by Wade Davis
Mallory had only begun. From this vantage he could finally look directly up Everest’s Northeast Ridge, only some three miles distant. Its viability as an avenue to the summit was made moot by a single glance at the mountain. The ridge, as Bullock later noted, was “enormously long,” in places formidably steep, with several imposing pinnacles, impossible to scale, impeding the route well below the junction with the north buttress, the shoulder that fell away to the North Col.
To the north the vista was more complicated. From the Karpo La they had stared down to a broad glacier running east. This sea of ice, they correctly surmised, was the head of the Kharta Valley. To the west the tangle of mountains and ridges included Changtse, the North Peak, the summit of which Mallory, with intense excitement, could just make out in the clouds. The elusive North Col was the saddle separating Changtse from Everest. For thirty minutes he strained his eyes to see more. But the col and all of its approaches remained hidden. He decided to go higher. Leaving Bullock with two of the men, he recruited Nyima and another strong climber, Dasno, and after a thirty-minute rest, they set off for the summit.
Almost immediately clouds billowed up from below, enveloping them completely. At the foot of the steepest slope, they removed their snowshoes and, struggling hip-deep in fresh snow, made their way across a dangerous crevasse. Dasno gave up and retreated to wait with the other men. Mallory and Nyima trudged on, up the steepest of slopes, pausing every few moments to listen to the sound of distant avalanches. Glancing over his left shoulder, Mallory suddenly saw the horizon to the west begin to clear and, through a hole in the clouds, once again spotted Changtse, the North Peak. His eye eagerly followed its ridge as it descended toward Everest. Then, for but a fleeting moment, the actual rim of the North Col came into view. He could see nothing of the slopes below it, nothing of the glaciers at its base.
Mallory and Nyima struggled on to the summit of Kartse, another hour of intense exertion. Again the mountain teased him with a glimpse of the glaciers to the north. But then came more weather, a thick veil of clouds that foreshadowed the night. His confusion was now confounded by frustration. “To be bewildered was all in the game,” he later wrote. “But our sensation was something beyond bewilderment. We felt ourselves to be foiled. We were unpleasantly stung by this slap in the face. We had indeed solved all doubts as to the East Face and the Northeast arête, and had solved them quickly. But the way to Chang La [North Col], which had seemed almost within our grasp, had suddenly eluded us, and had escaped, how far we could not tell. Though its actual distance from our summit might be short, as indeed it must be, the glacier of our quest appeared now at the end of a receding vista; and this was all our prospect.”
Disappointment spun Mallory into a whirlwind of thought and action. Moving off the Kartse summit in such haste that Nyima slipped and was nearly lost, he formulated a new plan even before reaching the deep snows of the couloir that in short order disgorged the party onto the glacier below and a rendezvous with Bullock and the rest of the porters. Bullock led the way from that point, freeing an exhausted Mallory to plan. Without delay, they would retreat across the Langma La. There had to be a glacier reaching to the face of the North Col, and that elusive river of ice had to flow east, “in which case its waters must flow into the Kharta stream,” Mallory speculated. Their time in the Kama Valley, while useful, was ultimately a diversion, and with the season advancing by the day, they had not an hour to spare. The earliest they could get back to the Kharta Valley, crossing the Langma La, would be August 9, two days hence. By Mallory’s reckoning, the initial reconnaissance would have to be completed by August 20, if they were to have sufficient time afterward to rest and regroup at Kharta before launching an actual attempt at the summit of Everest. This left little more than a week to complete the exploration of the unknown ice fields of the upper Kharta Valley, where the mystery of the North Col would surely be solved.
Unfortunately, Mallory’s resolve did not take into account his own physical condition. He had sensed weariness earlier in the day, a fatigue that was less exhaustion than lassitude. By the time they trudged through the deep snow covering the glacier, sinking to their knees even with snowshoes, his head was pounding. Reaching camp in the early evening, he went right to his tent and spent a feverish night, shivering with sweat in the cold. It was all he could do to drag himself down valley the following day to their base at Pethang Ringmo. News that Howard-Bury had arrived unexpectedly and was exploring in the vicinity did not elevate his spirits. He took immediately to bed, and slept the entire afternoon of Monday, August 8, while Bullock collected flowers and butterflies in the sun.
