Mountains of the Mind (34 page)

So what is now the highest point on the earth’s surface was composed in one of the earth’s deepest places. In the yellow rock-band which stripes Everest just below its summit, there are the fossilized bodies of creatures which lived in the Tethys Sea hundreds of millions of years ago. The rock up which so many people aspire to climb has itself climbed tens of thousands of metres vertically upwards, from the darkness of the Tethys trench to the sunlight of the Himalayan skies.

It was the collision of India with Tibet which created the Himalaya geologically. And it was the collision in the nineteenth century of the northward-expanding British Empire with the eastward-expanding Russian Empire which created the Himalaya in the Western imagination.

Before that point, almost nothing had been known in the West about the uplands of the trans-Himalayan region. Until the 1600s, indeed, most Europeans were unaware that the Himalaya existed.
Herodotus described India but made no mention of mountains to its north. Ptolemy compressed the Himalaya and the Karakorum into a single range, and elided the Central Asian plateau entirely. In the mid-sixteenth century, cartographers had succeeded in fitting together the perimeters of the countries, but the interiors of continents other than Europe remained mysterious.

At the beginning of the 1800s, however, the incipient threat of Russian expansion made it imperative for the British to gain information about the trans-Himalayan region. Among the seventy-nine high Himalayan peaks fixed by the GTS in the 1840s and 1850s was a Peak H, soon renamed Peak X V. It was sighted by a surveyor called John Nicholson, in observations carried out from viewing-stations on the plains of Bihar, 176 miles away from the mountain itself. The information culled by the GTS in the field was passed for computation and double-checking to the regional survey headquarters. It took seven years to verify the calculations for Peak XV, and to factor in the variables of temperature, pressure, refraction, and the gravitational pull of the Himalayan chain itself.
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Finally, in 1856, the surveyor general Andrew Waugh confirmed the altitude of Peak XV. It was, he felt confident to declare, at 29,002 feet ‘higher than any [peak] hitherto measured in India, and most probably the highest in the world’. So the mountain which we now call Everest, but had for centuries been known to the indigenes of the high Himalaya, was ‘discovered’ by the West.

Discovered, but not approached, because Peak XV stood on the frontier between the forbidden kingdoms of Nepal and Tibet. It was visible to the long-sighted telescopes of the Grand Trigonometrical
Survey, but for reasons both political and geographical it was practically unapproachable on foot. The British had long agreed to respect the sovereignty of the kingdom of Nepal, and that had put the southern reaches of the mountain out of bounds to surveyors or explorers. And Tibet was, after the Poles, the great unknown of the later nineteenth century. The novelist H. Rider Haggard spoke for many when he described it yearningly as ‘the untrodden land’. So few Westerners had penetrated into Tibet that it remained largely a
tabula rasa
, undefiled by fact or reportage – a blank sheet stretched tight over the highest plateau on earth, upon which the Western imagination could doodle its fantasies of the Orient.

‘Thebet Mountains’, in William Orme’s
Twenty-Four Views in Hindostan
(1805). The implausibly jagged and spirey mountains resemble a barrier, both to human passage and to the imagination.

Chief among these fantasies was that of Tibet’s spiritual purity. To many in the West the country seemed like an icy Eden: an elevated
sanctum in the heart of Asia. There the Tibetans led undisturbed lives, in harmony with the rhythms of the dramatic landscape around them, and morally purified by the beauty and the thin air. There what Ruskin called ‘the storm cloud of the nineteenth century’ – the three-fold miasma of industry, atheism and rationalism – had not gathered. A British traveller to Tibet in 1903 likened one of its mountains to ‘a vast cathedral’, and when at about the same time a French explorer finally reached the Tibetan uplands he described feeling as though he had ascended ‘through layers of cloud, from hell to heaven, leaving behind and below me this scientifically technical world which has done so much to increase man’s misery’. What Switzerland had been to the eighteenth century, Tibet was to the nineteenth: an upland Arcadia, enchantingly antipodean to the grimy cityscapes of Europe, Britain and America.

Clamped between Tibet and the forbidden kingdom of Nepal was Everest: the Third Pole, as Edward Whymper dubbed it in 1894. For seventy years – between the measuring of Everest, and the arrival of the reconnaissance expedition at its foot in 1921 – no Westerner got within forty miles of the mountain. There was a vacuum of information about Everest, and into this vacuum rushed hopes, fears and speculations. Undoubtedly, Everest’s inaccessibility helped to enhance its imaginative allure. In 1899 Lord Curzon, then Viceroy of India, gazed up at the white ramparts of the Himalaya from the windows of his cool and shadowed palace at Simla. Everest enchanted him. ‘As I sat daily in my room,’ he wrote, ‘and saw that range of snowy battlements uplifted against the sky, that huge palisade shutting off India from the rest of the world, I felt it should be the business of Englishmen, if of anybody, to reach the summit.’

