by Wade Davis
Writing some months later from the comfort of England, Mallory would wax eloquent about his time in the Kama Valley: “When all is said about Chomolungma, the Goddess Mother of the World … I come back to the valley, the valley bed itself, the broad pastures, where our tents lay, where cattle grazed and where butter was made, the little stream we followed up to the valley head, wandering along its well-turfed banks under the high moraine, the few rare plants, saxifrages, gentians and primulas, so well watered there, and a soft, familiar blueness in the air which even here may charm us. Though I bow to the goddesses I cannot forget at their feet a gentler spirit than theirs, a little shy perhaps, but constant in the changing winds and variable moods of mountains and always friendly.”
In the moment, his thoughts were less gently crafted. He was both physically sick and increasingly bothered by his companions. Days had been lost and, after nearly seven weeks at close quarters with the mountain, he was no closer to solving the challenge of the North Col. Coming down valley this very afternoon, he had foolishly lost his waistcoat along the way, and would be forced to dispatch Nyima to search for it. He was famously absentminded, but not proud of the fact. It was a dark cloud indeed that carried him over the Langma La the next morning, Wednesday, August 10.
Howard-Bury, for his part, remained focused on his larger mission, which was not to climb Everest himself but to explore and chart the geography and natural history of the entire region. It was he, more than Mallory, whose thoughts always came back to the valley floor and the gentler spirits at the base of the mountains. The moisture that every night enveloped even the upper reaches of the Kama Valley in mist made possible the most luxuriant of forests. The Kama Chu, the river that bursts from beneath the ice of the Kangdoshung Glacier, falls over 14,000 feet in twenty-three miles, dropping over a spectacular series of waterfalls into the deepest ravine on earth, the canyon of the Arun, a river older than the Himalaya. Beneath the black cliffs and ice fields of Makalu, a mere fifteen miles from the base of Everest, thrive immense forests of junipers and silver firs, trees the size of redwoods, and farther downstream great thickets of bamboo grow, as well as mountain ashes, birches, and rhododendrons the size of a woodsman’s cottage.
As Howard-Bury made his way down the valley, staying, for the most part, high above the river, he passed through acres of blue irises and lush hillsides of wild rhubarb with columns of pale leaves sheathing great spikes of flowers five feet or more in height. Every opening in the forest was carpeted in rare novelties, unknown flowers that he pressed between the pages of his Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, which he always carried with him. By midday the sun had burned away the clouds, and he saw silhouetted against the ice face of Makalu a ridgeline of silver firs. That night he made camp at the base of the Shao La in a dell known in Tibetan as the “field of marigolds.” The following day he “crawled up to the top,” crossing the 16,500-foot pass in driving rain, and was back in Kharta in time for tea.
THAT SAME EVENING found Mallory and Bullock well up the Kharta Chu, camped on a grassy shelf at 16,500 feet. Ahead of them they could see that the valley forked. Both arms would need to be explored. But after three exhausting marches, and with Mallory still ill with what he now feared to be tonsillitis, August 12 would be a day of rest. Bullock dispatched the men to gather firewood, while Mallory turned his thoughts toward home. He wrote to Ruth, proposing that she meet him upon his return in Marseille for a walking tour of Provence, or in Gibraltar, or in Italy, which he could reach by train. If Marseille, she was to stay at the Hôtel Louvre et Paix. If he did not find her at the hotel, he would leave a note at the post office and, as an added precaution, he would go there “every three hours beginning at 9 am and wait five minutes outside the main entrance.”
Mallory’s other proposal was perhaps more unsettling: he intended to bring back one of the expedition porters as a servant. His choice, he wrote, was Nyima:
I don’t know what his age may be, about 18 … He has the perfect temperament for what I propose he should do. He would naturally be turned on to all scullery work and floor scrubbing, carrying coals, cutting firewood, lighting the kitchen fire at as early an hour as you like, washing clothes … He could learn to bring in meals and wait at table … The boots, knives, swill pails, cinders and greenhouse stove would all be his province … And he would fetch and carry—he is a coolie whose job is to carry; and if you want a box weighing 70 pounds brought from the station, you would simply send him … He would save many a taxi drive by carrying luggage to the station … His present diet is chiefly flour and water, rice, occasionally meat and as luxuries a little tea and butter … He might inhabit part of the cellar or the outside coal shed might be freed by storing coal in the cellar … Would the other servants like him? Well, he is a clean animal and though he would look a bit queer to them at first they couldn’t help liking him. He is not very dark skinned like a plainsman.
