Mountains of the Mind (35 page)

George and Ruth Mallory in 1914. © Audrey Salkeld.

Concluding his public account of the first expedition, the 1921 reconnaissance trip, Mallory wrote that ‘The highest of mountains is capable of severity, a severity so awful and so fatal that the wiser sort of men do well to think and tremble even on the threshold of their high endeavour.’ It reads now like a warning to himself, which he failed to heed.

8 April 1921
– Mallory boards the SS
Sardinia
alone at Tilbury. The other members of the expedition have gone ahead, and he is to meet them at Darjeeling. The boat is small, his fellow passengers numbingly dull, and his cabin is claustrophobic, and noisy as a foundry. As soon as they have steamed far enough south for the air temperature to permit it, Mallory spends most mornings sitting in the bows, near where the ship’s anchors are lashed by their chains. Only the dark figure of the watchman on the upper bow-lookout, seated behind a canvas windscreen, is visible. Otherwise the bows are devoid of humanity, and this suits Mallory well, because he cannot abide humanity as it is to be found on board the
Sardinia
. He likes, too, the feel of the wind in his face, and to watch the wide sea and the passing land.

They take the ordinary route, steaming straight down to Cape St Vincent, and then turning east from there through the Straits of
Gibraltar and into the warmer waters of the Mediterranean. Even at sea, Mallory’s mind is with the mountains. Waking early one morning he sees the Rock of Gibraltar slipping by his porthole and rushes up on to deck. They glide past it, a grey mass in the blue light, and Mallory instinctively looks for the best climbing line up its sheerness. On 13 April, five days after leaving England, he looks through his field-glasses deep into Spain. He can see a range of clean and radiant mountains snow-covered to the waist: the Sierra Nevada. ‘Blessings on them!’ he writes to his diary. He gazes southwards, too, into Africa: its houses, churches and fortifications, its small cliffs and creeks, and the white sprawl of Algiers. It all passes him by smoothly to port and starboard, like a gorgeously slow news-reel, as the ship slides onwards over the guarded water of the Mediterranean, towards Port Said and the Suez Canal.

Mallory’s mind often drifts homewards, to the family he has left behind, to the way the sunlight streams through the loggia at the front of his house, and the white lilacs which will be in bloom on the bank behind the cedar tree in the garden, spangling the lawn with their petals.

The Canal is far less impressive than he imagines it, and its twin coasts are depressingly strewn with the debris of war – disembowelled trucks and stripped tanks, and rust bleeding into the sand around them. Where the sides of the Canal are low, Mallory imagines that it must seem to watchers from the desert as though their vessel is passing through solid sand, ploughing a path through the dunes like an ice-breaker; a ship of the desert.

After the Canal, the Red Sea, and after the Red Sea the Indian Ocean. No coastlines to watch here, only the curve of the horizon, and the odd distant ship steaming past beneath a feather of smoke. The skies of this ocean are vaster than anything Mallory has ever seen before, far greater in acreage even than the fenland skies he has come from. Here the clouds do not scud along like a fleet of airships,
keeping their formation, but pile up into thunderheads, made from the tangled wreckage of nimbus and cirrus: more a geological than a meteorological creation. Mallory wonders what it would be like to climb the clouds, to force a route up through their bosses, knolls and slopes, up to the rounded top of the topmost cloud. Then he realizes that the topmost cloud he can see is thousands of feet lower than the top of Everest. It reminds him of the audacity of what he is trying to do.

The sky elates him, but the sea puts him into an ominous mood. ‘It is curious,’ he writes, ‘how much I have a sense of the nearness of disaster and danger … the sea is as deeply evil as it is attractive.’ Briefly, on the bows of the ship, he yearns to shrug his coat off on to the deck and leap clear of the vessel and into the gun-metal water.

Then Ceylon appears, a smear of red and yellow surmounted by a luminous green stripe – which resolves itself, as they steam nearer, into clumps of painted houses set against the jungle. There is a welcome stop here for a day or two, and then the final sultry leg of the journey begins. Mallory sweats as he does his exercises on the fore-deck, as he lies in his cabin, and as he writes in the smoking-room. The air is rank with water – it is an amphibious substance, half-gas half-liquid. Sitting in the bows, willing Calcutta to appear on the horizon, it feels to Mallory as though his body is being pushed forward through something gelatinous. The Malayan for water, Mallory remembers, is
air
, and here in the tropics that apparent mix-up seems to make perfect sense.

They dock in Calcutta on 10 May, and after a night there Mallory takes the eighteen-hour mountain train across the plains, and then up to Darjeeling, the track cutting through hillsides stepped with tea-terraces, and steep-sided valleys whose vertical forests remind him of Chinese scroll paintings. It feels good to be in hill-country again after a month on the oceanic plains.

In Darjeeling he meets the other Everesters (as they have begun to call themselves) and it seems, finally, that the adventure might have begun. But no; before that the formalities must be observed. The first night there Mallory has to sit through a banquet arranged by the Governor of Bengal, their host in Darjeeling. It is a plumed and brocaded affair: lots of solemn pre-prandial hand-shaking, and then the many courses of the meal itself. Each diner has an attentive wallah standing disconcertingly behind their chair, like a ghost or a shadow. There is far too much pomp and circumstance for Mallory’s taste, but then as this Everest trip is in so many ways an imperial mission, pomp must be tolerated. He gets to meet his fellow expedition members. That night, he sends quick, sharp judgments of them in a letter back to Ruth. There is Wheeler the Canadian (‘you know my complex about Canadians. I shall have to swallow before I like him, I expect. God send me saliva.’) And Howard-Bury, the leader of the expedition, whom Mallory instinctively dislikes. He reeks of Toryism, crassness, dogma. There is Bullock, who will be Mallory’s partner on the mountain, and whom he knew at Winchester. Bullock has, bafflingly, brought a suitcase with him. Into it he has packed one coat and two sweaters to keep him warm, and a pink umbrella to protect him from snowstorms and sunlight, and to make him look ‘picturesque’ against the landscape. There is Morshead, the surveyor-mountaineer, who impresses Mallory: he looks tough. And there is Kellas, the Scottish doctor and mountaineer who has rushed back to Darjeeling after climbing a trio of high mountains in Central Tibet. Mallory takes to Kellas from the moment he arrives, ten minutes late for the Governor’s dinner, dishevelled ‘as an alchemist’ and muttering insincere apologies in his thick Scotch accent.

