The Last Englishmen Read online

  “Western ways leave behind nothing but unhappiness,” the headman replied tersely. Shipton attributed his stubbornness to “silly medievalism.” Michael asked the dzongpen to explain. Karma Paul translated.

  What will I do with the two hundred rupees you have paid me for the use of my ponies? Where there is no surplus there is nothing to buy. You have only to open your eyes to see that in this country, soil, crops, and people exist in a delicate balance. Money can’t replenish the fodder consumed by transiting yaks. Money will simply provide grounds for the headman in the next village to be jealous, thus establishing the conditions for perpetual strife. This is the material and spiritual effect of an expedition passing through our lands. This is how unhappiness and suffering are introduced into our lives.

  Everest Base Camp, East Rongbuk Glacier,

  July 16, 1935

  Michael had been watching clouds move across the valley when, far higher in the sky than he had been expecting, Everest suddenly appeared, still and colossal between towering banks of slowly exploding clouds. He was glad the mountain couldn’t be seen from Base Camp as the mere thought of it kept him awake with dread. At dawn he would have to ford an icy stream just below the snout of the Rongbuk Glacier. It was running balls-high.

  For the next two weeks Michael worked quickly, climbing up and down slopes, collecting angles, making and breaking camp. When he returned to the Kharta Valley to resupply and wait out a heavy snowstorm, he was invited to dine with a group of nomadic herders in a large yak-hair tent. The long slit in the roof that let out the smoke was closed against the falling snow. When Michael’s eyes adjusted to the gloom he took in the scene. A sick goat with bloodshot eyes lay on the floor trembling violently. Patches of its fur had fallen out and it had been given a threadbare jacket to keep it warm. An absurdly tiny lamb stumbled about but when he tried to take it in his lap, it bleated in distress.

  The shepherd’s wife sat cross-legged on the floor tending the fire with fuel so poor the embers threatened to go out before she could deliver a new gasp of the bellows. The automatic motion of her two hands was accompanied by a rapid monologue, delivered in a monotone and directed at her husband. He replied slowly and pleadingly. He was holding a listless toddler in his arms and rocking a wicker cradle bearing a tightly swaddled infant, as still as a doll. Michael decided the man was being rebuked by his wife for having invited a stranger to share their meal.

  Everyone at home had spoken of his trip to Tibet as a great adventure. But if that was so, why was he overcome by shame? Just that morning he had been eating peppermint creams sent down from Camp I, leftover bounty from the 1933 expedition. On top of that he had unjustly suspected Karma Paul in the theft of cigarettes and sugar. And then there were his complaints about his food. Of the twenty-four eggs he was given to eat that day, only three were properly soft-boiled. Furthermore he had grumbled that not enough water had been used for his stewed fruit. His overriding worry was not survival but the lack of a letter from Erica.

  Putting away his journal he looked out of his tent and saw it had finally stopped snowing; the clouds had lifted to reveal a full moon. The fixed points awaited.

  Upper East Rongbuk Glacier,

  in View of Makalu and Everest, July 27, 1935

  On half rations for nearly a week, Michael had lost a stone in weight. His constant squitters and increasing weakness were obvious signs of dysentery. The symptoms thus far had been mild, but he had the sense of his gut digesting itself even as he staggered along stony moraines. How he would manage the trek back he had no idea (the prospect of Kongra La was unthinkable), but if it meant he would be returned to his beloved wife intact, he would suffer through whatever pain he had coming to him. Doubtless Erica thought he deserved it.

  The clear culprit was a tiny piece of 1933 chocolate. It had crossed his mind as he accepted it from the Sherpa’s none-too-clean hands that if Tewan had dysentery, he would get it, but he hadn’t wanted to hurt his feelings. How ridiculous to take such a risk so as not to hurt a servant’s feelings! And now the tsampa flour had run out. There was no paraffin to make tea and still Shipton imagined that they would be able to complete the Nyonno Ri survey on the way back. Michael had sent two other porters, Ang Tsering and Ang Tensing, off to the Kharta Valley with money for food but they still hadn’t returned and now there was a sea of cumulous over the valley. The chaps had no tents and would have to sleep in the open, in a blizzard. He was racked with worry and stomach cramps.

