The Moth and the Mountain

by Ed Caesar

  He is now completing preparations for his attempt.

  “Enough rice and dates to last 50 days will be in my rucksack when I begin to climb Mount Everest after landing on the mountain 10,000 feet up,” he said.

  “One fit, trained man can succeed where a large group will fail.”

  Mr. Wilson reckons eight days will be required for the foot climb up and down.

  The correspondent described Wilson’s training, and his belief in the benefits of fasting, and his strange idea that having less food in his stomach would allow him to breathe deeper while climbing Everest. This notion has the appearance of something Wilson thought up on the spot. Wilson did not fast so that he could take in “a vastly increased supply of oxygen,” as he told the journalist. He fasted to purify his soul. But there was no purpose in talking about souls with the man from the Express.

  The article continued:

  His ten months of training and experimenting have given him the utmost confidence. He considers his optimism fully justified, as he has read every book and studied every map of Everest in that period.

  He told me that he will carry a sealed oxygen apparatus, but he will not use it unless he is absolutely forced to.

  “I intend to cache it at 20,000 feet, in order to have the lightest possible load for the final dash to the summit,” he said.

  “There is no stunt about it,” he said. “It is a carefully planned expedition, which is certain of success although the orthodox minded may consider it madness.”

  Wilson’s comments about the oxygen tank, if accurately reported, reveal how little he understood about climbing at altitude. What would be the point of caching his tank at twenty thousand feet? His need for oxygen would only increase with every foot he ascended.

  On the day the Express article was published, Wilson wrote to Enid, on State Hotel notepaper, jubilant and defiant. Wilson told Enid that if permission was not granted for his flight over Nepal, he’d “just have to take the law into my own hands, damn them.”

  Wilson did not know that the law had already taken matters into its own hands before he had a chance to do the same. Having posted his letter, Wilson returned to Lalbalu and flew his unladen Moth to the maharaja’s airstrip in Purnea, as the chief had instructed. But once he landed, waiting policemen impounded the plane, locked it in a hangar, and guarded it around the clock. What’s more, Wilson was told he would be charged three rupees a day for the protection. He had no choice but to go back to the house of his host, Sergeant Major Rimmington, with his plane under lock and key. Wilson didn’t know it yet, but his plan to fly to Everest was dead.

  * * *

  As Wilson licked his wounds, word spread of his story. Before long, Sergeant Major Rimmington’s house was festooned with curious observers, well-wishers, and journalists. One Indian newspaper correspondent found Wilson at the policeman’s bungalow and wrote a long story about the Englishman’s frustrations. The reporter described Wilson as “tall, muscular and good-looking, face beaming with intelligence and firm determination.… In his talk he was very polite and appeared quite frank although from it one could not but realize that Mr. Wilson was adventure personified.”

  In one exchange, Wilson admitted that he could not understand all the fuss about national borders, and airspace, and permissions, a theme that was much on his mind. The journalist wrote that while Wilson is “sincerely proud of his British ancestry,” he was “attempting [Everest] actually as an internationalist.”

  Wilson told the journalist about his new plans to secure flying permissions, including crossing the border at the Indian town of Raxaul to make a personal entreaty to the maharaja of Nepal himself. He made the two-hundred-mile trip to the border shortly afterward, by car and train, in terrible weather, and stayed in a guesthouse for several days, before traveling to the Nepali town of Birganj to speak to one of the maharaja’s men by telephone. His efforts were in vain. The maharaja was under pressure from British officials, who had sent another flurry of cables. He turned Wilson down.

  The result was disappointing, but the journey to Nepal was memorable. In a letter to Enid from the border, Wilson described how moved he was by the number of infirm and crippled people he met. Enid and Len’s generous nature, Wilson believed, would render them bankrupt in India because they would give money to every beggar they saw. In the same long, sentimental letter, he told Enid that he missed looking at her face; that he had learned some local words; that he had “only twenty quid left in the wide world” but was “happy as a sandboy”; and that he was a little homesick because “there’s no place like England.”

