Mountains of the Mind (36 page)

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:

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:

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

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.

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:

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.

There is. On 18 August they crack the geographical riddle. The answer involves coming at the North Col over a high pass known as the Lhapka La, and then up through the jumbled ice-falls of what they christen the East Rongbuk glacier. From there, apparently negotiable snow and ice slopes lead up to the North Col itself.

But, infuriatingly, just as they realize this the weather closes in. The monsoon has come to town. For almost a month they wait for a break in the weather. This is in many ways the hardest time of the whole expedition. As the men have worked the mountain, their bodies have begun to degenerate. Mallory, who has always been assured of his fitness, is slightly surprised by these signs that his body is vulnerable, that it can ever operate at anything other than optimum capacity. At night, they notice that their faces and hands take on a bluish tinge – from the oxygen deprivation – and Mallory is often woken by Bullock, who stops breathing for what seems like minutes. Bullock says Mallory does the same. The days are getting shorter as well, and the nights colder.

The enforced rest also gives Mallory too much time to think about Ruth. There are the wonderful moments when ‘the mail comes and love flies in among us & nestles in every tent’. In the darkness he dreams that it is Ruth and not Bullock lying near to him. He dreams, too, of himself speeding back to her, the green sea creamed by the prow of the ship, headed for some sun-soaked Mediterranean port, where the gulls fill the air with their almost solid cries, and ‘where I shall expect to see
you
smiling in the sunshine on the quayside’.

But he always wakes up next to Bullock. Bullock is one of those people who grow to fit their names: he has the power and diligence of a bullock, a bovine strength and dutifulness which Mallory quietly admires. He refers to him as his ‘stable-companion’.

There is talk of calling it a day. But Mallory, more than anyone, feels a ‘pull’ to stay in the area and wait for his chance; ‘the chance of a lifetime’. On 17 September the weather breaks. There is sunshine, and no snow. Quickly they move up to the upper camp, at 22,000 feet, reaching it on 23 September. And there the weather closes in again. During the night there is the sizzle of hard driving snow against the sides of the tent. Even in their eiderdown sleeping-bags the climbers shiver. The sardines they are meant to eat for supper freeze into little stone shoals which Mallory and Bullock have to thaw out by holding them in their hands. While they are melting snow for water, the two men take turns to lean over the pot so that the steam which tendrils off its surface warms their eyes. The wind rages continually at the tents, slapping the layers of canvas together, trying to rip the whole structure from the mountainside. Without the tent, without these few crucial millimetres of canvas, they wouldn’t stand a chance.