The Last Englishmen Read online

  It was in the 1930s, too, that a new paragon was forged in Europe, one in which manhood, nationhood, and summit seeking became inextricably linked. The men who aspired to climb the highest peaks were no longer Luftmenschen, men in thrall to the sublime like George Mallory, but Übermenschen, leviathans who wanted to stand on top and look down. Summits were no longer sought after as memorials to the fallen, or in pursuit of scientific knowledge, but as means to assert or reclaim a nation’s power and virility. Germany led the way in this attitude, but England and France duly followed suit, albeit in the less bombastic register befitting those who’d prevailed in the Great War. The Mount Everest Committee was equally captive to the sort of magical thinking its members imagined only their native subjects indulged in: the conquest of Everest would grant England powers more lasting and splendid than any imperial durbar. This fantasy had a flip side. Failure might unman the empire, strip the king-emperor naked for all to see.

  For the sages of the Everest Committee who kept an eye on these matters, John Auden’s royal invitation to visit Nepal was auspicious, raising the tantalizing possibility that access to Everest from the south might one day be granted. When writing up his account for the Himalayan Journal, John made sure to mention that east of Udaipur Garhi, through a scrim of mist and dust, the south face of Everest was just visible, seventy-three miles away. Had there been time to climb the Mahabharat Lekh, a fuller view of the southern approach might have been gained, but without permission to venture farther inland, he had to withdraw. Yet proximity to his mountain made him feel, briefly, less a stranger to himself.

  Royal Geographical Society, 1 Kensington Gore, London,

  September 3, 1932

  Two years before the earthquake, the Madras Weekly had carried an account of a plane flying in the vicinity of Everest on behalf of an American organization called “Knights of the Flying Carpets.” Arthur Hinks, the secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, was incensed. The Yanks had already been the first to fly over the poles and the idea of them anywhere near Everest was unacceptable. In the future, Hinks wrote the India Office, German mountaineering applications should take precedence over American. In the meantime he asked that the Government of India find out if the Maharaja of Nepal had granted the Americans permission to fly over his kingdom. And while they were at it, they should ask Tibet about a new expedition to Everest. Nepal issued a weak protest regarding the “unauthorized flight,” but it was five months before Hinks had an answer to his second inquiry.

  Nothing had changed.

  Hinks was unrelenting: if delicate reference were made to the still missing bodies of Mallory and Irvine, might that induce a change in attitude? Long silence. An application for permission for a British flight over Everest was, however, passed along to the Maharaja of Nepal. At the end of May 1932 word came back that the application was being given sympathetic consideration, and in July permission was granted. At nearly the same moment, the wind shifted, the clouds opened, and the long-hoped-for vision of the mountaintop appeared. The Dalai Lama had written a letter.

  “Almost every nation on the face of the earth is desirous of ascending the high mountains in the world,” the letter began. “The British are also very anxious to ascend Mount Everest,” His Holiness continued before adding, undiplomatically, “They have tried twice, but so far they have failed.” The British had obliged the Dalai Lama with a supply of modern weaponry and he proffered access to Everest via Tibet in return. The nine-year wait was over. Hinks was out the gate in a heartbeat.

  “The first, most anxious step is the choice of a leader,” Sir Francis Younghusband, the president of the Everest Committee had said, announcing the new expedition in September. “For good or ill much, perhaps all will depend upon him.” Both flight and climb would take place in April or May 1933. The question now was: Who would get there first? Man or machine?

  Lalbalu, Bihar, Army Dept. Landing Ground,

  160 Miles South of Mount Everest, April 3, 1933

  The flight over Everest’s summit was to be “austerely scientific” and “based in every detail on the most serious thought.” A year’s testing would be required to solve the technical challenges posed by the impact of high winds, high altitudes, and frigid temperatures on the flight’s aerodynamics and the frailties of the pilot’s body. Each of the two prototypes would be equipped with a supercharged, nine-cylinder Bristol Pegasus S engine, capable of ascending to thirty-four thousand feet. Finally, cameras screwed to the undersides of the biplanes would generate a series of survey strips to net the semi-mythical Everest on a Survey of India grid, thirty miles square.

