by Wade Davis
Returning to London in the first days of 1921, Mallory was at a loss. He wanted to leave Charterhouse, and knew that his literary aspirations, such as they were, would not be realized as a schoolmaster. His friends—those who’d survived—had not deserted him, but circumstances had changed. Duncan Grant, who’d never known the front, was living after the war with both David Garnett and Vanessa Bell, who was still married to Clive. The first time Duncan made love to Vanessa, her husband passed through the room and without missing a beat said, “Oh don’t stop. Please go on.” Others had settled down to more conventional affairs. In 1917 Geoffrey Keynes had married Margaret Elizabeth Darwin, the granddaughter of the great naturalist. In the spring of 1918, Geoffrey Young, with Mallory as best man, went to the altar with Len Slingsby, a young climber and actress. That same year, against all expectations, Maynard Keynes, whose promiscuity at Cambridge had been so legendary, had also fallen for a woman, Lydia Lopokova, a Russian ballerina, whom he ultimately married. By 1920 even James Strachey had settled down, and with his wife, the psychoanalyst Alix Sargant-Florence, buried himself in his life’s work, the English translation of the works of Sigmund Freud. Mallory, of course, was already the father of three children, a loyal and devoted husband, grateful to be home and alive.
The spasm of domesticity, though a fine antidote, could never mitigate the hangover of the war, which lingered even as talk of the conflict was banished from polite conversation—displaced, as Robert Graves scoffed, by the trivial, the marriage of London’s reigning beauty, Lady Diana Manners, or the success of a favorite horse at the Derby. The final betrayal of hope came with the Treaty of Versailles, negotiated by the same coterie of old men responsible for setting fire to civilization in 1914. Siegfried Sassoon described it as “a peace to end all peace.” Vera Brittain could not bear to read of its terms, so completely did it betray everything for which youth had fought and died. “They knew it was destined to cause another war,” wrote Graves, and yet “nobody cared.”
Such sentiments could not have been lost on Mallory, who, like so many of his generation, faced in the winter of 1921 an uncertain future. Charterhouse had become intolerable, a place of ghosts run by a headmaster who, knowing nothing of the front, expected life to continue as it always had, as if the war had been a mere interlude. The only anchor in Mallory’s life was his family, and the only endeavor at which he truly excelled was climbing. “The war had knocked the ball-room floor from under middle-class English life,” wrote Stephen Spender. “People resembled dancers suspended in mid-air yet miraculously able to pretend that they were still dancing.”
George Mallory was still very much in midair on January 22, 1921, when he received a curt letter from Percy Farrar of the Alpine Club, noting, “It looks like Everest will really be tried this summer. Party would leave early April and get back in October. Any aspirations?” Initially Mallory hesitated, reluctant to leave his young family, especially his son, John, an infant of only five months. Geoffrey Young, who had proposed Mallory to the Everest Committee, saw the expedition as George’s ticket out of Charterhouse and onto a larger stage. Ruth was against it, and Mallory almost refused. Young traveled to the Holt and made his case. He recalled, “I saw them both together, and in 20 minutes talk, Ruth saw what I meant: how much the label of Everest would mean for his career and educational plans. She told him to go.”
On February 9 Mallory met in London with Farrar, Sir Francis Younghusband, and Harold Raeburn, the expedition’s designated climbing leader. Mallory, Younghusband observed, accepted the offer “with no visible emotion.” A day later he thanked Geoffrey Young for providing the contact, writing, “I am just fixed for Everest … It seems rather a momentous step altogether with a new job to find when I get back, but it will not be a bad thing to give up the settled ease of the present life. Frankly I want a more eminent platform than the one in my classroom—at least in the sense of appealing to minds more capable of response … I expect I shall have no cause to regret your persuasions in the cause of Everest; at present I am highly elated at the prospect and so is Ruth: thank you for that.” The die was cast. In two months George Mallory would sail for India in what seemed at the time a good career move.
