Summit: A Novel

by Harry Farthing

  “My mother always left that page blank in remembrance of the photograph that Ang Noru took of Josef on the summit of Mount Everest. In his letter Josef told my mother that he would do what the Nazis ordered, summit and die on the mountain, if it would save his family and her, but he would never give them what they wanted, a picture of their flag dominating the entire world. Instead he dedicated his summit to the very people the Nazis were oppressing.

  “Ang Noru brought here only a single roll of film, the one with which Josef had shown him how to properly take a photograph. He never stopped apologizing for not bringing the camera with the film from the summit. He said that the last thing Josef did up there was take pictures to the north, south, east, and west to show beyond a shadow of doubt that they had really made it to the very highest point on earth. After, he had kept the camera around his neck, pushing it deep inside his jacket to protect it. During the descent everything became so desperate and sad that the camera was forgotten.”

  Henrietta opened her briefcase and removed a brown envelope. From within, she took out Josef Becker’s summit photo and placed it on the blank page. With a smile, she said, “Then, Ilsa Rosenberg, this is for you.”

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgements

  Summit is a fictional story that has fact in the foundations of its two imaginary journeys. The most obvious, of course, is that Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world. The officially recognized height is 29,029 feet, or 8,848 meters, although you will often hear other measurements mentioned that give or take a few of each. None question that it is the highest, even if that is a slightly more recent presumption than you might suspect. As late as the early 1930s, there were still some, particularly an American explorer called Joseph Rock, who thought that there was another mountain called Amne Machin, located deep within a largely unexplored area of northeastern Tibet, that rose to “at least” twenty-eight thousand feet and, possibly, could be higher still than Everest. I mention this only because, during his second expedition to Tibet in 1935, the German explorer, scientist, and SS obersturmführer Ernst Schäfer saw a “gigantic zeppelin” of cloud obscuring what he considered to be an immense mountain that set him to considering a possible return to climb it.

  Schäfer’s own ambition, when combined with the subsequent patronage of one of the most supremely evil men of history, Heinrich Himmler, would soon turn his attentions to other, still not totally understood objectives when he did revisit the country with an SS-sponsored expedition on the eve of the Second World War. Many stories can be found about Himmler’s interest in race theory, mysticism, and the occult, and, in particular, his fascination with the racial and spiritual origins of Tibet. Schäfer’s well-documented return to Tibet in 1938–9 undoubtedly gives some veracity to its core, even if the more fanciful myths are probably just that. Amne Machin was eventually proved to exist, although Rock’s estimate of height was an exaggeration to the tune of more than eight thousand feet. As far as I know neither Schäfer nor Himmler ever showed any interest in an ascent of Mount Everest, even if I am sure it must have crossed the alpinist Heinrich Harrer’s mind during his famous seven years in Tibet. He was a climber after all.

  It is written that Western eyes first saw Mount Everest some time around 1847. In the age of a mountain estimated to be over fifty-five million years old, this is a recent date in a long and mostly silent history. It is significant however in that it marks the beginning of a time when an observer might have wondered precisely how high the mountain was, or what august superior’s name they could attribute to it, or, just possibly, what it might be like to stand on the very top. Before the intrusion of Western ambition, observers would have assumed such a huge mountain to be the abode of gods, a place naturally beyond the reach of man, which already bore a name older than their ancestral time clock—“Chomolungma” for those looking from the north and “Sagarmatha” to those in the south—somewhere to be worshipped and feared by the hardy peoples who strove daily to eke out difficult existences in the valleys below.

  Even today, these valleys offer few Western luxuries, particularly one of the biggest: risking your own life when not essential for survival. The fourteenth Dalai Lama, in his message for the book Everest: Summit of Achievement, applied his keen wit to the truth, as always, when he wrote: “George Mallory, who was the first man to nearly succeed in the quest, famously answered, when asked why he wanted to climb Everest, ‘Because it’s there.’ I imagine that for most Tibetans, ‘Because it’s there’ was a very good reason for not making an attempt.”