  Lady “Poppy” Houston, a raging patriot, suffragette, and nudist, had little interest in either the survey or the science. “The chief aim of the Marquis and myself in this Adventure,” she proclaimed in the peremptory voice of a woman used to getting her way, was “to show India that we are not the Degenerate Race that its leaders represent Britain to be” but “a virile and active” one.

  Once a sixteen-year-old chorus dancer named Fanny, by the age of seventy-six Lady Houston had married four times and expressed her admiration for Mussolini by naming her lapdog Benito. Her feelings about the present British government were less tender. Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald had recently suggested that India might eventually become a dominion in the British Commonwealth. Poppy was having none of it. A stalwart member of the Indian Empire Society, expressly founded to oppose Indian self-rule, she had sailed her yacht, Liberty, along the south coast of Great Britain with a bunting proclaiming “TO HELL WITH RAMSAY MACDONALD.”

  Lady Houston and her ilk were known as Die Hards.

  After India and Benito, aviation was closest to her heart. When MacDonald pulled funding from the Air Ministry, raising the specter that a British aeroplane might not secure the Schneider Trophy for the third year in a row, Lady Houston stepped up with a hefty offer of one hundred thousand pounds to underwrite the development of the Supermarine S.6 engine. The prototype duly won the air race at Cowes. If the Supermarine S.6 was all about speed, the Pegasus S would be about altitude. The Everest Flight Committee—Conservative MPs, earls, wing commanders, newspaper barons, and John Buchan, a writer of spy thrillers and a fixture of the Conservative establishment—was not prepared to cede Everest to anyone.

  When Lady Houston had arrived with her checkbook, they were obliged to hear her out. The new India Bill before Parliament, she announced, was a shameful surrender. If India was, in Churchill’s phrase, “that most truly bright and precious jewel in the crown,” a successful flight over Everest’s summit would fix that troubled gemstone firmly in place. Churchill was a fellow member of the India Empire Society and Poppy had shared his disgust at the sight of that “half-naked fakir” Gandhi taking tea with Viceroy Irwin two years before. Irwin, she declared, was a traitor to his class. At least his successor, the Marquess of Willingdon, had shown he had some bones in his gloves.

  In the opening montage of Wings over Everest, Lady Houston, propped against enormous bed pillows wearing a fox stole and jeweled turban, stiffly reenacted her decision to fund the flight. The Schneider Trophy by her bedside had a close-up. Timelapse photography showed the building of the Pegasus S engine accompanied by scenes of people on telephones, at drafting tables, and rushing down steps, all in edifying contrast to a clip of natives playing pipes. In the gardens of the Maharaja of Darbhanga the pilots were shown in deep discussion, followed by a calendar with the days flying by. Twice-daily weather reports entailed further deliberations. The pages stopped at Monday, April 3, 1933. A ground crew reviewed a forty-six-item checklist. After final adjustments to their heated goggles, the two open cockpit biplanes took off to cheers. An overhead shot of natives gathering hay showed their astonishment.

  As deodar thinned out into pine, ilex, birch, then juniper and rhododendron, the ramparts of cliffs and rock faces appeared. Wave upon wave of mountains rose and fell below them, stretching hundreds of miles in both directions. Climbing to 19,000 feet, t
he pilots had their first sight of white peaks, with Kanchenjunga rising up under their starboard wing. A moment later two tiny summits appeared just to the right of the plane’s axis. A plume of crystallizing ice distinguished Everest’s summit from Makalu’s. The altimeter showed the plane at 33,000 feet, already 4,000 feet higher than Everest’s highest point. As they began their approach the wind velocity peaked at one hundred mph and a close-up of the thermometer showed the temperature to be minus fifty degrees Fahrenheit. On a notepad the Marquis of Clydesdale wrote, “That’s the NE ridge the climbers go up,” as the arête on which Mallory and Irvine were last seen came into view.

  The summit loomed up and passed beneath them. After the plane circled it for fifteen minutes, there was one last wide-angle shot of the Himalayan panorama to the west before the plane coasted down the airfield to applause, handshakes, and backslapping. A spokesman for the flight advised the Times that it would take time to study just what had been seen in those few sublime minutes “looking down on the world’s last penetralia.”

