The Last Englishmen

by Deborah Baker

  The rumor was that Protap and Bharat, Ratna’s only sons, had their English education cut short after Kitty’s sudden death. A heart attack, it was said, brought on from worry over Ratna’s drinking and debts. The mansion on Park Street was sold: each of the six Bonnerjee children received a small settlement. Protap had a “grace and favor” job but was more likely found at the racecourse and the establishments of Karaya Road. Only one of his four sisters was married. Bharat was said to be cuckoo. When Bharat looked as if he were about to say something, Protap told him to shut up, scarcely pausing long enough to take a breath.

  “I say—you must have another drink. You Reverend Scott, you Mr. Auden. What will you have?” He flagged a distant waiter.

  “Boy! Brandy lao!”

  “No really. I think I’ve had enough,” Reverend Scott said.

  “Oh no you must drink with us.” He shouted again. “Boy! Brandy lao!”

  But they couldn’t. Protap invited them back to the family flat for brandy. More excuses were produced; Protap didn’t give in easily.

  “Well, can I phone you?” he finally said.

  “By all means,” Reverend Scott said, graciously. They said their good-byes.

  Protap Bonnerjee was yet another instance of all that England had to answer for, John and Reverend Scott agreed as they stepped out. At nearly the same time, they brought up Sudhin. Only Sudhin managed to sustain a dignity and inner integrity, preserving the best qualities of both Europe and India. They didn’t think to ask themselves whether his poise, artfully balanced between one civilization and another, could survive a war.

  Reflecting on Protap’s melancholy fate, John Auden gained a little purchase on his own. The Christmas holidays were fast approaching and as memories of Nancy receded, he began to think more fondly about the woman in Brussels who had turned down his marriage proposal the previous Christmas. Perhaps he had shortchanged her. Unlike Nancy she was never impatient and there was never any fear of disaster in bed. More simply: she had been kind. Perhaps if Sudhin wouldn’t accompany him to the Garhwal, he would invite her instead.

  When Betty Boggins arrived in Calcutta Sudhin regretted not having taken John up on his invitation to the mountains. What was John thinking? But he kept quiet. On New Year’s Day John took Betty to Barrackpore. With dhows with lateen sails and dhoti-clad helmsmen, Barrackpore was one of Calcutta’s most picturesque sights. Betty was so taken with the spectacle she said if his marriage proposal was still good, she would now accept. As soon as John produced a ring, she mentioned that her father would need to see his divorce papers. It was perhaps then that John dimly recalled that his last visit to Barrackpore had been with Margaret. He was flying blind once again.

  Two weeks later they were motoring across the cool plains, skirting the edge of Nepal before tacking north. A water supply problem in the Aravalli Range twelve hundred kilometers to the south diverted him, but he was soon back north writing up his report. In Roorkee there was a map of London on the wall of his room. Nancy’s new address on Provost Road was near the shortcut they often took to Regent’s Park, he noted. Suddenly, an urgent memory of Nancy’s red dressing gown eclipsed all thought of water supply problems and Betty in the next room.

  When he fell ill on their arrival at Lansdowne Betty brought him steaming cups of tea, lined up the pencils on his desk, and arranged his books in a tidy stack on the bedside table. John received her ministrations meekly, wondering if this was the fever that would finish him off. Sweating through the sheets, fading in and out of sleep, he was dimly aware of a profusion of darlings and dearests wafting about him on a breeze of eau de cologne. Betty, efficiently plumping his pillows, had decided their wedding would be in late July, followed by a honeymoon in Ceylon. She would assemble her trousseau in Brussels while he finished up whatever it was he did.

  When he began feeling better he became ruthlessly eager for Betty to be off. Outside his window the familiar white peaks of the High Himalaya beckoned him. He studied the blueprints of the new maps of the Nelang-Gangotri region. He hoped to bring his structural study of the Garhwal up to the Tibet border. The day after Betty left a letter from the GSI arrived, asking him if he would be interested in a long-term posting in Afghanistan. A secret reserve of coal near the Oxus River needed mapping. A flight to Kabul, a three-week march through the Hindu Kush, an indefinite number of months spent mapping coalfields near the Russian border suddenly sounded infinitely more exciting than marriage. John cabled yes, he would be only too glad, only to hear back that nothing might come of it. The GSI would be in touch.

