Into The Silence

by Wade Davis

  For insights concerning the charismatic lama of Rongbuk, Dzatrul Rinpoche, I had both his spiritual autobiography, the namthar translated by Lama Urgyen, and Barbara Aziz’s superb book Tibetan Frontier Families, which grew out of extensive interviews with Tibetans from Tingri and the Everest region living in exile in Kathmandu. Also of great interest is the work of Sherry Ortner. See: Sherpas Through Their Rituals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), High Religion: A Cultural and Political History of Sherpa Buddhism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), and Life and Death on Mt. Everest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). For a lovely book of reflection, evocative of the spiritual life in the monasteries founded by Dzatrul Rinpoche, see: Hugh Downs, Rhythms of a Himalayan Village (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980).

  For E. O. Wheeler and the Canadian photographic survey technique, see: Don Thomson, Men and Meridians: The History of Surveying and Mapping in Canada, vol. 2, 1867–1917 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1967); A. O. Wheeler, “The Application of Photography to the Mapping of the Canadian Rocky Mountains,” Canadian Alpine Journal, vol. 11 (1920), pp. 76–96; E. O. Wheeler, “The Canadian Photo-Topographical Method of Survey,” Royal Engineers Journal (April 1922), pp. 177–85; “Report on the Trial of the Canadian Report on Photo-Topographical Method of Survey,” unpublished manuscript Royal Engineer Library, Mt Everest Operations of the Survey Dept, 1921 (97206); and The Survey of India During War and Early Reconstruction, 1939–1946 (Dehra Dun: Survey of India, 1955).

  8: Eastern Approaches

  For the unraveling of the Raj between the wars, see: Arthur Herman, Gandhi & Churchill (New York: Bantam, 2008). For the natural history and geology of the Everest region, with special reference to the Arun drainage and the eastern approaches to the mountain, see: Edward Cronin, The Arun (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979); and Toni Hagen, G. O. Dyhrenfurth, C. H. von Fürer-Haimendorf, and Erwin Schneider, Mount Everest (London: Oxford University Press, 1963). For the culture of the Sherpas and the cross-border trade between Tibet and Nepal, see: Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, The Sherpas of Nepal (London: John Murray, 1964), Himalayan Traders (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975), and The Sherpas Transformed (New Delhi: Sterling, 1984). If the British introduction of the potato brought new wealth to the Sherpas of Solu Khumbu, the rise of international mountaineering transformed their identity, for better and for worse. See: Vincanne Adams, Tigers of the Snow (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Jonathan Neale, Tigers of the Snow (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2002); and Tashi Tenzing, Tenzing Norgay and the Sherpas of Everest (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001).

  9: The North Col

  For a complete account of Morshead and Wollaston’s journey to Nyenyam, see Wollaston’s “An Excursion to Nyenyam and Lapche Kang,” in Mount Everest: The Reconnaissance 1921, pp. 281–89. For more on Lapche, see: Keith Dowman, The Sacred Life of Tibet (London: Thorsons, 1997), and Lobsang Lhalungpa, The Life of Milarepa (New York: Dutton, 1977). For progress reports on the expedition, see: “Mount Everest Expedition,” Geographical Journal, vol. 58, no. 3 (September 1921), pp. 225–26, and “Mount Everest Expedition,” Geographical Journal, vol. 58, no. 6 (December 1921), pp. 446–54. For publication of the first photographs sent from the mountain, see: “Mount Everest Expedition,” Geographical Journal, vol. 58, no. 4 (October 1921), pp. 276–83.

  Mallory and Howard-Bury were as oil and water. “Frankly I was quite glad Bury was away,” Mallory wrote after Howard-Bury left Kharta for the Kama Valley. “I can’t get over my dislike of him.” Mallory cared only for the climb. Howard-Bury’s proudest achievement, as he wrote to Younghusband, was the discovery in the valley of the fourteen lakes of a “deep claret coloured meconopsis,” a species of poppy, quite possibly new, “growing from two to two and a half feet high and covered with fifteen to twenty flowers growing up the stem.”

  As the expedition finally came to grips with the mountain, reaching the heights of the Lhakpa La and facing the ordeal of the North Col, the men were exposed to brutal cold and winds as violent as any experienced by polar explorers. Everest folklore suggests that they endured these conditions pathetically underequipped, dressed in tweeds, as the story goes. In fact, they had the very latest gear, and it was not insubstantial. For a fascinating review of the development of mountaineering equipment and clothing, with a discussion of what was available in 1921–24, see: Mike Parsons and Mary Rose, Invisible on Everest (Philadelphia: Northern Liberties Press, 2003).