  “My enthusiasm continues 100% with the impersonal objective of my mission almost a religion,” Wilson wrote. “I have no fear of any consequence and not a brood of thought as to what would happen in the event of failure.”

  Wilson concluded by telling Enid that the climbers of the Ruttledge expedition were still trying to reach the summit of Everest, in spite of the monsoon that had brought snowstorms to the Himalayas. It would be funny, he thought, if he waved them “Cheerio!” from the top of Everest. But Wilson must have known this was impossible. The weather, as he could see from his rainy journey to Birganj, had turned. Still, the continuing presence of the Ruttledge expedition at Everest made him anxious. For his summit climb to resonate, he needed the mountain to remain unconquered.

  * * *

  On the day he was entreating the maharaja of Nepal to let him fly over his country, a Reuters dispatch, later reprinted in Indian newspapers, stated that “a fresh attempt on Mount Everest is being planned, and six members of the expedition, including the leader, Mr Hugh Ruttledge, are reported to have left for camp. The weather is unfavourable and heavy snow has fallen above the 20,000 feet level.”

  Wilson read the report, and it caused a jangle of nerves. In truth, he need not have worried. If Wilson could have seen Ruttledge’s party, he would have beheld a group of frozen, exhausted, and sick men, who had no chance of further success. On June 21, 1933, Ruttledge evacuated Camp III, just beneath the North Col of Everest, for the final time. Nobody in the group had reached the summit. However, several adept alpinists in the group had climbed high on Everest, and three had climbed higher than twenty-eight thousand feet—an extraordinary achievement without oxygen. One of those men, Frank Smythe, became so delirious while climbing alone near the summit that he offered to share his biscuits with an imaginary companion.

  By late June, the mountain was covered in a blanket of snow, blocking any possible route to the summit. From the lower camps, Ruttledge had considered all of his options. Maybe, he thought, the blizzards were what the locals called a choti barsat—a “small monsoon” or “little rains”—which would soon break, leaving the mountain open to a further summit attempt. But even if that was the case, it had snowed heavily and continually for many days, and the covering on the higher slopes of the mountains would not shift. In his official record of the expedition, Ruttledge recognized that his expedition had been beaten by the mountain, and by the monsoon: “The weather, as always, had the last word.”

  Wilson, meanwhile, had finally given up his plan to fly to Everest. The rain continued to fall across northern India. Even when he read, at the end of the June, that Ruttledge’s party had beaten a retreat from the base of Everest, he felt no triumph because he realized that he, too, must wait until 1934 to climb the mountain. And he still did not have a clear plan of how to get there.

  * * *

  Wilson faced an even more pressing problem. He was nearly out of money. On occasion, he wired his mother in Bradford for £100 (around £7,000 or $9,000 in today’s money), but she did not have endless resources, and there was also his pride to think of. Wilson needed to find a way to stretch his resources over the next few months. The Moth was his only real asset, and the plane was deteriorating in the bad weather. In July, with permission to fly over Nepal firmly refused, he decided to sell Ever-Wrest.

  Over the next few weeks and months, Wilson tried to find a b
uyer for his plane and killed time in Purnea as best he could: reading, walking, making friends. The press reported every new twist of his adventure. When they caught up with Wilson, he told them that his plan was now to walk to Everest. Eagle-eyed British government officials clipped and filed the reports. The government men assumed that if Wilson was to trek to the mountain, he would have to do so as the previous British expeditions had done: from Darjeeling, through the British protectorate of Sikkim, and into Tibet. Government officials sent warnings ahead to agents in Darjeeling to expect a loudmouthed aviator, without an airplane.

  Wilson’s new plan was just as the officials had guessed. In the middle of August, he arrived in Darjeeling, a hilltop refuge from the Indian heat. The journey was dazzling. The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway used a tiny, chugging train on a two-foot-gauge railway. It ascended through clouds and mists on the spiraling line to Darjeeling, through woodland and tea plantations.