  It is said that in Sherpali, the Tibetan-based dialect used by the Sherpas, there isn’t even a word for the top of a mountain. When you now consider their famed familiarity with the upper reaches of the world’s highest mountains, it seems strange that they don’t possess their own extensive mountaintop vocabulary, a subtle lexicon to define the infinite variety of such places, much like the Inuit in their need to properly classify snow. But climbing to the top of mountains is a recent thing for the Sherpas, not yet a hundred years old, younger even than the motorcar, far younger than language. When their outstanding natural abilities started to necessitate the regular use of such terminology, it is said that the Sherpa simply adopted the words used by the first Europeans they accompanied, the English sahibs of the British Empire, inserting the words “top” and “summit” into their own dialect.

  In 1892, Clinton Thomas Dent, a past president of a still-youthful British Alpine Club already running out of unclimbed peaks in the European Alps, wrote an article for the October edition of a periodical called Nineteenth Century. It was entitled “Can Mount Everest Be Climbed?” It took sixty-one years to answer the question. On May 29, 1953, Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay reached the summit for the first time. The crisp, unequivocal image of Tenzing on “top” that clear day is one of the most recognizable photographs ever taken. It is image number forty-five in Time magazine’s “100 Greatest Images,” the first within the selection to be in full color rather than black and white, thereby leaving nothing to the imagination in the sublime moment of human achievement it portrays.

  In England, the news of the great mountain’s first summit was headlined as the crowning glory of the nation’s coronation of a new queen, fêted as the right and just conclusion of a string of eight official British expeditions to reconnoiter and/or climb the mountain that began in 1921. The only other official attempt to climb Mount Everest had been by the Swiss in 1952. Alarmingly, for the heavily invested yet still unsuccessful British, that Swiss expedition even had the audacity to be divided over two attempts: pre- and post-monsoon. It is reasonable to imagine that there must have been more than a few collective sighs of relief in London when they failed both times. The British undoubtedly knew that their 1953 expedition would be their last exclusive shot at the summit, for now they had to take their place within a queue of nations that desired to be first to place their flag on the top of the highest mountain on Earth. The world had changed dramatically since the end of the Second World War. Britannia no longer ruled the waves or the Indian subcontinent, for that matter. No longer could its regional power and influence keep the ascension of Everest its sole preserve, magnanimously permitting other countries other major mountains, such as K2, Kangchenjunga, and Nanga Parbat, but always keeping the biggest trophy for itself.

  The stories of the attempts to climb those other mountains are just as heroic, tragic, and inspiring as those of Mount Everest. The German quest to be the first to climb Nanga Parbat commenced in 1932. With five expeditions and the cumulative loss of eleven Germans and fifteen Sherpas and porters, it, at times, more resembled a blood feud between a nation and a mountain than a climbing endeavor. Nanga Parbat was also finally summited in 1953, just thirty-six days after Everest, by the legendary Austrian climber Hermann Buhl. Although part of a larger siege-style expedition, Buhl, one of the few true rivals to another Tyrolean climber, Reinhold Messner, for the title of “Greatest C
limber of All Time,” soloed the final section to the summit without supplementary oxygen and then, on his descent, bivouacked for a night, standing up, at over eight thousand meters before returning alive. The outstanding climber of his generation, Buhl had also served in the Second World War as a young first-aider in the German Gebirgsjäger mountain troops, seeing action at Monte Cassino. After Nanga Parbat, Buhl would go on to make another first ascent of an eight-thousand-meter mountain, Broad Peak, before losing his life on Chogolisa, aged just thirty-two. His legacy still continues in the spirit of anyone who turns his back on the option of a big, organized expedition and heads into the mountains with the barest minimum.

