The Moth and the Mountain

by Ed Caesar

  Reading all of this were Wilson’s two surviving brothers, Fred and Victor; his infirm mother, Sarah; his darling Enid, and Len; perhaps his estranged wife, Ruby, in New Zealand; perhaps all the women he had loved briefly, and abandoned. A few days after Wilson died on Everest, but before the news reached England, Beatrice Hardy Slater, Wilson’s first wife, married a salesman named Leonard Bentley. You can only imagine the complicated emotions she experienced when she read the reports of Wilson’s death.

  Only one newspaper secured an interview with Sarah Wilson. In its report of July 18, the Evening Standard of London quoted her at length. Evidently, she did not believe Maurice was dead. One wonders if the journalist was the first person to tell her the news. The interview shows a tangle of incredulity, pride, and fear:

  My son left England in May last year without saying goodbye. Until a few weeks before his departure he kept me in ignorance of his plans. I have been very ill, and he did not want to worry me unduly.…

  I knew he wanted to try some new adventure. He asked me for a map of India. I never guessed why he wanted it, even when I saw him poring over it for hours.

  He studied his Everest undertaking from every viewpoint. I expect he left without saying goodbye because he thought the leave-taking might upset me.

  I have great confidence in my son’s ability.

  I have one fear. His left arm was injured in the war and is practically useless. I keep asking myself: can it stand the strain? He was shot in the back and across the left arm and he cannot carry anything heavy.

  I am anxious about the oxygen apparatus he will have to carry and am wondering how he will go no about that. I am afraid it might be too heavy for him. Anyway, whether he succeeds or not I am very proud of him and his father would be too, if he were alive.

  Despite the deluge of interest in Wilson’s daring escape from Darjeeling in disguise, and his attempt to climb Everest, the British officials in India and Sikkim kept their composure. There was still the question of whether to prosecute the three Bhutias who helped Wilson.

  Williamson, the intrepid Brit in Sikkim, was at the heart of a quiet act of clemency. He seems to have been moved by Wilson’s final letter, urging the authorities not to punish the men. Williamson wrote to the foreign secretary of India, saying that if Wilson had returned from the mountain, “I should have been in favor of prosecuting him and pressing for a severe punishment”—an easy thing to say, given that he knew Wilson could never return. Williamson then continued his advice, suggesting, “Under the circumstances, I feel that the prosecution of the coolies would serve no useful purpose.”

  Tewang, Tsering, and Rinzing went free.

  * * *

  Nearly a year passed. On July 9, 1935, a new British expedition, accompanied by a group of porters that included Tewang and Rinzing, trudged its way up the East Rongbuk Glacier, to Camp III, and to the start of the climb of the North Col. The party was small, in comparison to previous British assaults on the mountain, and modest in its aims. Only a few months earlier, the Tibetan government had unexpectedly given permission for two British parties to visit the mountain, in 1935 and 1936. The Mount Everest Committee was caught off guard by the development. The committee hastily assembled a group of men to lead a small “reconnaissance” mission to the mountain in 1935, led by Eric Shipton, who had been on the 1933 Everest team. This trip in 1935, they hoped, would pave the way for a successful summit bid in 1936, for which the committee would have more time to prepare.

  About two hundred yards from the 1933 food dump, Charles Warren, a doctor, found the body of Maurice Wilson. He wrote in his diary:

  The body was lying on its left side with the knees drawn up in an attitude of flexion. The first boot I had found some 10 yards down the slope, the second was lying near the man’s foot. He was wearing a [illegible] pullover, gray flannel trousers with woollen vest and pants underneath. There was a stone near his left hand to which a guyline of a tent was attached. The torn remains of the tent were pulled out of the snow some few feet down the slope from him.

  Later, Shipton and his team found Wilson’s lightweight rucksack, with the concave mirror attached to it. They also retrieved the flag of friendship and the small green diary. They must also have found the poem “Mauvey an’ Me,” because that eventually found its way to its intended recipient in London. Shipton took the diary and the poem for safekeeping. He and his companions then found a nearby crevasse, where they buried Wilson’s body, which disappeared out of sight the moment it was dropped through the snow. The burial party marked the site using Wilson’s ice ax as a cross. Neither Warren nor Shipton make mention of the necklace with the gold crucifix. It was, presumably, buried with its owner.