  The town, which stood at nearly seven thousand feet of elevation, was odd and sometimes wonderful: English toffs in pith helmets and shorts; a police bagpipe band; Edwardian gables; Buddhist shrines; a raucous market. Games of cards and dice were played by locals on street corners. There were magnificent views. Meanwhile, all the white men and women traveled around town by rickshaw, pushed and pulled by brown-skinned “coolies”—the generic imperial term for an indigenous servant. Everyone, that is, except Wilson, who preferred to walk, for reasons of health, economy, and perhaps social justice. Although Wilson used the word coolie, which would now be considered racist, he treated local people equitably and was not obviously racist in his views. He evidently felt unease about the social divisions brought about by empire. How bloody awful it must be to be brought up a snob.

  Only days before Wilson arrived in Darjeeling, the Ruttledge party had taken the descending train out of town, bound for Calcutta and the ship home. The town was abuzz at their high adventures on the mountain. Wilson’s precise plan was still in flux, but he was thrilled to be nearer to his prize. He settled in a large boardinghouse called Minto Villa and started his preparations for Everest.

  * * *

  Wilson arrived in Darjeeling missing Enid more than ever. She had sent him a picture from home in the post, which he treasured. In one letter, he told her, “I keep pulling it out to have a look-see.” Wilson had by now stopped any pretense that their relationship was platonic, as propriety would have demanded. Instead, Wilson signed off his letters with kisses.

  “I’ll never collect them,” he wrote semiflirtatiously, semimournfully, beneath one line of x’s.

  What happened when these letters reached 101 Biddulph Mansions? Wilson often wrote separately to both Len and Enid, but he sent the notes in the same bundle for economy. Did Len read Enid’s letters? Did Enid read Len’s? When Len saw those x’s, did he recoil? Or had an arrangement of some kind been reached among the three? If such an understanding seems unlikely, given the ostensibly pinched morals of interwar Britain, so does the brazenness of Wilson’s ardor.

  With his epistolary love affair raging, Wilson made new friends in Darjeeling. Within a few days, he’d taken up with a sixty-five-year-old woman, a Mrs. Kitchen, whose first name he never mentions. (There is a record of a Reverend L. C. Kitchen, an American missionary who occasionally taught in Darjeeling; the two may have been married.) Wilson and she went for long walks together: up and down hills, and to the market to buy fruit. He walked around Darjeeling in his flying jacket and heavy boots—an odd sight—and spoke plainly to his new confessor about his hopes, fears, and plans for Everest. As if preparing his body for the rigors ahead, he also cut down on cigarettes and began to eat more sparingly.

  Wilson was charmed by Indian life in Darjeeling. He thought the local people were hardworking and amiable. The women carried tremendous loads on their heads, and everyone he met seemed to show him two rows of gleaming, smiling teeth. He was less enamored of the colonialists he encountered. One day, on a visit to a post office, Wilson was invited to a game of whist with other English settlers.

  “I hate the damned game,” he wrote to Enid. “But of course, had to accept.”

  There were, however, consolations of British settlement. Darjeeling had a cinema, which Wilson frequented. In a letter to Enid, he mentions a couple of “talkies” he had seen: The Phantom of Paris, which was released in 1931 and tells the story of an escape artist wrongly imprisoned for murder; and Love Me Tonight, a delightful Rodgers and Hart musical released in 1932 that centers on a penniless Parisian tailor who dresses as a nobleman to win the heart of a princess. Enid would have been amused. Not only is the pauper-in-disguise hero of Love Me Tonight called Maurice; the part was played by a famous French actor named Maurice Chevalier.

  * * *

  Wilson formulated a new plan to reach the mountain. He wanted, if humanly possible, to obtain permission from the Tibetan government to walk through the kingdom to Everest. He had half a mind to make the three-hundred-mile trek in November, then spend the winter at the foot of the mountain, in the Rongbuk Monastery, so that he could climb Everest in the spring. To do so, he needed to get a message to the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s divine ruler, who was the only man who could grant permission.

