The Last Englishmen

by Deborah Baker

  When they returned with this news, a melee broke out and eventually ten were given their rations and pay and let go. Boots and dark glasses were distributed, then rations, then blankets. Some complained they had no glasses, others that they had no boots. Some had boils, some were snow blind, some lay on the ground holding their heads and groaning in pain. Everyone, Michael noted drily, had a great deal to say. At last all were fixed up and fed. As quiet descended over the camp Michael wondered how the Baltis would survive another night. It rivaled Everest during the monsoons for misery. “Such fun to go exploring!” He and Shipton went over what they would do if there was a revolt in the morning.

  They broke camp before daybreak to try another side valley. By 9:15 Shipton had found a hard shelf from where he was sure he could see the pass. When they reached it, it proved an illusion. The pass was another two miles farther on and some six hundred feet higher in soft snow. They decided to stand between the false and the true pass and beckon the Baltis to cross the snowfield with their loads in order to receive their pay. The Baltis balked, eying a hairy-looking icefall. A standoff ensued until Angtharkay traipsed back and, through some miracle of Sherpa persuasion or dire threat, got them to advance.

  After paying off the mutineers, they were still left stuck in the middle of a pass at 18,650 feet with all their supplies. High winds prevented them from camping there and it was a severe drop to the Sarpo Laggo Glacier. Worse still, there was bloody awful-looking snow on it. Clearly, Michael thought, it was too early to be there. Nonetheless by June 4 Shipton was directing the movement of loads down to Sughet Jangal by the seventeen Baltis who had stuck it out and a few men they had taken on in Skardu. Michael was at his first station; K2 was in his sights, standing out “like a cathedral spire above the roofs of a provincial town.” K2 was the fixed point from which the entire summer survey would grow. To complete the moment John Auden showed up with the news that Tilman and Sen Tensing were on their way. The bandobast was over. The expedition proper had begun.

  Shaksgam Valley to the Aghil Pass,

  Greater Karakoram, June 20, 1937

  All along the path of the Sarpo Laggo Glacier they found remains of encampments, both the rectangular shapes of Younghusband’s tents and the circular rings of nomadic yak herders’. Sheep bones, the jawbone of a horse, and the ruins of a hut were all signs of human habitation. Perhaps Younghusband had been right about an old caravan route, Michael thought. But when was it abandoned and why? After crossing the Shaksgam River they climbed through a narrow defile that opened onto a forked valley, turning west then north. Was this the right way to the Aghil Pass? A single iron nail found underfoot was proof enough for Shipton.

  Suddenly, much sooner than expected, they were upon the crest of the Aghil Range. Below them the ground fell away into a valley and beyond that lay the Upper Yarkand River and the snowcapped mountains of Central Asia. Behind them lay the vast Karakoram. Of this view Younghusband wrote, “There arranged before me across the valley, was a glistening line of splendid peaks, all radiant in the sunshine…. Where I had reached no white man had ever reached before.” For Shipton nothing could spoil the moment.

  Michael, however, was stunned, scanning the horizon behind them in alarm. He had counted on being able to see at least one of the fixed points he had already established. But in the sea of peaks behind him, he couldn’t recognize any of them, not even K2. He had made a tremendous blunder. Back at the Sughet Jangal depot lay the Wild Precision Invar subtense bar in its box alongside its tripod. With the subtense bar he might have measured the distance between K2 and the Aghil indirectly, via an astronomical azimuth and latitude. How many times had Ang Tensing asked him if he needed it? It would be a two-day journey to retrieve it and return.

  And now, when Michael broke the news, Ang Tensing, the most helpful and cheerful bloke of the lot, rebelled: I’m not going, he said. “Na jaayega.” Ang Tensing had nearly been swept away crossing the Shaksgam. He had been severely shaken, having only just managed to hang on to the twenty-two-pound plane table. Where the Baltis were blasé about river crossings, the Sherpas simply hated them. So naturally Ang Tensing was angry. But one of the principal aims of their entire enterprise was to determine the position of the Aghil Pass.