  When he had last seen Shipton, all he wanted to know was how many stations he had completed. Michael was able to assure him that he had obtained enough points to draw a large-scale plan of Everest’s North Face and to calculate the altitude of any point on it. While this might help with the eventual summit attempt, what of their fate in the meantime? Shipton might be fine with a small party, but with one this large he was unable to prevent the Sherpas from plundering critical stores. When one of Michael’s porters caught another with a stolen tin of milk and two tins of Ovaltine there was a tremendous row. He’d had to screw up his courage and, with a look of supreme contempt on his face, intercede. It had ended without blows, but next time? The situation wasn’t helped by his feeling Shipton hadn’t divided the food fairly. Michael tried to look at his situation dispassionately, taking into account the effects of hunger, physical strain, and illness.

  When Ang Tsering and Ang Tensing finally returned with some food, they were able to make a start on the two-day journey back to Base Camp. Despite the misery in his gut Michael maintained a sailor’s sensitivity to wind. At the top of the pass there seemed to be three layers, a lower and upper layer of winds from the east, sandwiching a layer of winds from the west. The next morning Sen Tensing—he was finally beginning to learn the Sherpas’ names—once again carried him over the river of glacier melt to spare him the icy water. Humiliating.

  By the time they reached the fleshpots of Base Camp he had an appetite. Liver, mutton, rice, potatoes, and heavenly vegetables greeted him. This blunted the news that their stores had been ransacked. A Wild tripod, the Zeiss telephoto camera, and the RGS plane table tripod had been nicked, along with books, tsampa, a tent, a pair of his shorts, and a flask of cod liver oil. There was a letter from Granny, but again nothing from Erica. It had now been over a month since he’d discovered the loving letter she’d packed in his trunk. What was she thinking? He was left pondering her handwriting on the wrappers of the newspapers she’d forwarded.

  By the end of August he was sitting out another snowstorm 20,000 feet up Everest. The endless procession of monsoon flurries rendered survey work impossible. When it finally cleared he could scarcely blame the Sherpas for refusing to continue. Warmer temperatures combined with heavy snowfall made the snow pack unstable and avalanches more likely. Shipton had come to the same conclusion about the advisability of attempting to summit Everest during the monsoon.

  So, yes, the weather was kharab—beastly. Then the Primus died, kharab. And when they floundered around in snow and fell into thigh-high pools of freezing water en route to Camp III, the route too was pronounced kharab. So Michael sent Ang Tsering, Nyima Tsering, and Kusang with a rope to Camp III to fetch 1933 Danish butter and jam and pemmican and whatever else might be there, while he retreated to Camp II. While making a cup of Ovaltine, Michael was once more reminded that the shortage of fuel had obliged him to send three men over a dangerous route in search of food that didn’t need to be heated. Sulking in his tent he nursed a grievance that dated back to an incident on Mount Kellas when someone took his supply of sugar and Shipton made off with one of his Sherpas.

  Winter sports in the Alps would never be the same after this.

  The three porters returned in the pitch dark, fully knackered. He’d been in a fever of anxiety over what had happened to them but the butter they brought quickly transported him far from this blasted godforsaken place to a world of grass, lowing cattle, and mild English summers. When another day of snow kept him in his tent fiddling with his
instruments, Ang Tsering and whatshisname, the one with the upturned nose, showed up with news. The New Zealander and the expedition doctor were kharab, one with a bad stomach, the other a bad tooth. Both were on their way down and would soon be joining them. Ang Tsering then paused, and the other fellow, Rinzing, piped up. The route from Camp III to Camp II is, well, god, he was sick of hearing it and saying it. Kharab!