CHAPTER 9
The North Col
CHARLES HOWARD-BURY HAD reason to be content on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 2. After some confusion, and no small amount of conflict with the sirdar, Mallory and Bullock, along with thirty men, had finally set off late that morning for their exploration of the Kama Valley. Just after lunch, which Howard-Bury took alone, eleven muleloads of rations had arrived, flour, potatoes, rice, and sugar, supplies that had been dispatched from the British trading mission at Yatung on June 15. The rivers apparently were all in flood and many of the routes severely compromised, but at least he now knew that the essential supply line from Darjeeling remained open. Then, to his surprise, not three hours after Mallory and Bullock had left Kharta, Wollaston and Morshead turned up, utterly bedraggled after a 250-mile slog from the Nepalese frontier at Nyenyam. As they plunged into a feast of fresh peas, potatoes and wild mushroom stew, minced meat and chilies, washed down with steaming bowls of hot milk, they had quite a story to tell.
Their goal had been to explore the country west of Everest; Wollaston, in particular, saw reconnaissance and exploration, not alpinism, as the expedition’s essential mandate, as determined by Younghusband and the Royal Geographical Society. They had set out from Tingri on July 13, crossing the plain to reach the village of Langkor, where they camped beside the thousand-year-old temple. The following morning, in blinding sleet, they crossed the 17,981-foot Thong La to the desolate headwaters of the Bhote Kosi, which they followed south through massive granite gorges to reach, in four difficult marches, the border town at Nyenyam. The reception there was decidedly hostile. The dzongpen who had issued the original invitation, a dubious character in silk robes whose long fingernails celebrated his idleness, claimed to have no knowledge of it. In the market the traders, mostly Hindus, Newars from Kathmandu, refused the travelers’ money. Information about routes and geography was impossible to obtain, or patently false.
Despite the difficulties, they stayed for three days. Wollaston expanded his collections, adding a number of curious plants and defiantly killing insects, birds, and small mammals to take back as specimens. Morshead, as a diversion, descended into the narrow chasm of the Bhote Kosi as he searched for traces of the pundit Hari Ram’s 1871 expedition. The river, all waterfalls and cataracts, dropped 1,000 feet every two miles, and in one exhausting afternoon Morshead crisscrossed the torrent four times before turning back some ten miles this side of the Nepalese frontier.
Their return journey from Nyenyam began with a traverse of the Lapche Kang, an unknown range that led to the sacred valley of Lapche, birthplace of the mystic saint Milarepa, which no European had ever visited. When the terrain became too difficult for yaks, they hired as porters every able youth in the village of Tashishong and headed east, climbing a steep side valley to a massive moraine at the foot of a glacier. Suddenly overhead a lammergeier, or bearded vulture, the most majestic of all Himalayan birds, came sailing down in a wide circle to settle on the ice not a hundred feet away. Wollaston could see its black beak, the small circle of red around the eye. The enormous birds live by scavenging bones, which they drop onto rocks from great heights to free the marrow, the basis of their diet. Some swallow entire bones the size of a lamb’s femur.
The men continued up the glacier, struggling through soft snow, crossing crevasses with rotten planks pilgrims had left
on the ice, reaching the pass in a fog so thick that the stone cairns, bristling with prayer flags, seemed to move, as if a congregation of supplicants. Their porters stopped to make offerings, and by the time the party crested the divide and began the long descent, evening was upon them. They spent a miserable night camped on boulders at 14,600 feet, without proper shelter from a drenching rain and no fuel save twigs of dwarf rhododendron. The Tibetans huddled together in caves, laughing and drinking through the dawn.
The track that dropped to the valley led through meadows of yellow barberry and mountain ash before entering dense forests of juniper draped in wet lichen and prayer flags. Every rock, it seemed, had been carved with a prayer, every overhang transformed into a shrine, illuminated by butter lamps and festooned with blossoms. Great boulders had been engraved in letters several feet high proclaiming the universal mantra Om mani padme hum. In small caves solitary monks silently accepted offerings from a scattering of pilgrims who trudged by the British on the trail.
