Into The Silence

by Wade Davis

  At Kharta, Mallory, idle for the day, was having similar thoughts. Inactivity for him invariably provoked reflection, which slipped readily into melancholy. “It has been rather disappointing to see so little of Wollaston and Morshead,” he wrote to Ruth on July 31. “Poor Wollaston has had a bad time of it altogether. He reached Tingri the day before we left after seeing Raeburn safely into Sikkim and almost at once had two cases of typhoid to attend at Tingri, a place he disliked as much as I did … Of Raeburn we have no further news … Bullock though a very nice fellow is not a lively companion.”

  On the same day, Bullock and Howard-Bury rode three miles up the valley to visit the dzongpen, who appeared with his wife, a young woman adorned in jewels, amethysts, turquoises, pearls, and uncut rubies. “She had a most elaborate head-dress of coral and pearls, with masses of false hair on either side of her head,” Howard-Bury recalled. “It was not becoming.”

  Mallory, alone at base camp, remained focused on the challenge at hand. The locals knew Everest by name, Chomolungma, but aside from this it had been difficult to obtain any useful information, save that the mountain was to be approached only by crossing over the Langma La, a pass farther up the Kharta Chu leading to the south. On this they were quite specific. There the men would find another valley—clearly the Kama—that would lead right up to the base of the mountain. Beyond this, the local people appeared to know little. Where the Kharta Chu originated, they could not say. Whether it had its origins in the snows of Everest, they did not know. As to distances, they were hopeless. A journey could be measured in days or in cups of tea; it was only after some trial and error that the British determined that three cups of tea were roughly the equivalent of five miles. But again nothing was precise.

  Even the Tibetan name of the mountain had any number of translations and meanings. Howard-Bury quoted yak herders who called it Chomo Uri, which he translated as Goddess of the Turquoise Peak. Back in London Douglas Freshfield, a veteran of Kangchenjunga and a former president of both the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society, translated the name Chomolungma as Mother Goddess of the Country, which soon morphed into the even more fanciful Goddess Mother of the World. Charles Bell, the scholarly authority, claimed that the proper Tibetan name was, in fact, Kang Chamolung, meaning the Snow of Bird Land. David Macdonald, Bell’s protégé as British trade agent at Yatung and Gyantse, offered yet another, more descriptive name, which, translated, was: “the mountain you can see from nine directions, the summit you cannot see from near, the mountain so high that birds flying over the peak become blind.”

  MALLORY’S PLAN was to set out up the Kharta Valley with Bullock on Tuesday, August 2. But first he faced a minor crisis with the porters, “who made a good deal of fuss enquiring what their rations were to be.” He spent Monday and, in growing frustration, the first morning hours of Tuesday packing loads and securing additional supplies of salt, flour, and chilies for the men. The sirdar, Gyalzen, the man responsible for the job, had lost the confidence of all. Suspecting embezzlement, Howard-Bury had stripped him of his authority only the night before, and now he skulked about, sowing discontent. Mallory did not respond well. He drove the men hard, later commenting, “In a valley where there are many individual farms and little villages, the coolie’s path is well beset with pitfalls and with gin. Without discipline the Sahib might easily find himself at the end of a day’s march with perhaps half his loads.” Such an approach, as Howard-Bury fully understood, only caused the men to accomplish less. On their first day out of Kharta, after a slow march of just eight miles, the porters simply stopped, all thirty, and pitched camp despite Mallory’s protests. His response was to demand a double march for the following day.

  Despite the setback, Mallory remained sanguine. Howard-Bury had assured him that Everest lay but two days to the west, and logic alone suggested that the glacial stream of the Kharta Chu originated on the mountain; its upper left branch, Mallory surmised, must surely come from the North Col. In his mind’s eye, he wrote to Ruth, he envisioned a trek straight up the Kharta Valley to the “pass of our desire.” Within four days he hoped at last to be on the North Col, staring down into the great cwm of the Rongbuk Glacier, making plans for the Northeast Ridge, what he believed to be the only viable route to the summit.

