Dudley was beginning to worry about the expedition as a whole. Not only was Wiessner’s leadership weak on details and organization, but the team evidently lacked strength and experience. Fritz had assured Dudley that not only would Bestor Robinson be part of the team, but that Alfred Lindley and possibly Sterling Hendricks, both seasoned climbers, would be also. But those qualified men had bailed out of the trip and now, as Dudley looked at the young, almost sophomoric Dartmouth boys, the older and stiffly arrogant Tony Cromwell, and the autocratic Wiessner, he could only hope they would come together as a team.
On the boat with them was Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, a “vacationing” Nazi financier whom Fritz had known in Germany. Schacht was later to be credited with having designed the rearmament of Germany after its financial collapse following World War I, eventually enabling it to wage World War II. From 1933 until January 1939 he had been president of the Reichsbank, and was now traveling as Hitler’s minister without portfolio while still receiving his full salary from the Nazi government. He spent untold hours and dollars entertaining the Americans with stories and champagne, and most were charmed by him, particularly Fritz and Jack. Dudley, however, found him a “smooth article” with “a weak chin,” and, knowing that the British were watching him carefully, he questioned what Schacht’s actual business on the boat and in India might be.
Given that the team presented a dashing and handsome picture of adventure, wealth, and daring, women found them irresistible. The men befriended several of the prettiest ones, who laughed and pursed their fashionable red lips at Dudley’s camera while posing along the ship’s rail. One of them, a beautiful young German named Susanna Dreher, spent much of her time aboard ship torturing the randy young college boys. An attractive American, Mrs. Dorothy Dunn, also impressed the men with her long black hair, flashing blue eyes, and intelligence.
While Jack walked Dot Dunn up and down the palm court promenade and Dudley talked politics with her in the lounge, George and Chap had eyes only for Susie Dreher. George shamelessly flirted with the girl, incessantly trying to lure her away from her mother and into any number of compromising positions, but it was laconic, shy Chap who tantalized her with his reserve.
Chap was a born gentleman who would later woo his wife, Betty, by being the first man she ever dated who didn’t “jump all over” her. Instead, Chap would arrive at her house on time, open and close every door in her path, hold her firmly but respectfully on the dance floor, and then walk her back up the porch to her door, shake her hand, and say goodnight at the end of the evening. His boyish good looks and almost apologetic reserve were catnip to attractive women who had tired of more aggressive suitors.
In the end, George’s relentless hounding of Susie succeeded. On their last night on the ship and after many glasses of champagne, George headed to the pool for a nocturnal dip. As he went by Susie’s window he yodeled for her to join him, which she did. After some playful splashing in the pool under a waning moon, they sat on the deck “bundled in my big bathrobe” doing “one thing or another” until four in the morning.
When the men disembarked in Bombay the next day, George was “confronted by a paradox of emotions” at leaving behind Susie and, he admitted, the comforts of the ship. Susie and Dorothy Dunn joined the team for a lavish farewell lunch at the Taj Mahal Hotel, after which George and Jack walked the women back to the pier and stood as the Biancamano headed out of port for Singapore. George watched long after he could no longer see Susie’s white handkerchief waving from the deck, and then he and Jack walked back to the hotel. He was smitten and mused what an “awful blow to the family if I came home a married man.” Still, he wrote, “reason and the heart wind separate paths.”*
In Bombay the team walked the hot, dusty streets, marveling at the beggars who slept “littered all over the sidewalks,” the cacophony of tropical birds and honking horns, and the leisure of having servants draw their baths and serve them hot tea in bed. While there, they provisioned themselves with the last of their gear: hemp rope, foodstuffs they wouldn’t be able to get in the remote villages of northern India, and lightweight cookpots called dekshis. Also on the list were cheap glacier goggles to protect the scores of porters who would carry the team’s tonnage into base camp against snow blindness on the glacier. At every stop, with money already an enormous concern for Fritz, many important supplies were either eliminated or reduced. While the goggles were inexpensive they were not free, and if corners were to be cut, the porters would be the first to feel the blade.