  Who could have foreseen that the dust haze would make it impossible to see anything in the survey strips? Lady Houston’s cable refused permission for another go. It was enough that an Englishman had been the first to look down upon that tiny spot of frontier, dividing this world from the heavens of the next.

  Attention now turned to the mountaineers.

  Base Camp, East Rongbuk Glacier,

  Mount Everest, April 25, 1933

  John Auden had only just begun to study Himalayan tectonics in earnest when Margaret Marshall arrived in Calcutta to be consoled over the death of her husband. Not knowing quite what to say, he married her. No sooner was their honeymoon over than he became desperately eager to return to the mountains, disappearing for weeks at a time and leaving her alone and friendless in a tiny Calcutta flat. She took revenge by spending wildly and sleeping with his manservant. Their divorce would be finalized by the end of 1933.

  In the meantime, John had finished his geological map of the Krol Belt, delineating with utmost meticulousness the stratigraphic folds of the Lesser Himalaya near Simla. He’d also done an analysis of the granites in the area, and contrary to the common understanding that all granites of the Himalaya had intruded during the Tertiary period (66 million years ago to 1.5 million years ago), he’d found evidence of far older granite intrusions, occurring as much as 250 million years ago. Intrusion was the process whereby an igneous rock like granite is forced through other rock structures in the crust without breaking the surface. The granite pebble on which his analysis was based was found to have uncanny similarities to granite he’d collected elsewhere in the high elevations, suggesting a wave of simultaneous intrusions. Should there ever be another Everest expedition, he hoped this work would secure him the spot of expedition geologist.

  But when Bill Wager, whom John had known at Cambridge, arrived in Calcutta in March 1933, John realized he had missed his shot at being chosen. It was difficult not to blame Margaret for that, too. Over lunch he’d asked Wager if, as the expedition geologist, he would be surveying the East Rongbuk Glacier. The talk was all about taking the summit, Wager replied, with an unmistakable swagger. That had been galling. Not only did Wager know nothing of Himalayan geology but it was his first trip to India. Apart from Hinks’s insistence that all aspirants be Englishmen, John had to wonder how the rest were selected.

  Since most of the 1933 climbers were too young to have served in the war, the Mallory ideal had been rethought. Who would be the expedition’s leading man? Such a man had to embody all that was noble, stirring, and sporting about the English race. Bill Wager fit Hinks’s new template to a T: a first-rate English public school, membership in the Cambridge Mountaineering Club, and a thruster’s hunger for the top. He was also fresh from an arctic expedition on the East Greenland coast. Still, it was impossible to predict how these chosen paragons would perform in extreme altitude. Tempers might prove as debilitating as altitude sickness. Passionate hatreds between climbers, fanned by rivalry and isolation, didn’t make it into the official minutes, but there was always talk. Frank Smythe bore the brunt of it. Only Eric Shipton, a puckish twenty-five-year-old, seemed able to stand him.

  From the moment they first assembled, every climber was the object of scrutiny by the leader of the expedition, Hugh Ruttledge. Out of twelve mountaineers, three two-man storming parties would be named. Until the final roster was announced each contestant eyed the others warily and did his best to appear hale and hearty. Ruttledge named the chosen when they arrived at Base Camp. To console the six who hadn’t made the cut, he pointed out that if someone developed altitude sickness or, god forbid, had an accident, they might be called upon. Eric Shipton thought this tactless. It was typical of the war generation’s thinking to have an excess of young men on hand to throw at the battlements, while staying well to the rear themselves. Shipton and Smythe were named the lead party.

  But for his triumphant summiting of Kamet, the second-highest peak in British India and the highest ever climbed, Smythe might never have been considered. From an obscure public school he went neither into the military, university, nor colonial service. Worse, in the eyes of Arthur Hinks, he gave public lectures and interviews to the newspapers. But Smythe’s leadership on Kamet, a mountain on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau in the Garhwal, had been a triumph. Two separate parties had reached the summit, including Smythe, Shipton, two porters, and a transport officer.

  The selection of climbers was transparent when compared with how the committee settled on Hugh Ruttledge. “We must have a leader who has it in him right down to the nails of his toes,” Younghusband had declared. Sir Francis might have tapped his protégé Smythe, but to Hinks’s undoubted relief, it wasn’t up to him. His impetuous invasion of Tibet had been a thorn in the side of the Dalai Lama and the less he had to do with Everest, the better. After two members of the 1924 expedition proved unavailable, Ruttledge was chosen.

