by Wade Davis
Eager to get back to Tingri, Howard-Bury woke before dawn on July 11 and, leaving Chheten Wangdi to guide Heron and the rest of the party at a more leisurely pace, set out in the darkness to ford the Dzakar Chu. The river was deep and running fast. His pony was swept off its feet, leaving him clinging to the saddle, his entire body flailing about in the current and freezing water. It made for a miserable start to what would be a very long day. Four miles on, at Tashi Dzong, he changed horses and found a guide to lead him away from the river, toward the distant passes that led to Tingri. A cold rain fell all morning, and the dark valley through which they rode was bleak, as if haunted by some ancient calamity. There were dozens of abandoned ruins, villages destroyed, Howard-Bury surmised, during the Gurkha wars of the eighteenth century, when Nepal had ravaged the Tibetan borderlands. It was with relief that they finally climbed away from the fields and found themselves again on a narrow track, slowly clip-clopping over the rocks toward a high saddle that fell away to the west and the vast Tingri Plain. With miles still to go, they leaned into the wind and rain, abandoning themselves to the journey. Not until early evening, having ridden some forty miles since dawn, did Howard-Bury, drenched to the bone, finally arrive at his headquarters at Tingri. With his personal kit still back on the trail with Heron, he slept that night wrapped in a spare tent, without blanket or sleeping bag, and without complaint.
The following morning Wollaston and Morshead gave him a full debriefing. During his time away, the survey party under Morshead had ranged north and west of Tingri, struggling all the time with the impending monsoon, which broke in full force on July 7, driving the men back to headquarters. Working from their base at Tingri, Wollaston, frustrated still by the refusal of Tibetans to kill, had nevertheless amassed a considerable collection of insects, rats, butterflies, birds, and plants. His opinion of the land and the people had not improved, and his mood was grim. Tingri remained, he wrote, “a place of unimaginable filth, with people vile in their habits. They are indescribably dirty and beyond words ignorant and superstitious. I see a large number of fat pink tongues daily.” If the traditional Tibetan greeting did not impress, the stark landscape failed to inspire. “The air in Tibet is fine and exhilarating,” he granted, “but it is not my country and I don’t want much of it. There is nothing beautiful in huge snow mountains rising out of bare plain and I am not even sure there is any real beauty in a snow mountain pure and simple.”
Wollaston’s aversion to Tibet did not grow out of physical discomfort or dissatisfaction with his colleagues. The Everest expedition, he would write to Hinks, was a picnic compared to what he had endured in New Guinea. He liked Howard-Bury very much, admired him as a leader, and gave him full credit for the lack of friction among the men. Wollaston’s fundamental problem, as his own son would later reflect on, was his hatred of all religion, a sentiment born of science but forged in certainty by what he had experienced in the war. Unlike Howard-Bury, whose empathy and curiosity about the Buddhist path increased with each exotic encounter, Wollaston felt only a growing rage at a theocracy that, as he saw it, allowed monks and nuns to live idle and parasitic lives, exploiting the hardworking peasants and extorting the wealth of the nation.
What ultimately interested him was not the culture or even the conquest of Everest but, rather, “the indescribable beauty of the flowers and the sight of these mountains, the glaciers descending among tall fir trees.” Thus when Wollaston and Morshead informed Howard-Bury of an invitation that had come from the dzongpen to visit Nyenyam, a village and trading emporium on the Nepalese border well to the southwest of Everest, it was the opportunity to botanize in new country, see the great summits of Gosainthan and Gauri Sankar, mountains long confused with Everest, and add several hundred square miles of land to the map that galvanized their attention. To Wollaston, in particular, it was only of passing interest that their route would carry them by Lapche, home of Milarepa, the mystic saint of Tibet, and among the most sacred pilgrimage sites in Tibet. That their journey would begin with a visit to Langkor, a thousand-year-old temple that housed what was said to be the actual stone that the Buddha Shakyamuni had flung across the Himalaya to inspire Guru Rinpoche, was of considerably less significance to him than the possibility of encountering along the way plants, insects, and perhaps even animals unknown to science.
Morshead and Wollaston, accompanied by their Tibetan translator Gyalzen Kazi and the surveyor Gujjar Singh, set off on the morning of July 13 for a trip that would last three weeks. Howard-Bury, meanwhile, though keen to make the move to Kharta, had little choice but to remain at Tingri until Mallory and Bullock completed their explorations at Rongbuk, and Wheeler his photographic survey of the upper reaches of the Kyetrak and the Nangpa La. There was plenty of work to do: film from the various parties to be processed and printed, correspondence and reports to be written and dispatched, supply lines to maintain. Heron came and went, extending his geological surveys. Howard-Bury himself got away on a number of short excursions. He went north to the flank of the holy mountain of Tsibri, where scores of pilgrims from all corners of Tibet acquired, he wrote, “much merit” as they made the “circuit of the mountain,” five days of prayer and ritual prostration. On another outing he crossed the marshes to the hot springs at Tsamda, where, just as he was about to slip into the steamy pools for his first proper wash in weeks, villagers appeared to urge him most ardently not to proceed; autumn, after the harvest, was the proper time for one’s annual bath.
Wherever he rode on the plains of Tingri, Howard-Bury encountered herds of wild kiangs and antelope, and with each passing day the water rose higher, transforming the entire expanse of the valley into one vast wetland, alive with waterfowl, mergansers, bar-headed geese, and black-necked cranes. Thunderstorms rolled in every evening, and the nights flashed with lightning. The weather came mostly from the north, from beyond Tsibri and the mountain ridge that separated the Phung Chu from the Tsangpo, the valley of the upper Brahmaputra River. Rarely did rain come from the south, with the monsoon. Indeed, when a south wind blew, the rain stopped altogether, which both surprised and relieved Howard-Bury. Perhaps, he mused, they might still have time for a final go at the mountain. On the afternoon of July 22 a halo of yellow, green, and white light circled the sun. That evening, for the first time in days, there were lovely views of Everest and all the great summits stretching west as far as Cho Oyu.
But the pressure was on. Wheeler, who returned to Tingri on the night of July 18, painted a grim picture of conditions on the high flanks of the Everest massif. On the evening of Thursday, July 21, a message arrived from Mallory suggesting that the reconnaissance of the north and west sides was complete; they were ready to move to the east. “A chit in from M tonight,” Wheeler recorded in his journal. “He does not say so in so many words but I gather the N and W are pretty much out of the question.” The following day, Wheeler added: “A coolie in from Mallory to say that he is moving east, if possible over a pass between the 23,000[-foot] group of Everest which he hopes will lead to the Kharta Valley.”
Unfortunately, even as Wheeler wrote these notes in his journal, on the afternoon of July 22, a courier was delivering to Mallory the letter from Howard-Bury indicating that all the photographs taken with the quarter-plate camera were useless. Mallory, as we have seen, had inserted the plates back to front. Thus ended any thought of heading directly to Kharta, east across the mountains, a route that would no doubt have led to their discovery of the way to the eastern side of the North Col, the key to the mountain. Instead, while Bullock made a final thrust toward the North Face, Mallory would have to exhaust two precious days scrambling to reshoot what he could of the lost images. Broken in spirit, at least for the moment, he sent word that the climbing party would retreat via the Rongbuk Chu and rendezvous as instructed with Howard-Bury and Wheeler on July 25 at Chöbuk, the small hamlet some five miles downstream where the river first takes the name the Dzakar Chu.
ON SUNDAY, JULY 24, leaving Heron to continue his g
eological work north of Tingri, Howard-Bury and Wheeler set off for Kharta, by way of Chöbuk, where they expected to meet up with Mallory and Bullock the following day. Their first march carried them south over familiar ground, some twenty miles across the Tingri Plain to Nezogu, where a bridge crossed the Kyetrak Chu. There, Wheeler had left his camp, and they were delighted to find tents pitched and food ready upon their arrival. Howard-Bury had shot a goa, and that evening they ate well. Snow fell overnight and well into the dawn, which made for a slow start to a day that brought them fifteen miles over the Lamna La to Chöbuk. Howard-Bury, despite a detour high along a ridge south of the pass, arrived early, well ahead of the rest of the party, which was still drifting in at 4:00 p.m. when Mallory and Bullock turned up, spent and exhausted from their time at Rongbuk.
Wheeler, by contrast, had never felt stronger. Quitting his horse, he walked all the way from Kyetrak that day, “feeling fit as could be, for the first time since I’ve been in Tibet.” At the grassy saddle of the Lamna La, he abandoned the main track, which dropped down to the valley and Chöbuk, and set off on his own, reading the land. Staying high, he traversed several spurs until he reached the main ridge overlooking both the hamlet, now far below to the north, and the corridor of the Rongbuk Valley, which opened, he recalled, onto “a glorious view of Everest.”
It was one month to the day since this same distant vista had left both Mallory and Bullock silent in awe. As had they, Wheeler first saw the looming North Face from a distance of fifteen miles on a perfectly clear afternoon. Little did he know that rarely again would he see the sun or, indeed, the mountain. His task was to map its every contour and outcrop. The weather that month would prove so dreadful that to establish a single station, he would have to trudge his crew and equipment three and sometimes four times thousands of feet up the same slope, racing the clouds just to secure a single photographic image. But for the moment the summit loomed clear, and having charted in his mind all the points of perspective that would reveal the whole, he recalled, “[I] dropped down the spur to Chöbuk, which I reached about 5:30. … We spent the evening gassing hard and swapping lies.”
Mallory, for reasons difficult to ascertain, had an abiding dislike of Canadians, and since the beginning of the expedition he had treated Wheeler with some disdain. Now, in a quiet way, he had the beginnings of a change of heart. He and Bullock were off to Kharta and what promised to be more temperate climes. Wheeler, he knew, was heading back up to Rongbuk to attempt the impossible in conditions that were deteriorating by the day. In a letter to Ruth, begun on July 22, when he had first learned about the photographic calamity, and finished six days later at Kharta, he wrote, “Wheeler turned up late the same evening. He has been making his photographic survey to the west—doing much of what I did on that last day, but doing it alone! A dreary job in this broken weather. However he had had some rest at Tingri and seemed fit and cheerful. And now he was going up the valley we had just come down. It seems rather a silly business that he couldn’t have joined forces with us up there. But we were able to tell him a good deal to help him.”
Wheeler had the toughest assignment, and everyone knew it. That he was a highly accomplished mountaineer, stoic and focused, who never wavered from his duty and never complained was now evident to all, including Mallory. Morshead, in particular, had enormous respect for his fellow officer from the Survey of India. “It is difficult for those who have not actually had the experience,” he would write to Hinks, “to conceive the degree of mental and physical discomfort which results from prolonged camping during the monsoon at heights of 19,000 ft or more, waiting for the fine day, which never comes. Such had been Wheeler’s fate ever since leaving Tingri, three months previously.”
ON THE MORNING of July 26, leaving Wheeler at Chöbuk with his porters, Howard-Bury, Mallory, and Bullock pushed on for Kharta. They had a slow start, not breaking camp until 9:00 a.m. During the night Howard-Bury and Chheten Wangdi, as well as several of the porters, had suffered severe inflammation of the eyes, the onset of snow blindness. The previous day had been overcast. But such was the power of the Himalayan sun that with even the slightest snowfall, Howard-Bury realized, it was imperative to wear goggles. He would not make the same mistake again, though others would and with dire consequences.
With good horses, they soon made up the time, cantering down the valley and up and over a low pass to reach Halung, where they paused to picnic in the grass. From a spur en route they had caught a dramatic glimpse of Everest, encircled by formidable black bands of perpendicular cliffs. It looked, Howard-Bury wrote, “as impossible as ever.” Mallory, for the moment, wanted nothing to do with the mountain. He was still luxuriating in seeing the world green again. “To see things grow again as though they liked growing, enjoying rain and sun—that has been a real joy.”
One would have thought that they had come down from the moon, and in a sense they had. “I have been half the time in ecstasy,” wrote Mallory, referring to their short passage from Chöbuk and Rebu across the Doya La to Kharta. “We came up to a remarkable pass between two ranges of snow mountains—not a high pass, only about 17,000 ft. There the ground was a wilderness of flowers, rock plants nestling under the big flat stones; most beautiful of all the blue poppy and a little pink saxifrage growing almost like a cushion flower and there was a fine gentian … And here we are in the Arun Valley perched a little above its wide flat basin before it goes down in a narrow and fearsome gorge to Nepal and India, the valley of the monsoon.”