  Upon his return to Darjeeling, Shipton ensured that the British authorities were notified of the discovery of Wilson’s body. Shipton also handed over Wilson’s possessions, which were sent to Len Evans, the executor and beneficiary of Wilson’s will. The Indian government wrote to Sarah Wilson, who at first refused to believe the news. They assured her that the body found on Everest was that of her son. But when she herself died, some months later, doubt was still in her mind. In her will, she left a third of her estate to Maurice, in the hope that some dreadful mistake had been made, and that he would eventually return. The painful details of Sarah Wilson’s befuddlement were reported, unkindly, by the newspapers.

  On the night after the discovery and burial of Wilson, Shipton and his fellow expedition members gathered in one tent. They were, at that moment, the highest human beings on the planet. The conditions outside were brutal. The events of the day had shaken them. One member of the party, Edwin Kempson, began to read from Wilson’s diary, aloud. As they huddled there, at over twenty-one thousand feet, Wilson’s story cast a spell. The climbing party listened in disbelieving silence.

  Isn’t she a darling? Not you—the ruddy mountain, I mean.…

  Strange, but I feel that there is someone with me in tent all the time.…

  Off again, gorgeous day.

  After the final legible entry in the diary, there was some weak and unintelligible pencil scrawl. It seemed clear to Shipton’s party that Wilson had died sometime in the early days of June, of exhaustion and exposure. Whatever Wilson’s last thoughts were, he was not able to share them.

  The poem returned to England by sea. Wilson had written and sent the first half of “Mauvey an’ Me” to Enid from Darjeeling. He finished the poem before he reached the mountain. Enid would read its final, unpolished verses more than a year after they were composed. Within them, she found a quartet that surely caught her—lines that contained all the greatness and strangeness of the man she loved, a man who loved her back until the day he died on a high mountain, boots off and knees drawn up, like a sleeping child:

  Thoughts of dear friendships at home in the maelstrom,

  Digging for gold in a mock paradise;

  Of war that is past, and again in the making,

  No fools so foolish as fools that are wise.

  The story of Maurice Wilson’s adventure blazed around the world three times: once in 1933, when he bested the Air Ministry and set off for India; another time in 1934, when he went missing on Everest; and once more, a year later, when his body was discovered. On each occasion, the newspapers carried double-page features, interviews with his friends, expert opinions, and investigations of Wilson’s motives. In their descriptions of Wilson, the press reports often reverted to a peculiarly British word: pluck. It suggested a kind of doomed heroism, but with an added and poignant resonance. The word was, like many other aspects of British life in the 1930s, a hangover from the war. How many widows and mothers had received letters fifteen years earlier describing their lost boys as “plucky”? James Akam, Wilson’s pal from Cecil Avenue, had written one of those letters himself, to the mother of one of his men, blown to bits in a French ditch.

  “If ever there was a plucky lad,” Akam wrote, “he was one.”

  After these initial starbursts of i
nterest, the appeal of Wilson’s story withered. With the passing of years, the circle of people who’d known Wilson intimately became smaller. Sarah Wilson died in 1936, confused and distressed—and still imagining her third son might return, alive and well, from Everest. Victor Wilson died of a heart attack in 1938, while on a health trip to New Zealand and the South Pacific, aged forty-two. He had never recovered from the battles of Bullecourt.

  You are tempted to think of Victor’s journey as a final pilgrimage to his lost brother’s old stamping grounds. This may be a romantic notion, but whatever sparked his voyage, it was a strange decision for a deaf and unwell man. He left his wife, Elsie, at home in Yorkshire, with almost no money. The trip was scheduled to take at least a year.

