Mountains of the Mind

by Robert Macfarlane

  They dock in Calcutta on 10 May, and after a night there Mallory takes the eighteen-hour mountain train across the plains, and then up to Darjeeling, the track cutting through hillsides stepped with tea-terraces, and steep-sided valleys whose vertical forests remind him of Chinese scroll paintings. It feels good to be in hill-country again after a month on the oceanic plains.

  In Darjeeling he meets the other Everesters (as they have begun to call themselves) and it seems, finally, that the adventure might have begun. But no; before that the formalities must be observed. The first night there Mallory has to sit through a banquet arranged by the Governor of Bengal, their host in Darjeeling. It is a plumed and brocaded affair: lots of solemn pre-prandial hand-shaking, and then the many courses of the meal itself. Each diner has an attentive wallah standing disconcertingly behind their chair, like a ghost or a shadow. There is far too much pomp and circumstance for Mallory’s taste, but then as this Everest trip is in so many ways an imperial mission, pomp must be tolerated. He gets to meet his fellow expedition members. That night, he sends quick, sharp judgments of them in a letter back to Ruth. There is Wheeler the Canadian (‘you know my complex about Canadians. I shall have to swallow before I like him, I expect. God send me saliva.’) And Howard-Bury, the leader of the expedition, whom Mallory instinctively dislikes. He reeks of Toryism, crassness, dogma. There is Bullock, who will be Mallory’s partner on the mountain, and whom he knew at Winchester. Bullock has, bafflingly, brought a suitcase with him. Into it he has packed one coat and two sweaters to keep him warm, and a pink umbrella to protect him from snowstorms and sunlight, and to make him look ‘picturesque’ against the landscape. There is Morshead, the surveyor-mountaineer, who impresses Mallory: he looks tough. And there is Kellas, the Scottish doctor and mountaineer who has rushed back to Darjeeling after climbing a trio of high mountains in Central Tibet. Mallory takes to Kellas from the moment he arrives, ten minutes late for the Governor’s dinner, dishevelled ‘as an alchemist’ and muttering insincere apologies in his thick Scotch accent.

  From Darjeeling, after much delay, the expedition departs. Fifty mules and their muleteers, a throng of porters, cooks, translators and sirdars, and the Everesters themselves. For days they move through the greenhouse of the Sikkim jungle. It rains profusely, and this causes problems. Mallory has his black cycling cape and Bullock his pink umbrella, but nothing keeps you dry beneath such a prodigious downpour. Everything is wet, water slides and trickles off every leaf and stone. The mules they procured in Darjeeling are plump creatures, unused to the jungle paths. Nine fall sick, and one collapses and dies. After five days there is no choice: they decide to pack the mules and their muleteers back to Darjeeling, and extemporize with local transport – yaks, ponies – once they get into Tibet. The rain brings out the leeches, too. Both sorts – the string-thin, army-green leeches and the tuberous, ochre-striped tiger-leeches. They come from all directions, and in their hundreds: undulating over the ground at surprising speed, or standing erect on leaves and branches, waving like admonishing fingers in the air. The porters nip them off from their legs with a twist and a pull, leaving little rings of blood that bleed on for hours afterwards, and quickly the Westerners learn to do the same.

  But there is also a beauty in the moist, riotous densities of the jungle. The rain glosses the thick leaves, and gathers in bulging silver puddles in flower heads. Dragonflies, like little neon bars, dart and hover over the ponds. Mallory is especially enchanted by the flowers: the roseate orchids, and the lemony flowers of the rhododendrons. And of course there is Bullock’s umbrella, which upside down on the ground looks like an extravagant, unheard-of bloom.

  Then, abruptly, the jungle ends. The party cross the watershed of Jelep La – all of them feeling the altitude a little at 14,500 feet – and from this high point they gaze north. The air here smells cleaner and colder; oxygen-flavoured, almost. For the first time the mountains are visible, the snow mountains which Mallory has come so far to see, leaping up above the rim of the horizon. In front of them lies Tibet, and somewhere inside that country, Everest itself. ‘Goodbye beautiful wooded Sikkim,’ writes an excited Mallory, ‘& welcome – God knows what!’ The change in terrain is total. As they descend towards Phari, the air becomes much drier and the vegetation is transformed. Here there are tall silver fir trees, with dark rhododendrons at their feet.