  Given the ticklishness of the food and fuel situation, the arrival of his colleagues was a great bother. Michael wasn’t about to share his carefully husbanded supplies, namely, his Ovaltine. Nor had he missed white man conversation. The sole pleasure of their company would be the opportunity to jointly curse Shipton. Sen Tensing was suffering from snow blindness: the glasses provided by the expedition were worthless. And Tilman had not only taken his Primus (stolen might be more apt) but had thrown the burner away. There were now two broken and one working Primus for the entire expedition. And Shipton had let the porters burn the remaining supply of firewood in one night, a quantity that would have lasted him six days. His men were more or less living on jam. They would soon be reduced to eating snow. Without the excess crates of the 1933 expedition what would they have done? He and Bryant took bets on who would mutiny first, the sahibs or the Sherpas.

  The following day he only just made his station, snatching a few angles by working fast on rotten snow, before the clouds covered Khartaphu, his fixed point. Flurries followed. When Shipton showed up, Michael’s effort to bring his attention to the expedition’s organizational flaws blew over his head like the icy cloud stream over Everest.

  Kharta, Lang Chu Valley,

  September 5, 1935

  “O Gawd! O Gawd!” Michael wrote in his journal. He’d got out of the tent at 4:30 but within minutes it began to snow. The day before had progressed from a night spent on frozen granite, to clouds at 7:00 a.m., to falling through snow up to his waist with icy water rushing into his boots because his shoelaces were broken. On top of that he couldn’t see through his dark glasses, the theodolite was frozen solid, there had been a glacial stream to ford barefoot, and a forty-pound rucksack to carry to 21,000 feet. Returning to camp meant being confronted with the blocks of ice that were his boots, soaked socks, a sunburnt face, his tent a grotto of slush, no sugar, no tea, nothing to read, and no candle to read it by.

  Yet the survey of the Everest region was nearly complete. With the turning of this page or the next of his diary, they would be heading home. With that in mind, when Michael awoke the next morning to yet another blizzard, he and his team of Sherpas left their tents to spend the morning playing in the snow. Snowballs were thrown. He gave them a course in sitting glissade. And about the time one arrived, red cheeked, at the Alpine lodge, to sit down to a hot breakfast of bacon and eggs before a steaming cup of tea and a roaring fire, they returned instead to camp to face their frozen and filthy tents.

  And then it was over. He stood at the top of a pass and beheld yaks grazing on green grass by a crystal-blue lake, 1,500 feet below. He thought of his descent as a return to life from death and summoned a dim memory of his arrival at Cat Bells from boarding school in the summer of 1917. Suddenly there were yak herder tents and a real fire and the first human beings he had seen outside their expedition since he’d left the shepherd’s tent. He pitched his tent on a carpet of grass.

  And he awakened the next morning not to flurries or hailstorms or rocks under his back but a balmy air reminiscent of West Greenland in September. There was plenty of milk to drink and cheese to eat. The profusion of flowers reminded him of an exhibition at Chelsea. He identified rhododendron, Himalayan rose, and that bright little blue starflower he’d seen in the Alps. It trumped Kew for its beauty. Every blossom reminded him of Erica, who had taught him to love flowers.

  But then the anticlimax: the Kharta mailbag produced a single letter … from Granny. Why didn’t Erica write? Even the porters heard from their wives. A chhang party hosted by the dzongpen of Kharbung failed to lift his spirits. He found it impossible to get drunk on chhang and if he heard “Cats on the Housetops” sung one more time he would knife someone, Bryant most likely. Having lost a bet the New Zealander had swum in the river and they were all meant to celebrate this outstanding feat with one obscene song after another. He knew he would soon miss the Tudor scene of sitting round the fire in a smoky room filled with hungry people waiting to eat, but he was thankful to hear Nyonno Ri was out of the question. The plan was now all out for home.

  Somewhere over France,

  October 11, 1935

  Having seen Michael’s photograph in the Bombay papers, a group of bumptious Bengalis traveling with him on the SS Strathmore couldn’t resist offering their opinions on Everest in an exaggerated, hearty manner. Where the Arabs and Persians kept aloof, sitting upright on benches reading the Talmud (or something), these affected, half-educated Indians had no such self-possession. Michael could swear their specs were nothing but panes of glass. They had clearly drifted away from their own people and would never find a way back. Michael wondered how far he had drifted. The English residents of Darjeeling had appalled him with their obliviousness, whether to the ominous developments in Abyssinia or a gorgeous butterfly with black velvet wings. Among them he’d felt like a foreigner.

