Do What Thou Wilt

by Lawrence Sutin

  Much of the bundobust preparation had been delegated to the manager of the Drum Druid Hotel, where Crowley lodged in Darjeeling. This manager, an Italian named A. C. R. de Righi, volunteered, by Crowley’s account, to come along and serve as transport manager for the climb. According to de Righi, however, Crowley demanded from him a participation payment of £100, as well as certain jewelry and Tibetan religious banners in de Righi’s possession. Relations between the two men would be strained for virtually the entirety of the expedition. Crowley later lashed out racially at de Righi—“his character was mean and suspicious and his sense of inferiority to white men manifested itself as a mixture of servility and insolence to them and of swaggering and bullying to the natives. These traits did not seem so important in Darjeeling, but I must blame myself for not foreseeing that his pin brain would entirely give way as soon as he got out of the world of waiters.”

  The team that Guillarmod had assembled in haste prior to joining Crowley in Darjeeling on July 31 included two fellow Swiss, Alexis Pache and Charles Reymond. Pache was a Swiss army officer with little climbing experience; Crowley, however, formed an immediate liking for Pache—“a simple, unaffected, unassuming gentleman. He was perfectly aware of his own inexperience on mountains, and therefore in a state to acquire information by the use of his eyes rather than his ears.” Reymond had often climbed solo in the Alps—a point in his favor; otherwise, Crowley found him “a quiet if rather dour man, who seemed to have a steady mind and common sense.” Guillarmod appeared to Crowley, at this point, “a shade irritable and fussy,” suffering from various minor health ailments and from what Crowley perceived as a wound to his ego at not being the expedition leader. Relations between the two would further decline as the altitude increased.

  Such, then, were the unlikely dramatis personae for the disaster to come. While in Darjeeling, the five men—Crowley, Guillarmod, Pache, Reymond, and de Righi—entered into a written agreement. Guillarmod was to be the “sole and supreme” judge as to all matters of health and hygiene. Crowley was acknowledged as the “sole and supreme” judge as to all mountaineering questions. No one would be obliged to risk their lives for any reason. All disagreements would be subject to arbitration; no resort to the courts was allowed. The agreement was admirably comprehensive; in practice, however, it was ignored as events took their course.

  The expedition set forth at last from Darjeeling on August 8. In addition to the five Europeans and their six personal servants, there were three Kashmiri guides (veterans of the K2 expedition) sent for by Crowley and seventy-nine porters plus their leader or sirdar—a total of ninety-four persons. As opposed to K2, the route to the outskirts of Kanchenjunga—roughly fifty miles—was relatively easy, consisting largely of government-tended carriage roads and mountain trails. The two major difficulties were the penetrating rains and the tenacious leeches. The first key destination was Chabanjong, eighteen miles northwest of Darjeeling, where the major food supplies had been stockpiled. En route, six porters deserted so as, Crowley surmised, to make off with their small advance wages.

  As with the porters on the K2 expedition, Crowley claimed that his goal now was to establish both ease of relations and unblinking obedience: “I gave a prize to the first three men to come into camp every day and those who had come in first three times had their pay permanently raised. I made friends with them, too, by sitting with them round the camp fire and exchanging songs and stories.” At the same time, the “Bara Sahib,” as Crowley was called, utilized firmness of will to instill a lurking fear: “A moment’s hesitation in complying with any order of mine and they saw a look in my eyes which removed the inhibition. They knew that I would not scold or wheedle, but had a strong suspicion that I might strike a man dead without warning; at the same time they knew that I would never give an unreasonable order and that my active sympathy with the slightest discomfort of any one of them was as quick as my insight to detect and deal with malingering or any other attempt to pull my leg.” Even allowing for cultural differences, it is difficult to believe that Crowley won their trust in this manner.

  Once the expedition reached the Yalung glacier, the tension between Crowley and the other Europeans—in particular, Guillarmod—began to mount significantly. There survive two primary versions of the events that ensued. The first is by Guillarmod who, nearly a decade later, in 1914, would publish a lengthy two-part article, “Au Kanchenjunga,” in the mountaineering journal Echo des Alpes. The second, of course, is that of Crowley in the Confessions—and in an unpublished critique of the Guillarmod article that Crowley intended as an appendix to the Confessions. Both men were anxious to establish the propriety of their actions; both accounts will be utilized in reconstructing the events that follow.

