The Last Englishmen Page 12

  On the way back they retrieved Mallory’s ice ax and Wager climbed to the top of the ridge to take in the icefall on the Nepal side. Back at Camp VI Smythe and Shipton heard them out, deciding to head directly to the Great Couloir. Wager and his partner began their descent. Down on the East Rongbuk Glacier, Ruttledge knew nothing of the climbers’ fate. That night there were no hunting yarns over the campfire. When no message came down the following morning, he set up the telescope and trained it on the monsoon clouds covering the North Face like a shroud. No one said a word to him.

  During the night Smythe kept rolling over Shipton. Having to constantly roll him back, uphill, did not make for restful sleep. Snowfall the next day meant another night spent in this way. Finally, they were able to proceed to the couloir, following a narrowing series of ledges. Shipton realized he was as weak as a kitten and left the mountain to Smythe.

  Smythe might have been a humorless and self-aggrandizing man at sea level but under the effects of hypoxia a yogi-like calm descended on him. It was in such a state that he reached the far side of the Great Couloir by 10:00 a.m. Here he planned to ascend the smaller couloir straight up the face of the final pyramid. But the snow was as soft and loose as goose down and swallowed him up to his thighs. Two weeks earlier, they had climbed 1,000 feet in an hour. Now he progressed less than a foot a minute and every step forward put him a step away from a safe return. He gave up.

  The Dalai Lama ascribed the expedition’s failure to the rage of the mountain’s guardian deities. But Eric Shipton felt the entire vision of the expedition was suspect. The trip across the Tibetan Plateau had involved thousands of pack animals. There was a contingent of signal corps officers, armed guards, and seventy-two Sherpas and Bhotias to ferry supplies to and from the high camps. These supplies included tins of herring, smoked salmon, lobster, crab, salmon, asparagus, caviar, and foie gras. Dozens of cases had been left behind, a colossal waste of money and the porters who brought them there. Did every climber require a tent and personal servant? Including those never called? Ruttledge’s obsession with acclimatization meant that the deterioration that set in at high altitudes had time to get a foothold.

  Meanwhile the air commodore who flew over Everest was comparing his triumph to Alexander’s conquest of India. He quoted Napoleon’s “he who holds India, holds the world” to underscore the tortured conceit that Everest, a mountain that wasn’t even in India, was a proxy for England’s global domination. He didn’t hesitate to declare the failure of the mountaineers’ expedition “a splendid achievement,” as if the magnetic field surrounding Everest could bend a logic that prevailed elsewhere. When, defying Lady Houston, a second flight was made, the pilots congratulated themselves on their daring. The survey strips had magnificent definition, unbroken continuity, and were precisely overlapped.

  Michael Spender, who had perfected the use of aerial photography while mapping the coastal mountains of East Greenland that summer, was dismissive. Around Everest, the enormous range in mountain heights meant that the distortions of vertical photography were extreme. The plane should have carried an additional fixed camera to capture the differences in their relative heights. Then the resulting survey strips might have been plotted against existing ground surveys to create a map of the Everest region. As it was, the pilots put a pretty face on things to hit the obligatory note of triumph.

  Bill Wager blamed Ruttledge for the failure of the 1933 Everest expedition. After trashing the man in a letter to John, Wager had gone on to note that John shared one of Hugh Ruttledge’s mannerisms. It wasn’t an India thing, or anything deplorable, he said, just some tic he had ever since he’d known him.

  He stopped there, leaving John beside himself with worry over what it was. That was Wager’s idea of fun.

  CHAPTER 8

  Goddess Mother of the World

  The Grand Hotel, Chowringhee Street, Calcutta,

  May 20, 1935

  The Grand Hotel had an extravagant white-pillared colonnade that stretched down an entire block. This afforded the veranda above a spectacular view of the Maidan and the Victoria Memorial. But that afternoon it was the dining room of the Grand, where high officials went to see and be seen, that had the most interesting sight. Had the viceroy himself made an appearance he would not have turned as many heads as the spectacle of Eric Shipton and his ragtag entourage arriving for lunch.