From Darjeeling, after much delay, the expedition departs. Fifty mules and their muleteers, a throng of porters, cooks, translators and sirdars, and the Everesters themselves. For days they move
through the greenhouse of the Sikkim jungle. It rains profusely, and this causes problems. Mallory has his black cycling cape and Bullock his pink umbrella, but nothing keeps you dry beneath such a prodigious downpour. Everything is wet, water slides and trickles off every leaf and stone. The mules they procured in Darjeeling are plump creatures, unused to the jungle paths. Nine fall sick, and one collapses and dies. After five days there is no choice: they decide to pack the mules and their muleteers back to Darjeeling, and extemporize with local transport – yaks, ponies – once they get into Tibet. The rain brings out the leeches, too. Both sorts – the string-thin, army-green leeches and the tuberous, ochre-striped tiger-leeches. They come from all directions, and in their hundreds: undulating over the ground at surprising speed, or standing erect on leaves and branches, waving like admonishing fingers in the air. The porters nip them off from their legs with a twist and a pull, leaving little rings of blood that bleed on for hours afterwards, and quickly the Westerners learn to do the same.

But there is also a beauty in the moist, riotous densities of the jungle. The rain glosses the thick leaves, and gathers in bulging silver puddles in flower heads. Dragonflies, like little neon bars, dart and hover over the ponds. Mallory is especially enchanted by the flowers: the roseate orchids, and the lemony flowers of the rhododendrons. And of course there is Bullock’s umbrella, which upside down on the ground looks like an extravagant, unheard-of bloom.

Then, abruptly, the jungle ends. The party cross the watershed of Jelep La – all of them feeling the altitude a little at 14,500 feet – and from this high point they gaze north. The air here smells cleaner and colder; oxygen-flavoured, almost. For the first time the mountains are visible, the snow mountains which Mallory has come so far to see, leaping up above the rim of the horizon. In front of them lies Tibet, and somewhere inside that country, Everest itself. ‘Goodbye beautiful wooded Sikkim,’ writes an excited Mallory, ‘& welcome – God
knows what!’ The change in terrain is total. As they descend towards Phari, the air becomes much drier and the vegetation is transformed. Here there are tall silver fir trees, with dark rhododendrons at their feet.

Then on to the high gravel deserts of southern Tibet, which proceed for hundreds of glaring miles. It is six days’ march from Phari to Kampa Dzong, the Tibetan hill-fort through which Younghusband’s army passed en route to Lhasa. Six days over high sepia deserts. Like all deserts, these ones are cold and calm in the early mornings when they wake; by lunchtime the heat is rampant, shimmering up in waves ahead, glaring off the surfaces of rock rubble, creating a furnace hot enough to strip away the skin on one’s cheeks. In the afternoon the wind stirs itself, and stirs too the tons and tons of dust which lie loosely on the ground. At night tailless rats scutter about unnervingly on the groundsheets of their tents, and the temperature hurtles downwards. The mountains which edge the deserts are bosomy in profile, cleaved by long-vanished glaciers and river gulches, shaley in texture, the higher ones striated horizontally with snow.

All the group are suffering from stomach problems now. Most afflicted, though, is Kellas, racked with dysentery and so weak that he has to be carried on a litter. He had started the expedition exhausted by his triple ascent, and has not been able to fortify himself since. He refuses to turn back, though. Just short of Kampa Dzong, on 5 June, not long after crossing a high pass, he dies in a splutter of blood and shit.

Suddenly this imperial progress has become a funeral cortège. It seems strange and wrong that death should have visited the expedition so early, so far from the mountain itself. Mallory writes to Ruth to reassure her of his own fitness, knowing that Kellas’s death will make it into the despatches which Howard-Bury is sending back almost daily to
The Times
. Mallory’s own letters take upwards of a month to reach England.

They put up a tent to house Kellas’s body overnight. The next day they dig a grave in the friable earth of a stony hillside and bury Kellas so that he lies facing the three peaks that he climbed before the expedition began – and which indirectly killed him. Howard-Bury recites the standard passage from Corinthians into the empty air, and the four porters whom Kellas had come to know so well sit on top of a flat boulder near the grave, and listen to the Englishman speak. This done, they build a stone cairn over the grave, and march on.

Kampa Dzong is a Tibetan fort which guards the entrance to a narrow valley. Here, spirits improve. Bury shoots a gazelle and a fat-tailed sheep, and Bullock bags a goose and catches a dish of little fishes. Despite the death of Kellas and the asperities of the terrain, Mallory feels exhilarated by the prospect of getting closer to Everest, and of going where no one has gone before. ‘We are now in a country which no European has previously visited,’ he writes to Ruth. ‘In another 2 days’ march we shall be “off the map”; which was made at the time of the Lhasa expedition.’ For Everest at this moment exists only in the imagination of the West. It is nothing more than a handful of distant sightings glimpsed over decades, a triangulated peak with a height and a set of coordinates to pin it down in space. It exists only in expectation.