by Wade Davis
Wheeler had conducted some initial trials at Dehra Dun before leaving for Darjeeling. But time had been limited, and the real work, as had always been anticipated, would begin in the field, on the unknown slopes of Everest. “This area seemed suitable for the experiment,” he later wrote. “It contained some 1200 square miles of country—about a season’s work, given fine weather—and gave opportunities for photographing all types of country from rolling hills with villages and cultivation, through steep gorges, to glaciers and tremendous snow and ice clad peaks. With Major Morshead’s approval I therefore decided to tackle this area with a view to fair-mapping both on 1 inch and ¼ inch scale.”
Wheeler was embarking, as Howard-Bury well appreciated, on the most challenging of all assignments. Over the five-and-a-half-month length of the Everest reconnaissance, he would be isolated with his native men for nearly three months, far longer than any other British member of the expedition. Altogether he would spend forty-one days camped on moraines and glaciers between 18,000 and 22,000 feet. He would secure and develop 240 images. Each of these photographs implied a dawn departure and a grinding ascent, fully laden with gear. For each good day, there were a half dozen when the wind blew ice and snow on the heights, and stations were attained at enormous effort only to have the camera enveloped in cloud and the entire exercise rendered pointless. It challenged morale, but it also obliged Wheeler to remain constantly vigilant. He saw the landscape through the precision of a lens, with the discipline of one who could not squander an instant. The literal burden of his load slowed him down. But with his measured pace, there was little on the horizon that escaped his notice.
On the night of Monday, June 27, there was a sharp frost, and the following morning, while Wheeler readied his kit and crew, Howard-Bury and Heron started early for the Nangpa La. For the first seven miles they rode together up the moraine on the east side of the glacier. Heron moved slowly, trying to make sense of the landscape. As a geologist, he struggled to understand the presence of marine fossils and great bands of sedimentary rock at heights previously unimagined by science. Howard-Bury grew impatient, eager to reach the pass before it might be obscured by cloud. Abandoning his pony and his colleague, he pressed ahead on foot, with one porter, climbing in four miles up a steep and slippery moraine, setting an impossible pace, as each new side valley revealed yet another magnificent river of ice. By the time he reached the end of the moraine, his porter’s boots had literally fallen to pieces. Shouldering the heavy camera, Howard-Bury headed on alone, across firm ice that soon turned soft. Floundering in wet snow and water to his knees, he made his way to the edge of a crevasse, which he followed for half a mile to a rock wall that led, after much effort, to the heights of the Nangpa La.
Exhausted, he glanced into Nepal, saw little, and then lay down in the hot sun and fell asleep. Some minutes later he awoke to a storm, and found himself, to his astonishment, beneath an inch of snow. By the time he made his way back down off the pass, having lugged the camera for some six hours, he could barely walk. Heron and his porter awaited at the edge of the moraine to lead him back to Kyetrak, where, somewhat to his surprise, he discovered that Wheeler had himself headed up the Nangpa La, intent on spending a fortnight on the ice.
That evening Wheeler, camping at 18,180 feet just four miles shy of the pass, rested alone in a Meade tent, “comfortable enough inside but horrible to get in and out,” he reported. It measured seven feet by six, and stood about five feet high, thin canvas with pegs and poles weighing perhaps fifteen pounds. His three high-altitude assistants, Ugyen, Dawa, and Rinjia Namgya, shared a larger Whymper tent. Unable in the cold to kindle a yak-dung fire with flint, they took advantage of the double-barreled Primus stove Wheeler had picked up in Calcutta. Though difficult to ignite at high altitude, it burned decently once it got going. Together they fed well on oxtail soup, mutton, fried potatoes, sweet biscuits, and prunes. Wheeler retired to his tent with a cup of cocoa and a copy of Douglas Freshfield’s Round Kachenjunga, lent to him by Heron. He was having trouble sleeping. “I find that I am on the point of dropping to sleep,” he confided in his diary, “when I seem to hold my breath and wake up gasping. Am ready enough to go to sleep but can’t quite bring it off.” The dark, restless hours of the night brought quiet concerns. “The going is bad,” he wrote on June 28, a Tuesday. “Huge moraines, side glaciers shooting rocks down. The natives say that a good many people lose their lives … Everywhere the rocks are frightfully loose—falls go on all the time on all sides. The peaks are all so steep, particularly the screes. I have never seen such consistently steep faces and ridges.”