  When Mallory recalled first seeing the Kangshung, or East Face, of Everest, two vertical miles of hanging ice, he famously wrote, “Other men, less wise, might attempt this way if they would, but, emphatically, it was not for us.” The East Face would not be climbed until 1983, thirty years after Hillary and Tenzing’s ascent. That successful climb, by an American expedition led by James Morrissay, was followed in 1988 by a four-man American-British team that pioneered a route up the South Buttress to the South Col. Among the climbers were Stephen Venables and Ed Webster, who lost several fingers to the frost. Both have written wonderful books, and Venables, in particular, has emerged as one of the finest mountaineering writers. See: Stephen Venables, Everest: Kangshung Face (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989), Everest: Alone at the Summit (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), and Everest: Summit of Achievement (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003); and Ed Webster, Snow in the Kingdom (Eldorado Springs: Mountain Imagery, 2000).

  Reaching the summit of Everest today virtually implies that a book celebrating the effort will follow. Most of these recall why the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss dismissed travel books as “grocery lists and lost dog stories.” But among the scores of mountaineering books on Everest and the high Himalaya are some that are truly memorable. For the wonderful writings of Frank Smythe, see: The Kangchenjunga Adventure (London: Victor Gollancz, 1930), Kamet Conquered (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1932), The Spirit of the Hills (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1935), Camp Six (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1937), The Adventures of a Mountaineer (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1940), and The Mountain Vision (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1941). For the first successful aerial reconnaissance, see: P. F. M. Fellowes, L. V. S. Blacker, and P. T. Etherton, First Over Everest: The Houston–Mount Everest Expedition, 1933 (New York: Robert McBride, 1934). For the 1963 American success, see: Americans on Everest (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1964). For classic accounts by three of the greatest Everest climbers of the modern era, see: Chris Bonington and Charles Clarke, Everest: The Unclimbed Ridge (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1983); Chris Bonington, The Everest Years (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1986), and Everest (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002); Thomas Hornbein, Everest: The West Ridge (Seattle: Mountaineers, 1989); Reinhold Messner, Everest: Expedition to the Ultimate (London: Random House, 1979), and The Crystal Horizon (Ramsbury: Crowood Press, 1989).

  Harold Raeburn could not get a break. That he had walked across the flooded landscape of Tibet to rejoin the party counted for little; his failure to bring the mail invoked the wrath of all. “Raeburn’s capacity for being tiresome is unlimited,” wrote Mallory to Geoffrey Young. “Raeburn like a mug didn’t bring the mail on,” noted Wheeler in his journal, “much to everyone’s disgust.” Bullock lamented, “Raeburn, who looks very grizzled, passed our mails and stores at Chushar, but did nothing to bring them on!” The missing mail had become an obsession. On September 8, 1921, Wheeler noticed a familiar figure climbing up the slope on the far side of the river, across from his camp in the upper Kharta Valley. He shouted but could not be heard. The man turned and gestured. It was Morshead’s colleague from the survey party, Gujjar Singh, who had been mapping the country north of Kharta. They were all old soldiers, so Wheeler wrapped a white towel around his ice ax and for more than thirty minutes communicated with Singh, signaling in Morse code. “Our hopes were raised when he started ‘mail,’ ” Wheeler later wrote his wife, “but they fell when the next word was ‘not’ and continued ‘arrived at Kharta yet.’”

  For Heron’s corr
espondence with the Mount Everest Committee, see: RGS Box 11, File 4, and Box 27, File 3. For formal acknowledgment of Wheeler’s discovery of the East Rongbuk route to the North Col, see: “Mount Everest Expedition,” Geographical Journal, vol. 58, no. 5 (November 1921), pp. 371–78. See also: J. N. Collie, “The Mount Everest Expedition,” Alpine Journal, vol. 34, no. 223 (November 1921), pp. 114–17. The return of the last of the party to Britain and the formal end to the 1921 reconnaissance was announced in “Mount Everest Expedition,” Geographical Journal, vol. 59, no. 1 (January 1922), pp. 50–51.