  He was off to his mountains.

  Hoping to spark some conviviality at an evening halt, he threw a campfire party for the porters who’d come with him from Lansdowne, supplying several gallons of local spirits and three Hurkiya women to sing and dance. He dressed one of his porters in Wystan’s Chinese dressing gown and invited him to open the festivities. By custom men were there to sing and clap sticks together, not dance, so the Hurkiya stalked off, insulted. Inevitably the men followed them and failed to turn up the next day.

  That evening he’d had to sleep on straw in a flea-infested village hut. That, the 103-degree heat, and the Potu fly bites that peppered his face, arms, and legs meant he arrived in the sacred confluence town of Devprayag, where the Ganges met the Bhagirathi River, in a foul mood. A letter from Eric Shipton awaited him, expressing hope John might still join him in the Karakoram for their sixteen-month survey expedition. He was sorry to have missed speaking with him about it while he was in London. There was also a wire from Betty, sent from the Bombay docks, professing her love and perpetual devotion.

  Christ, he thought.

  If the GSI missed him at Harsil he would stop at Gangotri on the twentieth of June. After declining Shipton’s invitation and cabling Betty to suggest they postpone their wedding, he was off again.

  Sachthol Bad Balgach, Switzerland,

  April 29, 1939

  Michael Spender could never escape the thought that, at least when compared to a well-maintained machine, a man’s mind was a second-rate device. Hard work, accurate measurements, and the right instruments had gotten him far in life. Yet he had begun to suspect that such things offered little in the way of answers to the questions that really mattered. Personal happiness, for a start. He had met Karl Jung the previous year sailing back from India. Over the course of their passage, Dr. Jung outlined his theory of the collective unconscious. Michael was sufficiently taken with it to submit himself to a course of Jungian analysis on his return to London.

  It was not a success. He’d had to ask Stephen to answer the analyst’s questions about his childhood as he recalled very little of it. After that he’d resigned himself to being shut out of ordinary, instinctual understandings that other people seemed to grasp quite readily. He called this capacity “the elusive element,” and imagined that it helped explain certain human behaviors, such as Nancy’s rages or Tilman’s hysterical laughter, or Erica’s neediness, he found unfathomable. His analyst had advised him not to get involved with anyone unless that person had a placid nature. That ruled out Nancy. So he’d left London for a placid village in Switzerland where the Wild factory was located.

  From 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Michael and Shipton fitted the photograph pairs from the 1935 reconnaissance of Everest into a Wild A5 stereoautograph. The Wild A5 was an advance upon the stereoplotter he’d worked with in Zurich in 1931 as it accommodated the crow’s-eye view of aerial photography. The A5 minimized the distortions of magnified aerial photographs automatically, thereby enabling him to make use of the 1933 Everest flight survey strips that had been gathering dust at the RGS. Combined with the photographs taken on the 1935 reconnaissance, he could finally draw Everest’s Felszeichnung. Sitting beneath the A5’s high arch of olive-green steel, his eyes watched for the moment when the split pairs aligned themselves in the viewfinder and Everest was brought into the room. Raising the pairs brought different elevations and bands of rock into sharp focus, as if h
e were climbing the North Face himself.

  If only he could see himself as clearly. If only he had a black box to automate the calculations involved in mapping a way forward in his life. He saw his prospects for happiness slipping away like sand in an hourglass. At 4:00 a.m. on May 13, 1939, Michael was expected at the Marseilles dock to join Shipton for his sixteen-month survey expedition in the Karakoram. The reckless possibility of begging off was stayed by the thought of Hinks’s fury, Shipton’s disappointment, and unemployment.

  Michael decided to send letters off to Hinks and Shipton, reference the current war scares, and express concern at being away from Europe at this critical time. These would be followed a week later by a “definite decree of non-cooperation.” But before he had time to post the second batch he had a blistering note from Hinks telling him his only “duty” was to the Karakoram. Shipton was sick at the thought of losing him. But then the rest of Czechoslovakia fell to Hitler and an English civil air survey concern offered him a job plotting an aerial survey of the Iraq oil fields. Oil was the new coal.