  But something was amiss. The men had camped at a valley junction, as expected, but the route to Chomolungma, as described by a local leader who said the journey would take five days, climbed away from the Kharta Chu, rising beyond a track that crisscrossed a trickle of a stream, nothing like the glacial torrent one would expect to issue from the frozen heart of the mountain. Mallory, uncertain of their position, stubbornly insisted that Chomolungma could be reached within two days, as Howard-Bury had anticipated. The village headman shrugged, the sirdar said nothing, and the matter rested until the morning of August 3, which dawned in drizzle and fog. They broke camp, according to Bullock’s journal, just after 7:00. The visibility only decreased as they climbed high through dense thickets of rhododendrons and junipers, reaching by midday a small blue lake on a flat shelf of rock. Mallory was completely mystified. With each step they had moved south and west, away from both the Kharta Valley and the known direction of Everest. That afternoon they continued to climb, a slow, ponderous slog in the rain and mist, to a pass that registered on the aneroid fully 4,000 feet above their camp of the previous night. They crossed the threshold of the Langma La, the most formidable of the passes leading to the Kama Chu, the northern doorway to the hidden valley of Khenbalung, in cloud cover so thick it muted the joyous shouts of the men.

  Beyond the pass the track fell away due south, and Mallory, still perplexed by their direction of travel, noticed a shift in mood among the men. “Grumblings had subsided in friendliness,” he wrote and, though burdened by sodden tents and heavy wet loads, the porters “all marched splendidly.” When finally, two hours and some 2,500 feet below the pass, they halted for the day, making camp on a grassy bench where yaks grazed and stone huts offered shelter from the wind, he found the men “quite undepressed with the gloomy circumstance of again encamping in the rain.” That night in a fragmentary conversation with the headman, with the sirdar acting as translator, Mallory solved a small part of the puzzle: there were two mountains known to the hill men of Kharta as Chomolungma. “It was not difficult to guess,” he later recalled, that “if Everest were one, the other must be Makalu, which is twelve miles southwest of Everest. We explained that we wanted to go to the one to the right.”

  The morning of August 4 brought further confusion. Breaking camp again at 7:00, and again in cloud and drizzle, they followed the track down a steep moraine, dropping some 700 feet to the valley floor, where thickets of giant rhododendrons concealed a rickety bridge over a stream. They crossed and continued through wet meadows, eventually reaching the snout of a glacier that evidently crossed the valley from the south, at ninety degrees to the flow of the Kama Chu, the muffled roar of which they could hear. The trail carried them up and over the ice, and along the base of high cliffs obscured in mist. Toward midday the sky suddenly opened, just for a fleeting moment, to reveal “gigantic precipices looming through the clouds.” This glimpse of Makalu, towering so high above them, unsettled their senses, and they almost welcomed the gray clouds that closed around them, darkening the Kama Valley with rain. They pushed on for another two, perhaps three, miles, following the lateral moraine of yet a second glacier flowing as a river along the valley floor, until coming upon Pethang Ringmo, a nomadic encampment where they stopped for the night. “There was no point in going further,” Mallory wrote. “We had no desire to run our heads against the East Face of Everest; we must now wait for a view.”

  They woke to the sound of yak bells and the spacious silence of a broad expanse of meadows flanked by glacial moraine and ice. The elevation was 16,400 feet, and there was a dusting of snow. The “weather signs,” Mallory recalled, “were decidedly more hopeful as I looked out of our tent, and we decided at once to spen
d the day in some sort of reconnaissance up the valley.”

  Finally they could see something. They were camped on the northern side of the valley. At their backs, running east to west, was a formidable ridge of uncertain height, with great spurs of rock, each separated from the next by basins of ice. This was the range they had crossed, the one broken by the Langma La. The glacier they had mounted and traversed the previous day was the Kangdoshung, which does indeed flow into the Kama from the south, from the lower face of Chomo Lonzo, at 25,604 feet the sister mountain of Makalu (27,765 feet). Acting as a dam, the Kangdoshung blocks the passage of a much larger glacier, the Kangshung, a mile-wide river of ice that flows from the base of Everest itself and dominates the upper valley floor, concealing the Kama Chu, which runs beneath it. From Pethang Ringmo, peering back down the valley to the east, Mallory could just make out the massive tangle of ice that marked the meeting of the glaciers. Of the mountains they knew to dominate the valley to the south, they could see little, save a glimpse of the white summit ice of Pethangtse (22,014 feet), which appeared out of clouds so close to the zenith of the sky that they questioned their vision.