  The sight of five sloops and ten destroyers at Aden confirmed his feeling that something was up. But it was the Norfolk cruiser flying an admiral’s flag that compelled him to risk a flight from Marseilles. That was how he came to be sitting in an aeroplane stunned by the certainty he was about to die. The port engine had already cut out once and the pilot’s landing technique at a refueling stop nearly ended in disaster. They were now flying blind in a fog along the French coast. After the months of strain the silent, high-wire tension in the cabin was too much to bear.

  He stopped writing for a moment to look out the window.

  Thank God. The clouds had lifted. The way home was clear.

  Rudagaira Valley, Tehri Garhwal,

  October 23, 1935

  Before leaving Calcutta for the Garhwal John Auden had lunched with Michael Spender. Michael told him that during the reconnaissance Shipton had climbed twenty-six peaks over 20,000 feet, including twenty-four first ascents, all of it in monsoon conditions.

  This had put John in the mood to prove something. He had first followed the pilgrimage trail all the way up to Gaumukh, the snout of the Gangotri Glacier, the largest glacier in the Indian Himalaya. As the wellspring of Mother Ganga, Gaumukh was considered the most sacred of all pilgrimage destinations. Here the snowmelt created a small milky stream. As this holy water trickled downward, threading its way through high peaks of the Greater Himalaya, more water, from glaciated side valleys, quickened the river’s pulse. Pilgrims walked against its flow. As they climbed, they accumulated merit and received blessings from the babas living in caves along the path. John carried Map 53 J from the Survey of India to check its accuracy. The pilgrims carried no maps at all.

  At the temple town of Gangotri he had engaged several local porters to assist his two Darjeeling Sherpas, Dawa Tendrup and Ang Tsering. The Sherpas signaled his seriousness. The roster for the 1936 Everest expedition was still open.

  Dawa Tendrup had looked after Frank Smythe when he climbed Kamet in 1931 and had been a porter on the catastrophic 1934 German expedition to Nanga Parbat. Four Germans and six Sherpas had met their deaths in the aftermath of a phenomenal blizzard; Herr Hitler himself had awarded Dawa Tendrup a medal for courage. Ang Tsering had not only survived that (though he lost several toes) but had been on earlier German attempts to climb Kanchenjunga in 1929 and 1931, and with Shipton on Everest in 1933. He was just back from the Everest reconnaissance that John had not been asked to join.

  The steep alpine entrance to the Rudagaira Valley was a short walk from the temple town. After a two-day trek up the valley, hanging glaciers and falling rocks thwarted his attempts on Jogin I on the east side, and two of the three Gangotri peaks. That left Gangotri III, a slightly smaller peak at 21
,578 feet at the southwest end of the valley. This peak appeared to be continuous with the snow saddle he had seen from an earlier, higher camp. The closer he got to the saddle, however, the more daunting its appearance. At 19,000 feet, Dawa Tendrup called a halt, pointing out crevasses hidden by a thin crust of windswept snow. After descending to 15,000 feet, John turned around to look back at the summit and was shocked to discover that the snow saddle didn’t even lead to the peak. Its ridge, however, led down to a pass at the southernmost end of the valley that appeared to look over yet another glacial valley. It was probably not more than 18,000 feet in height, but it seemed to be one of the few places along this part of the main Himalayan range where a route toward the temple town of Kedarnath might be forged. He vowed to return.

  38 Upper Park Road, Belsize Park, London,

  New Year’s Eve 1935

  The Boys waited patiently in ill-fitting suits for the filming to start. They were to be playing guests at a New Year’s Eve party, footage meant for some GPO film celebrating the miracle of the telephone, wireless, and postal service, in connecting Englishmen all over the empire with home over the holidays. The sitting room at Upper Park Road was as bright as day, and just like a real New Year’s Eve party there were a great many bottles about. There were also two double arc lamps and four single ones, a platform for the camera and its spotlight. Sprigs of holly graced a mantel strung with paper chains. Wystan Auden was demonstrating the dance he wanted them to perform. Of course he had to dominate; he was the director. They heard he was once a schoolmaster.