Fever and lassitude carried Mallory through the night and into the morning. Bullock could not remain idle for a second day. Though Mallory professed to harbor no thoughts of competition with his companion, the prospect of being left out at the moment of discovery depressed him. Still, as he put it, the hunt had to go on, and thus from the “ungrateful comfort” of his sleeping bag, he waved Bullock off on the morning of August 13, wishing him well.
From the summit of Kartse they had seen the southern branch of the Kharta Glacier and had not been convinced that it reached as far as the North Col. Bullock, accompanied by Sanglu, who spoke some English, therefore elected to explore the northern arm of the valley. They followed the glacier stream to the foot of the ice, and then, staying on the northern side, proceeded up and along the lateral moraine, climbing in a morning roughly 2,000 feet to reach the end of the rocks and a broad bay covered by a powder of fresh snow, where Bullock decided to establish a base. Word reached him that one of the porters, Ang Pasang, was played out on the trail. Bullock sent one of the men down for his load, and with him a note to go back to Mallory. The content of this note and the timing of its dispatch, as we shall see, were of considerable significance.
After a quick lunch, they set out onto the glacier, only to find it covered in deep snow. Bullock pressed ahead with Sanglu, leaving the porters with their heavy loads to plod at their own pace. It was late afternoon before Bullock himself completed the traverse, and well after 7:00 p.m. before the first of the exhausted porters arrived. They spread rocks to level a patch of ground and in the faint moonlight pitched a single Mummery tent. Bullock dined on tinned beef, biscuits, and jam. The following morning, August 14, dawned cold and clear, and with firm snow they reached, in two hours, the col at the head of the valley. Its elevation, Bullock recorded, was 19,770 feet. After crossing the saddle, they descended into the next valley just far enough to see that it ended close to a prominent mountain named Kharta Changri (23,149 feet). They most assuredly, as Bullock recognized, were not looking down upon the elusive North Col. Retracing their steps, they returned to the saddle by 10:00 a.m. and hastened down the glacier before the sun had a chance to soften the snow. They reached their base by midday. Leaving Sanglu and the rest of the men to break camp the following morning, Bullock and Dorji Gompa, after a brief halt for lunch, continued down the valley to rejoin Mallory.
TORMENTED STILL by the thought that he might miss “the joy of wresting from the mountain its final secret,” Mallory had left his tent on the morning of August 13 and was sitting in the sun sharing his “dismal tale” in a letter to Ruth when he was interrupted by the unexpected but welcome arrival of a party from Kharta. It was Morshead, whom he had not seen in more than seven weeks. A favorite on the long approach march from Darjeeling, Morshead brought not only his stout character but also supplies and, from Wollaston, the expedition physician, “medical dope” to treat Mallory’s fever. His presence was medicine enough, and Mallory immediately “began to entertain a hope for the morrow.”
Just before dark that day, the porter turned up with the note fo
r Mallory that Bullock had written earlier in the afternoon. The actual wording of this chit, which has not been preserved, is unknown. Bullock’s journal entry of the day states only that he sent a “message to M. saying that this valley was not the one we were looking for.” In the official expedition account, written months after the fact, Mallory quotes Bullock’s note as having said, “I can see up the glacier ahead of me and it ends in another high pass. I shall get to the pass tomorrow morning if I can, and ought to see our glacier over it. But it looks, after all, as though the most unlikely solution is the right one and the glacier goes out into the Rongbuk Valley.” Mallory goes on in the published account to suggest that he and Bullock had previously discussed the possibility that the glacier at the base of the North Col flowed not east but somehow north and back into the Rongbuk Valley. If so, there is no mention of it in either Bullock’s journal or in any letters written during the expedition by Mallory. During their monthlong reconnaissance of the Rongbuk Valley they had in fact walked past the mouth of the East Rongbuk twice, failing to explore it. The size of the outflowing stream did not suggest a glacial watershed of any significance.