  In one of Victor’s last acts, he sent a letter to a friend at home—a Mr. E. Russam of Leeds, Yorkshire—via the Tin Can Mail of Tonga. The Tin Can Mail was an unusual postal service that operated off the island of Niuafo‘ou. Correspondents would put their postcards in biscuit tins and throw them over the side of their boat. The letters would then be collected by Tongans who swam or canoed out to collect them, then sent them on. Victor died six days after throwing his tin overboard. The contents of his letter are unknown.

  From 1938 onward, Fred became the sole surviving Wilson brother.

  * * *

  Just as the Great War had interrupted the Everest project, so too did the Second World War. But in 1946, after the conflict finally ended, climbers from many countries were naturally ambitious to climb the world’s highest peak. In 1947, an inexperienced Canadian climber named Earl Denman followed in Wilson’s footsteps by sneaking into Tibet and attempting the mountain by the northern route. Denman was accompanied by the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, who had been with Shipton when he found the body of Maurice Wilson in 1935. Unlike Wilson, Denman was sensible enough to turn around when he could not reach the North Col.

  As for official expeditions to Everest, the British now had competition. For decades, Britain had enjoyed almost exclusive rights to the mountain from the northern, Tibetan side, because of their diplomatic relations with Lhasa. But after China invaded Tibet in 1950, the northern route was closed, and the southern Nepali route became the only viable option. In 1951, a British expedition led by Eric Shipton scouted possible routes to the top of Everest from the southern side and concluded that a summit bid was possible via the Western Cwm. The following year, however, Nepal granted permission to a rival Swiss expedition. Two men on that expedition—the Swiss climber Raymond Lambert and Tenzing Norgay—climbed within 820 feet of the summit before turning back.

  In 1953, the British were once more granted permission to attempt a summit climb. They knew it could be their last for years. On that 1953 expedition, Tenzing Norgay climbed with a New Zealander named Edmund Hillary right to the top of the world. They carried three flags with them to the summit: the Union flag of the United Kingdom, the United Nations flag, and the flag of Nepal. Hillary also placed a small crucifix on top of the mountain. The news was cabled back to Britain, where a young Queen Elizabeth II was awaiting her coronation. The Times, whose correspondent James Morris was at expedition base camp, reported the news with poetic awe:

  “Today, high above the Nuptse ridge, Everest looks as surly, as muscular, as scornfully unattainable as ever; but after 30 years of endeavour the greatest of mountains is defeated, and many are the ghosts and men far off who share in the triumph.”

  Everest had been climbed, and Everest fever gripped Britain and the world. The New York Times splashed its headlines across the front page in a giant font: 2 OF BRITISH TEAM CONQUER EVEREST; QUEEN GETS NEWS AS CORONATION GIFT; THRONGS LINE HER PROCESSION ROUTE; HIGHEST PEAK WON. In India, police wielding batons fought back crowds who had gathered at the airport to acclaim Hillary and Tenzing.

  In the mid-1950s, with interest in Everest still bubbling, Dennis Roberts revisited the story of one of the “ghosts” of Everest. In 1957, he published his book about Maurice Wilson, I’ll Climb Mount Everest Alone. His account was based on Wilson’s diary and letters to Enid. Although Roberts never spoke to Fred Wilson or any other family member, he interviewed the Evanses many times and read Wilson’s letters, on the condition that he never publish any of the correspondence while Enid was alive. (The mystery is what happened to Enid’s letters to Wilson, which were among the documents the Bhutias took to Darjeeling, and which were then sent to Len Evans, along with Wilson’s ciné film from Rongbuk. They all disappeared. Perhaps they were too scandalous, or perhaps, like many old things, they were simply lost.) Roberts’s account is strange, often compelling, and often wrong, as the endnotes will discuss. But it’s also an unavoidable truth that this book would not have been possible had Roberts not written his. For one thing, Enid would never have given up her letters, which eventually found their way to Canada, to Germany, and then to an untidy office in Manchester, England, where they remain.

  Maurice Wilson continued to haunt the mountain. His body reappeared from its crevasse grave on Everest in 1959—the first of five times it has done so—before disappearing once more beneath the winter snow. In the 1990s, an American climber who saw the skeleton of Maurice Wilson removed his jawbone. The climber packed the bone in his rucksack, then took it back to America, where he put it on his desk, as a memento.