THE DAY AFTER cresting the Nangpa La, Howard-Bury and Heron set out to scout the Rongshar Valley, fording the Ra Chu at Kyetrak at dawn and climbing the moraine on the western side of the glacier to reach the grassy hills that rose gently to the 17,700-foot Phuse La, the second of the major passes. Clouds hid much of the horizon, though one magnificent peak showed through from the south. Howard-Bury came upon a herd of female bharal so docile he passed on his pony within fifty yards. The long descent west beyond the pass toward the Rongshar Valley was a well-traveled track, a proper trail engineered into the rocks above the Shung Chu, a wild torrent that became quite impassable as it picked up other glacial streams coming off the divide. Alpine meadows of barberry and honeysuckle, white and pink spireas narrowed into a great gorge that after some distance opened upon the green barley fields of Tasang, a small settlement where on a terrace above the hamlet the party camped for the night. They had dropped more than 4,000 feet from the pass, and were delighted to be once again in a land of forests and fields. They cooked that evening on a fire made of juniper, a pleasant change from the acrid scent of yak dung, a fuel that ruined the taste of every meal.
In the morning, Howard-Bury awoke in a holy valley, a place sanctified in part because of the abundance of juniper, a wood sacred to Tibetans. The scent of the tree always reminded him of his home in Ireland. On all sides of Tasang, he was told, hermits and nuns lived in caves. They used juniper branches as incense, and each morning and evening lit fires at the mouth of their dwellings to purify the space. The villagers supplied them with food each day. Just above the British camp, high in the rocks, lived one man who had gone into life-long retreat. Howard-Bury could see the blue smoke of his fire. It was said by the locals that after meditating for ten years, he would be able to live on only ten grains of barley a day. “There was another anchorite female,” Howard-Bury wrote, who was said to have lived in the valley for 138 years and “was greatly revered. She had forbidden any of the animals in the valley to be killed, and that was the reason why the flocks of burhel [bharal] we had passed were so extremely tame.”
Resting the transport for a day, he and Heron walked alone farther down the trail, covering perhaps eight miles, descending much of the time through narrow ravines and low forests of birch, willow, and wild rose. At every spring grew great masses of anemones and yellow primulas, while on drier ground were thickets of gooseberries so plump with fruit that the two men gathered in an hour a supply sufficient to last for several days. According to the aneroid, they’d reached as low as 12,000 feet, where they learned from a local herder that the trail continued down for three more days before entering the chasms that marked the boundary between Tibet and Nepal.
The exploration of these borderlands would have to wait. Howard-Bury’s more immediate concern was the situation of Mallory and Bullock in the Rongbuk Valley on Everest, the most promising of all approaches to the mountain. On the last day of June Howard-Bury and Heron turned their backs on the Rongshar Valley and retraced their path to Tasang, arriving in a cold rain after a long and exhausting slog. The following morning, in thick mist, they recrossed the Phuse La and dropped once more into the valley of the Ra Chu. At Kyetrak they learned that Wheeler remained at his high camp, isolated on the flank of the glacier just below the Nangpa La. As they turned north, seeking a ford across the river and the track that would lead them to the Lamna La pa
ss and the Rongbuk approaches to Everest, Howard-Bury looked back to see thick sheets of sleet and freezing rain darkening the moraine. He would not set eyes on Wheeler again for nearly three weeks.
THE MONKS of the Rongbuk Monastery did not look favorably on the strange guests who arrived uninvited in the sixth month of the Iron-Bird year at their high mountain retreat in the shadow of Chomolungma. When Howard-Bury attempted to present his credentials, a passport bearing the seal of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, he learned that the head lama was in retreat and unavailable for an audience. Only twenty monks lived permanently among the low stone chambers of Rongbuk, but several hundred came and went through the summer months, and in cells and caves the length of the valley lived between three and four hundred other recluses and hermits, men and women who had taken lifelong vows of isolation and retreat. The presence of the British was certain to disturb their meditations, not to mention upsetting the wild creatures, as well as the demons and deities of the mountains.