Lapche itself was a tiny warren of perhaps a dozen households, half Tibetan and half Nepalese, families that came and went in service to the shrine. The famous temple was a simple but imposing structure, a square of stone perhaps two hundred feet to the side, each with a hundred prayer wheels set into the wall. It enclosed a courtyard paved in cobbles, with sheds along the perimeter to shelter the pilgrims; at the center sat a plain stone sanctuary, with a pagoda roof burnished in copper. Wollaston found it hard to believe that seekers came from all over Tibet to worship the footprint of a saint who’d once lived in a hermit cell beneath a rock, or that such a squalid building, reeking with butter lamps, could be one of the holiest sites of Buddhism. To make his stay even more unpleasant, he was forced to shield his eyes from the scores of new plants, animals, insects, and butterflies he was unable to collect for fear of antagonizing, as he put it, the “plodding dead faced pilgrims.”
The old smugglers’ route Morshead had chosen to reach their next goal, the Rongshar Valley, obliged them to cross two 17,000-foot passes and traverse “sundry glaciers … stumbling over moraines, and nearly always in an impenetrable fog.” For the entire march the weather was so foul they could see nothing save the ground at their feet, but for Wollaston this was enough. He discovered several novelties, including two new species of primulas, one of which today bears his name. A delicate plant with a bell-shaped corolla the size of a “lady’s thimble, of a deep blue colour and lined inside with frosted silver,” it is found today in specialty gardens throughout the temperate world.
As they finally crested the Kangchen La, the second of the passes, and began the long descent into the Rongshar Valley, the clouds opened to reveal for a moment a quite unexpected sight: the stunning summit of Gauri Sankar, “blazing in the afternoon sun.” Long mistaken for Everest, and never seen closely by a European from the Tibetan side of the Nepalese frontier, it was, at 23,440 feet, a much smaller mountain, but more beautiful. The following morning the weather cleared and Wollaston was able to photograph its entire form, soaring 10,000 feet above the pine and birch forests of the Rongshar, “a knife-edged ridge of ice” rising to a “glistening summit.” Wollaston was among the most accomplished of all photographers on the 1921 reconnaissance, and of all the images he took, it was this single shot of Gauri Sankar, “pure and simple,” that hung on the wall of his family home for the rest of his life.
Morshead and Wollaston were now in country familiar to the British expedition. In the last days of June, Howard-Bury and Heron had trekked into the Rongshar from its head, crossing the Phuse La from Kyetrak, descending eight miles beyond the village of Tasang, reaching roughly the point where Morshead and Wollaston, coming out of the heights to the west, encountered the main trail. Yet another great circle of exploration had been completed. They turned upvalley, passing in time through the same beautiful thickets of red roses, the scent of which had so enchanted Howard-Bury. They, too, found that the entire valley was given over to the sacred. Everywhere they encountered prayer wheels, driven by wind or water. No animal could be harmed. As they pitched camp in a willow grove, a herd of gazelles, utterly fearless, grazed in the grass by their tents. The scene reminded Wollaston of a moment, half a lifetime away, long before the war, when on a sacred island in Japan he had fed wild deer from his hand. Now in need of food, Morshead and Wollaston purchased a goat. Out of respect for the people of Rongshar, they brought the animal alive up and over the Phuse La, before slaughtering it in the bright sun of Tibet. The meat lasted for four days, just the time it took them to reach the British base at Kharta.
WITH SUPPLIES IN HAND, and Wollaston and Morshead in camp, Howard-Bury was free to pursue Mallory and Bullock over the Langma La. Accompanied by Chheten Wangdi and a dozen porters, he headed up the Kharta Valley on August 5. The progress was slow, six miles in six hours. At every village, as he fully understood, tradition demanded that the men stop and drink. They finally halted for the night at 16,100 feet, the limit of firewood on the approaches to the pass. In the morning the men were fed and off by 5:30. Howard-Bury, as was his habit, brought up the rear, accompanied by two trusted porters, Ang Tenze and Nyima Tendu, who carried his rifle, shotgun, and three cameras.