Bullock’s note of August 13 was written before he had crested the saddle of the valley he was exploring. It’s not clear how he might have anticipated what lay beyond and with the confidence that Mallory attributed to him. And had Bullock that day had some revelation concerning the East Rongbuk Glacier, as Mallory’s recollection suggests, it is curious, given the significance, that he made no mention of it in his journal. Writing in the field on the night of August 13, Mallory himself makes no reference to Rongbuk or to any particular breakthrough in their understanding of the mountain. To the contrary, he simply writes, “Bullock’s chit in the evening was very depressing—foreshadowing as it did fresh efforts of reconnaissance.”
On the morning of August 14, Mallory and Morshead left to scout the southern arm of the Kharta Glacier, the branch that Bullock had not explored. With Mallory still recovering, they set a leisurely pace. Fortunately, the sky remained clear until noon, and they were able to reach high enough up the valley to see the ice of the Kharta Glacier rising to a shallow col on the skyline. Beyond this broad saddle, known to Tibetans as the Lhakpa La, they could just see, to their astonishment and delight, the tip of the summit of Changtse, the North Peak, which with Everest cradled the North Col. They could not tell what lay beyond the Lhakpa La, between it and the base of Changtse. But if the ground could be covered, it might offer at last an avenue of attack. Encouraged, they returned to base camp, keen to set out on a more thorough reconnaissance in the morning.
When they got back, however, eager to share the plan with Bullock, “a fresh bone,” as Mallory later wrote, “was thrown into our stew.” A letter had arrived from Howard-Bury, with an enclosure from Wheeler, a hand-sketched map that revealed the solution to the puzzle that had tormented them for all these many weeks. In the official expedition account, Mallory implies that this letter reached them after he and Bullock had effectively solved the mystery of the North Col. Wheeler’s map, which Mallory went to some length to disparage, may in fact have been the very first indication that he or Bullock had of the existence of the East Rongbuk Glacier, an embarrassing oversight that Mallory went out of his way in the official expedition account to obscure. One thing is certain: it was not Mallory or any of his English compatriots who first discovered the key to the mountain. It was the Canadian Oliver Wheeler, working alone in the solitude of the Rongbuk Valley.
ON THE EVENING of July 26, the day Howard-Bury, Mallory, and Bullock had pushed on to the new British base at Kharta, Wheeler, camped amid the buckthorn thickets at Chöbuk, had reasons to be optimistic. From what he had seen from the trail, the peaks of Rongbuk appeared more accessible, the side valleys shorter, than what he had confronted on the western approaches to Everest. Unlike the climbing party, his focus was less on the summit than on the satellite features of the massif, the lower peaks and ridges that might provide stations for his photographic survey. He required a certain number, and within limits, the more he could establish, the more proficient would be his map, but he had no desire to haul his hundred-pound kit up one more slope than was necessary. The unknown factor remained, as always, the weather.
From Chöbuk it was a ten-mile march to the Rongbuk Monastery, a climb of some 1,500 feet along a well-trodden track, fairly crowded on the morning of July 27 with the narrow traffic of yaks and porters carrying bundles of firewood and hand-hewn timbers destined for the gompa and the hermit cells of the valley. Making his first camp close to the monastery, Wheeler assessed his situation. The monks were unfriendly, resentful of his presence, and no one was willing to sell him supplies. “It is a bleak cold spot,” he confided in his journal, “hemmed in by high shale peaks, changing to granite a bit further up.” The following morning he left camp at 8:00 to climb to 19,900 feet, “a tremendous grind” to reach a summit spur, where he waited all day in the rain to secure a single image. It was a bitter taste of what was to come.