  Crowley left Tseram (designated as Camp 1) with a small contingent on August 21, proceeding northeast along the Yalung glacier to the base of Kanchenjunga. His mood was one of buoyant optimism. The altitude was over 14,000 feet, but none of the men was feeling its ill-effects, and the weather was favorable. Crowley established Camp 2 on the glacier, two miles from the Kanchenjunga summit. From here he made a reconnaissance to confirm the feasibility of the southwest-face route. The following day, August 22, Crowley pushed ahead to establish Camp 3 farther along the glacier, at a height of roughly 18,000 feet. From Camp 3, Crowley sent back one of his porters to inform Guillarmod and Reymond that it was safe to push on and join him. But Guillarmod, who led the march, found it difficult to trace Crowley’s steps. Guillarmod described the glacier terrain as “crumbling moraine, crevasses, and torrents, often uncrossable, whose banks one has to ascend for a great distance before finding a ford.” Crowley, in his later response, engaged in imperious punning: “In matter of fact, with a little effort, one might almost have gone in a Ford! There was never the slightest difficulty about the route.”

  Guillarmod led the porters in a circuitous route and ultimately encamped, at day’s end, on an open patch of ice below the slopes that ascended—in Crowley’s view, easily so—to Camp 3. Crowley viewed this decision as “inexplicable imbecility.” The next day, Guillarmod and his men did ascend to Camp 3, which Crowley described as “extremely pleasant”—“I took pains to fix up an excellent shelter for the men by means of large tarpaulins, and saw to their comfort in every way.” Whether Crowley was providing adequate comfort, or even essential equipment, was by this time a bone of contention between himself and Guillarmod. The latter, observing the porters climbing the icy mountain in their bare feet, grew convinced that Crowley had not spent the funds allocated to supply boots to them. Crowley claimed, instead, that the porters had packed away their boots so as to preserve them: “The economical natives of India always carry their shoes unless there is some serious reason for putting them on.” Could the ascent of Kanchenjunga have failed to constitute a “serious reason,” even for experienced porters? No subsequent expeditions to Kanchenjunga recorded such “economical” behavior. And why did not Crowley get his money’s worth, so to speak, by ordering that the boots be worn? If they were unnecessary, why provide them at all?

  Crowley was eager, on August 27, to push on to the proposed Camp 4 by way of an early morning march, to avoid the later sunlight and the potential dangers it could cause on certain stretches of snow. During the march, Crowley tried to buck up the porters—whom he felt had been demoralized by the complaints of Guillarmod and Reymond—by putting on a daredevil exhibition of glissading. Crowley later made use of this episode in his novel The Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922), wherein the feat is ascribed to King Lamus, a character based on Crowley: “I was in command of a Himalayan expedition some years ago; and the porters were afraid to traverse a snow slope which overhung a terrific cliff. I called on them to watch me, flung myself on the snow head first, swept down like a sack of oats, and sprang to my feet on the very edge of the precipice. There was a great gasp of awed amazement while I walked up to the men.” The entire contingent arrived safely at the new Camp 4, a narrow site with only limited natural
shelter afforded by rocks.

  If Crowley’s intent was to improve morale, he failed. The next day, several more porters deserted the expedition. One of them slipped and fell to his death because—according to Guillarmod—Crowley had carved inadequate steps in the ice. Crowley rejected the accusation: “I cannot think where he could have fallen. No-one ever showed me the place.” On August 29, Guillarmod descended with a party of porters and found the mutilated body on a spur of rock some 1500 feet below. The porters performed a Tibetan Buddhist burial and, according to Guillarmod, saw the death as a sacrifice demanded by the god of Kanchenjunga.