That evening after dinner, Mallory returned from a stroll with a bouquet of wildflowers, including fringed grass of Parnassus, white and yellow anemones, larkspur, and potentilla. “My dearest Ruth,” he wrote, “you can imagine how lovely all this has been after the stern world of glaciers and moraines! This is a good spot; Bury has chosen well.” Bullock, if less effusive, was equally glad to be down at last in a land of forests and fields, though his eyes were still on the heights. “Makalu was visible through clouds due south,” he wrote in his diary. “Rather a stony road and a long ride. Had rhubarb for dinner and juniper wood for fuel!”
The party awoke in Kharta late on the morning of Friday, July 29, delighted at the prospect of doing nothing for a day. Bullock wrote to his wife, Alice, while Mallory took in the lay of the land, walking to a high point above their base. Across the valley to the south the monsoon clouds came up the gorge in thin wisps, only to dissipate as rainbows in the sunlight. A dark band of fir and birch marked the boundary where the mist stopped and the valley opened onto rich fields and meadowlands. To the east sheets of distant rain veiled the horizon. To the north, beyond the mountain ridge that rose above their base, the sky was dark with heavy clouds. Kharta, by contrast, nestled in the rain shadow, enjoyed clear skies and a “delicious climate.” By the time Mallory returned to camp, the air was actually hot. That afternoon, Howard-Bury recorded a temperature of seventy-five degrees inside his tent, a pleasant change after Tingri, let alone Rongbuk.
While Mallory and Bullock rested and regrouped, Howard-Bury, having seen to the construction of a new darkroom, elected to scout the Samchung La, the closest and most eastern of the three openings to the Kama Valley. Traveling light, he left Kharta early on July 30 and rode hard, crossing the Kharta Chu at the first possible ford, then climbing 3,000 feet up a steep and stony track to reach the pass. Unfortunately, clouds covered the heights, and it was only upon descending 500 feet on the other side that he suddenly beheld a beautiful lost glen and, beyond it, a string of fourteen lakes, each a different shape and color—turquoise, blue, green, and black—all flung like jewels the length of a hanging alpine valley that disappeared into the mist. Along a track of loose stones, he slowly made his way south, hoping to catch a glimpse into the Kama Valley. Instead he found himself climbing steeply once more, on a track carved through deep snow, to reach another pass, the Chog La, at 16,100 feet considerably higher than the Samchung La. At the summit fierce winds and blinding snow precluded any chance of seeing in
to the Kama, let alone tracking its course toward the eastern face of Everest. Taking shelter behind the ruins of a stone wall, he waited for an hour, hoping for a break in the weather, before reluctantly retracing his path through an alpine valley as beautiful as any he had ever encountered.
Crossing back over the Samchung La, with all the Kharta Valley now at his feet, Howard-Bury rested for a time, as was his habit when alone. The air here was clear and there was no sign of rain, let alone snow. He noticed a red-breasted rose finch perched on a dwarf rhododendron. From a willow thicket came the call of a laughing thrush and the squawk of blackbirds. Over the valley ravens and black-eared kites flew at extraordinary heights, and at the very zenith of the sky, he saw the dark silhouette of a lammergeier, soaring toward the east. From the pass the Kharta Chu appeared a sliver of silver, flanked by fields and villages that seemed toylike in the immensity of the landscape.
If geography defined the next challenge, circumstances, Howard-Bury knew, would determine the players. Kellas, the one Britisher who had probed the Kama—securing with the help of his native colleagues photographs, albeit from a distance, of the major glaciers and mountain approaches—was dead. Harold Raeburn, the titular head of the climbing party, the man expected to orchestrate the alpine assault on the summit, was lost to the expedition, evacuated by Wollaston to Sikkim, and not expected to return. With Wheeler preoccupied at Rongbuk, and Morshead and Wollaston not scheduled to reach Kharta from their explorations of the Nepali borderlands for some time, it would fall to Mallory and Bullock to follow the Kharta Chu to its source, cross into the Kama, and ascertain which valley, if either, offered an opening to the mountain.