  Two years after the failure of the 1933 expedition, the Tibetans had once more granted England access to Everest. As it was too late in the year to put an expedition together, the Mount Everest Committee decided that a small team would first undertake a reconnaissance and thereby lay the groundwork for an all-out attempt on the summit in May 1936. Photographs of the seven members of the 1935 reconnaissance, taken on their arrival in Bombay, had been splashed all over the Statesman, and in these Eric Shipton, expedition leader, stood front and center. While in Calcutta Shipton planned to invite at least one member of the Himalayan Club posted in India to join them on the reconnaissance. If that man fared well, he would be asked to join the 1936 summit attempt. It was this that brought Shipton to the Grand that sweltering afternoon. John Auden’s name was in the mix.

  Three of the five climbers Shipton brought from London were former members of the Cambridge Mountaineering Club. The fourth was a New Zealander named Dan Bryant to whom Shipton had taken a shine. The fifth climber and the man with whom Shipton had achieved the greatest feat in the history of mountaineering was nowhere to be seen. After a hot night at the Tollygunj Club, Bill Tilman had gone directly to Darjeeling to begin requisitioning supplies and overseeing the selection of porters. He found Bengalis insufferable.

  Though Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman would eventually be known as the “terrible twins” of Himalayan mountaineering, they were really more of a mismatched pair. Where Tilman was square in jaw and stature, Shipton was slim and elfin with an open face and a splayed stance like a penguin. Tilman was the son of an English sugar merchant and a veteran of the trenches. Shipton grew up on a tea plantation in Ceylon and was too young to have fought. Tilman was not known for easy affability. Shipton regarded his fellow man as an entertainment not to be missed. Tilman disdained female companionship; Shipton was a momma’s boy. Indeed, Shipton’s mother (Tilman called her “The Holy”) was just then picking up last-minute provisions at New Market.

  On Shipton’s return from Everest in 1933, Tilman had invited him on a climb in the Lake District. Shipton had a better idea. Come to India for seven months, he countered. Convinced by Bill Wager that exploration was a higher calling than bagging peaks, Shipton suggested they attempt to penetrate the unexplored sanctuary surrounding Nanda Devi, the highest peak in British India.

  Central to the sacred geography of Hindus, Nanda Devi was known as the earthly home of the seven Rishis. Hugh Ruttledge believed the sages had chosen it because their meditations were least likely to be disturbed, though many had tried. Ruttledge himself had attempted it three times but had been unable to penetrate the ring of thirty peaks, each over 21,000 feet, that surrounded the mountain. On the ring’s western edge was a fantastic twenty-mile gorge where the Rishi Ganga had sliced a deep and narrow cut through the stone. No one had yet succeeded in forcing a way up. Shipton proposed going up the gorge, reconnoitering the inner sanctum and all possible routes to Nanda Devi’s twin summits (the highest, 25,643 feet). They would then exit over the outer ring wall to the east.

  Shipton and Tilman embarked from the temple town of Joshimath accompanied by three Darjeeling Sherpas. With the Rishi Ganga tumbling furiously 1,500 feet below them, they inched along, hugging cliffs, pelted by falling rocks, before finally reaching the sanctum, conducting their survey and making their exit. Shipton was thereby confirmed in his belief that smaller parties were more suited to exploration and climbing than the overstaffed military siege model Ruttledge had followed on Everest. Shipton and Tilman’s 1934 season was universally hailed for the triumph it was.

  For the 1935 reconnaissance, the Evere
st Committee told Shipton to explore the possibility of an Everest summit attempt in monsoon weather, but expressly forbid him from trying one. His main mission was to oversee a survey of as many of the glaciers surrounding Everest as he could, a far more technical undertaking than the one he’d done in the sanctum. Hinks wanted a map showing both the precise elevations of Step 1 and Step 2 on the northeast ridge, and the contours of the bands of rock that defined the Great Couloir. He believed such a map would help settle the question of which route was more likely to see an Everester to the summit. The climbers would also take calibrated photographs of the horizons from highest peaks and ridges in the immediate neighborhood of Everest and photograph what they could of the approach to Everest from Nepal. John Auden’s report on the 1934 earthquake had just appeared. A change of heart in Kathmandu was always possible.