  Well, there it was and Michael was sick about it. They sat down for tea in silence. Finally, he asked Auden to explain in Hindustani. So John Auden made a little speech on why it had been entirely reasonable for Michael to imagine he would see some peak from this height and distance. After a minute of strained silence, Ang Tensing relented.

  “Ham jaenge.” I’ll go.

  More than anything Michael hadn’t wanted to carry any more weight and the subtense bar, made from nickel iron alloy, weighed fourteen pounds. When he realized that they were going to have to carry fifty pounds apiece for the Aghil survey, his heart sank. As it was, he arrived at camp behind the slowest coolie, having turned into a kind of insensible rock plant. But he wasn’t a rock plant; he was a tender sapling. It was the old problem: they weren’t workers; they weren’t natives. Unlike Tilman, they weren’t even soldiers. They were upper middle. Auden agreed.

  Both he and Auden had also left behind their tape measures but rather than confess to this as well, they made do with a tent pole, a rope, and Spender’s slide rule to establish a base.

  Ang Tensing left without turning around to wave good-bye.

  Aghil Pass to the Yarkand River,

  Chinese Turkestan, June 26, 1937

  Heading down from the pass, Michael came across a makeshift shelter. There were lashings of yak shit, remains of abandoned dwellings, and a good source of water. Bedding down within the walls of a roofless hut, sheltered from the wind, gave him a sense of security. It was a relief to be out of the cramped confines that work among the high glaciers involved. He enjoyed being on his own with four Sherpas and a Balti, as he had been on the 1935 Everest reconnaissance. It spared him having to accommodate other people’s idiosyncrasies. He didn’t expect to see Shipton or Tilman for at least a week.

  At times, though, the hoary phrase “His first thought was for the welfare of his men” haunted him. What if they ran out of food? What if his porters refused to share his tent when the rain turned to snow in the night? The Sherpas missed the lavish rations they’d had on Everest and they were already running dangerously low on salt. Michael had come upon a herd of wild sheep that afternoon but Tilman had Auden’s rifle. And of all the vegetables, he would find one—chives—that couldn’t be eaten in quantity. Finally, he knew damn all about where he was but was expected to be decisive about where to camp. Every day he found himself tied into knots over this. After Ang Tensing returned with the subtense bar, he’d tried to get him to weigh in.

  “If we go up it will mean an easier climb tomorrow but a vile camp tonight. What shall we do?” Only to have Ang Tensing reply:

  “Are we staying here or going on?”

  He said quickly, “Going on.”

  There was another worry. Ang Tensing reported the Shaksgam was already rising. There would be an awful row if Shipton didn’t show but a far greater crisis would ensue if they were forced to cross the river on their own. For these reasons it was a relief to have someone to talk to when his route happened to cross John Auden’s a few days later.

  When Auden first joined them in Srinagar, Shipton had teased him about his beard, impressed by his ability to flout Calcutta’s pukka grooming code. Privately, Michael sniggered at his silly hat. Halfway through the march to Askole, he’d asked Auden if he’d ever met Christopher Isherwood.

  “The last time I saw him was the night before my divorce proceedings went through,” Auden had replied. There was then a long silence, giving Michael time to reflect that his reply had the very shape of a sentence by Somerset Maugham. Only a Maugham character would continue his story, not leave his listener hanging. He’d been annoyed. Still, right now he was hoping Auden would reassure him about the river crossing and the ration supply.

  A
fter a brief visit, the two men parted at the foot of a desolate gully-like valley, one that appeared to climb 400 meters every kilometer. At the head of this valley would be Michael’s next station, giving him an entire afternoon to ruminate on his conversation with John Auden.

  The essential quality of life on an expedition, Michael decided, was that it was stimulating, but in predictable ways. There was either something to eat or nothing at all. The temperature was either hot as the blazes or deathly cold. One’s mood was either that of dreading a descent to some nasty river, an ascent to a fearsome height, or rejoicing in a cozy and tidy camp. Finally, the day either threatened you with bad weather or promised clear skies. There was never a moment of indifference.

