It went round and round, this Great Game, all in all a good-natured amusement for gentlemen of leisure who found the settled life tedious. Predictably, for all the blood and treasure expended on the North-West Frontier, when the threat to Britain’s hold on India finally arrived, it would not come in the form of Communist hordes spilling over 20,000-foot passes, led by some latter-day Alexander the Great. It would come from the air.
Focused on connecting one fixed point to the next, Michael had no idea what purpose his maps would serve. But they were now six weeks out of Askole and if they didn’t reach some settlement in another six weeks, they would starve. The Wild phototheodolite was broken. Their boots were in an appalling state. F6’s had lasted the longest. Where the Sherpas had “Om Mane Padme Hum,” Michael had settled upon chants of “onandonandon” and “upandupandup.” Fridtjof Nansen must have chanted the Danish equivalent while crossing Greenland by dogsled, he supposed.
“The further we go, the stronger the Nansen flavour, the only way to safety, ahead,” Michael wrote in his journal. “There is no retreat.”
Camp near Head of the Crevasse Glacier,
Greater Karakoram, August 11, 1937
A shortage of fuel decided it. A party of fifteen couldn’t manage on a pint of paraffin a day. Given all that remained to be surveyed, Shipton decided that they should now split up; one pair to continue due west and the other lay to rest two longstanding geographical controversies concerning two regional legends.
A nineteenth-century explorer named Martin Conway had seen a large pool of smooth white ice out of which mountains rose like islands. He named it “Snow Lake.” A few years later, Dr. and Mrs. Workman, two intrepid Americans, saw Snow Lake from a distance. Perhaps owing to the beauty of Conway’s description the idea arose that Snow Lake was something like an ice cap. The Workmans went further, insisting that a nearby glacier, contrary to every other known glacier, had no outlet, no snout. Other explorers followed, including John Auden in 1933, but none was able to get close enough to investigate.
When Conway questioned the idea of a glacier without an outlet, Dr. Workman angrily told him he should go see for himself before casting aspersions. Grateful for something new to argue about, Tilman championed the Workmans’ position, pleased to call into question scientific expertise and come to the defense of a lady. Auden backed him. Shipton and Spender backed Conway. Michael ridiculed the accuracy of the Workmans’ observations, their atrocious prose, and their amateurish maps. In this way the terrible twins of Shipton and Tilman, of Auden and Spender had an awkward exchange of partners.
Since Tilman was restless to begin preparing for Everest and Auden needed to return to Calcutta in advance of his furlough, Shipton tasked them both with settling the controversy over Snow Lake and the Cornice Glacier before finding their separate ways back home. Shipton knew that John wanted to be chosen for the 1938 Everest expedition. And Tilman shared Auden’s pawky sense of humor. It might have worked.
But no one thought to ask the Baltis. They refused to proceed in any but a southerly direction. This, combined with a broken Primus, left Tilman to solve these geographical riddles alone. Shipton allotted him two Sherpas and twenty-two days of food. Auden, with the four Baltis, was given sufficient food to last twelve. The two men parted at a pass they had discovered together. Had the Baltis not balked, had they had an extra Primus and a week or two alone together, would Tilman have asked Auden to join him on Everest? Perhaps.
Instead, John’s last view of Tilman was upside down through the sights of the theodolite telescope from a survey station at 17,300 feet. Then he turned away from the panorama, away from Tilman and the dream of Everest, to head south. Descending to the Nobande Sobande Glacier he lost a day trying to find a way through a terrifying maze of towering ice pinnacles. His Baltis invoked Allah throughout the night. Early the next morning he sent two of them to prospect a route. They returned jubilant and covered with mud. They raced down, bombarded by boulders released by melting ice. As they reached the snout of the Panmah, a mudflow carrying a 120-ton boulder swept past them. For the Baltis this was “one more proof that God exists and was favorably disposed.” They flew like jailbirds.