  10: The Summit of Their Desires

  John Morris served with the 1st Battalion of the 5th Leicester Regiment in 1915–18 and then with the 3rd Battalion of the 9th Gurkhas. For his early life and his war experience, see Hired to Kill, as well as Christopher Moore’s Trench Fever, a haunting account of his grandfather’s frontline experiences in the same regiment in which Morris served. See also: J. D. Hills, The Fifth Leicester (Loughborough: Echo, 1919), and the war diaries of the 1st Battalion of the 5th Leicester Regiment (TNA: PRO WO 95/2690). Morris’s impressive military record, on deposit at the British Library Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections, India Office Records (IOR), belies the self-deprecating style of his memoir (IOR: Service Record L/MIL/14/16968). Commissioned into the Indian Army on July 29, 1918, Morris served with the 9th Gurkhas until October 27, on which date he reported for duty with the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Gurkhas, then stationed in Haifa (TNA: PRO WO 95/4689). For his active service as part of the Waziristan Field Force in 1921, including an account of the ambush that resulted in the slaughter of his force, see the 2nd Battallion, 3rd Gurkha Rifles War Diary (TNA: PRO WO 95/5399). Morris, the only more or less openly homosexual member of the Everest expeditions, was very close to E. M. Forster. Their letters, from the early 1930s to the late 1960s, are in the E. M. Forster Collection, King’s College Archives, Cambridge University. For Morris’s correspondence with the Everest Committee, see: RGS Box 31, File 3. For his ethnographic work, see: John Morris, Living with Lepchas (London: Heinemann, 1938). See also: John Morris, A Winter in Nepal (London: Rupert Hart, 1964), and W. Brooke Northey and John Morris, The Gurkhas (London: John Lane, 1928).

  For the formal announcement of those selected for the 1922 expedition, see: “The Mount Everest Expedition,” Geographical Journal, vol. 59, no. 3 (March 1922), p. 207. With the men en route for India, the RGS and the Alpine Club published the results of the 1921 effort. See: C. K. Howard-Bury, “The Mount Everest Expedition,” Geographical Journal, vol. 59, no. 2 (February 1922), pp. 81–99; George Leigh Mallory, “Mount Everest Expedition: The Reconnaissance,” Geographical Journal, vol. 59, no. 2 (February 1922), pp. 100–11, and “The Mount Everest Maps and Photographs,” Geographical Journal, vol. 59, no. 2 (February 1922), pp. 131–36. For papers read at the joint meeting of the RGS and at Queen’s Hall December 20, 1921, see: C. K. Howard-Bury, “The 1921 Mount Everest Expedition,” Alpine Journal, vol. 34, no. 224 (May 1922), pp. 195–214; and George Leigh Mallory, “Mount Everest: The Reconnaissance,” Alpine Journal vol. 34, no. 224 (May 1922), pp. 215–27.

  The discussion concerning the use of oxygen was ongoing. See: “The Mount Everest Expedition,” Geographical Journal, vol. 59, no. 5 (May 1922), pp. 379–83; and P. J. H. Unna, “The Oxygen Equipment of the 1922 Everest Expedition,” Alpine Journal, vol. 34, no. 224 (May 1922), pp. 235–50. See also: Arthur Hinks, “The Mount Everest Maps and Photographs,” Alpine Journal, vol. 34, no. 224 (May 1922), pp. 228–35; A. M. Heron, “Geological Results of the Mount Everest Expedition, 1921,” Geographical Journal, vol. 59, no. 6 (June 1922), pp. 418–36, and A. F. R. Wollaston, “The Natural History of Southwest Tibet,” Geographical Journal, vol. 60, no. 1 (July 1922), pp. 5–20.

  Colin Crawford was commissioned as second lieutenant on March 26, 1915, and from November 27, 1916, he was in Mesopotamia with the 2nd Battalion, 5th Gurkhas. His medical officer was Richard Hingston, who would later serve in the same capacity on the 1924 Everest expedition. The men were together in the field for several months, until Hingston took ill and was invalided out of the war zone. On March 10, 1917, Crawford was sent to reinforce the 1st Battalion, 2nd Gurkhas, and after June 1, 1917, to the 1st Battalion, 6th Gurkhas at Aziziya. For war diaries, see: 2/5 Gurkhas (TNA: PRO WO 95/5197); 1/2 Gurkhas (TNA: PRO WO 95/5180); 1/6 Gurkhas (TNA: PRO WO 95/5020, TNA: PRO WO 95/5024). See also: F. J. Moberly, Official History of the Great War: The Campaign in Mesopotamia, 1914–1918, vol. 3 (London: HMSO, 1925). In 1940, with Britain under siege, Crawford as a schoolmaster and member of the Home Guard led night patrols of boys, searching for German saboteurs. In place of a revolver, he carried a “villainous looking kukri,” the stealth weapon of choice of the Gurkha regiments. For Crawford’s correspondence with the Everest Committee, see: RGS Box 13, File 4.