  In a similar vein, Auden either said too little or too much. When Michael told him what Ang Tensing had said about the rising Shaksgam, he expected to be reassured. Instead, it was if a dam had burst. Auden launched into his own anxious litany about the river. And on the subject of running short of rations, Auden told him he had left a Balti in charge of his tent for two days while he and Lhakpa reconnoitered the no-man’s-land bordering the Upper Yarkand River and the Balti had eaten more than his share of rations. To this he added another concern. Lhakpa had seen two Yarkandi boys tending a flock of goats on the far side of the river. They were all now at risk of capture by Chinese border patrols.

  Shipton and Tilman were not expected back from their high stations until July 3, Michael reflected. He should have told Auden that wits and a rope would get them across the Shaksgam and if someone drowned, well, it couldn’t be helped, but why not wait before starting to grumble? And there was no use in pointing out the flaws in Shipton’s running of an expedition. It was his show. Michael decided that Auden suffered from the neurotic’s habit of fretting about things that couldn’t be helped, conveniently forgetting that he had been fretting about the same things.

  After settling these matters, not even the ever-multiplying lice in his shirt could keep him from sleeping.

  Junction of Sarpo Laggo and Crevasse Glaciers,

  Greater Karakoram, July 19, 1937

  George Mallory wasn’t the only graduate of trench warfare to find solace in the high mountains. To walk roped to another man, along a high ridge, a precipice on one side, a snowy slope falling away on the other, felt both familiar and necessary to Bill Tilman. At high altitudes the deep sleep of exhaustion kept nightmares at bay. The endless rigors settled the soul. Peace might be found sitting on a mountaintop with a pipe looking out over an undulating cloud cover, or at a fireside slurping tea in the company of younger, more lighthearted, men.

  Because of his successful ascent of Nanda Devi in 1936, that past March Tilman had been elected by a jury of his peers (Shipton among them) to lead the next attempt on Everest. On his return from the Karakoram he would be choosing his team. Tilman may have appeared misanthropic and crusty, but on Nandi Devi he’d had a strong rapport with the young Americans who accompanied him. Until the 1935 reconnaissance of Everest, he’d had that with Shipton. But he never found his feet that year. Plagued by altitude sickness and nameless fevers, he fell behind while Shipton shot ahead of him, disappearing into the mists. In the Aghil Range they had recovered their easy rhythm. Yet the day after recrossing the Shaksgam (which went smoothly after all the fretting) and starting up the Crevasse Glacier, their settled arrangement began to shift.

  Of the glaciers that met at Sughet Jangal, the Crevasse was the largest. It ran like a sclerotic east–west artery across the Karakoram with major branches leading off north and south. The third part of the survey would bring them down the Crevasse to those glaciers lying between the Sarpo Laggo Valley and the Shimshal Pass in the far west. This area alone was about 1,000 square miles. From Shimshal they would make their way back to Srinagar. On July 17 all the porters were mustered to help Shipton and Tilman shift their food and supplies from the Sughet Jangal depot to another some distance up the Crevasse.

  Michael had a hellish time managing without his Sherpas. When his tent flooded with glacier melt he’d had to move to a more uncomfortable spot on higher ground. Then there was the damned business of getting a fire going. He’d had to use a bit of his precious plane table sheets to get it started. And doing his own cooking and washing up prevented him from adding the angles and fixed points they had all amassed to his sheets.

  Tilman had no patience for Michael’s carping about the sparse rations and the disgusting food, often breaking out in hysterical fits of laughter by way of a reply. These fits mystified Michael. As for survey work, Tilman regarded it much as “not too patient uncle might regard his nephews playing trains on the table on which he was shortly expecting his lunch.” He preferred climbing without the nuisance of heavy survey equipment. So when Michael started in on not being able to put the finishing touches on his plane table sheets because his Sherpas were otherwise occupied, Tilman finally lost it.

  “If everyone was carrying bloody heavy loads up,” Tilman had raged, “we’d be doing double relays instead of treble.” Tilman obviously expected Michael to help with the ferrying of supplies and was furious when he acted as though he was meant for more important tasks (Auden was suffering from fever). But once again Michael was baffled by what F6 was going on about. When Tilman protested at how the scientific nonsense was holding them up, did that mean he wanted to go home? When Shipton got to this incident in his expedition narrative, he mentioned only that extreme isolation could impose a considerable strain on a party. He later claimed it was the scientists who needed to be kept apart, but that was disingenuous.

