Leaving Guillarmod in charge of Camp 4, Crowley, Reymond and Pache advanced to Camp 5 at an elevation of 20,343 feet. Waiting for supplies that never arrived, a frustrated Crowley again observed how failure to follow orders stalled their progress. Finally, on August 31, the team pressed on. At this point, Crowley realized ascent would be more difficult than he initially estimated: the mountain was steep at this point, and sported many granite precipices.
With porters cutting steps out of the ice, they climbed quickly to a height of 21,000 feet. Crowley paused, watching small hunks of broken ice scuttle down the hillside as the workers hacked away. He noticed a few bits of snow also skimming along the surface. When a hiss like hot water coming to a boil reached his ears, he knew an avalanche was beginning. AC ordered the men to brace themselves on the steps, knowing they’d be safe there. They did as the sahib instructed. One porter, however, panicked and began untying his rope in order to sprint across the sliding snow. Crowley again instructed him to stay put. When he ignored the command, AC used the only swift and sure solution: He knocked the porter upside the head with the flat of his ax.43
Panic far outstripped the size of the avalanche, and the snowslide passed them without incident. Nevertheless, the party called it a day and returned to Camp 5. There, gossip among the porters changed the snowslide into a cataclysm and the blow to the porter’s head into a violent assault. That night, several frightened men deserted, complaining to Guillarmod that Crowley was beating them. Crowley would later claim that the porters were exaggerating the incident during the avalanche. But Jacot-Guillarmod, despite the porters having been unruly and very difficult to keep in line, believed them.44 Indeed, Reymond recorded in his diary that he and Pache had observed Crowley at Camp 5 beating old Penduck, alternately kicking him and hitting him with his alpenstock as the porter laid in the snow, howled, and pleaded with him to stop.45 The doctor decided matters had gone far enough.
Photo of Kangchenjunga by Jacot-Guillarmod, showing the party’s route up the mountain and the location of several of its camps. The camp numbers differ from Crowley’s: VII is Crowley’s Camp 5, and VI is Camp 4. (photo credit 6.3)
The next morning, as Crowley and his remaining company prepared another attempt on the slope, Guillarmod unexpectedly ascended to Camp 5 with de Righi and his party behind him. What the hell are they doing here? Crowley wondered, dumbfounded. He thought they had supplies but, learning they had none, AC once again pondered: What the hell are they doing here?
The answer was simple: mutiny.
Jacot-Guillarmod had had enough. The unfollowed orders, fleeing porters, and hazardous ascent convinced him to hold a meeting of the expedition’s principals. The climbers voted to oust AC and make Jacot-Guillarmod leader. “You may be a good climber,” the doctor told Crowley, “but you’re a bad general.”46 The doctor even convinced de Righi, who ascended with him, into backing this plan. Although hurt, Crowley merely scoffed, “There is no provision for this stupidity in our contract.”
“It is only a piece of paper,” Jacot-Guillarmod replied coolly; it was his right as initiator of the expedition.47 Assuming command at 5 p.m. on September 1, 1905, the doctor declared the expedition over, effective immediately. Crowley watched helplessly as Jacot-Guillarmod wrested the expedition from his hands; watched as all the porters, with insufficient room for all of them at Camp 5, descended to take shelter behind the rocks at Camp 4; watched as Pache, his campmate, sided with Guillarmod. Only Reymond (at Jacot-Guillarmod’s request) remained with Crowley.
They’re fools, AC thought. None of them know the first thing about Himalayan climbing. And there they were, preparing to climb down even though night would fall before they finished. As his friends left, Crowley implored—to Pache in particular—to wait until morning, when it would be safer. “If you go now, you’ll be dead within ten minutes.”
Deaf ears turned away and started down the mountain. Crowley retired to his tent, Reymond thought, with the injured air of a deposed monarch.