After exclaiming at the enervating 130-degree heat, which felt at once clammy and dusty, the men boarded the Frontier Mail train for the two-and-a-half-day, 1,000-mile journey north. With the carriage windows open to the heat, dust, and stench, after a few hours on the rackety train the men were caked in a layer of grime and dirt they felt as grit in their teeth. Mile after mile, station after station, they made their way north. Some stations teemed with monkeys which jumped through the trees as the train coasted into the depot; in others, shrouded women and girls approached the train and sold food to the passengers through the windows. From the scorching lowlands which Jack thought resembled America’s desert Southwest, through the tree-lined streets of Delhi, they eventually saw the city of Rawalpindi come into view.
Filled with the clamor of mules, horses, goats, sheep, dogs, rickshaws, taxi horns, and men wearing turbans, long robes, and baggy pants, Rawalpindi was bursting with the smells and noise of Far East commerce. Several times the men had to jump out of the way of wildly ornate horse-drawn carts, some of the last remnants of the jeweled elephant trains which carried the Moghul emperors from Delhi to their summer palace in Srinagar. Now, rather than emperors and jewels, the carts were piled high with grain, fruit, and live chickens and goats, and were adorned with garish paint and shiny trinkets. Stepping carefully over the piles of excrement and open sewers, the travel-weary team made their way through the mayhem to their hotel, where the tea was hot and the bathwater warm enough to shave with for the first time since Bombay. For breakfast they had a feast of cereal, fish, liver, potatoes, ham, eggs, and fruit, which barely held them until lunch because of their hard work packing and weighing scores of loads for the porters. Dudley and Jack organized the foodstuffs while Fritz “fussed” with the duffel bags. As they worked, Tony strutted about, officiously checking his clipboard, clucking and warning the men that they couldn’t possibly get the loads packed in time for the freight train’s departure that afternoon to Srinagar. Dudley exchanged annoyed looks with the other men, all of whom ignored Tony and continued packing. When they finished their job with time to spare, they stifled the urge to say “Told you so!” as they loaded the crates. At first light in the morning, they followed the freight to Srinagar, the capital of the Vale of Kashmir.
The team traveled in two decrepit station wagons, a Chevrolet and an Oldsmobile, the drivers of which had to tweak and fiddle with the engines to keep them running on the long drive north. They passed through irrigated orchards of banana, plum, orange, apricot, and peach trees, above which every inch of available mountainside was terraced with fields of rice and other grains. Averaging only 20 miles per hour, they took nearly eleven hours to make the 200-mile drive along rutted roads and through flooded rivers. For the men, Srinagar was literally the end of the road. From there they would be trekking the 330 miles to base camp on foot.
In Srinagar, they stayed at the villa of Major Kenneth Hadow, a cheerful representative of the fading British colonial rule, whose great-uncle had perished on the Matterhorn in 1865. Hadow was a fan of both mountains and Americans, and his hospitality was legendary among explorers, cartographers, photographers, and mountaineers who traveled through the area over the years. He showed the men to a private guesthouse in which they each had their own room and specially hired servants to attend to their every need. Jack, who was not used to such pampering, felt as royal as a king and Dudley, who was accustomed to it, agreed that he had rarely felt so well cared for.
As the men basked in Hadow’s hospitality, they each picked up a pen and tried to capture the first two weeks of the trip in their journals and letters home. While Dudley wrote to Alice, Gwen, and Clifford of the hot, crowded ship and boisterous Bombay, Jack detailed his trip from the train station in White River Junction, Vermont, to the foothills of the Himalayas, taking particular note of the meeting with Fritz on the Biancamano. He wrote that he couldn’t quite forget “Fritz’s look of disappointment at finding insignificant Jack filling Bestor Robinson’s boots. Ah well, there I was, and who the hell cares what ‘Baby Face’* thinks anyway?” It was an odd statement, given that Fritz liked Jack and had worked hard for his inclusion and that, until the expedition, Jack had admired and liked Fritz. Whatever Jack was feeling sitting by Hadow’s fireplace in Srinagar, either insecurity and embarrassment because he couldn’t pay his full expedition fee or perhaps resentment because Fritz wasn’t treating him as the team’s top dog as he had for some reason expected as his due, it’s evident that, only a few weeks into the trip, the dynamic of the team was shaky and Fritz’s leadership had already begun to unravel.