  Wilson’s story also lingered. In 1980, a British playwright named Barry Collins wrote a one-man play about Wilson called The Ice Chimney, in which Wilson battles with himself and God at the foot of the North Col. In a strange coincidence, the play was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival of 1980, at almost exactly the same time Reinhold Messner was invoking the spirit of Wilson in his own pioneering summit of Everest by the northern route.

  In 2003, an American named Thomas Noy emerged with an outlandish new theory about Wilson. Noy believed Wilson had been the first man to reach the summit of Everest and had died on the way down. Noy’s theory was based on a conversation with a member of the Chinese summit expedition of 1960, who claimed to have found the remains of a tent at nearly twenty-eight thousand feet, which—Noy thought—could not have belonged to anybody but Wilson. Other alpinists and historians questioned the site of the torn tent. But, more persuasively, they also negated Noy’s theory with common sense. Wilson possessed neither the skill, nor the equipment, nor the support, to reach the summit of Everest. It is possible to say with some certainty that Wilson died attempting to climb the North Col, sometime in the early days of June 1934.

  * * *

  In 2011, you read a paragraph about an Englishman from the 1930s who decided to climb Everest and was banned from doing so—a man so driven and defiant that he flew a plane thousands of miles, then walked hundreds more in a priest’s outfit, to the foot of the world’s tallest mountain, just to begin his attempt—and you wanted to know more. Now you are eight years older, with two children. A significant portion of your own life has gone, filled with its own joy and heartbreak, adventure and torpor. You are in your fortieth year. Wilson was thirty-six when he died. You think about how young he was when he chose not to retreat from the mountain.

  Maurice Wilson in uniform, wearing his Military Cross ribbon, 1918 or 1919.

  At Wilson’s great-nephew’s house in Bradford, there is a photograph of Maurice Wilson in a brown leather frame, next to his Military Cross for valor. The photograph shows Wilson in uniform, with his West Yorkshire Regiment emblem on his lapel, and his MC ribbon on his chest. His hair is blond and combed back, with a raffish curl. He looks unblemished. The photograph was taken after he had recovered from his gunshot wounds, in 1918 or 1919. A twenty-year-old war hero. He is sitting at a desk, poring over a map and pointing to a particular spot. You can’t see what part of the world the map shows, but you think at first that it must be the Western Front. That would make sense: the soldier pointing to the place where he made his stand. But, no, you look closer, and that’s not right. The map shows a bay and some islands. It looks at second glance like the Adriatic coastline, but then you t
hink that can’t be right either. In any event, it is not a map of the battlefields of northern Europe. Where then? It drives you mad.

  You want to know what he’s pointing at because you want whatever evidence you have collected of Wilson’s life to have meaning. But now, many years after your mania began, you realize that not everything can have meaning, in a historical sense. To believe so would be to misunderstand both people and stories. Wilson was pointing to a map. So what? Perhaps the photographer thought that a man in uniform should point at a map. It is a plausibly gallant pose. The map was probably chosen at random. Your desire to know is always strong, and your ability to know is at times so frustrated, and between these two poles is the no-man’s-land the biographer often inhabits. Sometimes, Wilson seems distant and ancient. At others, he is so close that you can hear him.

  Off again, gorgeous day.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I could not have climbed this mountain alone.

  Many historians and archivists helped me to understand the story of Maurice Wilson, and his world. Kathryn Hughes, who runs the West Yorkshire Lives site, dug up a photograph of young Stanley Wilson dressed as a Belgian soldier in 1914. Hannah Rogers at the York Army Museum provided me with unit diaries and military records for the Wilson brothers. John Sheehan, author of the terrific Harrogate Terriers, shared his scholarship on the First Fifth battalion’s wartime experiences with me, and he also pointed me toward many invaluable original sources. Only with John’s help was I able to piece together Wilson’s life-changing battle at Wytschaete. His maps were invaluable when I stood at Wytschaete, exactly one hundred years after Wilson’s stand. Thank you, too, to Roman Borisovich, who walked the Somme battlefields with me and bought me a beer in Ypres.