Over the next two days he had his camp moved, in stages, farther up the valley, eventually occupying a site a mile below the snout of the main Rongbuk Glacier, where Mallory and Bullock had their base. His focus for the moment was the “23,000 ft group to the east.” His deliberate goal was to look “over into the Kharta side.” On Saturday, July 30, he set out to establish a second station, climbing in three and a half hours to 19,400 feet, where again he was obliged to wait until early evening to “get a round of angles and some indifferent photos.” Though stymied again by the weather, he was able to study the entire Rongbuk Valley, from a mile or two below the monastery to the massive cirque at the head of the glacier beneath the North Face of Everest itself. His surveyor’s eye did not fail to notice that the mountain wall of the eastern side of the Rongbuk Valley was cleft at only a single point. He could not see beyond the ridgeline, but this opening became his goal.
The following morning, with a light camp, he moved four miles up the “main valley and a mile up the next side valley from the east, coming I think from the 23,000 ft group.” To cross the outlet, he had stayed high on the ice. The glacial stream itself, roaring out of the mountains, proved too treacherous to ford. Wheeler made camp early, knowing that the water levels would drop with the dawn. One clue as to the size of the unknown drainage, he noted, was the surge of meltwater late in the day, an indication of a large surface of glacial ice exposed to the sun. “Anyhow,” he confided in his journal that night, “it is a very big valley, and where it goes remains to be seen.”
The next day, Monday, August 1, was a disappointment. The water had indeed dropped, but it remained a torrent, and with the rocks glazed in ice, “it was the devil crossing the stream” to reposition the camp, though they managed to do so. Wheeler then set off on another horrendous climb, only to wait in the rain and clouds until 5:00 p.m., failing to fix a single point due to the “cursed weather.” Feeling ill, he nevertheless moved camp yet again the following morning, pushing a further four miles up what he now recognized as the East Rongbuk Valley, establishing a bivouac on a miserable patch of debris-covered ice. His four porters failed to arrive until dark. They slept without blankets. He rewarded each with a Tibetan coin, “which seemed to satisfy them perfectly.”
Feeling fit by morning, August 3, a Wednesday, he traversed the slush and ice for half a mile to reach a prominent shoulder, which carried him over frozen scree to a high ridge, where he established a station at 20,000 feet. For once the clouds cleared, and he realized the significance of his discovery: “The valley tends a bit to the south and reaches right past Everest to a pass at the end of its E ridge—vastly bigger than I had imagined.” From its confluence with the main Rongbuk Valley, he estimated, the East Rongbuk reached for some fifteen miles to the very foot of Everest; a single branch of its glacier directly opposite his station stretched to the northeast for five to six miles, reaching toward a tangle of mountains anchored in the far distance by Kharta Changri. To the
southeast, he had a sighting of Makalu, which implies that his vista on this clear afternoon took in as well the Lhakpa La, the high saddle at the head of the Kharta Glacier, which Mallory and Morshead would not see until the morning of August 14. Wheeler returned to camp by 3:30 p.m. after a “glorious glissade down perfect snow, the first I’ve had in this country, about 1000 feet of it.” The porters, he reported in his journal, “funked” at the opportunity. They had never seen someone ski down a mountain on his boots.
The snow began to fall that night and did not let up for thirty-six hours. At noon the next day, August 4, a party of porters appeared out of the storm with supplies and a precious delivery of mail, including delicacies from his wife, Dolly, and some real cigarettes, which he smoked with such fervor that he nearly made himself ill. By the next morning, after a sleepless night, he really was sick, and with three feet of fresh snow on the ground, there was nothing to do but lie in the tent and busy himself with his correspondence. “So long as I can get the lie of the land this side in my head,” he wrote to his wife, “September’s work will be pretty easy. And I think I’m well on the way to it now.” He went on to describe the difficulty of the terrain on the surface of the glacier. Between the lateral moraines the ice formed pinnacles a hundred feet tall, impossible to climb, stacked one upon another for miles. To cross the glacier implied tackling each in turn, struggling up vertical walls only to tumble down on the other side into hollows and ponds of ice water. To cover a mile of ground took him on one occasion four hours, and he and the men were “cooked before we ever started the days work.” The valley, he wrote in a subsequent letter to Dolly that went out on August 6, “runs along the whole north face of Everest, from the north to the east, which I think can be done. The existing map is of course totally wrong.”