  Guillarmod was now convinced that an ascent up the southwest face was impossible and, as a practical matter, a dangerous folly. More immediately, he viewed Camp 4 as inadequate. The drawbacks of its location were highlighted when, that same August 29, Pache arrived there with men and supplies. This was contrary to Crowley’s express order, conveyed by courier, that Pache settle in at Camp 3. This lack of coordinated movement—and respect for Crowley’s judgment—was typical of the expedition. As Crowley would later acknowledge: “The root of the problem, apart from any ill-feeling, was that none of my companions (except Pache) understood that I expected them to keep their word. I had arranged a plan, taking into consideration all sorts of circumstances, the importance of which they did not understand and others of which they did not even know, and they did not realize that to deviate from my instructions in any way might be disasterous.” Given Pache’s untimely arrival at Camp 4, the question arises as to why Crowley so pointedly exempted him in the above quote. One possible answer: Crowley wished to stress his good relations with Pache in light of what was to come. For in three days, while attempting to descend the mountain, Pache would die.

  During the next two days, August 30 and 31, Crowley further explored ascent routes, accompanied by Reymond and Pache. Guillarmod was sent down to Camp 3 with orders to take control over supply transport, as Pache had reported that de Righi was withholding food from the advance party. On August 30, the highest fixed site attained by the expedition was established at Camp 5, which Crowley estimated at 20,000–21,000 feet, or roughly 2,000–3,000 feet higher than Camp 3. The next day, August 31, in the course of an exploratory climb with six of the men, there arose the one instance of physical beating that Crowley himself acknowledged. During the ascent of a couloir, some snow dislodged (Crowley termed it “a little avalanche”) and one of the men lost his nerve and began to untie himself from the rope linking him to Crowley and the other climbers—a taboo in terms of safety and technique. As Crowley explained, “There was only one thing to do to save him from the consequences of his suicidal actions, and that was to make him more afraid of me than he was of the mountain; so I reached out and caught him a whack with my axe. It pulled him together immediately and prevented his panic communicating itself to the other men. Things went on all right.” Even Crowley could not fail to note, as they returned to Camp 5 at day’s end, that the morale of the men had suffered: “Their imaginations got out of hand. They began to talk nonsense about the demons of Kanchenjunga and magnified the toy avalanche and Gali’s [the beaten porter] slip and wallop to the wildest fantasies. During the night some of them slipped away.” Guillarmod recounted that he met with some of these porters in Camp 4 on August 31. They charged that Crowley had beaten them and declared their intent to leave the expedition. But in Camp 3—again according to Guillarmod—de Righi quelled the mutiny by promising that Crowley would beat them no more and that they would spend no further nights in the same camp with him. De Righi subsequently ascended to Camp 4, where he and Guillarmod resolved to depose Crowley as leader and to terminate the expedition, which now seemed to them a fatal folly.

  On the morning of September 1, Guillarmod and de Righi commenced their ascent to Camp 5 and a confrontation with Crowley. That same morning, Crowley, Pache, and Reymond made a further exploratory climb, achieving the greatest height of the entire expedition—estimated by Crowley as “easily” 21,000 feet. Pache and Reymond were highly optimistic as to further ascent, according to Crowley. Upon their return to Camp 5, they found Guillarmod and de Righi, accompanied by twenty porters. Guillarmod demanded to be named leader. Crowley cited their written agreement, to no avail. According to Crowley, “There was no suggestion that I had acted improperly in any way. From first to last it was merely the feeling of foreigners against being bossed by an Englishman.[ … ] I did my best to reason with them and quiet them, like the naughty children they were.” The divisive issues seem to have been three in number—the choice of an ascent route; the treatment of the men; and, as an intangible emotional factor, the festering ill will that had arisen between Crowley, on the one hand, and Guillarmod and de Righi, on the other.

  In trying to assess these factors, there is little that need be said of the third. The ill will was a fact, and stemmed from the careless formation of the expedition team—an error that must be laid at Crowley’s feet, as leader. The treatment of the men has been presented from the dual perspectives of Crowley and Guillarmod; both confirm that Crowley was feared by the porters, and that this fear flared on August 31. As for the ascent route, while it is impossible to determine retrospectively what success the expedition might have enjoyed, the evidence suggests that Crowley chose a feasible route. Testimony on this score comes from British mountaineer John Tucker, a member of a 1954 surveillance expedition to Kanchenjunga, the findings of which were instrumental to the success of the 1955 Evans expedition. Tucker was no admirer of the “notorious” Aleister Crowley. But he made an honest assessment that ended five decades of pointed silence in British climbing circles: “The disrepute attaching to this man has caused the high endeavor and achievement of this [1905] expedition to fall into undeserved obscurity.” Specifically, Tucker vouched for Crowley’s planned route:

