“And Makalu,” says the Deacon. “Twenty-seven thousand seven hundred sixty-five feet.”
“My God,” I whisper. One could take the highest peaks of America’s Rocky Mountains and they would be lost in the foothills of these white-fanged giants. The cols—the saddles—that were the low points connecting Everest and the other peaks started above 25,000 feet—3,000 feet higher than any mountain in North America.
Usually, according to Reggie and the Deacon, members of previous expeditions had been able to catch glimpses of Everest at other times during the trek west toward Shekar Dzong—especially if one was willing to detour up the Yaru Valley west of Tinki Dzong and do a little climbing—but we’ve spent the last five weeks trekking under thick, low clouds, often against freezing rain and blowing snow, so this sunny day atop Pang La is our first view of the mountain.
Reggie beckons me forward, and I lie prone next to her on the reddish soil and hard rocks—a strangely intimate moment—and she steadies the barrel of the telescope as I peer through it.
“My God.” These seem to be the only syllables I’m capable of this day.
Even at my young age—I’d turned 23 somewhere in Sikkim on April 2—I’ve had enough mountaineering experience to know that a mountain that seems unclimbable from a distance can reveal routes, perhaps even easy routes, once one gets close enough to it or actually on it. But the summit of Everest looks…just too large, too tall, too white, too windy, too infinitely far away.
Jean-Claude has crawled up to use the Deacon’s binoculars.
“You can’t see the North Col or the high point on the East Rongbuk Glacier from here because of the intervening hills,” says the Deacon. “But look along the North East Ridge. Can you see the First Step and Second Step nearing the summit?”
“All I can see is an endless plume of spindrift,” says J.C. “What must those winds be like on that North East Ridge right now?”
Instead of answering that, the Deacon says, “You can clearly see the Great Couloir—or what they’re calling Norton’s Couloir now—stretching down to the left from beneath the Summit Pyramid.”
“Ah, yes…,” breathes J.C.
It’s impossible for me to tell through Reggie’s slightly jiggling telescope whether or not that couloir is deep in snow and a pure avalanche deathtrap or not.
“The strong spring winds are good,” Reggie says, her voice almost lost beneath the Pang La wind hooting and whistling between boulders. “They clear away the monsoon and winter snows. They will give us a better chance of finding Percy.”
Percy. In my growing eagerness to get on the mountain and to start climbing, I’ve almost forgotten about Lord Percy Bromley and our ostensible reason for coming so far. The thought of the young man’s corpse up there somewhere on that unassailable, inhuman mountain with its impossible winds makes me shiver.
Pasang’s powerful voice comes up to us. “The lead porters are approaching the summit of the pass behind us.”
Reluctantly, eyes watering from both the wind and the fatigue of squinting so hard at the distant peak in the unrelenting light, all four of us stand, brush dust and pebbles from our heavy layers of goose down and wool, turn our backs to the wind from the west, and walk—half-staggering in the gusts now at our backs—toward the narrow trail leading across the saddle of this pass.
Sikkim had been all hothouse flowers, jungles of rhododendrons, air almost too thick and humid to breathe, steaming overgrown valleys, camping in clearings that weren’t really clearings, salting leeches off our bodies at the end of long days hiking through wet vegetation and avoiding the daks—tidy little bungalows that the Raj had placed every eleven miles, a long day’s march, on the long main route into Tibet toward the closest Tibetan trade capital, Gyantse. Daks, according to Reggie and Dr. Pasang, came complete with fresh food, beds, books to read, and a permanent servant, called a chowkidar, in each bungalow. But our group camped a mile short of each dak or two miles beyond, never taking advantage of the bungalows set there for precisely the purpose we needed them.
“British expeditions stay in the daks,” said the Deacon as we sat around one of our early campfires in the Sikkimese jungle.
“So do hundreds of other Englishmen,” said Reggie. “Trade representatives going north to Gyantse. Officials of the Raj. Naturalists. Cartographers. Diplomats.”
“But we’re none of those things,” said the Deacon. “One look at our climbing gear and miles of rope and the servants will send the word about us forward into Tibet.”
“How?” asked Jean-Claude.
The Deacon removed his pipe and smiled thinly. “We’re not quite as far off all maps as we feel, gentlemen. Even here in Sikkim. The Raj has run telephone and telegraph wires all the way north to Gyantse, across even the high passes.”