As the men looked toward their assault on K2, they knew they had untold amounts of hard work ahead of them and a limited window in which to get it done. Learning from what the early explorers had discovered of the region, Charlie Houston and now Wiessner knew they had only four months in which to reach the mountain, climb to the summit, descend back to base camp, and trek back out to civilization, before catastrophic amounts of snowfall and frigid temperatures would stop the team in its tracks. Teams must wait for the worst of the snow to melt before they can get close to the mountain and, once there, they have only two months before winter returns in mid-to late August.
In preparation for the unrelenting labor ahead, Fritz had arranged for the men to spend a week acclimatizing and skiing at the Ski Club of India’s Khillanmarg hut overlooking the vale. It sat a day’s hike above the mountain village of Gulmarg, a favorite resort for Western diplomats and military brass who often left their wives (and girlfriends) unattended while they returned to their offices in Bombay and Karachi. Curiously, he also invited two young British women, Rosi Briscoe and Fiona Williams, to join the team at the hut. While George Sheldon noted that they were “not too interesting and they have a sense of humor like a lemon,” Dudley wrote to Alice that he feared “two girls amongst six men is bound to cause demoralization” and distract them physically and psychologically from their preparations for the physical rigors ahead. The only member on the team to have seen the horrors and demands of warfare up close, Dudley was all too aware that the battle they faced ahead of them in the mountains could be just as life-threatening. While he didn’t question Fritz about his decision to invite the young women, Dudley was concerned about the man’s judgment.
The team’s training took on a competitive edge once the men hit the slopes. After climbing on their skis from the hut at 10,000 feet to the summits 3,000 and 4,000 feet above them, they raced each other down, each boasting of his exploits and deriding the others’ achievements. Jack noted each time Chap fell; Sheldon took particular delight in detailing Fritz’s missteps; and both men remarked that Dudley usually steamed ahead of the group and then raced down like “a rocket,” zooming past them all. While Jack was an accomplished skier and expected to do well, Dudley surprised them not only with his strength and speed on the rough and challenging slopes but also with his seeming indifference to the thinner air at 14,000 feet.
Dudley was pleased that the long, hot, dusty journey to the foothills of the Himalayas was over and that he felt better and in finer shape than he had expected he would. The skiing was some of the best he’d ever had, although the younger men were often careless; if not for some fast maneuvering on his part, he and Chap would have collided as the boy skied out of control down the steep slope straight toward him. Sounding rather avuncular, he scolded Chap after the near-collision. Chap tipped his hat in apology as he continued down to the hut. Again, as Dudley watched in concern, Chap gathered too much speed on his already tired legs in the deep snow, fell, somersaulted four or five times down a hundred feet, and finally came to rest, miraculously in one piece. He then climbed back up for his poles, shook himself off, and skied slowly down to the hut, carefully turning the skis with legs that now shook with fatigue.
Each day ended with an enormous dinner, a parlor game called Up Jenkins, which involved two teams passing a hidden coin beneath the table, and a round or two of chess, although the men were learning that Fritz was not only a terrible chess player, he was a worse loser and took most of the fun out of it for them. Often, as if they couldn’t quite help themselves, the Dartmouth boys would have a water fight, exhausting themselves in the thin air and soaking their already damp clothes. Some nights, Jack, Fritz, Chap, and the two English girls would argue politics and religion while Dudley, Tony, and George read books and wrote letters home.