Then came the march down valleys, uphill and downhill, through pine forests and over trout-filled streams. Tobacco and eggs were restored to them in Askole. Apricots were plentiful in Skoro La. At Skardu John received three months’ worth of mail, including Carritt’s drunken Darjeeling letter pleading with him to join the Communist cause. Madrid was still holding on but the Japanese Army was now in Peking and Shanghai was on the verge of falling. Closer to home, a massive avalanche had buried seven Germans and nine porters on Nanga Parbat, nearly the entire expedition, in the middle of the night. Karl Wien was among those who had found a lasting repose. John read, too, that Gandhi had finally been granted an audience with Linlithgow. Despite Congress’s assumption of power in the regional ministries, the ban on the Communist Party remained; only the viceroy could remedy that. So it was business as usual for Special Branch on Lord Sinha Road.
John Auden walked in long, fast strides. Milestones passed one after another. A countdown that began with weeks turned to days, then hours, and finally minutes. The last mile passed in a blur of anticipation of Lady Clutterbuck’s food hamper. After the deprivations of glacier work, the exhaustion of carrying a heavy pack over hundreds of miles of inhospitable terrain, England was now his only fixed point.
Junction of Wesm-i-Dur and Snout of the Braldu Glacier,
Greater Karakoram, September 2, 1937
Side by side in their sleeping bags, Shipton talked to Michael of his early climbs in the High Dauphiné, where he first fell in love with mountains. Michael spoke of the impact of Europe on his Englishness. They dreamed of boarding school and the boys and masters they once knew. Some nights, kept awake by Shipton’s perpetual cough, Michael worried about money, wondering whether he could still afford to keep a car.
Shipton and Tilman both shunned the “caviar and aspic” quest for glory. Though Tilman preferred steerage to first class, the recent death of his parents meant he would never have to work again owing to dividends from West Indian sugar. Shipton carried a hundred-pound note in his pocket; Michael never had more than forty shillings in his. He had turned over his Leverhulme Fellowship money to Erica and posted articles to the Spectator from Skardu and Askole for money. John Auden, having no Granny Schuster to call on in a pinch, was even more hard up. The GSI wouldn’t even buy him an ice ax. At the end of the expedition he owed Shipton 250 rupees.
When Shipton pressed him to climb a serious peak, Michael quailed. Wary of approaching clouds, he protested he might lose the lower station if he risked going higher, though a higher station meant more ground covered. He also asked himself if he really felt any closer to the Unspeakable at 20,000 feet. Shipton and Tilman clearly did. But he saw only a chaotic arrangement of peaks, ridge upon ridge of ice and snow and rock, sometimes rising to a misshapen and loutish summit. Truth be told, Michael preferred sailing.
Which pass would lead them to the Braldu Glacier, the one Shipton had stumbled on or the one Michael had? Shipton agreed to try Michael’s in hope that it might spark his interest in exploration. And indeed, the limestone walls of his valley were filled with marine fossils. Michael saw enough whelks, periwinkles, mussels, and sea urchins to be reminded of his beachcombing days on the Great Barrier Reef expedition. But a few days in it dawned on them that their route didn’t meet up with the Braldu Glacier until very near its end and the valley they’d just walked had a name: Wesm-i-Dur. “Whatever that means,” Michael wrote, content to be back among named places. The detour meant an eight-day journey back up the Braldu to complete the survey.
So much for any idea of himself as an explorer.
K2 was once again the world’s most stupid mountain, good for only one thing: a fixed point. But what meaning, he wondered, did the sacrifice and suffering they underwent for the sake of a map really serve? In A Passage to India,
which Michael had been rereading each night, E. M. Forster wrote that babas went to the mountains to submit to rigors that would free them from the curse of property. In Christianity asceticism was undertaken as self-punishment for one’s sins. But Michael was inclined to subscribe to the Tibetan belief that their suffering had no meaning at all. The high mountains were really all about one thing: death. After three months in their grip, the farther he got from them, the happier and more alive he felt.