  Then on to the high gravel deserts of southern Tibet, which proceed for hundreds of glaring miles. It is six days’ march from Phari to Kampa Dzong, the Tibetan hill-fort through which Younghusband’s army passed en route to Lhasa. Six days over high sepia deserts. Like all deserts, these ones are cold and calm in the early mornings when they wake; by lunchtime the heat is rampant, shimmering up in waves ahead, glaring off the surfaces of rock rubble, creating a furnace hot enough to strip away the skin on one’s cheeks. In the afternoon the wind stirs itself, and stirs too the tons and tons of dust which lie loosely on the ground. At night tailless rats scutter about unnervingly on the groundsheets of their tents, and the temperature hurtles downwards. The mountains which edge the deserts are bosomy in profile, cleaved by long-vanished glaciers and river gulches, shaley in texture, the higher ones striated horizontally with snow.

  All the group are suffering from stomach problems now. Most afflicted, though, is Kellas, racked with dysentery and so weak that he has to be carried on a litter. He had started the expedition exhausted by his triple ascent, and has not been able to fortify himself since. He refuses to turn back, though. Just short of Kampa Dzong, on 5 June, not long after crossing a high pass, he dies in a splutter of blood and shit.

  Suddenly this imperial progress has become a funeral cortège. It seems strange and wrong that death should have visited the expedition so early, so far from the mountain itself. Mallory writes to Ruth to reassure her of his own fitness, knowing that Kellas’s death will make it into the despatches which Howard-Bury is sending back almost daily to The Times. Mallory’s own letters take upwards of a month to reach England.

  They put up a tent to house Kellas’s body overnight. The next day they dig a grave in the friable earth of a stony hillside and bury Kellas so that he lies facing the three peaks that he climbed before the expedition began – and which indirectly killed him. Howard-Bury recites the standard passage from Corinthians into the empty air, and the four porters whom Kellas had come to know so well sit on top of a flat boulder near the grave, and listen to the Englishman speak. This done, they build a stone cairn over the grave, and march on.

  Kampa Dzong is a Tibetan fort which guards the entrance to a narrow valley. Here, spirits improve. Bury shoots a gazelle and a fat-tailed sheep, and Bullock bags a goose and catches a dish of little fishes. Despite the death of Kellas and the asperities of the terrain, Mallory feels exhilarated by the prospect of getting closer to Everest, and of going where no one has gone before. ‘We are now in a country which no European has previously visited,’ he writes to Ruth. ‘In another 2 days’ march we shall be “off the map”; which was made at the time of the Lhasa expedition.’ For Everest at this moment exists only in the imagination of the West. It is nothing more than a handful of distant sightings glimpsed over decades, a triangulated peak with a height and a set of coordinates to pin it down in space. It exists only in expectation.

  The following morning, before breakfast, Mallory and Bullock climb the barren, scree-laden slopes – two steps up, one back – above the fort. They ascend for perhaps 1,000 feet, up into the golden sunlight, and then:

  we stayed and turned, and saw what we came to see. There was no mistaking the two great peaks in the West: that to the left must be Makalu, grey, severe, and yet distinctly graceful, and the other away to the right – who could doubt its identity? It was a prodigious white fang excrescent from the jaw of the world. We saw Mount Everest not quite sharply defined on account of a slight haze in that direction; this circumstance added a touch of mystery and grandeur; we were satisfied that the highest of mountains would not disappoint us
.

  He has seen it at last, the mountain which has drawn him so many thousands of miles across the world. And, just for the time being, he doesn’t want to see Everest ‘sharply defined’, he wants it to retain its mystery, to remain a conspiracy of imagination and geology, a half-imagined, half-real hill. This is the Sublime at work inside Mallory, stimulating his appetite for intimation, for haze, for mystery, convincing him that what is half-seen is seen more intensely. Mallory is attracted by what J. R. R. Tolkien would later call glamour – ‘that shimmer of suggestion that never becomes clear sight, but always hints at something deeper further on’.