CHAPTER 6
The Doorway to the Mountain
FOR A FORTNIGHT the steamer Hatarana, carrying masses of equipment and stores destined for the expedition, lay at anchor in the languid waters of the Hooghly River, awaiting a berth at the Calcutta docks. A slot finally opened on May 10, the morning George Mallory disembarked from the Sardinia. Though the Hatarana’s cargo would be unloaded within a day, Mallory, ever impatient and encumbered with thirty-five pieces of luggage of his own, arranged for the bulk of the goods to follow and left that afternoon for Sealdah Station to catch the Darjeeling Mail, the evening train that ran north overnight to Siliguri. The terminus of the line, Siliguri, a small trading settlement scattered on a stony plain, lay seven miles from the slopes that rose out of the flatlands of India to form the foothills of the eastern Himalaya. From there he would transfer to the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, a narrow-gauge ribbon of track that zigzagged and looped its way some 7,000 vertical feet up the flank of the mountains to the hill station of Darjeeling, the summer seat of the government of Bengal and the staging point for the assault on Everest.
His journey of some four hundred miles began in sweltering heat and dust as the Darjeeling Mail steamed and clattered through a monotonous landscape of paddy fields and bamboo, plantations of coconut and betel palms, bananas and plantains. Three hours from Calcutta came a deafening roar as the train pounded over the Sara Bridge across the Padma, and then, with the night, long shadows from the moon and the faint light of scores upon scores of silent villages, a concentration of humanity unlike anything Mallory had ever seen. At dawn, nearing Jalpaiguri, he had a first fleeting glimpse of ice summits on the horizon, a vista at once daunting and exhilarating. Reaching Siliguri just after six in the morning, he took tea in a pleasant refreshment room reserved, as were all such establishments on the line, exclusively for Europeans. Native porters, meanwhile, hustled to transfer his gear to the Darjeeling Himalayan line, which departed punctually each day thirty-five minutes after the arrival of the mail train from Calcutta.
Leaving Siliguri, the track ran seven miles through fever-haunted ground, past a vast, empty field where the Younghusband Mission had encamped before its 1904 invasion of Tibet to the station at Sukna, where finally it began to climb, first gradually, through a rich forest of semul and sal trees, and then up a steep gradient that carried the train cars, almost toylike in scale, higher and higher into the mists. At Kurseong, some thirty-two miles from Siliguri and nineteen shy of Darjeeling, Mallory got off the train and walked ahead, making better time on foot as he took in the stunning views of the green plains of Bengal, some 5,000 feet below, across which ran rivers he compared to ribbons of silver. Looking above and to the skyline, he saw for the first time the summits of Kabru and Kangchenjunga, soaring to heights that dwarfed any mountain he had known in the Alps. Fields of tea glowed with a deep uniform green, but what most impressed him, as he wrote to Ruth in his first letter home from Darjeeling, “was the forest itself, the incredibly touching and mysterious beauty of a tree clad hillside with all its wealth of growth and variety of greens and darkness and brightness. In one spot especially where I was walking ahead of the train I was irresistibly reminded of wooded hillsides in Chinese pictures where they are used to express some deep religious feeling.”
Through a soft rain the train continued to climb, past fields of maize and dairy cattle, and forests of pine and fir that challenged all memory of the sultry lowlands abandoned but hours before. The air at Ghoom—at 7,400 feet, the highest station on the line—was actually cold and the wind penetrating as the train made the final descent over four miles to Darjeeling. Mallory strained for another view of Kangchenjunga, but the horizon was cloaked in clouds.