Adding the last stations to the plane table sheets, Michael joined Shipton in a celebratory meal of two extra large grouse. The next morning they set off down the glacier with the sight of the grass and trees of the Shimshal Valley beckoning them in the distance. Soon they came upon the Braldu River, divided into numerous fast-flowing channels. The farther down they walked, the more its channels proliferated. Eventually, the valley on the other side became too enticing. They decided to try and cross.
On the way over, however, they had a furious argument.
What real difference had the various rulers of India made to the lives of the Baltis? Michael had asked. The Moghuls might have imposed a new religion, the English higher taxes, but what did those amount to in the elementary facts of their existence? Beyond a sound house and sufficient food to eat, Baltis required little. Did they even know who ruled them? Kashmiris filled the role of district officers. The only evidence of English rule he could find was the king’s face on the postage stamp and the baksheesh they had distributed on Coronation Day. “Our big Sahib is being given a golden topee,” Auden had explained in Hindustani. But the Baltis simply thought Shipton was getting a new hat. If the Baltis didn’t care about all that nonsense, why should anyone? They were fooling themselves with this pompous Raj business.
It was at a Copenhagen coffeehouse crowded with Danish explorers in deep conversation that Michael had begun to question the notion of empire. These men shared one idée fixe: that Greenland should “take its place in the modern world.” How might the Eskimo be protected from exploitation and reach the point of doing without the protection of the Danish government? Greenland was a source of rare minerals, but all mining profits were turned over to the literate West Greenland men of mixed Danish and Eskimo blood who administered the country. Michael had been struck by the idea of administering a country entirely for the benefit of the people who lived there. He doubted the same would ever be said of the British Empire.
The British Empire, Shipton countered, was predicated on the belief in the tremendous power of personal example. It was the responsibility of explorers and mountaineers, of superior men like themselves, to establish friendships in foreign lands and be done with talk of politics and war. “Even a philosophy of Empire could be worked out on the basis of personal relationships,” Shipton insisted.
To set oneself up as a paragon of Western civilization or the embodiment of a heroic ideal, Michael countered, was a romantic delusion. Once a person decided what was worth doing—whether that was growing potatoes or mapping the Crevasse Glacier—he should just do it. If Shipton thought climbing Everest worthwhile, he was welcome to it, but it didn’t mean anything more than that. It was a mountain, not a metaphor.
Shipton felt Michael was apt to argue for the delight of it, espousing views he didn’t necessarily hold very firmly. But before he could respond Michael fell with a splash into the Braldu. He lay there for a moment like a beetle upended on his back, arms and legs waving helplessly while the waters washed over him as if in a tremendous hurry to join the Upper Shaksgam fourteen miles downstream. Michael finally emerged on the other side of the river, fully soaked and freezing cold once again.
Three hundred more miles to Srinagar.
38 Upper Park Road, Belsize Park,
London, July 1937
Constance Rosalie Auden had been in the audience at the tiny but packed Mercury Theatre in Notting Hill for the debut of Wystan and Christopher’s play, The Ascent of F6. Wystan was still in Spain and she had been beside herself with a mother’s worry. Christopher Isherwood’s mother was there too, sitting behind E. M. Forster and his friends. When the lights went up Kathleen Bradshaw-Isherwood had seen that the play’s dramatic climax had upset Mrs. Auden. The demon haunting the summit of F6, it developed, was the hero’s mother. It was the Mother who had sent her son to his premature death.
“Poor Mrs. Auden,” she thought.
William Butler Yeats thought the play simply brilliant. His one complaint touched on the Mother demon’s final appearance on the summit. The play wasn’t about the making of a fascist megalomaniac, or an Oedipal struggle. The play was about India. Auden and Isherwood had missed a great opportunity to skewer the British Empire, he wrote the director. The white garments should fall away to show the demon in profile as the face of the Mother Country, a snow-white Britannia on an imperial rocking chair.
“That I think would be good theatre.”
Wystan hadn’t needed to stay long in Spain to see that the Republican cause was not the struggle he took it for. In July 1937 he was back at 38 Upper Park Road when Nancy rang from Cornwall, looking to berate Bill for not answering her letters.