  They leave Kampa Dzong after a few days’ rest, and move on westwards. Now they pass through the true badlands of Tibet, a wilderness of sand dunes and mud-flats set in a bronze light. Here the wind is almost a blessing, for it keeps squadrons of voracious sand-flies pinned to the ground. The pack animals flounder in the mud, and have to be coaxed up steep sand cliffs. To Bullock it seems the most godforsaken, sterile region in the world. To Mallory’s alert eyes, however, it is not entirely bereft either of charm or colour. He notices miniature blue irises blooming leaflessly from the gravel, and a few vivid nasturtium-like plants with pink and yellow petals, and tiny green leaves. It is as though there is a trove of colour buried just beneath the desert surface, peeking through here and there.

  One morning, as has become their custom, Mallory and Bullock push on together ahead of the main group. On horseback now, they ford a deep river and canter for miles along the bed of a gorge. Suddenly the sides of the gorge peel back and they discover themselves out on a sandy plain. And there, before them, gleaming through the cloud, beneath a cavernous sky, are the mountains they have come so far to see. Again Mallory feels strongly the shiver and thrill of going where no one has gone before:

  I felt somehow a traveller. It was not only that no European had ever been here before us; but we were penetrating a secret: we were looking behind the great barrier running North–South which had been a screen in front of us ever since we turned our eyes westwards from Kampa Dzong.

  It is for moments like this that he has come on this ‘great adventure’, as he has taken to calling it.

  With time to kill while the others catch up, Mallory and Bullock tether the ponies and scramble up a shaley small peak at the northern corner of the gorge. From its summit they turn westwards. The clouds have come in and obscured the mountains since they emerged from the gorge, and it seems that even with the field-glasses they will be able to see nothing. But then

  suddenly our eyes caught glint of snow through the clouds; & gradually, very gradually in the course of 2 hrs or so visions of great mountainsides & glaciers and ridges now here now there, forms invisible for the most part to the naked eye or indistinguishable from the clouds themselves appeared through the floating rifts and had meaning for us; – one whole clear meaning pieced from these fragments, for we had seen a whole mountain-range, little by little, the lesser to the greater until, incredibly higher in the sky than imagination had ventured to dream, the top of Everest appeared.

  While they are at the summit a wind gets up and starts to blow the sand of the plain, so that from above, while they are descending, the plain seems like a basin of rippling silk.

  Soon they pitch camp at Shekar Dzong – the White Glass Fort. The whitewashed walls of the buildings shine in the sun. To Mallory every detail of camp life – the fibrous guy-ropes, the tea chests which double as stools, the heavy canvas of the mess tent, the clinking cooking bowls – is made beautiful by the conscientious light of this place, which picks out each aspect and each grain of each object. Inquisitive Tibetans stroll among the Everesters: mothers with babies slung in their papooses, grimy toddlers, lean fathers.

  They spend two nights at Shekar Dzong. The post arrives, and Mallory gets a sheaf of letters from Ruth. He replies straight away, and presses tiny Tibetan flowers between the pages of his letter. He tells her that this day – the day he saw Everest in snatches through the cloud – was ‘somehow a great landmark’. Everest had now ‘become something more than a fantastic vision’. To be sure, it is a landmark, or better perhaps to say a turning-point. For from this day forth Everest, more even than Ruth, becomes the focus of Mallory’s letters. The mountain starts to intrude into his thoughts like a lover. The third point of the love triangle which will destroy both Mallory and Ruth is put in place. ‘Where,’ he asks Ruth in his letter to her, ‘can one go for another view, to unveil a little more of the great mystery? – from this day that question has been always present.’

  On 19 June, some four weeks after leaving Darjeeling, the expedition crosses a series of bridges slung like dilapidated train-tracks over churning rivers, and turns into the valley which leads up towards Tingri Dzong, a trading village on a hillock in the middle of a salt plain, forty miles distant from Everest. Here Howard-Bury sets up a permanent dark-room and mess tent. Tingri is to be HQ, the base of operations, the nerve centre of the expedition.

  Mallory is keen to get on. After only a short break he and Bullock push up the Rongbuk valley to establish a more advanced base camp, some fifteen miles short of the mountain itself. Here Everest, ‘amazing in its simplicity’, looms over them. It is showcased by its surroundings. The long arms of the Rongbuk valley, its high walls perforated by caves in which Buddhist hermits live, extend downwards from the mountain like ‘giant’s limbs: simple, severe, superb’. And within them the Rongbuk glacier runs itself up into the cwm at the base of the mountain ‘like the charge of the light brigade’.