  After our 1954 reconnaissance which, it is true, took the climbers nearer to the face itself—Guillarmod’s pessimism appears excessive. Nor is it possible in the light of our reconnaissance to dismiss Crowley’s excessive optimism as springing from a lack of technical knowledge. Guillarmod’s defeatist attitude may well have contributed to the long-standing neglect of Kanchenjunga’s West Ridge and South-West Face. It also must be conceded that Crowley’s route up the steep slopes toward the Kangbachen Peak (one of the lower summits of the Kanchenjunga West Ridge), was not ill-chosen.

  Tucker did, however, note that a traverse from the West Ridge to the summit of Kanchenjunga, as Crowley ultimately intended, might have proved impossible.

  Satisfying as it may be to apportion merit and blame in retrospect, there was no such resolution on September 1. When Crowley would not be moved, Guillarmod seized leadership, supported by de Righi and Pache. Reymond alone decided to remain with Crowley, though he maintained good relations with the mutineers. Guillarmod led the men back down to Camp 4, departing at the relatively late hour of 5 P.M. Crowley had already ordered seventeen of the porters to descend to Camp 4, as supplies were inadequate in Camp 5 and the selected porters were capable of handling the treacherous descent late in the day. All of them reached Camp 4 safely. But Crowley felt no such confidence in the climbing capabilities of Guillarmod. In the Confessions, Crowley claimed to have prophesied Pache’s death:

  To my horror, I found that Pache wanted to go down with them.[ … ] I explained the situation, but I suppose that he could not believe I was telling the literal truth when I said that Guillarmod was at the best of times a dangerous imbecile on mountains, and that now he had developed into a dangerous maniac. I shook hands with him with a breaking heart, for I had got very fond of the man, and my last words were, ‘Don’t go: I shall never see you again. You’ll be a dead man in ten minutes.’ I had miscalculated once more; a quarter of an hour later he was still alive.

  Whatever may or may not have been said prior to the descent, the result was the death not only of Pache but of three of the porters (whose names are recorded by neither Crowley nor Guillarmod). According to Guillarmod, all si
x of the party were roped together. Proper safety technique demands that the rope be fully stretched at all times; Crowley claimed afterwards that Guillarmod failed to see to this, and there are ambiguities in Guillarmod’s narrative that bear Crowley out here. Following Guillarmod on the rope was de Righi, then two of the porters, then Pache, and then a final porter. As Guillarmod tells it, the third porter slipped, dragging with him first his fellow porter, then Pache, and then the final porter. Their fall created an avalanche. Neither Guillarmod nor de Righi were seriously injured, but the other four were buried under the snow. The two survivors, still roped to the four others, cried out to Camp 5 (still within earshot) for help, then fell to digging. Reymond, hearing the cries, collected some of the scattered ice-axes as he made his descent, and with these as tools the three men continued to dig. It would take three days finally to uncover the victims, buried under ten feet of snow. (“Pache’s Grave” has since become a site name on maps of Kanchenjunga.)

  What of Crowley in all this? Simply put, when he heard the cries he chose not to respond. It was this behavior, amply publicized by Crowley himself in letters published shortly thereafter in the Pioneer of India and the London Daily Mail, which earned him a lasting ignominy in mountaineering circles. In one of these letters, written in his tent on that very night, Crowley described how he had remained in his sleeping gear drinking tea, then offered an explanation that dripped with contempt: “As it was I could do nothing more than send out Reymond on the forlorn hope. Not that I was overanxious in the circumstances to render help. A mountain ‘accident’ of this sort is one of the things for which I have no sympathy whatsoever.… To-morrow I hope to go down and find out how things stand.” Crowley was fond of invoking the standards of honor of the English gentleman. His behavior on this night flaunted those standards. One can well speculate that, had Crowley been the one in danger, and had Guillarmod and de Righi failed to respond, he would have excoriated them for their perfidy and cowardice.