They crossed the Langma La in mixed weather, with clouds hanging at 22,000 feet, obscuring the summits. Just beyond the divide, Howard-Bury caught a marmot with bluish-gray hair, a curious specimen, which he sent back with one of the porters to Kharta for Wollaston. The rest of the party continued down several thousand feet, passing through grassy meadows and alongside a beautiful blue lake before making camp in early afternoon on a long terrace perched perhaps a thousand feet above the floor of the Kama Valley. Howard-Bury spent the rest of the day lying among the rhododendrons, watching as the wind blew the clouds across the white cliffs of Makalu and Chomo Lonzo.
The following morning, in a burst of energy, he scrambled 1,000 feet up the ridge behind their camp, then made his way down into the valley, passing through copses of juniper and ash and meadows festooned with wildflowers, including a blue primula, which he recognized as a new species only just discovered a fortnight earlier by Wollaston at Lapche. He reached Pethang Ringmo by midafternoon and learned, to his satisfaction, that Mallory and Bullock had chosen it as their base. He enjoyed the rest of the day there, basking in bright sun, as he listened to the thunder of avalanches breaking on all sides of the valley.
Mist enveloped the camp the following morning, but there were glimpses of blue sky, and he made haste to march up the valley to reach a ridge directly across from Everest that he had noted the evening before. In the fog he walked almost directly by Mallory and Bullock’s advanced camp, as they woke after their long day on Kartse. He saw no signs of them, but he did find the ridge he was seeking, which he climbed, some 3,000 feet in a long morning, to emerge from the clouds at 19,500 feet, no more than three miles from Everest. He remained on the summit spur for several hours, admiring the vegetation, chasing without luck a new kind of rat, listening to the sounds of great masses of ice exploding off the hanging glaciers of the Kangshung Face, and photographing the extraordinary panorama, from Everest and Lhotse, through Pethangtse to Makalu and Chomo Lonzo, and beyond a hundred miles to the east, where the summit of Kangchenjunga emerged from an ocean of clouds over Nepal.
Howard-Bury was in high spirits when he returned, in early afternoon, to the camp at Pethang Ringmo. Mallory was not. “Bury came in about two, full of talk and genial,” he wrote to Ruth. “He bothered me a great deal about rations.” In truth, as Bullock recorded, Howard-Bury simply confirmed that the unrest among the porters at Kharta had indeed been instigated by the sirdar, Gyalzen, who was now placed on probation, under threat of being reported to the authorities in Darjeeling. In a gesture that ought to have pleased Mallory, Howard-Bury had decided to distribute food, barley flour and rice, as well as salaries directly to the men, thus bypassing the embezzling hands of any intermediary. Mallory, sick with fever, was not in the mood to discuss it. He took to his bed and sl
ept the rest of the day.
Briefed by Bullock about the Kartse climb and their plans to explore the glaciers of the upper Kharta, Howard-Bury agreed that, should Mallory be fit, they would return together in the morning to the base of the Langma La. While Bullock and Mallory made their way the following day over the pass, he would continue his explorations of the upper Kama Valley. Ten days earlier he had ridden out from Kharta, up and over the Samchung La, crossing the valley of the fourteen lakes to crest, in the clouds, the Chog La. This was the most eastern route into the Kama Valley, the one farthest from Everest. The Langma La they were coming to know well. There was evidently a third pass, the Shao La, halfway down the Kama, which also led back to Kharta. As long as he was on this side of the divide, why not have a look?
Mallory awoke feeling peevish but able to travel. It had rained most of the night, and he had slept poorly. He suffered from swollen glands, a raw throat, and a pounding headache. He ate little before they set off, in the damp and cold, just after 7:00. The pace of the yaks irritated him, as did the exuberance of Howard-Bury, who abandoned the party along the main trail to scramble 1,000 feet up the rocks in an attempt to photograph Makalu and the Kangdoshung Glacier, falling away from Chomo Lonzo. “Bury went ahead on some stunt,” he later complained in a letter to Ruth. “Very unsociable I thought.” Howard-Bury turned up late in the day, after they had set up camp, and then, having chatted briefly with Bullock, decided to pitch his own tents at a yak encampment some distance farther along the shelf. A storm of rain swept across the face of Makalu.