  Geoffrey Bruce, commissioned in August 1914, served alongside his father, Lieutenant Colonel G. T. Bruce, the brother of General Charles Bruce of Everest fame, in the Glamorgan Yeomanry. For his army record, see TNA: PRO WO 374/10236. His unit reached Egypt on March 3, 1916; on October 5, 1916, his father became commanding officer (TNA: PRO WO 95/4427). On February 2, 1917, the Glamorgan Yeomanry was absorbed as part of the 24th Battalion, Welsh Regiment. Bruce served in Egypt and Palestine until he joined the 6th Gurkha Rifles in July 1917, destined for deployment to the North-West Frontier. For accounts of skirmishes, pitched battles, and British pacification efforts led by Bruce, see: D. G. J. Ryan, History Record of the 6th Gurkha Regiment, vol.1, 1817–1919 (Aldershot: Gale and Polden, 1925), and H. R. K. Gibbs, History Record of the 6th Gurkha Regiment, vol. 2, 1919–1948 (Aldershot: Gale and Polden, 1955).

  For Bruce’s record in the Indian Army, see: IOR L/MIL/14/607. His annual performance review for 1920 describes a soldier not “decidedly above or below average in any respect as to call for special notice.” He was not recommended for accelerated promotion, and his name did not make the “Selected List” for the Staff College. In 1923, by contrast, in the wake of his great success on Everest, the Annual Confidential Report describes Bruce as “an exceptionally brilliant officer … His record as a member of the Mount Everest Expedition last year, marks him as a born leader and as possessed of the greatest determination, endurance and self reliance.” Recommended immediately for the Staff College, Bruce would in time attain the rank of major general and serve as deputy chief of staff of the Indian Army. For him, as for many, Everest had indeed been a good career move. For his correspondence with the Everest Committee, see: Box 36, File 3, and Box 22, File 3.

  Many documents pertaining to Tom Longstaff are preserved at the Alpine Club Archives. See especially: P44 Longstaff Papers; Geoffrey Winthrop Young Correspondence; B49 Miscellaneous Correspondence. D57 contains a set of personal diaries, including the one he kept from February 16 through July 18, 1922. It begins on the eve of his departure for India and ends when finally, suffering from phlebitis, he reaches home, having endured Hinks’s tirade at the RGS in London on the morning of July 17. Longstaff’s journal is really a series of short notes, with as many as three days covered on a page. It is not nearly as comprehensive as the diary of George Finch (National Library of Scotland, Manuscripts Collection), which begins on March 3, as he leaves Victoria Station, and ends in Bombay on July 1, as he embarks on the P&O Macedonia for home. But together with Wakefield’s journal, these diaries provide a fascinating lens on the 1922 expedition.

  Colonel Strutt, a career officer, has a large army file (TNA: PRO WO 339/12240); it includes correspondence concerning his rescue of the Austrian royal family. For more on the controversy and the wrath of Curzon, see: TNA: PRO WO 371/6102. Strutt sailed for France on September 9, 1914. In command of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Scots, 8th Brigade, 3rd Division, he was wounded at Vieille-Chapelle on October 15, during the retreat from Mons. For the war diary of the 2nd Royal Scots, including a report of Strutt being wounded, see: TNA: PRO WO 95/1423. For his medical board proceedings on October 26, see: TNA: PRO WO 339/12240. For his correspo
ndence with the Everest Committee, see: RGS Box 18, File 2. For additional correspondence, see: Alpine Club Archives, Geoffrey Winthrop Young Collection and F7 Strutt Papers.

  Arthur Wakefield’s 1922 Everest diary begins on Sunday, February 26, and ends on Saturday, September 30, 1922. It is a record of a man far more active and engaged than the disparaging remarks by General Bruce and Finch after the expedition would suggest. With Longstaff hors du combat, Wakefield stepped in as an effective and hardworking medical officer. For a fascinating review, see: Ronald Bayne, “Dr. Arthur Wakefield on Mount Everest in 1922: ‘This Has Not Been by Any Manner of Means a Picnic,’” Journal of Medical Biography, vol. 11 (2003), pp. 150–55. For Wakefield on the death of the Sherpas in 1922, see: “The Everest Disaster: Dr. Wakefield’s Experience,” Times, January 22, 1923.