Howard-Bury begged pardon, and through his interpreter promised to be respectful and refrain from all further hunting. On the approach march, he had again marveled at the docility of the wildlife. “They seemed to have no fear whatever of human beings,” he wrote. “On the way up the valley we passed within forty yards of a fine flock of rams, and on the way back we passed some females that were so inquisitive that they actually came up to within ten yards of us in order to have a look. The rock pigeons came and fed out of one’s hand, and the ravens and all other birds were equally tame.” It was most interesting, he remarked, “to watch all their habits and to see them at such quarters.” These were the words of an English naturalist. But what was going on at Rongbuk was something altogether different and new to him. “With my own eyes I watched the wild sheep coming down in the early morning to the hermits’ cells and being fed not 100 yards from our camp,” he noted. As he walked away from his first inconclusive interview with the attendants of the lama of Rongbuk, he passed a large white chorten, propped up by long wooden poles. A narrow crack ran down its side, and it appeared ready to topple at any moment. Like the entire monastery, it had the feel of something very old and very new, as ancient as the land and as timeless as the sky.
RONGBUK HAD, in fact, attracted Buddhist seekers since the time of Guru Rinpoche, Padma Sambhava, who was said to have spent seven months in dark retreat in the valley while sowing the land with sacred treasures. In the eleventh century the tantric wizard and mystic yogini Machig Labdrön, heroine of all Tibet, came to the frozen reaches of Rongbuk to shatter orthodoxy through a spiritual practice that became known as chöd, literally the “cutting through” of attachment. A Buddhist scholar of renown as a young woman, she later sought to free her mind of all intellect, believing that only by severing attachment to the conceptual realm could true liberation be achieved. The catalyst of transformation was the wild, the most fearful places, cemeteries and charnel ground, sky burial sites and the most ragged and exposed of landscapes. “Unless all reality is made worse,” she wrote, “one cannot attain liberation … So wander in grisly places and mountain retreats … do not get distracted by doctrines and books … just get real experiences … in the horrid and desolate.” Face your demons was her message; annihilate pride and vanity, and make a gift of one’s body to the wilderness.
Illumination in sacred madness was the essence of the chöd practice. Men and women went to the most desperate reaches of the mountains, not simply to live in caves but to retreat into an inner cavern, the universe of one’s being. In time they took on the appearance of the very demons they sought to vanquish, faces black with soot, fingernails never cut, hair matted in tangled locks hanging to the ground. Exposed to the coldest winters, they possessed nothing more than a trident and a scrap of cloth for shelter, a human skull for a bowl, a ritual bell, a two-headed drum, and a trumpet made of human bone. When they slept they remained in an upright posture. In the morning, before drinking hot water, they swallowed dried barley powder to feed the worms in their stomach. At night, drum and trumpet in hand, they danced before all the deities and dakinis, trampling underfoot the fetters and attachments of samsara. When they died, it was said, rainbows crossed the sky, a sign that their minds had dissolved back into clear light.
AMONG THOSE who sought refuge in Rongbuk in the late nineteenth century was a young monk by the name of Ngawang Tenzin Norbu. Born in Kharta, close to Everest, in the Fire-Rabbit year, 1866, he had grown up to a hard life of poverty and loss. A brother had died at fourteen, a sister in childbirth at twenty. His father was a dharma practitioner but also a drunkard. The lad studied at the Mindroling Monastery but without money or support had been obliged to beg to stay alive. Undaunted, he went on retreat for the first time at fourteen, and so great was his compassion that the sound of birdsong only reminded him of the depth of human suffering. When he emerged, his lama, Trulshik Rinpoche, instructed him to go to Rongbuk. At first he protested, dismissing it as an uninhabitable land, a country of bears and yeti. “Who says we need grass and trees to study dharma?” his teacher famously replied. So Ngawang Tenzin Norbu went, and for more than three years meditated in a cave without a door, certain that at any moment a yeti would arrive and devour him. Abandoned by his attendant, who found the conditions impossibly arduous, he persevered despite privations—no clothes, no shelter, and little if any food. Finally at twenty-five, he returned to Shegar to formally take monastic vows.