At Darjeeling Station a gaggle of female porters, tumplines in han
d, waited to hoist his luggage up the hill to Government House, where he was scheduled to stay as the personal guest of Lord Ronaldshay, governor of Bengal. Mallory, for his part, reached the mansion in a rickshaw, pulled and pushed by a team of three men, all Lepchas, indigenous hill people of Sikkim. Mallory referred to them simply as coolies, a term applied casually by the British to any working native, be they Tibetan, Nepali, or Indian. He would have preferred to stay at the Mount Everest Hotel, on Auckland Road, where he understood Bullock and his young American wife to be waiting, or even at the Bellevue, on Commercial Row, where the officers assigned to the expedition from the Survey of India, Oliver Wheeler and Henry Morshead, had been staying with their wives since arriving from their headquarters at Dehra Dun, the Wheelers on April 30 and the Morsheads three weeks earlier. But expedition leader Charles Howard-Bury had decided to billet both Mallory and the naturalist and physician Sandy Wollaston at Government House, where they would share the guesthouse, posh accommodations with a commanding view of the town. Mallory arrived just after three in the afternoon on May 11, only to learn that he was expected that evening at a formal dinner and reception, being hosted by Lord Ronaldshay himself.
It was, Mallory reported to Ruth, a “swagger” affair, complete with printed guest list and embossed invitations, servants dressed in red livery and gold and silver braid, a proper orchestra, and a table laid with a dazzling array of plates, flatware, bowls, and crystal. There were thirty guests, fifteen couples, who arrived two by two. Mallory escorted Evie Morshead. He had known her husband’s brothers at Winchester. Henry gave his arm to Mrs. Graham, whose husband ran the mission and vocational schools at Kalimpong. The Wheelers, who had married only seven weeks before, in Bombay, arrived with the Bullocks and immediately made their way to Sandy Wollaston, who had sailed from Marseille with the Bullocks on the P&O ship Naldera, reaching Bombay on April 30. “A comfortable journey out,” Wollaston reported in a letter to Arthur Hinks of the RGS, “but a villainous journey across India” had delayed his arrival until May 9. He had been in Darjeeling for only two days.
Harold Raeburn, the leader of the climbing party, had been staying at the Mount Everest Hotel since April 23. He had occupied his time profitably, engaging four cooks for the expedition and some forty porters, Sherpa Bhotias, as he described them, men of Tibetan ancestry whose homes lay in Solu Khumbu, the high alpine valleys of northeast Nepal that reach to the very southern flank of Everest. With the help of Howard-Bury, who had made his way to Darjeeling at the beginning of May after paying a social call on the viceroy, Lord Reading, in Simla, Raeburn had outfitted each hired man with boots, blankets, cap comforters, fur gloves, and warm clothing. Those destined for the high camps were given eiderdown sleeping bags. As only Henry Morshead spoke Tibetan, interpreters had to be found. Howard-Bury identified two ideal candidates. Gyalzen Kazi, raised in Sikkim, was fluent in the language, capable of reading and translating even the most obscure Buddhist scriptures. Chheten Wangdi was himself Tibetan, a former officer in the army of the Dalai Lama who had later served with the Indian Army in Egypt during the war.
Raeburn, a Scot not much given to British pomp, was in muted conversation with Alexander Heron, who had been appointed to the expedition by the Geological Survey of India, when Howard-Bury arrived, closely followed by Lord Ronaldshay, who was accompanied by two aides-de-camp in full dress uniform. The room fell silent as the governor made his circuit, shaking hands with each guest, engaging in the small patter of conversation that protocol demanded. From this point in the evening everything unfolded like clockwork. The servants stood by to usher each diner to a proper place at the table, and they hovered throughout the service, ready to top off each fluted glass with champagne. Music played and the conversation remained light until dessert, when Lord Ronaldshay rose to pay homage to the health of the king-emperor. Everyone stood in silence as the orchestra played “God Save the King.”
The only unscripted moment occurred some ten minutes after everyone had been seated, when an odd rumpled figure burst into the hall. Alexander Kellas, whose absence from Darjeeling had been the cause of much anxiety for both Howard-Bury and Wollaston, arrived at Government House dressed for the field and soaking wet, having walked the four miles from his lodgings at Ghoom. In India since June 1920, he had been almost continuously on expedition for close to a year, exploring the mountainous ridges that formed the northeastern Nepalese frontier and testing the oxygen apparatus destined for Everest. He had returned to Darjeeling only on the evening of May 10. Exhausted and feeling ill, he’d taken to his bed and rested most of the next day, very nearly sleeping through the governor’s dinner. At fifty-three, he was too old for such a pace. Though utterly spent, and suffering from obvious symptoms of enteritis and dysentery, he shared no word of his condition with Howard-Bury or even his old friends Morshead and Wollaston, who were all delighted that the veteran climber, deemed indispensable to the expedition, had finally appeared.