  Shipton left for the Karakoram without him.

  Unnamed Pass between Rudagaira Valley and Gatling Glacier,

  18,200 feet, June 29, 1939

  On his arrival in Harsil to continue his structural study, John Auden realized it was a year to the day he’d flown from Zurich to see Nancy. How eagerly he had anticipated their reunions! And what disasters had lain in wait. Beset with longing and loneliness, and under the influence of some very strong chhang, John tried to fathom the truth about love.

  For the women on Karaya Road sex was not a sacrifice, a gift, or a dream of a leafy bower. It was a straightforward matter, its price known in advance and its success guaranteed. What an ecstasy it was to be freed of the fetters of respectability for an hour! He left the beds of these women lighthearted, unaccompanied by a sense of loss. But with Betty the price of love had kept rising. The chhang awakened memories he had tried to stifle, assaulting him like a fusillade. There were her yes darlings, no darlings, and my-goodness-gracious-mes. There were her atrocious dresses and letters filled with mysterious nothings. That time she put Beethoven on the gramophone, timing it for his return like a scene from a Hollywood film. The oppressively silent hours she had spent studying her fingernails, the Krishnamurthy on her bedside table aside a volume of Rupert Brooke marked with red silk tabs, all the while his loan of Frank Smythe’s account of his triumph on Kamet remained unopened.

  It got worse. The time she had sat with her legs carelessly apart, exposing her pussy.

  Exposing her pussy!

  The night before Betty left Lansdowne he’d had a dream in which he was in a motorcar racing up a dark mountain road. Signs written in Hindustani loomed out of the darkness, only to disappear behind him before he could make out what they said. What on earth had possessed him to agree to marry her? It was a failure of courage. He would have to live with that. “It had better never be,” he wrote in his journal a few days after leaving Harsil.

  There was still no reply from Betty. And Afghanistan had fallen through.

  The Jadh Ganga Valley in the upper Garhwal was a meeting ground of Shiva and the Buddha. Here lichen-crusted gompas and Shiva lingams coexisted peacefully. Boundary pillars, on the other hand, those heathen idols worshipped by Survey of India pundits, were constantly being uprooted and moved. To John’s eye the valley, with its arid wastes and rock spirals, was unquestionably Tibetan. But when had the character of a landscape ever determined the location of a border? Mapmakers drew the lines, boundary pillars marked them, and soldiers defended them.

  The new maps didn’t cover his intended route, so John had to guess which pass wouldn’t find him crossing into Tibet, though by Tibetan lights he already had. After a day of struggle up a slope of sticky snow he reached a pass just as a blizzard arrived. Only when it cleared did he realize that he was in the wrong valley. He saw another pass to the south; the map gave it a height of 19,300 feet. Shouldering his heavy pack, he marched off.

  As lightning flashed and thunder cracked around him, he and his porters humped for hours over one ugly scree heap after another, walking along the flanks of a gorge in dismal clouds, debris crumbling beneath their boots like a rotten slagheap. His efforts seemed preposterous. Whether he succeeded in extending his tectonic study to the edge of Tibet or forged a new route from one part of the Himalaya to another, what did it matter? Scott and Carritt at least tried to do something on India’s behalf. He felt exhausted and defenseless.

  They finally made camp in the pouring rain. Looking ahead John thought there might be a pass from the Mana Glacier to the Arwa Valley, but the last 1,000 feet were too steep and didn’t appear oriented in the right direction. There may have been a more roundabout route at the end of the glacier, but given the ugliness of the moraines and the rubbishy weather, he was disinclined to try a pass over 20,000 feet. With the excuse of having to check his mail at Gangotri, he was able to hide how relieved he was not to be facing three nights without fuel, camping on a glacier.

  As they reached a large alpine meadow, an eagle dropped a wolf cub in front of them. Christened Jimsie, the cub joined the expedition, soaking John’s sleeping bag with pee but providing some warmth and lifting his spirits. At Nelang, halfway down the Jadh Ganga, Jimsie had her first taste of fresh meat and the porters got plastered on four gallons of chhang. John had hoped to get them to dance, but they passed out too soon. At Gangotri there was still no word from Betty.