Connected by one hundred feet of rope, Jacot-Guillarmod, de Righi, Pache, and three porters with crampons—Bahadur Lama, Thenduck, and Phubu48—began their descent, with Jacot-Guillarmod and de Righi in the lead. As they turned a sharp corner of the slope, a porter slipped. “No,” Pache cursed to himself in split seconds, “the descent has barely started.” He watched helplessly as the porter fell over the edge, taking the next porter in line with him. “No,” Pache lamented: “Seventeen porters just passed through here without a hitch.” By the time Pache realized he was tied to the same rope as the two falling porters, he was also plummeting down the slope, taking another porter with him.
Below, Guillarmod and de Righi saw their four comrades plunging toward them. Preparing to intercept their sprawling friends, they spread their legs, planted themselves on the path, and braced themselves. As the four falling bodies slid by, they caught one of them. The rope which encircled the waists of the other three snapped tight. For a moment, they stopped.
Then the snow beneath them slid.
A fifty-yard-wide avalanche of snow started down the hill, and de Righi slipped. Guillarmod held him with one arm while his other gripped his ax—the only thing keeping them in place. He held with all his strength, but the five men were just too heavy. Guillarmod’s fingers slid off the ax handle despite themselves, and the avalanche swept all six men down the mountain. Guillarmod tried to grab an ax in his path, but everything was happening too quickly; all he could do was paddle to keep on top of the sliding snow.
In five seconds, it was over: they fell into a crevice, and Guillarmod watched his friends vanish under the falling snow. Then darkness and debris engulfed him as well.
Breathing was difficult at first. He couldn’t move, and he wasn’t even fully conscious. Gasping for air, he realized he was cold, and then he realized what had just happened. Guillarmod pulled himself free by his rope and found de Righi at the other end, on top of the crevice. He was pinned down by Guillarmod on the one side of his rope and by their buried comrades on the other. Had Guillarmod died, he would have been trapped there and frozen to death. As it was, after Guillarmod freed him, he was so shaken he was unable to stand.
Guillarmod attempted to rescue the others alone. He tugged on the rope which ran vertically into the snow-filled crevice below, knowing four men were on the other end somewhere. With no tools with which to dig, he used his bare hands. Soon, de Righi joined in, but it was just too slow. The doctor cried out in desperation, “Help! Reymond, help! Bring ice picks!”
“What’s that?” Reymond asked.
“What?” Crowley asked with sour disinterest.
“It sounds like de Righi and Guillarmod yelling.”
He shrugged. “So? They’ve been yelling all day.”
Reymond still had his boots on. “I think I should go and look.”
“Well, send word back if you need help.” Crowley obviously didn’t mean it. He figured Reymond was deserting, too. He remained in his tent, drinking tea. When he received no word from Reymond, AC rolled over in his sleeping bag and fell asleep, alone at Camp 5.
So Crowley describes this incident. The account in Reymond’s diary differs: Hearing the cry for help, Reymond, who still had his boots on, ran out of their tent, looked over the edge, and saw Jacot-Guillarmod and de Righi pulling at a rope that disappeared into the snow at their feet.
“Where’s Pache?” Reymond shouted.
“Buried in the snow with three porters,” Jacot-Guillarmod replied. Reymond could hear the deep anguish in his voice. “Come on, hurry!”
Reymond ran back to the tent and reported to Crowley, “Pache and three porters have run into an avalanche.” Crowley didn’t move, but remarked that the stupidity of people could fill an entire avalanche. Not waiting for orders, Reymond packed food into a backpack, put on his crampons, and headed down the path. To his great surprise, Crowley did not follow.49
Reymond looked like an angel at the top of the crevice, looking down on the doomed
party and asking, “Do you need help?” After he rounded up axes and joined them in the pit, they dug at the tons of snow and ice that covered Pache and the others. They worked in turns, individually digging with an ax in the ever-deepening pit and hacking out more snow until white powder coated their bodies and their fingers felt like they were aflame. When darkness came with no sign of their comrades in the snow, they knew the truth:
Pache and the porters were already dead.
Crowley awoke the next morning and climbed down to Camp 4 to look around. He thought he heard voices, but saw no one. When he reached Camp 3, he found Guillarmod badly bruised and his back hurt; de Righi’s ribs were also bruised, and he complained of other injuries. Then he found out: Pache and his three best porters were dead at the bottom of an avalanche.