Five years after Curzon wrote those words, the mystery of Tibet was exploded for ever when Francis Younghusband led a British force into Tibet from India. The
casus belli
was allegedly territorial incursion – Tibetan ‘troops’ were reported to have crossed the frontier and carried off Nepali yaks – but in fact Curzon was worried about Russian influence in Tibet, and wanted to solidify British influence in the country. Younghusband, ever keen for action, recommended in the language of the day that ‘the power of the monks should be so far broken as to prevent them any longer selfishly obstructing the prosperity both of Tibet and of the neighbouring British districts’.

The Tibetans did not let Younghusband and his army just walk in. The first stand-off came near the village of Gyantse. Two thousand Tibetans armed with matchlock guns, swords and spears faced a smaller British force carrying cannon and Maxim guns. The British fired, according to a Tibetan survivor, ‘for the length of time it would take six successive cups of hot tea to cool’. When the guns stopped chattering, twelve British had been wounded, and 628 Tibetans killed. By the time Younghusband reached Lhasa, a further 2,000 Tibetans had died, compared to forty British soldiers.

The bloody fall of Lhasa meant that yet another unknown had been penetrated. John Buchan, commenting on the invasion of the city in his book
The Last Secrets
, wrote that ‘it was impossible for the least sentimental to avoid a certain regret for the drawing back of the curtain which had meant so much to the imagination of mankind … With the unveiling of Lhasa fell the last stronghold of the older romance.’

The older romance may have fallen, but a new and perhaps more potent magic had been revealed within Tibet: that of Everest itself. And it had been revealed to a mountaineer, explorer, mystic, Romantic and patriot, a man perhaps more receptive than any other to the idea of surmounting that peerless mountain. From the barbed
wire and sandbags of one of the British encampments, Francis Younghusband had seen Everest ‘poised high in heaven as the spotless pinnacle of the world’, and he had been entranced. That distant vision of Everest would take seed in Younghusband’s imagination, and would flourish over time from a vision into an ambition.

It had time to flourish, because the 1904 Tibetan invasion led indirectly to the Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907 – a concord in which both sides agreed to prohibit further expeditions into Tibet. With Nepal still out of bounds, the 1907 agreement effectively made Everest unreachable. But in 1913 John Noel, a young British army officer, made an illicit sortie into Tibet disguised as an ‘Indian Mohammedan’ and got to within forty miles of Everest. He reported it as ‘a glittering spire of rock fluted with snow’.
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Noel’s account piqued the interest of many in Britain, not least the members of the Royal Geographical Society. Plans were made for an attempt on the mountain, but then the First World War intervened. Almost immediately after the Armistice, however, mechanisms were set in motion. And on 10 January 1921 the Royal Geographical Society – newly under the presidency of one Francis Younghusband – made public its plans to send an expedition to the mountain. In his book
Everest: the Challenge
, Younghusband recalled his determination ‘to make this Everest venture the main feature of my three years’ Presidency’. He had settled upon his Grail. All he needed was a knight-errant to lead his quest.

‘Galahad’ was what Geoffrey Winthrop Young used to call George Mallory. On 9 February 1921 Younghusband took Mallory out to lunch and asked him if he would join the first reconnaissance expedition to Everest, due to depart that April. Although he had already
been separated from his wife and three children for long periods, and although he had a job and a house to keep up, Mallory accepted quietly and quickly – ‘without visible emotion’, remembered Younghusband – over the snowy linen of the lunch table.

It was a career move of sorts. Had Mallory, then thirty-five years old, summitted Everest and returned successfully, the cachet of the achievement would certainly have made him financially secure for his lifetime. But there were other career paths open to him, less dangerous ones. He had a steady job as a schoolmaster at Charterhouse, he wanted to pursue his writing ambitions – journalism, fiction – and his left-wing interest in international politics. Above all, Mallory wanted to be with Ruth and his three young children, Clare (aged six), Beridge (aged four) and John (aged six months). After marrying in 1914, Mallory had been separated from Ruth for sixteen months during the second half of the war, fighting as an artillery officer on the Western Front. The separation was difficult for them both and when the Armistice came they both felt that their married life could now properly begin. Shortly before he returned to England from France, Mallory wrote ecstatically to Ruth of the ‘wonderful life we will have together’, and urged them both to realize ‘what a lovely thing we
must
make of such a gift’.

It was not to be. Some force, some set of forces, deeply embedded in Mallory, meant that when he was given the chance to go to Everest, he accepted. And when twice he returned safely from the mountain, he twice chose to return again. To read Mallory’s letters and journals from the three Everest expeditions, as I have done, is to eavesdrop on a burgeoning love affair – a love affair with a mountain. It was a deeply selfish love affair, which Mallory could and should have broken off, but which instead destroyed the lives of his wife and his children – as well as his own. We do not have Ruth’s letters to Mallory during the Everest expeditions. Although she wrote regularly to him, only one of her letters has survived. So we cannot properly
know how she felt about her husband’s actions. Her voice in this three-way relationship – this love triangle – is practically inaudible. What we do know is that Mallory fell in love with Everest, and it eventually proved the death of him. What is hard to understand, and what this book has tried in part to explain, is how he could fall in love with a lump of rock and ice, when his own flesh and blood wife loved him so very much.