  Just before setting sail for India, Shipton spent a weekend with Bill Wager. He wanted to solicit his thoughts on candidates for the reconnaissance and the 1936 summit attempt. Wager advised Shipton that every expedition needed a man “so universally disliked that the others, with a common object for their spleen, would be drawn together in close companionship.” For example, in Greenland there had been this impossibly pompous man named Spender. Shipton was thus tickled to learn that Hinks’s last-minute choice for chief surveyor of the 1935 reconnaissance, now sitting across from him at the Grand, was none other than Michael Spender. Wager had set him up nicely.

  Michael had felt like a thief stealing off as he did. His wife, Erica, hadn’t taken the news of a six-month expedition at all well, though Aunt May had kindly offered to look in on her while he was away. A crowd of family and friends appeared at the station, so even their final moments were in the public eye. In Paris he scoured the rue de Rivoli for a gift, only to get lost in the Latin Quarter. After a lonely dinner he caught the overnight train to Marseilles. Once aboard he became so absorbed in the tasks of preparing plane table sheets and holding theodolite classes for the climbers in the well decks that Erica was soon forgotten.

  Over lunch at the Grand an officer of the Imperial Forest Service backed John Auden’s candidacy for the open spot on the expedition roster unreservedly, as did two senior colleagues of Auden’s at the Geological Survey. Shipton had once been quite keen on John Auden but he cited Bill Wager’s opinion that Auden would be no good for “the top.” The Calcutta contingent disagreed vociferously.

  Michael Spender kept quiet. He wasn’t really interested in who was chosen. He didn’t know John Auden, only Wystan, and he couldn’t imagine Wystan climbing anything more challenging than a flight of stairs.

  “No controversy for me,” he wrote in his diary.

  Shipton decided to stick with the men he had.

  House of the Dzongpon of Sar,

  Tibet, June 19, 1935

  “The less said about to-day the better,” Michael wrote in his journal before launching into a long account of their travails. The march began innocuously enough. First they passed through a dense forest that looked and smelled just like Kew Gardens’ Jungle House. The yaks, both the wisest and most stupid animals he had ever encountered, took the most roundabout routes and invariably got jammed between trees or tangled in vines, having forgotten they had his equipment on their backs. Above the tree line it began to rain and with that the temperature dropped and the wind, first coming from the north then switching to the west and southwest, began to roar. It was fantastic.

  Staggering toward the crest of Kongra La pass they all looked like second-rate actors, miming the climbing of Everest as if on a stage, bodies curved against the wind, faces screwed into scowls. Michael was wearing his anorak over an Iceland sweater and never felt so cold and so bloody. Shipton and Bryant, the New Zealander, were hunched over the necks of their ponies, too sick to walk. Even Tilman declared it one of the most unpleasant marches he’d ever experienced. This Everest business was clearly all about making oneself deliberately ill, Michael decided. Only the Tibetan mule drivers seemed blithely unaware of the cold.

  Then it was a sixteen-mile downward trek to the stony ground of the Tibetan Plateau. Michael’s headache eased. His sweater came off but his knees screamed with pain. Tilman kept stumbling and retching. The last few miles were excruciating and Michael finally broke down and did the last hundred yards on horseback, another torture, but a relief from walking. When they reached the level plain dust devils spun around them as if to welcome them to hell.

  “Dear, dear E, if only one could meet you at the end of a day’s march,” he wrote that evening in his journal, sucking on the ginger toffees his wife had packed to soothe his throat. He dreamt of trying to telephone her. Though he remembered the Hampstead number, try as he might he couldn’t recall the exchange. This didn’t bode well for his calculations.

  For days they marched west in the searing sun, the escarpment of the Himalayan range in the distance to their left, yellow sandstone hills and empty riverbeds all around them. Michael regretted the loss of his topee and when he put a red handkerchief over his head his horse shied. When he tried an umbrella the nag took off on a tear and didn’t slow until nearly a mile on. Finally, the north-south Nyonno Ri range rose before them, its peak a focal point due west of a village called Sar. This was the tangle of peaks Shipton had discovered on a ten-day sojourn with Bill Wager after the 1933 attempt. Though they were still a great distance from Everest, Shipton had decided to survey this area, too, though he hadn’t received permission from the Tibetan authorities for the detour.