The days began with the servants softly murmuring “Chai ready, sahib,” as they handed each man his tea in bed. After a relaxed breakfast, the men would put a coat of wax on their long wooden skis, adjust their leather and steel bindings, gather their gear, and climb a different mountain, gazing in amazement at the scenery around them as they ascended. As they reached the summit, the landscape on the other side would reveal itself: seas of white foothills capped by towering rocky, snow-covered peaks, mountain lakes, and, in the distance to the northwest, their first glimpse of an 8,000-meter peak, Nanga Parbat. The men stared in silent wonder at its sheer size, 26,660 feet rising almost ominously out of the earth, its complex ridge lines, ice cliffs, hanging glaciers, and rock walls reaching toward the sky. They had never seen anything like it and they weren’t sure it was an altogether pleasant sight. If this is what Nanga Parbat looks like, many thought, what the hell are we in for with K2 and another 2,000 feet on top of that?
The men climbed and skied hard and conditioned their bodies well, often taking their pulse as they reached the peaks above Khillanmarg. Except for Jack, who suffered insomnia, one of the classic signs of altitude sickness, none seemed unduly bothered by the climbing with heavy skis or demanding skiing at that altitude. As part of their conditioning, George and Jack bet five dollars that they would both keep their cigarette consumption down to three Lucky Strikes a day until their return to Srinagar in August. (What’s remarkable is that they could smoke at all in air which felt increasingly claustrophobic the higher the men got.)
On one of their last mornings at the Khillanmarg hut, Sheldon, whose pen was often as sharp as his wit, was in rare form:
Chota Hazri* at 5:30 am. Everybody pretends to ignore Kargil [one of Hadow’s servants] as he pushes you with a pleasant ‘good morning.’ I’d like to shoot him. But Jack immediately jumps up and throws on his clothes. He then cracks bad jokes which would even be lousy with a beer let alone early in the morning. Then Lhama [another servant] grunts and rolls over. Pop Sahib† and Dudley quietly get up and set about dressing. Then comes the climax of the operation. Baby Face, Half Pint, or Fritz Sahib gets up. Now, Baby Face sleeps with woolies around his neck to keep out the air. He always is way down in the foot end of the bag. But when he gets up; Ah, first there is a movement in the bag and a bald head comes out (this process may be likened to the process of birth), then a pair of shoulders and after a mighty convulsion—the whole man. Immediately it becomes alive and intensively awake (up to this time it might have been an egg). It jumps up, a smile on its face, mighty flexes of muscles. The Leader is up!
Although it had been an invaluable week of conditioning, Dudley couldn’t help but notice that the men just weren’t coming together as a team. Fritz was a detached ruler, issuing directives and criticisms which the rest of the men largely ignored, often with snickering derision. Jack and George seemed incapable of a day without pranks. Chap was a nice boy, but he was almost impossible to get to know and he went through the day nearly mute in his silent observations of the world. And Tony somehow seemed out of place, havin
g already told Fritz he didn’t intend to climb far out of base camp. Why then, Dudley wondered, was he here? As Dudley packed his ski clothes and parka, he hoped his worry was just nerves and that everything would move into place as soon as the men started on their trek.
On April 27, the team left the ski hut and returned to Major Hadow’s for a final week of equipment staging, team organization, and the obligatory goodbye parties. Unlike British explorers Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman, who favored small, lightweight expeditions where every man carried his own gear plus a share of the team’s essential equipment, the 1939 American K2 expedition had four tons of equipment, necessitating first a fleet of ponies and then scores of porters from the Hunza region of Baltistan. For the first two weeks of the march, porters carrying 50 to 55 pounds and ponies carrying 150 pounds would be able to haul the bulk of the team’s gear, but once they left the flood plains of the Indus, Shigar, and Braldu rivers and headed into the mountains, they would rely entirely on manpower to carry their loads.
These porters, or “coolies,” as they were called by the “sahibs” before the civil rights movement of the 1960s dictated a less racist distinction, have been hired since the days of Alexander the Great to do the white man’s heavy lifting on his explorations. Even though they are indispensable in carrying the team’s tonnage, these local men and boys are still largely seen as uneducated and often untrustworthy servants. In 1939 the team’s month-long trek into the mountain would require a series of porters, each traveling between two and three days from their village, paid pennies a day for their effort, and sent home as another group was hired for the next leg.
The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 Page 9