“It’s true,” said Reggie. “We won’t be off the main north-south trade route until we turn west toward Kampa Dzong, well into Tibet. But in the meantime, I believe the only ones we’re fooling with our rugged camping rather than spending relatively comfortable nights in the daks are some of the leeches we’ve encountered.”
Our starting out had been all downhill from Darjeeling to the Tista Bridge. The Sherpas had left before dawn on March 26 with the ponies and loads, and we brought our rucksacks and extra provisions as far as 6th Mile Stone in two rugged trucks, one driven by Pasang and the other by Reggie. There we joined the trekkers while Edward the chauffeur and another man returned the trucks to the plantation, and we and the thirty Sherpas and our ponies and mules continued steeply downhill to and across the Tista River to the Sikkim village of Kalimpong.
We camped beyond Kalimpong because Reggie did not want to give advance notice to the crotchety governor of Sikkim, Major Frederick Bailey, the official who (according to Reggie) had been sabotaging the Everest Committee’s permissions to enter Tibet just so that he might someday get a chance to climb the mountain himself. There was a border guard as we entered Sikkim—a lone Gurkha—who accepted Reggie’s Tibetan travel permit without protest, and we were all amused at the lone guard shouting orders to himself—“Right hand salute!” “Left turn!” “Quick march!” The Deacon informed us afterward that when a Gurkha lacked an officer or NCO to give him orders, he was quite happy ordering himself around.
Twice during our six days crossing Sikkim did brown men in police uniforms catch up to our line of Sherpas and mules and small white ponies, but in each case Reggie took the official aside, spoke to him privately, and—I can only guess—gave him money. In any event, no one tried to stop us in Sikkim, and in just under a week of breathing the over-sweet scent of rhododendrons while pulling leeches off any unprotected parts of ourselves after wading through waist-high wet grasses, we were approaching the high pass—Jelep La—that would bring us into Tibet. We were not sorry to put Sikkim behind us; it rained constantly, and soon all our clothes were sodden; not a day of pure sunlight in which we could lay our clothes and socks out to dry. I thought I was the only one who’d picked up a light case of dysentery during our Sikkim crossing, but I soon realized that it was bothering J.C. and the Deacon as well. Only Reggie and Pasang seemed immune to the embarrassing disability.
I’d been dosing myself with lead opium for several days before the Deacon noticed my illness and referred me to Dr. Pasang. The tall Sherpa nodded when, embarrassed as I was, I admitted to my intestinal problems, and then gently suggested that the lead opium would have some effect on the dysentery but that the side effects from the nightly dosings might be worse than the disease. He gave me a bottle of sweet-tasting medicine that quieted my guts within a day.
At first I would walk ahead of my white pony, carrying almost 70 pounds of gear in my pack, but Reggie convinced me to ride when I could and to let the mules carry most of my load. “You’ll need your energy on Everest,” she said, and I soon realized that she was right.
Weakened some by the dysentery from which I was just beginning to recover, I became used to our expedition’s habit of stopping in e
arly evening, the Whymper tents and larger cooking tarp tent already erected for us by advance Sherpas and our sleeping bags laid out, and accustomed also to awakening to the soft tones of “Good morning, Sahibs,” as Babu Rita and Norbu Chedi brought J.C. and me our coffee. Next door, the Deacon would be drinking his coffee, and Reggie, always up and dressed before any of us, would be having her morning tea and muffins with Pasang by the fire.
It wasn’t until we climbed 14,500-foot Jelep La that I realized how the illness in Sikkim had weakened me. In Colorado with Harvard climbing friends a few years earlier, I’d all but galloped up the 14,000-plus-foot Longs Peak and felt great at its broad summit, able to do handstands, but climbing the switchbacks and then the wet and slippery stones—a sort of endless natural staircase—toward the summit of Jelep La, I found myself taking three steps, then leaning on my long ice axe and gasping for breath. Then three more steps. Since the high point of the pass was less than half the altitude of the summit of Everest, this was not a good omen.
I could see that Jean-Claude was also breathing a little harder and moving a little slower than usual, although he’d been atop enough 14,000-foot summits. Only the Deacon from our original party seemed already acclimated to the altitude, and I noticed that he had some trouble keeping up with Reggie’s fast hiking and climbing pace.