  Having dispatched the porters down valley to cut juniper for fuel, Mallory and Bullock lingered briefly in camp, waiting for the weather to lift, before setting out to explore the upper reaches of the Kangshung Glacier. High winds spun the clouds, and though the weather remained gray, by late morning the sky over the mountains partially cleared to reveal a landscape of stunning scale. First the snow and ice faces of Makalu and Chomo Lonzo, soaring 11,000 feet above the valley floor, and then, as Bullock recalled, the “terrific” cliffs below Lhotse, the south peak of Everest. By noon they had reached high into the basin and climbed the shoulder of a ridge that formed a corner of the valley wall. For the first time Mallory, somewhat above Bullock on the slope, beheld the East Face of Everest and the formidable Northeast Ridge, “cutting across the sky to the right.” All that he had previously experienced as a mountaineer receded in memory as his eyes beheld “a scene of magnificence and splendour” that provoked, he later recalled, a completely “new sensation … fresh surprise and vivid delight.”

  Everest and Lhotse, separated by a prominent saddle, the South Col, formed a single mountain wall, which fell away in a tumble of buttresses and ice fully two vertical miles in height. At the base of this imposing face, the head of the Kangshung Glacier widened into a massive cirque, with great tongues of snowbound rock and ice reaching from the valley to the skyline. Viewed from the east, Everest and Lhotse appeared not as individual mountains but as a single massif of impossible dimensions. From Lhotse a “prodigious” shoulder fell away to the southeast, merging into a ridgeline of wild precipices that swept the length of the Kama Valley only to be swallowed after about twelve miles by the equally formidable bastion of Makalu and the multiple summits of Chomo Lonzo. As Mallory’s eye traced the lines of ascent to every spur, the broken edges of every hanging glacier, he stood in the shadow of three of the five tallest mountains in the world, Lhotse, Makalu, and Everest.

  Exhilarating as this was, his concern remained focused on the task at hand. The height of land dominated by the great summits on the southern side of the Kama Valley marked the frontier with Nepal. Had they presented an avenue of approach, Mallory might well have been prepared to violate the border, but they most assuredly did not. As Mallory looked west to Everest, it was the unknown ridge of mountains on his right that presented the immediate challenge. These extended in an easterly direction from the very foot of the Everest’s Northeast Ridge. Mallory’s goal on leaving Kharta had been to reach the North Col. Instead, “after three days traveling in the clouds,” he wrote to Ruth, they had found themselves “in a different part of the world and cut off from our North Col by an impassable barrier.” Bullock was certain that the Kama Valley would not lead them directly to the col, and he wrote as much in his journal on the night of August 5, upon their return to camp. But there remained a chance, which Bullock acknowledged, that closer to the base of Everest, or just beyond the height of land that formed this frustrating barrier and divide to their north, they might find a way.

  At the same time, they had an obligation to complete a thorough visual reconnaissance of the East Face and the Northeast Ridge. This remained their mission. Mallory’s solution was to climb. Even in the uncertainty of clouds, he had noticed a “conspicuous snowy summit,” the second prominent peak along the divide on this wild side of Everest. His porters knew the mountain as Kartse. From its summit, they would be able to scan at close quarters the entire Kangshung Face of Everest, even as they determined what lay beyond to the north and west in the uppermost reaches of the Kharta watershed, ice fields that would surely flow, he anticipated, as far as the base of the elusive North Col.

  On the morning of Saturday, August 6, they struck the Whymper tents and moved farther up the Kama Valley, following the edge of the glacier for some two hours before rounding a shoulder to pitch camp on a high shelf at 17,700 feet. Bullock spent the afternoon hunting butterflies in the snow. Mallory found shelter by a stream in the lee of a moraine, and did his best to study his proposed line of ascent. Though dwarfed by Everest, Kartse, at 21,348 feet, was nevertheless an unclimbed peak, some 5,000 feet higher than any mountain in Europe, located in unknown country, and exposed to monsoon winds and weather. Mallory and Bullock would scramble up its slopes merely to have a good look around. “Our object tomorrow is to discover what is behind the wall of this coombe [sic],” Bullock noted that night in his journal. “It is now snowing.”