  A fall off a horse had left this balding, bespectacled, and nearly fifty-year-old district officer with a pronounced hitch in his gait. But he was a pukka sahib and a keen huntsman. There were striking parallels between climbing and hunting, he argued. Just as mountaineering wasn’t simply about getting to the top, shikar was more than the desire to kill something. Ruttledge loved to sit around the fire telling hunting yarns and debating the best route to Everest’s summit. This debate began in Sikkim and the climbers were now perfectly sick of it, but Ruttledge wouldn’t let it go. His fussy habit of handing out raspberries couched in magnificent language also did not go over well.

  In the years since Mallory and Irvine’s disappearance on the final approach to the summit, the findings of the Everest expeditions of the 1920s had been thoroughly debated. On the 1921 reconnaissance, a surveyor had discovered that the East Rongbuk Glacier was the only possible approach to the mountain. This glacier ended at a nearly vertical 1,200-foot wall of rock and ice. From there one ascended to the snowy ridge of the North Col at 23,000 feet, the point from which any attempt on the summit from the north really begins. That was the un-controversial part. From the Col there were two possible routes over the last 6,000 vertical feet. The first was the northeast ridge. This ridge sported two formidable obstacles known then as Step 1 and Step 2. Step 2 was a steep rock promontory rising over 130 feet (from below it looked more like 200), the last dozen being nearly straight up.

  Would they, as Mallory had, climb just below the knife-edge arête to make a direct assault on the steps while the winds off the Tibetan Plateau tried to blow them to kingdom come? Or would they choose the second option, traversing the treacherous outward-sloping and icy-smooth slabs of the Great Couloir on the North Face that at the slightest misstep would deliver them to the East Rongbuk Glacier 10,000 feet below? The climbers dutifully took turns gazing through a telescope designed to study the stars.

  Ruttledge had devised a strategy that divided the route to the summit into three stages. The trek across Tibet to Base Camp was complet
e. The supplying of Camps I-IV up the East Rongbuk Glacier was in progress. The final stage, establishing the last two camps above the North Col and the siege of the summit, was a month away. It was for this last bit that the chosen six were husbanding their energies, curled up in their sleeping bags and fanatically checking their basal pulses. Steady acclimatization was their leader’s mantra. Eric Shipton joked that they would soon be getting bedsores. Only Bill Wager was languishing at Base Camp, suffering from hill trots. Wager had only just made the third team and a case of the trots wasn’t going to stop him from proving that he was of the same stamp as the rest.

  Mercifully, he believed the worst was behind him and he saw no reason why he wouldn’t be ready when the call came. “The mountain is not a slag heap as I had heard,” Wager wrote John Auden on Expedition stationery, rubbing yet more salt in his wounds.

  Camp VI, 27,400 feet, North Face of Mount Everest,

  1,602 feet from the Summit, May 31, 1933

  A fully recovered Bill Wager bedded down at Camp VI, his tent fixed on a tiny ledge on Everest’s North Face, 1,602 feet below the summit. Two weeks before, the telegraph line strung from Base Camp brought word that the monsoon had been seen off the coast of Ceylon. No one believed this; it was far too early. The wind blew hard, the tents filled with the sound of coughs. It was a fitful night. The next morning Wager and his partner chose Mallory’s route, setting off at 5:40 a.m. toward the first of the two steps on the northeast ridge. En route Wager’s partner found Mallory’s ice ax. They had reached hallowed ground.

  They ascended Step 1 only to find Step 2 insurmountable. Descending 200 to 300 feet below the ridge, they tried crossing the Great Couloir, picking their way over slabs covered in loose, light snow. In winter, high winds removed the snow as it fell, sweeping clean the bands of rock on the North Face. At a certain point, Wager later theorized, the balance of power shifted and the accumulation of snow exceeded the power of the wind to remove it, marking the shift from winter to monsoon conditions. They managed to cross the couloir and climb a steep buttress only to find another, smaller couloir on the far side. Nine hundred feet short of the summit, their time ran out.