At the time the only permanent structures at Rongbuk were a cluster of meditation huts, inhabited by ascetic nuns. But in 1901, at the age of thirty-five, Ngawang Tenzin Norbu returned to the valley, determined to build a monastery at this highest of sanctuaries. With immense personal energy, he expanded a small lodge into a temple, and built housing for a growing circle of students, both young monks and nuns. He secured the patronage of merchants in Tingri and of the Sherpas of Solu Khumbu, beyond the Nangpa La pass in Nepal. His profound spiritual charisma in time inspired the loyalty of the entire rural population living in the environs of Everest, in both Tibet and Nepal.
Children startled by his uncanny physical resemblance to Shakyamuni called him Sangye Buddha, the Buddha of Rongbuk. To their parents he was Dzatrul Rinpoche, revealer of hidden treasures, a living embodiment of Guru Rinpoche. A spiritual master of chöd, he dispatched over the course of his life more than a thousand seekers into the mountains to confront their demons. Asked in later years by a novice ascetic the proper course of action should a yeti appear at the mouth of a cave and disrupt one’s meditation, the master responded, “Why, of course, invite him in to tea!”
Like many great Tibetan lamas, Dzatrul Rinpoche dictated a namthar, a spiritual autobiography—less a personal account of a life than a celebration of the ritual practices that gave a life meaning and transcendence. The text documents in numbing detail his mastery of well over a hundred esoteric rites, vows, transmissions, blessings, and purifications, as well as all the baroque happenings of an existence dedicated to devotional ceremony. But it also returns time and again to actual events, though not always in linear chronology. The great stupa at Rongbuk, the namthar reveals, was built only in 1919, two years before it appeared so decrepit to Howard-Bury. The rinpoche himself had mixed the mortar, combining earth, water, and sacred relics: the flesh of realized beings, salt from the mummified remains of treasure seekers, bits of hair said to be that of Milarepa. With the construction finished, he traveled to Nepal to consecrate a new monastery, Tengboche, a gompa he had first envisioned in a dream. To reach Khumbu, he crossed the Nangpa La, carried over the 19,050-foot pass on an eight-man palanquin, an honor reserved for only the highest lamas. The day was beautiful, he remembered, “no snowstorms, only a spring like rain.” When the party reached Tengboche, a five-colored rainbow arose over the new monastery, and the following day, as Dzatrul Rinpoche sang the juniper offering, the sun, moon, and stars appeared in the sky at the same time.
Travels and pilgrimage consumed much of 1920, including a journey to Kharta, on the e
ast side of Everest, to perform a sky-cleaning puja and make offerings to the protector of the hidden valleys of Guru Rinpoche, a white-haired woman enveloped in jewels who came to him in a vision. But in 1921, he remained at Rongbuk, taking care of the business of the monastery, the mundane demands of an abbot: construction projects, paperwork, bureaucratic challenges, taxes to pay to the government at Shegar. In the fifth month, according to his namthar, Dzatrul Rinpoche had a powerful dream. “From the east a roaring sound with light appeared … After this,” he wrote, “six English Sahibs, 30 servants and 70 animals carrying loads arrived here. They camped close to the eastern spring and stayed there. The leaders went to the snow mountain. They stayed for 20 days and couldn’t climb the mountain. They returned without making any trouble or harm to the local animals or the humans in the region. They left through Kharta.”
The presence of the Everest expedition, the first Europeans the monks of Rongbuk had ever seen, warranted but a cursory mention in the namthar—these few lines and nothing more. For Dzatrul Rinpoche, it was a busy summer. There were more than 450 monks in residence. There were tantric initiations to perform, the entire Kangyur (the essential canon of the Buddhist religion) to recite, great feasts to be prepared. At the end of the retreat, the entire community performed a long-life ritual for him, creating a mandala so radiant that “the sky filled with rainbows and flowers in five colors rained down.” Beyond the monastery, the chöd practitioners emerged from their caves to dance, utterly grounded in purpose, for there was no place in Tibet more desolate than Everest, and for them, desolation was good.