  Morning came early for them: they woke at 2:00 a.m. and set off in the dark, with four porters, using lanterns and candles to light their way along a stony ridge that ran north of their camp. The new snow, icy and granular, crunched beneath their boots. The air was frigid but clear. “It was a night,” Mallory recalled, “of early moons.” They walked in keen anticipation, for the stars were bright and there was not a cloud in the sky. “Even before the first glimmer of dawn,” he wrote, “the white mountains were somehow touched to life by a faint blue light—a light that changed as the day grew.” The sun reached first the summit of Makalu, and as the glowing red light, “a flush of pink and purple shadows,” fell upon the massive ice cliffs of Chomo Lonzo, Mallory turned to see Everest itself unveiled. “We were not kept waiting for the supreme effects; the curtain was withdrawn. Rising from the bright mists Everest above us was immanent, vast, incalculable—no fleeting apparition of elusive dream-form; nothing could have been more set and permanent, steadfast like Keats’s star, ‘in long splendour hung aloft the night,’ a watcher of all the nights, diffusing, it seemed universally, an exalted radiance.”

  Such eloquence, summoned long after the event, belied the reality of the moment. The cold that morning was intense. The cook was sick. The porters, wrapped in wool blankets, had refused to stir until threatened. Boots, outer clothing, and gear were frozen stiff. It was only after considerable cajoling that Mallory had gotten his small expedition under way. The first goal was a conspicuous saddle, the Karpo La, lying to the east of Kartse. The most direct approach carried them up and over a steep outcrop of rock. Mallory took delight in the feel of firm granite, and the porters, though totally inexperienced as climbers, proved, if anything, too cavalier in their exertions; he had to throw down the odd stone to remind them of the perils of failure. As they scaled and traversed the bluff, Mallory cast his eye toward Everest and the daunting Kangshung Face. The most threatening feature, as he saw it, was a series of massive hanging glaciers that dominated the lower cliffs and buttresses. “It required,” he recalled, “but little further gazing to be convinced—to know that almost everywhere the rocks below must be exposed to ice falling from this glacier; that if, elsewhere, it might be possible to climb up, the performance would be too arduous, would take too much time and would lead to no convenient platform; that in short, other men, less wise, might attempt this way if they would, but, emphatically it was not for us.”

  B
y the time Mallory and his small party crested the Karpo La, just before 9:00 a.m., both he and Bullock had dismissed any notion of a direct attack on Everest from the Kama Valley. (The Kangshung Face would prove to be the most difficult route up the mountain; it would not be successfully climbed until 1983.) There remained, however, the possibility of the Northeast Ridge, which Bullock referred to in his journals as the East Ridge. He and Mallory, it will be recalled, were obsessed with finding a way to the eastern base of the North Col precisely because they had seen from Rongbuk that from the col a manageable route rose up a steep shoulder to meet the upper limits of the Northeast Ridge, which led to the summit pyramid of Everest. Might the Northeast Ridge be followed all the way from its base? From the Karpo La, it was impossible to know, for the view of Everest and the lower Northeast Ridge was blocked by the snow summit of Kartse.

  After a quick breakfast, Mallory led the party along the snow ridge that reached west toward Kartse. At close to 20,000 feet, with storms threatening from the south, it was by no means a trivial ascent. The exposures were severe, the threat of avalanche a constant menace. To traverse a gully of deep, powdery snow, Mallory established a rope anchor on an island of rock and, using hand signals, patiently guided men who had never before faced such danger. Once all were safely across, he entrusted his own life to Nyima, a sturdy youth of eighteen who had been his most faithful and dependable companion since the beginning of the expedition. The only viable route led up an extremely steep slope, the head of which was blocked by overhanging ice and hard snow. Belayed by Nyima, Mallory “hewed at the cornice above his head, fixed a fist-and-axe hold in the crest and struggled over.” Inspired by Mallory’s example, the men followed, and with “explosive grunts” overcame in turn an obstacle unlike anything they had ever confronted. Exhausted, they huddled on the edge of the ice as Mallory worked on, cutting steps in the hard snow for some 400 feet, until finally a stretch of level ground was achieved. It was after midday by the time the men crossed the flat shoulder of snow and collapsed in a heap at the base of the final slope, some 500 feet below the Kartse summit.