We reached Yatung in Tibet, and the differences between Tibet and Sikkim could not have been much greater. It had snowed on us at the high point of Jelep La, and the snow and driving winds from the west continued as we headed out onto the high, dry Tibetan plain. From the jungle riot of colors in Sikkim—pinks and rich cream colors and colors I didn’t even have names for but which Reggie or the Deacon identified as mauve and cerise—we’d emerged into an essentially colorless world, gray clouds low above our heads, gray rocks to either side, and only the dull native red of the Tibetan soil to add a little color to the universe. Our faces were soon muddy with that windblown red soil, and when the cold wind made my eyes water—before I learned to wear my goggles even at that relatively low altitude—the tear streaks would run like bright blood down my mud-caked cheeks.
We spend our last night of the approach trek outside the small, windswept village of Chōdzong on Monday, April 27, then the next day we head down the eighteen-mile-long valley to the Rongbuk Monastery only some eleven miles from the entrance to the Rongbuk Glacier, the proposed site of our Base Camp.
“What does Rongbuk mean?” asks Jean-Claude.
The Deacon either doesn’t know or is too preoccupied to answer. Reggie replies, “Monastery of the Snows.”
We stop at the windswept monastery long enough to ask for an audience with and a ritual blessing from the Holy Lama, ngag-dwang-batem-hdsin-norbu, the high lama Dzatrul Rinpoche. “The Sherpas aren’t as superstitious about this as Tibetan porters would be,” Reggie explains as we wait, “but it’s still a good idea to get such a blessing before we proceed to Base Camp, much less attempt to climb the mountain.”
But we’re to be disappointed. The Holy Lama with the title sounding like a tin can tumbling down concrete steps sends word that it is “inauspicious” for him to meet with us now. Dzatrul Rinpoche will summon us back to the monastery, his lama representative says, if and when he, the Holy Lama, feels it is auspicious to grace us with his presence and blessing.
Reggie’s surprised at this. She’s always had a good relationship with the monks and chief Holy Lama at the Rongbuk Monastery, she says. But when she asks a priest she knows why the Dzatrul Rinpoche is refusing to see us, the bald old man answers—in Tibetan, which Reggie translates for us—“The auspices are bad. The demons in the mountain are awake and angry, and more are coming. The Metohkangmi on the mountain are active and angry, and…”
“Metohkangmi?” asks Jean-Claude.
“Yeti,” the Deacon reminds us. “Those ubiquitous hairy manlike monsters.”
“…your General Bruce assured us three years ago that all the British climbers belonged to one of England’s mountain-worshiping sects and that they were on a holy pilgrimage to Cho-mo-lung-ma, but we know now that General Bruce lied. You English do not worship the mountain.” Reggie is interpreting as fast as the old monk is speaking.
“Is this about the dancing lamas and Noel’s damned motion picture?” asks the Deacon.
Reggie ignores the question and does not translate it for the monk. She says something in singsong Tibetan, bows low, and all five of us, including Pasang, back out of the monk’s presumably holy presence. The old man returns to spinning a prayer wheel.
Outside in the wind again, she lets her breath out. “This is very bad, gentlemen. Our Sherpas—especially our chosen Tiger high-climbers—very much want and need this blessing. We’ll have to set up Base Camp and then I’ll return and try to convince the Holy Lama that we do deserve a blessing for the mountain.”
“To the Devil with him if the old man doesn’t want to grace us with his damned blessing,” growls the Deacon.
“No,” says Reggie, gracefully swinging herself aboard her tiny white pony. “It will be to the Devil with us if we don’t get that blessing for our Sherpas.”
It was back in late March when we were camped just past the first major Sikkim village of Kalimpong that the Deacon had his visit from the Mysterious Stranger.
I’d noticed the tall, thin man when Dr. Pasang led him into camp and Reggie started chatting with him, but between the traditional Sherpa-Nepalese clothing, the brown cap that was really more turban than cap, the brown skin and huge black beard of the stranger, I assumed that this was an unusually tall Sherpa, or perhaps a relative of Pasang’s, visiting us. I did note that he was wearing solid, if very worn, English hiking boots.
It turned out not only to be a white man, an Englishman, but a very famous Englishman.