  While everyone else began to climb and survey the valleys and ridges east of Nyonno Ri, Michael proceeded alone. Anxious about his first climb to 18,500 feet, he clung to Shipton’s assurance that an extra 4,000 feet wouldn’t defeat him. He did make it, but the clouds came in and he had to return two days later. Over the next ten days he secured a good number of stations. Karma Paul, acting as both expedition interpreter and sirdar for the Sherpas taken on in Darjeeling, quickly picked up the rhythms of his routine. Many of the Sherpas were from Solo Khumbu, a Nepali village in the shadow of Everest, about 120 miles west of Darjeeling. They knew the mountain not as the last penetralis or the sine qua non of fixed points but as “The Mountain So High No Bird Can Fly Over It” or “Goddess Mother of the World.”

  When the weather was sufficiently clear, Michael left his tent at two in the morning to get his tripod in place by sunrise. The RGS’s Wild phototheodolite he was using was the heaviest, the most sophisticated and fickle. It tended to seize up in the cold, so it sometimes was a challenge to get readings, but he was usually back at camp by 10:30. After putting away his angles, they would make a start for a new camp in midafternoon. The porters, better at managing their half-starved ponies, stopped every so often for him to catch up, but for the most part Michael was left to himself at the fag end of their seedy-looking procession. The only difficulty was staving off sleep while waiting for it to become dark enough to change the photographic plates. Otherwise he felt fit.

  At one point he found himself in a village that didn’t appear on any map. But it was the village after that one where things took a bad turn. Just outside it two men, clad in bloody, tattered rags, stepped from behind a rock, wailing. Corpse butchers, Karma Paul explained. Since the ground was frozen and there was no wood for cremation, the dead were cut up and fed to vultures. As no one had died recently, they were hungry. Karma Paul gave them a coin.

  After making camp the entire village came out to watch Michael take a shit. When he tried to return to his tent, the village idiot, fettered hand and foot, blocked his way, shaking his chains and shouting angrily. This appeared to rouse the staring crowd from their torpor. A hailstorm of stones came down around him before he managed to get into his tent.

  At midnight, Michael was woken by loud, unearthly music, like trumpets and oboes and conch shells, alternating bars of G, F-sharp, G, F-sharp, con espressione. Were the corpse butchers now coming for him? By 2:00 a.m. the rumpus had quieted and he started off to his station. At 2:30
an odd, twisting pain started in his belly. After hastily completing his readings he returned to his tent deathly ill.

  His next memory was of looking up to see the dzongpen of the village, with the long gold pendant of his office hanging from his left ear, issuing orders. He was half carried through a kitchen filled with staring women, up a dark stairway and ushered into a cool room with a comfortable bed and a view of the night sky through an opening in the roof. He was distantly aware the dzongpen was trying to get him to take some water. Tapers of incense were lit to drive off whatever demon possessed him.

  When the dzongpen left to say his prayers in the shrine room, Michael heard the ring of a bell and the stroke of a drum. He first hallucinated he was a Chinese puzzle, then that Erica had delivered a baby. At one point he opened his eyes and found the women of the house, each bearing a candle, standing around his bed looking down at him like a ring of angels. Only then did he realize he was in the same room where he’d drunk chhang in a lovely chased silver cup nine days before. The dzongpen of Sar’s house was the first Tibetan house he had been in and, despite the mooing calf tied up on the ground floor, the perpetual toing and froing and salaams of the servants had left the impression of a royal court. He awoke feeling better.

  In the meantime, word had come back from the Tibetan authorities that they were to stop their work in the Nyonno Ri and carry on directly to Everest to begin the reconnaissance. Shipton sent a letter of protest and five days of inactivity passed while they awaited word from on high. The ministers stood firm; their permits never allowed for a survey of the Nyonno Ri range. At their good-bye meal, Shipton produced one high compliment after another but the dzongpen was more interested in the hair on the New Zealander’s legs. Bryant, in turn, treated him to a Maori rendition of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” After the tap dancing, high-pitched singing, the raising of toasts, Shipton braved asking why the Tibetans were so reluctant to let him explore their country.