Anguish and anger mixed within Crowley: his rash comrades had died as the result of their ill-conceived coup. “The conduct of the mountaineers amounted to manslaughter. By breaking their agreement, they had assumed full responsibility,” he wrote bitterly.50 Reymond recorded in his journal that Crowley, to the surprise of the others, explained that he thought the victims had been thrown on the rocks like the last porter, which is why he didn’t come to help the night before.51 That evening, Crowley took Reymond’s place in de Righi’s tent (forcing Reymond into Jacot-Guillarmod’s), and the next morning, around 11 o’clock on September 3, AC left for Darjeeling. He wired his accounts to The Pioneer and Daily Mail, and awaited the rest of the party.
The others, meanwhile, stayed behind to recover the dead. Three days of digging finally uncovered the deceased climbers. A lama in the group said prayers over the bodies. and the porters lowered their three dead companions, arms crossed, into a crevasse and covered them with snow. “The god of Kangchenjunga took them,” they declared fatalistically, “and they will spend eternity near him.” They carried Pache to Camp 3, where fifty porters helped erect a memorial cairn. Reymond spent three days engraving Pache’s name and the date of his death onto a slab of granite. The moraine hillock where he died to this day is known as Pache’s Grave.
The tension on the mountain that led to Jacot-Guillarmod assuming control of the expedition spilled into the world’s newspapers at what the Alpine Club called “lamentable length.”52 Initial news of Pache’s death was reported widely, including in the Manchester Guardian, Journal de Genève, Science, and the Alpine Journal.53 Because Crowley returned to Darjeeling ahead of the rest of the party, his were the first press releases to reach print. He had been documenting the climb’s progress in a series of articles for The Pioneer titled “On the Kinchin Lay.”54 His latest installment described the tragedy and placed the blame squarely on his teammates, saying that the accident occurred in the course of his team abandoning him on the mountain; they proceeded “ignorant or careless of the commonest precautions for securing the safety of the men.”55 Crowley described sending Reymond to investigate the ensuing avalanche, and even admitted that he remained in his tent:
Reymond hastily set out to render what help he could, though it was perfectly out of the question to render effective aid. Had the doctor possessed the common humanity or commonsense to leave me a proper complement of men at Camp V, instead of doing his utmost to destroy my influence, I should have been in a position to send help. As it was I could do nothing more than send out Reymond on the forlorn hope. Not that I was over anxious in the circumstances to render help. A mountain ’accident of this sort is one of the things for which I have no sympathy whatever56
Alexis Pache’s grave on Kangchenjunga. (photo credit 6.4)
This sparked a war of words between the expedition’s principals, beginning with a detailed rejoinder by de Righi, countersigned by Jacot-Guillarmod and Reymond, in the September 29 edition of The Pioneer. Regarding the most serious charges, de Righi wrote:
Mr. Crowley further says that we left him without men. Every coolie with him, owing I suppose to fear of the mountain and of Mr. Crowley, had bolted the night before, so that he only had with him Thenduck senior, who, after his treatment at Mr. Crowley’s hands and feet, begged of us to be taken down. This was the only man we deprived Mr. Crowley of; as of Mr. Pache deciding to come down with us (he was not persuaded by the Doctor), his servant, Bahadur Lama, came down with him, making thus our party up to six men. We, of course, could not refuse them, so the charge that we left him without effective help, our answer is, we only took one man who was sick and bruised. He further states that had the Doctor possessed the common humanity and common sense to leave him men he could have sent an effective rescue party. This Doctor Guillarmod was unable to do as no coolie then would stop with such a Sahib, who convinced his coolies to march with the business end of his ice-axe or the toe of his well shod boot.57
In his final installment (penned the day after the accident but allegedly not edited in response to de Righi’s letter), Crowley conceded that his last report was written on the heels of the accident while in a charged emotional state and without all the facts. “I was under the (false) impression that the Doctor and Righi were on one rope, and the rest … on another. What I supposed to be the matter was that these five had been seen to fall over the cliffs on to the lower glacier.” So far, so good. However, his list of reasons for not rendering help after the avalanche shockingly concluded, “The doctor is old enough to rescue himself and nobody would want to rescue Righi.” The article ended with the following dig at de Righi: “It is only fair to add that on my return I found (in spite of the absence of the brilliant young manager) that the food and attendance at this hotel had very much improved, even to excellence.”58