  During that thirty-year, presummit period of British expeditions on Everest, there were three unofficial solo ventures to climb the mountain, undertaken by an Englishman in 1934, a Canadian in 1947, and a Dane in 1951. They all failed, one of them, the Englishman, Maurice Wilson, dying in the process. In addition, it is said that in 1952, the six-man summit team of a clandestine Russian expedition led by a Dr. Pawel Datschnolian, also intent on stealing a first ascent, was blown off the Northeast Ridge, never to be seen or heard of again. The existence of this expedition is still unproven today.

  In 1953, when Hillary and Tenzing safely made it down from the summit, the New Zealander and the Sherpa with Tibetan origins, for that’s what they were, completed a journey for the British that could be said to have started with that first sighting of the mountain in 1847—a difficult and dangerous journey that lasted over a hundred years set against a backdrop of world history that saw the rise and fall of great empires, the most terrible wars known to mankind, and the birth of the modern, technological world. A number of times the journey had already come desperately close to reaching its destination. In 1924, the third British expedition to Mount Everest put the greatest climber of its day, George Leigh Mallory, and his younger colleague, Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, high on the Northeast Ridge, wearing early oxygen apparatuses, and, in the words of another team member, “going strong for the top.” The pair never returned. Discussion immediately ensued as to whether they might have made the summit before they succumbed—a debate that continues, heated and passionate at times, almost as if chorused by the old pantomime refrain of, “Oh yes, they did! Oh no, they didn’t!”

  George Mallory’s frozen body was found in 1999 in the very place where it finally stopped falling down the North Face some seventy-five years before. I have read that the internal mechanism of his broken wristwatch still partially functioned. Letters found on his body, wrapped for safekeeping in a still brightly colored paisley handkerchief, were as crisp and clear as the day they were written. Conspicuous by its absence within those personal papers was a photograph of Mallory’s long-suffering and devoted wife, Ruth. Mallory had always said he would place it on the summit. “Oh yes, they did!” some cried once more. It had long been wondered whether Mallory’s body, when found, would also offer up the borrowed Kodak Vest Pocket camera that the pair was carrying, the hope being that frozen within would be an undeveloped film that might finally reveal the truth of the greatest climbing mystery once and for all, but sadly, “Oh no, it didn’t!”

  The hunt for Sandy Irvine’s body continues, determined in its desire to ascertain if it was he who was carrying the camera on that fateful day. Strangely, in all the analysis of the pair and their equipment, I have never heard mention of a “summit flag.” But surely they would have had one? Possibly it too was left on the summit alongside that photo of Ruth Mallory or maybe it fell to oblivion, still attached to Mallory’s ice axe, leaving him to claw painfully at the rocky slopes with his hands as he tried to arrest that final, fatal fall. But then again, perhaps Sandy Irvine also has the flag. If so, it must be folded in a frozen pocket or stuffed inside a frayed cricket sweater because it wasn’t attached to his ice axe, which was found in 1933 lying on a rock slab at 27,760 feet (8,460 meters) on the Northeast Ridge, just below the First Step.

  After that first summit in 1953, it took twenty-six years for the next one hundred ascents. It took another nineteen years to rack that total up to a thousand. There have now been over seven thousand summits by more than four thousand individuals. The youngest climber to have summited was just thirteen, the oldest, eighty. In 2011, the legendary Apa Sherpa summited for the twenty-first time and then finally retired. In 2013, Phurba Tashi equaled that record.

  There are actually over twenty routes to the summit of Mount Everest. A number are still unclimbed. Each bears a history underwritten, and in a few cases unwritten, of the most extreme human endeavor imaginable. In the twenty-first century, the majority of these routes have been ignored by climbers who, more eager for success than originality, tend to take one of two tried and tested routes to the top: the Southeast Ridge route on the Nepali side, following that utilized by Hillary and Tenzing in 1953, or the Northeast Ridge on the Tibetan side, pioneered by those first British expeditions in the ’20s. An industry has grown up around both paths to the top of the world.