  The previous British Everest expeditions of the 1920s had courted the Tibetans for years before being allowed to approach the mountain. The first British sortie in 1921 only proceeded after the Dalai Lama acceded to a request from a British diplomat at the end of a convoluted negotiation that involved a massive arms deal between the two countries. Unlike the British negotiators of that era, Wilson had no Lee-Enfield rifles to bargain with, nor any means to protect Tibet from Chinese aggression.

  After the 1924 British expedition to Everest, in which Mallory and Irvine died while making a summit attempt, the Tibetans cooled on allowing access to the roof of the world. They particularly objected to a film made by one of the 1924 Everest party, John Noel, which used seven Tibetan monks as dancers at screenings. It took nine years for another British expedition to be granted permission to trek to Everest via Tibet. Wilson hoped to make an entreaty through the British resident in Tibet—the most senior imperial emissary—but knew his request was unlikely to succeed.

  Maybe, Wilson thought, he wouldn’t need permission. In 1922, an American adventurer named William Montgomery McGovern had sneaked into the forbidden capital of Tibet, Lhasa. He squirted lemon juice in his eyes to make them appear darker, colored his skin with pigment, and wore the habit of a Tibetan servant. After outwitting patrols, and arriving in Lhasa, his whereabouts were eventually discovered and his house stoned by a mob led by Buddhist monks. Eventually, McGovern slipped out of the back door in disguise, then joined the mob in pelting stones at the house; he was eventually given an escort back to India by the civilian government of Tibet.

  McGovern’s incredible story was well-known, especially in Darjeeling, from where he had set out on his journey. What’s more, he wrote a book about his adventures, To Lhasa in Disguise, which was published in 1924. Even if Wilson had not read McGovern’s book, there seems little doubt Wilson would have known the outline of the tale. Then there was the story of Captain John Noel, who would later so incense the Tibetans with his insensitive traveling show. In 1913, he had trekked in disguise as a Buddhist pilgrim to within forty miles of Everest.

  Wilson hoped he wouldn’t need subterfuge, however. Within a few days of arriving in Darjeeling, he met a man named Karma Paul, who had acted as the interpreter on the 1922 and 1924 British expeditions to Everest and had recently returned from the mountain with the 1933 party. In his book The Assault on Mount Everest, 1922, Charles Bruce describes Paul warmly:

  He was quite young and had been a schoolmaster in Darjeeling. He had also worked, I believe, for an office in Calcutta.… He was a great acquisition to the Expedition, always good company and always cheerful, full of a quaint little vanity of his own and delighted when he was praised. He served us very well indeed… and it was a great deal owing to his cheerfulness and to hi
s excellent manners and way with the Tibetans that we never had the smallest misunderstanding with any officials, even of the lowest grades, to disturb our good relations with the Tibetans of any kind or class.

  Karma Paul told Wilson not only that he could help gain permission from Tibet, but that he might also accompany Wilson on his trek to the base of Everest. This was just the luck Wilson needed. He engaged Paul immediately. In preparation for his trek, Wilson also began to learn a few words and phrases in Tibetan.

  As he awaited action from Karma Paul in late August, Wilson went to see a palmist and clairvoyant in Darjeeling. He told Enid earnestly that the palmist was the seventh child of his parents, both of whom were the seventh child of their respective parents—and was therefore gifted with foresight. The soothsayer in Darjeeling told Wilson many things that seemed to strike a chord with him: that he wouldn’t do the climb until the spring; that he had three real friends in the world; that a woman at home would benefit from his success; that he had a wonderful, self-taught brain; that one woman had loved him very much, but he could not return it; that he’d had a tough life; that he had tried one thing after another in business; that he’d live to be ninety years old; and that what he was looking forward to—being married to a good woman—would not happen until he was thirty-seven years old. Wilson was bowled over.

  * * *

  In this period, Wilson’s enthusiasm and optimism sang out. After his months of purgatory in Purnea, the real prospect of adventure was thrilling. His letters show a man absorbing every morsel of useful information he could, even if such information led him to wrong, and potentially lethal, conclusions. At the end of one letter to Enid, all of Wilson’s finest and most dangerous qualities combine: curiosity, empathy, vainglory: