind blowing fiercely and the heavens illuminated by curious rays of light cast upon a purple sky, Howard-Bury dined elegantly on wild greens, garlic, and turnip leaves, and watched as a herd of kiang, wild asses, grazed freely in the barley fields that surrounded his camp.

  The following morning he was off early, intent on climbing a small hill of some 17,700 feet as he made his way south. The route proved longer than anticipated, the mountain more distant, the glacial stream of the Ra Chu difficult to ford, and it was not until nearly 9:00 a.m. that he reached the summit. From the heights, he could see north a hundred miles to the watershed of the Tsangpo and beyond, a “charming picture,” he recalled, of light, shade, color, and clouds. To the east the top of Everest emerged from a sea of icy peaks, and ahead in the direction he was traveling, Cho Oyu dominated the sky. Howard-Bury had never seen such rock, immense granite precipices descending sheer for several thousand feet until reaching “great winding glaciers.” At first the Nangpa La was clear, but as he glassed its slopes, long wisps of clouds whipped across the ice, within minutes obscuring the pass and all the surrounding mountains. Even in summer, he had been told, entire yak trains had simply disappeared, snuffed out by sudden blizzards that spun fine, powdery snow into such whirlwinds that men and animals suffocated in the open air. In these mountains, he mused, exposure was the danger, with every change of weather bringing the possibility of peril.

  WHEELER AND HERON were camped at 16,500 feet near the small hamlet of Kyetrak, a bleak and grassless cluster of stone houses located about a mile below the snout of the glacier, altogether some twenty miles south of Tingri. Howard-Bury caught up with them late in the day, just after they had returned to base camp and were resting against the walls of the crumbling chorten that dominated the village. Howard-Bury mentioned Wheeler’s orderly Asghar, who had fallen into delirium from typhoid. Wheeler shared what he had learned of the land. By good fortune a Gurkha salt trader from Nepal had come down out of the Nangpa La, and they had conversed for a time in Hindustani, which Wheeler spoke fluently. Wheeler himself had completed two brilliant days of survey work, under mostly clear skies, with little wind. Just that morning in bitter cold he had left camp before dawn and climbed high up the eastern flank of the valley. From that station he had photographed Cho Oyu, Gauri Sankar (23,405 feet), and Gyachung Kang (25,990 feet), as well as the entire length of the Kyetrak Glacier, including the approaches to both the Nangpa La, in the south and west, to the Phuse La, a second and lower pass that led to the Rongshar Valley and the sacred homeland of Milarepa.

  Wheeler had reason to be pleased. With his camera he was not simply photographing scenery but, rather, beginning one of the more remarkable experiments in the recent history of the Survey of India. Since the seventeenth century surveyors had relied essentially on the same basic field techniques. A plane table, a flat wooden surface, supported generally by a tripod, was set over a known point, oriented by compass, and brought to the horizontal by adjusting the legs of the tripod and verifying the inclination with a bubble level. A sheet of drawing paper was attached to the table, and surmounting the paper was positioned a telescopic sight connected to a flat, straight-edge ruler. Distances, angles, bearings, and elevations along a line of sight were measured and then inscribed directly onto the paper. The drafting work was done in the field, as the map sheet literally came into being point by point.

  This traditional methodology, suitable for the soft downs of Suffolk and the leisurely pace of the Ordnance Survey of the home islands, had proved impossibly cumbersome in the high mountains of the empire, be they the Ruwenzori, Himalaya, or Pamirs, where the weather alone demanded that men work quickly and with far greater efficiency. Wheeler’s father, Arthur Oliver, had pioneered what came to be known as the Canadian photo-topographical method, a clever innovation that substituted a theodolite and a fixed-focus F45 camera for the sight rule and plane table. Stations were established, as always, by rigorous triangulation, and notes on angles and exposure carefully recorded in the field. The photographs, composed as true perspectives, captured the country precisely as it would be seen through the eye of a surveyor working with telescopic sight and plane table. The image, secur
ed on a glass plate negative, could be developed later, the print studied at leisure back at base. No drafting was done in the field, which freed up time, allowing for more stations to be established and much more ground to be covered. Accuracy was also enhanced, since the surveyor as cartographer had not only his memory but also an actual image of the landscape as a visual reference to complement the raw data.

  The Canadian photographic technique naturally had its limitations. As in all cartography, it depended on the precision of the triangulation that was the foundation of the survey. Fixed points had to be true. High stations had to be established, the more the better, and not necessarily mountain summits, for it was essential to secure multiple images of the same topography from distinct points of reference, the greater the overlap and coverage the better. Above all, the weather had to be clear, the winds moderate, the camera position steady and secure to allow for sharp three-to-five-second exposures. And, although the new method required less cumbersome equipment, the essential gear was not insubstantial.

  On behalf of the Survey of India, Wheeler had purchased and assembled the basic kit in Canada while on leave in 1920. He carried the camera, a supply of eleven glass plates, as well as notebooks and pencils in a stout leather case in a knapsack that weighed some thirty pounds. The theodolite broke down into two parts, each stored in a protective wooden box. Together with the tripod, this added another twenty-seven pounds. The leveling base for the camera, spare plate holders, measuring tapes, three-cornered canvas bags to fill with dirt or stones to steady the tripod, and other miscellaneous items brought the total field kit to nearly 100 pounds. In addition, there was the supply of glass negatives, which Wheeler had packed himself, wrapping each plate in dry botanical paper, then placing them individually in one-inch protective sleeves in tin-lined boxes, which he personally sealed with solder. Each of these boxes weighed thirty-two pounds.