  Shipton was a man of great focus. His thoughts on the people who lived in the foothills revolved around how suitable they proved as porters, what food they had to offer, and how likely they were to importune him for baksheesh. While he admired and respected the Sherpas, he was doubtful they would ever achieve the technical competence of the best Alpine guides. The following year Tenzing Norgay would note that when a porter became dazed at Camp 4 on Everest’s North Col, though Shipton was in charge of the camp, he had left him there. Tenzing did not think that was right. Sherpas had been known to keep the dying company, even if it meant certain death. Eventually Tilman, descending from a higher camp and with the assistance of other Sherpas, helped the man reach safety.

  Finally, though Shipton respected scientific expertise more than Tilman did, it was an abstract respect. He didn’t pretend to understand what Auden was doing with his rock hammer. Maps, however, he knew. The thrill of summit seeking with Tilman paled beside the opportunity to fill in a blank space marked “unexplored.” While he might write vivid descriptions of landscapes and the feelings they evoked in him, only plane tables, subtense bars, and theodolites could deliver a map that would accurately convey the high concentration of dangerous peaks and glaciers of the Karakoram. And for that he needed Michael Spender.

  More to the point, topographical maps of sensitive border regions, where the line between one country and another was imprecise, were of particular interest to those with a say in funding expeditions. The Sino-Burmese Frontier Commission had recently demarcated Burma’s border with China. In his grant application, Shipton argued that the Shaksgam region had equal geopolitical importance; identifying the exact location of Aghil Pass was a critical security task. In a calculating aside, he mentioned that Soviet agents were said to have shown up in the capital of Chinese Turkestan. Rumors of Soviet agents always got attention from the ministry for border security, the Foreign and Political Department.

  For his Royal Geographical Society audience, Shipton made a more sentimental appeal. With so much of the Himalaya untrammeled, he argued, exploration should take precedence over summit seeking. Shipton may have accepted the notion that the mountaineer’s desire to climb ever higher peaks was being exploited to further imperial or jingoistic ends, but the enduring attraction of being the first man, the first nation to take a summit remained irresistible, even for him. He struggled to hit the right note but ended back on the expe
cted one. Only if undertaken in “the right spirit” could tackling Everest “demonstrate our modern superiority!”

  Bill Tilman wanted no part of Shipton’s “modern superiority.” The advantages of the Western way of life were far from obvious to him. On the 1935 Everest reconnaissance, he had viewed the dzongpen of Sar’s wariness of Western ways as a testament to the native wisdom of the Tibetans. And what was the value of a precise border where before there had been a vague one? Did such specificity deter the invader or provide reason for a scrap? Why couldn’t the exact location of passes, the intimate knowledge of mountains, and the seasonal ebb and flow of rivers be left to the memories of goatherds?

  As a young subaltern fresh out of the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, Winston Churchill asked himself similar questions. On the one hand he saw no profit in the holding of garrisons on the Afghan border. It was a blunder to have made a stand there. Let the devil hill tribes take out their devilry on one another, he wrote. On the other hand, the strategic importance of high passes was undeniable. A Russian force descending from Chitral would have an easy way to Jalalabad. If they didn’t make a stand there, a Russian agent would make it his business to get the hill tribes to make a stand against the British.

  “Can you ever, having advanced against Asiatics, safely retire?” asked G. W. Steevens, Churchill’s favorite Victorian journalist. What was there to show for these border wars? Only more wars, equally inconclusive, one after another. No sooner had they crowned one height than another rose up in front of them. And as Chitral was just one tiny point on a long, infinitely tangled frontier, “it was precisely thus that the frontier lures you on.” The English might show the hill tribes how they could occupy their valleys by driving them into the winter snows to freeze to death. Or they might exterminate the lot outright. Then again that might draw Russia into the void. And if the Indian Army engaged the Russian on the frontier, there would be mutiny among the disaffected at their rear, in India.