Mallory, who, like Raeburn, disdained formalities, took to Kellas immediately. “Kellas I love already,” he wrote to Ruth on May 17. “He is beyond description Scotch and uncouth in his speech—altogether uncouth. He arrived at the great dinner party ten minutes after we had sat down, and very disheveled … His appearance would form an admirable model to the stage for a farcical representation of an alchemist. He is very slight in build, short, thin, stooping, and narrow-chested; his head … made grotesque by veritable gig-lamps of spectacles and a long pointed moustache.”
Though by his own admission it was “early to be writing about the personnel,” Mallory had within days of arriving in Darjeeling formed strong opinions about all his colleagues, judgments that for the most part he clung to for the remainder of the expedition. Bullock, of course, was an old friend from school. Wollaston he also knew and admired, “an absolutely devoted and disinterested person.” Morshead seemed “a very nice man, quite unassuming and gentle, resembling his brothers a good deal in both face and manners, but considerably shorter than either of them.”
His other companions fared less well. The geologist Heron he dismissed as dull. He described Harold Raeburn as “extremely irritating” and dictatorial, a man with no sense of humor, utterly lacking in calm, and consistently “wrong in his facts.” As for expedition leader Howard-Bury, Mallory found him to be “too much the landlord, with not only Tory prejudices but a very highly developed sense of status and contempt for … sorts of people other than his own; he makes himself very pleasant with H.E. [Lord Ronaldshay]—too pleasant I sometimes think.”
Mallory reserved his harshest comments for Oliver Wheeler, a man he had never met and whose stunning achievements on Everest he would never acknowledge. “Wheeler I have hardly spoken to, but you know my complex about Canadians. I shall have to swallow before I like him, I expect. God send me the saliva.”
OVER THE FOLLOWING DAYS, even as the men and their wives enjoyed the popular amusements of Darjeeling—tennis, badminton, and golf at the Gymkhana Club, leisurely teas amid the potted plants and chintz and leather chairs and month-old copies of the Times and the Illustrated London News, the afternoon horse races at Lebong, dances and drinks in the evening at the Everest Hotel—the broad outline of the expedition came into focus. As Howard-Bury explained to Mallory, Bullock, and Wollaston—all newcomers to the Himalaya—at a meeting on the morning of May 12, there were two approaches to Tibet from Darjeeling, both well known to the British since the days of the Younghusband Mission. One, he indicated, ran directly north through Sikkim to Kampa Dzong via Gangtok, the Teesta Valley, and the Serpo La, the pass Younghusband had crossed in July 1903 on his first diplomatic foray into Tibet. This route would be taken by Henry Morshead, whose primary duty as an officer of the Survey of India was to fill in the map by completing a quarter-inch plane table survey of the crown of the Himalaya, a swath of unknown land 65 miles wide and 225 miles long that lay north of the Nepalese frontier and south of the drainage of the Tsangpo/Brahmaputra River, which had been mapped by Ry
der during the Rawling expedition in 1904. Morshead’s survey, if successful, would add some fifteen thousand square miles to the map of the Raj.
The second approach to Tibet followed the traditional trade route between India and Lhasa, taken by Younghusband’s invasion force in 1904 and by Howard-Bury himself during his scout in 1920. It ran from Darjeeling to Kalimpong, across the Jelep La and the Tibetan frontier to Yatung, and then up the Chumbi Valley to Phari and thence north to Gyantse and Lhasa. Some thirty miles beyond Phari a track branched off the main road, crossed a pass called the Dug La, and then ran west, reaching Kampa Dzong in four to five days, according to Howard-Bury’s sources.