  After resupplying, they crossed over the Bhagirathi River and turned south up the Kedarganga Valley, weaving their way through pine and rhododendron in pouring rain. They ascended a ridge on the west side of the valley and descended into the Rudagaira Valley, using a compass to navigate through the clouds. He’d been in this valley in 1935, when he had tried and failed to climb the Jogin and Gangotri peaks with Dawa Tendrup and Ang Tsering. This time he had only local porters, but one of them, Juin Singh, had been with him that year.

  The rain continued steadily for twenty-five hours and then off and on again for three more days. Auden finished a Spanish Civil War novel for the third time and brought his field notebook up to date. A porter returned from Gangotri to report the babas were saying it was written in the shastras that the rain would continue for nine more days. He also brought a letter from the director of the GSI. Auden was being transferred to work on mineral springs. This spelled the end of his Himalayan work. So John Auden was now resolved. It was now or never. He would attempt a new pass over the main range even if it killed him. Juin Singh was as eager as he was.

  They moved camp to the southern end of the valley, in the shadow of hanging glaciers from the previous ice age, dirty with debris from bygone rock falls. The skies gradually cleared. Before them rose a pristine and nearly vertical wall of snow with a sharp crystalline crest. The sunset that night was the most beautiful he had ever seen. The moon rose in a blue-green night sky. Here, in the heart of the High Himalaya, there were no superior or inferior races. Here, in the deep time in which these mountains came into existence there was no such thing as British rule or God’s inscrutable wisdom. There was only the simultaneous feeling of pain and peace, of sound and suspended quiet. His heart was full.

  If luck is with him, an explorer will return home to tell his story and collect his laurels. Few will grasp the dangers he has faced or the knowledge he has brought back. Maps can’t convey what it is like to submit to a cold that grips a body at sunset or the hours spent under an unforgiving sun and a heavy pack. Even more difficult is the realization that the man who has returned is little changed from the one who left and that soon the longing to go back will return. Maps will be taken out and an even more treacherous route plotted. In this way the explorer exists suspended between the longing for home and the longing for extinction.

  John Auden knew he had done nothing that summer that was not done as a matter of necessity by the people of the Jadh Ganga Valley. Their lives were a silent reproach to the lofty notion
s of men like him. Unlike babas and mountaineers, they accumulated no merit in the course of extracting a meager living from an unforgiving land. Without benefit of ice ax, tricouni nails, and Player’s cigarettes brought up from the plains, they simply made their way from one high valley to another to graze their sheep.

  They broke camp at dawn and started up the pass. Every so often John would stop and lean on his ice ax to wait for his breathing to slow. They reached the pass by 8:20 a.m. but the precipitous drop to the glacier below gave him pause. There was a fierce wind and a long moment when the pounding in his chest nearly undid him. “Fear is the enemy of love and the destroyer of life,” he told himself, summoning the god Krishna’s admonition to the fearful warrior Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. Then he got out his line and roped up. Juin Singh went first, committing him to follow. And he did.

  After a slippery descent to a virgin snowfield, after hours of struggle through fresh and sticky snow, they were faced with an icefall that appeared to extend the length of the valley. John was reminded of his troubled crossing of the Karakoram, alone with his Baltis, and the impatient march back to the road that would take him to Srinagar, Calcutta, and thence to London and Nancy. What awaited them all now?

  But on this bright morning, with a wolf cub strapped to the top of his rucksack, Juin Singh was fearless on the heavily crevassed ice, hopping from rock to rock, never losing his footing, never wavering. The hour, the day, the triumph, was all his.

  The last six marches were so hot they took to walking at night in the light of the nearly full moon. On arrival in Mussoorie, John was relieved of his beard and lice-infested clothes. For three months he had heard only the wind and rain slapping his tent, the thunder of avalanches, and the pistol shot of rock falls. Now an army band tortured a Gilbert and Sullivan number at the bandstand. Ladies under parasols on the arms of men in oversized topees strolled along the green. That Mussoorie was not even a first-rank hill station made this parade seem all the more desperate. Amid the Savoy’s shabby grandeur, his men were suddenly timid and self-conscious. Juin Singh alone strutted about, whistling to get the attention of the waiters. John cringed, only to flush at his cringing. They moved to a more modest establishment down the mall, accompanied by Jimsie.