Before a whisper of the stranger’s identity started buzzing around the camp, the Deacon’s personal Sherpa, Nyima Tsering, had come to fetch our friend. “A sahib is here to see you, Sahib,” said Nyima to the Deacon with his habitual giggle.
The Deacon and J.C. were both fiddling with the oxygen apparatus flow valve. When he looked up toward our visitor, the tall, bearded man in Nepalese peasant clothing but wearing solid English hiking boots, the Deacon leaped to his feet and jogged over to shake his hand. I assumed that the Deacon would bring the stranger over to the fire and introduce him to Jean-Claude and me, but instead the two men—rather rudely, I thought—walked away toward the nearby stream that flowed into the Tista River we’d just crossed. There we could just see through the screen of trees that the stranger squatted in a Sherpa-like manner, the Deacon sat on a small river boulder, and the two immediately became lost in conversation.
“Who is that?” I asked Reggie when she finally strolled over to see if we wanted some more coffee.
“K. T. Owings,” she said.
I couldn’t have been more dumbstruck if she had announced that the stranger was the Second Coming of Christ.
Kenneth Terrence Owings had been one of my literary idols from the time I was twelve years old. The so-called “climber-poet” had been one of the top five living British alpinists before the Great War, but also one of England’s more celebrated free-verse poets, easily ranking with Rupert Brooke and even the other great poets who’d died in the War—Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Charles Sorley—or those few who’d survived to write about it, including Siegfried Sassoon and Ivor Gurney.
K. T. Owings had survived the War, after being promoted all the way from lieutenant to major, but he’d never written a word about the fighting. In fact, as far as I knew, Owings had never written another word of poetry since the War. In that sense he was very much like the Deacon, who’d been rather famous for his verse before the War but hadn’t published—or evidently written—a word since the fighting began. Nor had Owings returned to the Alps, where, like George Mallory and the Deacon (and often in the company of the Deacon), he’d become so famous as a climber before the War. K. T. Owings had simply disappeared. Some new
spapers and literary journals reported that Owings had gone to Africa, where he’d climbed Mount Kilimanjaro by himself and simply refused to come back down. Others were certain that he’d gone to China to climb unnamed mountains and been killed by bandits there. The most recent authoritative word was that K. T. Owings—to cleanse himself of his experiences in the Great War—had built a small sailing ship, attempted to sail around the world, and drowned in a terrible storm in the South Atlantic.
I looked through the branches again. There was K. T. Owings, dressed in something like clean rags, black beard with swatches of gray in it, squatting on his haunches and chatting away a mile a minute with the Deacon. It was hard to believe.
I stood, took my metal water bottle, and began walking toward the stream.
“Mr. Deacon wanted to be left alone with him,” said Reggie.
“I’m just going to get some water,” I said. “I shan’t bother them.”
“Make sure you boil it before drinking,” said Reggie.
I all but tiptoed down to the stream, keeping a thick screen of branches between me and the two men. Leaning to my left toward the screen of branches, the better to eavesdrop as I filled my large metal water bottle, I realized that the Deacon was speaking too softly to be heard but Owings’s voice was a deep rasp.
“…and I’ve reconnoitered high enough to see that there’s a serious step in the ridge, a rock face about forty feet high, just below the summit ridge…I can see it from the valley with binoculars and caught another glimpse climbing above the Cwm…”
What was this? Owings seemed to be warning the Deacon about the First or Second Step…probably the Second Step, since the summit ridge lay just beyond…on the North East Ridge of Everest. But we all knew about the First and Second Steps, although no one—with the possible exception of Mallory and Irvine on the day they disappeared—had yet gone high enough on the ridges to tackle them (especially the larger, steeper-looking Second Step). The two Steps had been visible in photographs taken since the 1921 expedition. Why would Owings be cautioning the Deacon about such an obvious thing now? And for some reason he’d used the term “Cwm” rather than Col for the North Col. Perhaps the poet-climber had his own names for various features that had been named since the 1921 recon expedition. Had Owings tried to climb Mount Everest on his own and been turned back by these formidable rock-step obstacles high on the North East Ridge? The Steps were a main reason—along with the terrible winds along the ridgeline—why Norton and others had moved onto the North Face to try ascending the near-vertical Great Couloir.