This drama replayed itself in Switzerland, when these stories were picked up and run by the Journal de Genève and Gazette de Lausanne et Journal Suisse. These include de Righi’s account, a detailed series on the climb by Jacot-Guillarmod, and conclude with Reymond’s account of the climb in the February 5, 1906, Journal de Genève.59 These accounts maintained that Crowley lacked the skills necessary to lead the expedition effectively. The clash ended quietly, however, when Guillarmod threatened, if Crowley did not desist, to accuse him of fraud, sending a copy of Snowdrops along with the complaint. Crowley relented. In the months to follow, Jacot-Guillarmod would go on to report the tale of their expedition to the French Alpine Club, the Swiss Alpine Club, and the Geographical Society of Geneva.60
In the end, the image that stuck not only with his peers in the climbing community but also with the general public was an unflattering portrait of Crowley painted by his own words, as quoted above. If his flippancy did not seem cold enough, his later letters commented that although it would have taken him only ten minutes to dress, he did not do so because there was no word from Reymond. Writing in the Daily Mail, Crowley added, “I am not altogether disappointed with the present results. I know enough to make certain of success of another year with a properly equipped and disciplined expedition.”61 Furthermore, the attacks on the Alpine Club couched within his narrative further drew the ire of fellow climbers. As one person wrote of Crowley’s first article for The Pioneer:
From the tone of it, I judge him to be a disappointed candidate for membership of the Alpine Club, to which I may add, I have not the privilege of belonging. The sport of mountaineering will certainly suffer no loss if Kinchenjunga permanently effaces this polished individual.62
In the end, Crowley painted himself as a detached and uncaring leader who simply did not want to rescue his comrades.
Kangchenjunga was history. The crushing, embittering experience scarred Crowley: he would never again make a climb of any consequence, and Kangchenjunga phobia would haunt him even in his last days.
Long after this tragic attempt, the Five Peaks remained elusive: Raeburn and Crawford’s 1920 attempt was cut short because they were inadequately equipped. In 1929, snowstorms at 24,272 feet turned back Bauer’s expedition. The following year, Dyhrenfurth lost a porter in an avalanche and abandoned the peak in favor of a smaller mountain. Bauer tried again in 1931 but gav
e up at 25,500 feet when he encountered an unclimbable slope. Cooke’s 1937 expedition failed similarly, while Frey died in his 1951 attempt with Lewis.
Not until 1954 did John Kempe’s expedition successfully conduct reconnaissance of Kangchenjunga’s southwest approach, paving the way for the British expedition that conquered the mountain in 1955.63
And not until the twenty-first century—a century after this fateful climb—have Crowley’s mountaineering accomplishments been seriously reevaluated. Colin Wells, author of A Brief History of British Mountaineering (2001), called him in 2002, “one of the most accomplished and talented climbers in his era,” and quoted Mick Fowler, who repeated many of Crowley’s Beachy Head climbs eighty-five years later, as saying admiringly,
Crowley was outrageous! He was obviously good; something of a star rock climber, in fact.… He was light years ahead of his time in his attitude to tackling vertical chalk cliffs. The ground he covered was without doubt amongst the most technically difficult in Britain, but his achievements were never really appreciated in his lifetime.64
Similarly, Isserman, Weaver, and Molenaar conceded in Fallen Giants,
From far outside the privileged purlieus of the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society (who between them did in fact conspire to diminish or even erase Crowley’s achievement), he found his way to the world’s second- and third-highest mountains and somehow discerned and reconnoitered the routes by which they would first be climbed.65
Finally, Canadian Alpine Journal editor Geoff Powter noted in Strange and Dangerous Dreams, “Crowley’s rehabilitation in climbing circles has been as dramatic as it has been elsewhere,”66 due in no small part to the fact that the sport’s vanguard and rock stars of today, living on the edge, share more in common with Crowley than they do with his staid and proper peers.
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