  Familiarity does indeed breed contempt, but either route to the summit of Mount Everest is still enough to tax a human body to its very limits. The ancient Eastern demons that guarded the summit for millennia may well have been vanquished by science and progress, but others from the West have replaced them. Overcrowding, global warming, commercialism, reckless ambition, human tragedy—all now haunt the mountain just as they do the rest of our modern world. But for all this, make no mistake, even today, climbing Mount Everest is one of the most incredible things you can do. Anyone who walks those heights gets himself or herself, for a few fleeting moments, slightly closer to heaven. Getting there will also have provided one or two quite intimate glimpses of hell.

  Summit is unashamed fiction as big as the mountain at its center, yet it has sought to be faithful to any actual historic climbs it references and imposes no impossible actions or conversations on the participants. This novel’s honest desire to transport and entertain should not be mistaken for a lack of the sincerest respect and appreciation for those who first did these things for real, especially Hillary and Tenzing’s successful first ascent. If I have unintentionally trod on any other legacies, then please forgive me.

  And yes, if you are wondering, I have also lived with that summit photograph of Tenzing for a very long time. I will go on doing so, having failed to insert myself into it one difficult day in 2006. When I think of my own Everest experience I am well aware of the irony in the title of this novel, Summit, because actually I didn’t. They used to call climbing alpine mountains “slaying dragons.” That is obviously Victorian melodrama, but it was a fact for me that if I summited a mountain it did tend to diminish and then fade from my life—I guess I was just a peak-bagger after all. Turning back from the summit of Everest created the unexpected by-product of the mountain accompanying me through life ever since. At first that wasn’t easy, a daily reminder of a huge disappointment, but now I enjoy the companionship, the mountain’s continued presence in my memories, my dreams, my imagination. I know it will stay with me forever, and I am happy about that. It’s a magnificent and historic mountain, and I sincerely hope this book does it some justice.

  Coming to a close, I am extremely grateful to Tad Shay, Ron Follmann, Rhys Jones, Justin Adams, Michelle Thornton, Ian Lawrence, Robin Maceyunas, Jennifer Jackson, Julie Heap, Pat Patel, Tony Schlegel, Bob and Mimi Graham, Eric and Bobbi Jo Engleby, Sam and Deb Sprayberry, Fred and Kelley Murray, Cookie and Harrison Jones, and John Jordan and Jane Farthing for all their enthusiasm for Summit from the very start. David White MD and Jens Klingenstein were generous with their time and knowledge in helping me with a number of medical and German language queries relating to the development of the story. A particularly big thank-you must also go to the “Mothers of Punctuation,” Lucy Farthing and Marilyn Follmann, for pulling my initial narrative into pristine order. It was neither an easy nor a quick task.

  The journey from self-published “bucket-li
st whim” to nationally published debut novel is as long and difficult as climbing Everest itself and only through the assistance of the following people would it have happened: John and Penny Coppedge; Linda Malcolm of Indigo Books on Kiawah Island; Paula and David Whisenant; my two “consiglieri,” John Huey and Bill Barry; my agent at the Gernert Company, Will Roberts; my editor, Madeline Hopkins; and Josh Stanton, Lauren Maturo, Kathryn English, and all the team at Blackstone Audio and Publishing. I am indebted to you all for making this particular “summit dream” come true. To my three daughters, Hannah, Eden, and Isla, I say follow your dreams too because within them magic awaits. Finally, without the tireless support of my incredible wife and “compadre,” Farrah, none of this would have been possible. To you I send my special love and complete appreciation for everything you have done to help Summit be the very best it can be and give it a visibility without which it would have undoubtedly remained hidden.

  I’ll admit to never being the strongest climber, but I had my moments—moments that two people, Italian mountain guide Massimo “Tambo” Tamburini and nineteen-time Everest summiteer Sherpa Mingma Tsiri, ensured that I would be able to enjoy for a long time after. Each of you gave me more than you can ever know, and I dedicate Summit to you both in return.

  Harry Farthing, April 2016