  It is from here that the work really begins. They are here, this year, to try to find the best way up Everest. To do this, they must unlock the mysteries of the mountain and its satellite peaks; must decipher its geography. Days and then weeks are spent mapping, probing, photographing, hurdling the ridges that radiate out from the hub of the massif. Each ounce of information about the mountain is gained through graft. On the good days they wake early – the sunlight at dawn moves across the campsite like a tide flowing in, inky on one side and gold on the other – and walk for ten or a dozen hours, often carrying heavy photographic equipment. It is not easy going. There is the altitude and the temperature, to begin with. And the Rongbuk glacier doesn’t provide the walkway to the base of the mountain that it promised from afar. As Mallory quickly discovers, the glaciers in this part of the world – nearer the equator – are not as pedestrian-friendly as Alpine glaciers. Here, the ice has been wrought by the overhead sun into densely clustered forests of ice pinnacles, some of them fifty feet high, the ice beneath them fissured into a labyrinth of crevasses and pressure ridges. ‘The White Rabbit himself would have been bewildered here,’ writes Mallory. He soon realizes that progress is best to be made away from this weird scape of icy stalactites, up on the lateral moraines of the glaciers; though these routes have their own dangers, threatened as they are by rock- and ice-fall from the cliffs above.

  Most of the time Mallory is enchanted by the landscape. On good evenings he watches red sunsets over Everest, and notes how twilight flattens the mountains to two dimensions, like cardboard cut-outs, and how the gleaming summit of Everest hangs over him ‘like Keats’s lone star’. In the mornings he watches almost lustfully as Everest divests herself of cloud:

  An ‘Everester’ in front of the ice pinnacles of the Rongbuk glacier. Photographer John Noel. © Sandra R. C. Noel.

  We watched again last morning that oft-repeated drama which seems always to be a first night, fresh and full of wonder whenever we are present to watch it. The clinging curtains were rent and swirled aside and closed again, lifted and lowered and flung wide at last; sunlight broke through with sharp shadows and clean edges revealed – and we were there to witness the amazing spectacle.

  This is mountaineering as strip-tease. Mallory is smitten. He is possessed of a seemingly inexhaustible energy, a ‘driving power’ as he calls it. Everest has created for him, he writes to Ruth, ‘an exhilarating life’.

  Sometimes,
though, very occasionally, Mallory is just sick of it all: the repetitive food, the bullying of the body by the altitude, the bad weather, the cramped little tents. By 12 July they have established a second advanced camp at 19,000 feet, at which altitude the Primus stoves won’t work and the ice is as hard as stone. Pinned down by bad weather at this camp, listening to fine grains of snow falling incessantly on to the sides of the tent, Mallory writes to a friend:

  I sometimes think of this expedition as a fraud from beginning to end invented by the wild enthusiasm of one man – Younghusband … and imposed upon the faithful ardour of your humble servant. Certainly the reality must be strangely different from their dream. The long imagined snowslopes of this northern face of Everest with their gentle & inviting angle turn out to be the most appalling precipice nearly 10,000 ft high …

  It is not entirely lost on Mallory that he is climbing a mountain of the mind, and by no means wholly of his own mind – more of Younghusband’s. The talk back in Britain, at the Alpine Club and the ‘Jog’, had been of easy snow slopes. But of course no one before Mallory had been near enough to Everest to see its north face – these easy snow slopes, like so many aspects of so many mountains, had been imagined into being. The reality, as Mallory points out, is ‘strangely different’ – an ‘appalling precipice nearly 10,000 ft high’.

  From the beginning it has been clear that the North Col – the ‘col of our desires’ as Mallory calls it – holds the key to the mountain. It is the northern shoulder of the peak, from which an apparently climbable ice and rock ridge angles up to the summit. If a camp could just be pitched on the Col, then it seems likely the mountain will fall. The problem, though, is how to reach the Col itself. The first month is spent trying to force a way up from the main Rongbuk glacier. But it is too dangerous, and impossible for the porters. The route needs to be one up which supplies and equipment can be carried. So, in mid-July, Mallory and company decide to quit the main Rongbuk valley and walk round to the east of the mountain and see if there is a way up to the North Col from there.