Wystan promised to pass along her “connubial requests.” He had also mentioned an erotic dream in which she figured.
“Up the Old Flag,” he had said.
“That was cheering,” Nancy wrote Louis MacNeice, still heartbroken in the Hebrides.
CHAPTER 12
Taking a Hat off a Mouse
Hotel St. Peter, Zurich, Switzerland,
March 27, 1938
Driving to Zurich from London with Erica, Michael Spender systematically itemized the portents of war. Factories and mines in the Saar district were running three shifts a day. When he asked at a shop for cream he was told no one used cream any longer. Animals were being butchered to save grain, pastures put to plow. The newspapers were so filled with rabid Jew baiting and saber rattling, it was hard to find an intelligible voice. A headline “Have We Still Any Private Life?” castigated those who “missed sitting in cafés and listening to nigger bands.” A good German scorned such Jewish entertainments. Finally, the road to Saarbrucken led down one Adolf Hitler Strasse after another, each town filled with youths in cheap, ill-fitting uniforms. In the wan faces of these young Germans, in their quickness to violence, Michael saw unsettling signs.
Michael knew what Stephen thought was needed. Six days after Hitler’s Anschluss of Austria, the Group Theatre premiered his brother’s play Trial of a Judge to an audience of high-strung leftists. The play concerned a judge presiding over a trial of Communist conspirators. After first siding with the Fascists the judge recants and becomes a Communist, thereby joining the conspirators on the firing line. In the wake of the Anschluss everyone in the audience was presented with the same stark choice. Stephen had made his.
But how did becoming a Communist alter anything? Michael wondered. He ascribed the rise of the Nazis to the failure of England and France to grasp Germany’s desperation and imagined Hitler might welcome a friendly alliance with Britain. At the Alsace border, every seam of Erica’s clothing was minutely fingered for the crackle of hidden papers. It was a sensitive border region, Michael supposed. The mobilization of mines and factories was essential to Germany’s survival, not, as he once thought, the reason for its distress. It was the closeness of French guns that posed the real threat. He admired the punctuality of German trains. Efficiency always impressed Michael.
Still, he was relieved to reach Zurich. The annual spring festival was under way and the city streets were festooned with bunting and alive with parades. Shops were fully stocked. On Sunday night men dressed as clowns carried the Boog, representing Old Man Winter, through a jeering crowd. At sunset he was impaled above his funeral pyre and set alight. But even here, at every banquet table in every guildhall, the talk was of the Anschluss. Fearing they’d be next, the Swiss were anxious to distance themselves. When Churchill pointed out that with Austria gone, the Czechs were isolated, his reception was similar
to Old Man Winter’s. No one wanted to hear it. Though the 1938 expedition was well under way, when Michael and Erica met up with John Auden, in Zurich to confer with an eminent Swiss geologist of the Alps, the subject of Tilman and Shipton’s progress up Everest was quickly dispensed with. Instead, the question that had dogged them since childhood was now on the table. What would they do if there was a war?
As a member of the Calcutta Flying Club, John hoped to join the Royal Air Force as a pilot. Though Michael was leery of flying, he also wanted to join the RAF. The Ordnance Survey had recently completed a three-year triangulation of the British Isles but had contracted the mapmaking to civilian air survey concerns. Michael had argued in the Spectator that private firms were incapable, that the Air Ministry should take charge. Armed with a stereoplotter and a fleet of specially equipped planes, he and the RAF could do for Britain what he had once done for Switzerland.
Erica was far more interested in hearing about John Auden’s search for a wife than listening to Michael go on about the competing qualities of the German and Swiss stereoplotters. She had had enough of being a mapmaker’s wife. After the Karakoram, Michael had stayed on in India for another six months to work on the Shaksgam map. Now, while he worked on his map of the Everest region at the Wild factory, she planned to take the baby and visit her friends in Germany. She no longer understood Michael. They had lost whatever connection they once had.
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