Justin Go - The Steady Running of the Hour

At Darjeeling we stayed at the Mount Everest Hotel. There I packed & weighed & repacked my kit. There I wrote you another letter that went into the wastebasket. There I donned evening dress for the last time and we went to dine with the Governor’s wife.

We set off from Darjeeling in motors for the first few miles — wonderfully steep driving — then we began our march, a hot breeze carrying us down the hill, the air perfume-scented & bearing huge mountain butterflies. We chased after them with nets for Hingston’s collection: he is our medical officer & a keen naturalist.

We all have ponies for riding, but when we can Price & I break ahead on foot, for the sake of quiet & solitude. Often in those moments my thoughts turn to you — how you would love to ramble here, how you would admire the scenery & the strange, kind people, the queer overgrown plants, the crystal sky. But I see it only through a glass darkly. For even in steaming jungles I think of the windswept plateau beyond, and high above the snow-covered ranges, one peak the most brutal & majestic of all. Imogen, I’m not ready to see the mountain. She could never be all I’ve imagined, and if she is we haven’t a chance. And yet I want to see her so badly, searching the horizon for snow mountains at the crest of every pass, even though I know we are weeks away.

I write in comfort on a solid table in a dak bungalow. We shall not enjoy such luxury for long; I save the weightier words for then, for if I finish now this goes with the next mail-runner. You can write to me thus:

The Mount Everest Expedition

C/O British Trade Agent

Yatung, Tibet

Though I shall not expect it.

We return to England in August. Am I mad enough to hope your telegram marks the start of something new? I am so mad. As we were once so mad together.

Yours Ever,

Ashley

Yatung

2 Apr 1924

My dear Imogen,

We’ve crossed the frontier into Tibet at last. From Kapup I climbed the whole 3,000 ft to the Jelep La on foot to test my wind. It was hard going, the pass snowblown & rocky, but even in a gale it gave me some satisfaction to walk from Sikkim into Tibet, standing higher than the summit of most Alpine peaks. I felt fit & hadn’t even a headache to trouble me. But am I fit enough? Can any man be fit enough?

We shall know soon enough. For don’t believe what you see in the papers — we do not climb the mountain, we lay siege to her. Against Everest we field an army of hundreds: for a leader, our General Bruce, who commands the expedition, for officers, the nine of us Britishers. For NCOs, the loyal Gurkhas; for soldiers, the sixty porters and Sherpas, freshly clad in English underwear & gabardine pyjama suits; lastly the mercenary army of 200 villagers we enlist to take us as far as the base camp.

The stores for the assault, collected from the ends of the earth, ride before us each day on the back of an endless train of mules. Wooden cases of tinned food: Hunter’s Hams, Heinz Spaghetti, every vegetable that can be tinned and some that ought not to be; Maggi soups, Horlick’s powder; legions of biscuits. Also rarer delicacies: crystal ginger; tinned quail with truffles; foie gras au Lyonnais; four doz. bottles of Montebello’s 1915. For the General knows we march on our stomachs. Then our armaments: the sinister oxygen apparatus, with its look of Victorian plumbing; the sharpened crampons, steel stakes & pitons; the Swiss ice axes, coils of flaxen rope; rolled Whymper & Meade tents, boxed Primus stoves & Unna cookers; the countless silver oxygen cylinders, the colour-coded canisters of petrol & paraffin.

The absurdity of it — the best that man can produce, pitted against a tower of rock millions of years old. And we shall hardly look like men at all, for you would laugh to see my costume for the heights. Heavy boots with Alpine nails, underclothes of Shetland wool & Japan silk; Norwegian stockings, woollen jersey and mittens, Jäger trousers, soft Kashmir puttees, a suit of windproof gabardine. Then a fur-lined leather motorcycle helmet, a six-foot muffler; snow-goggles of Crooke’s green glass. Not to mention that inhuman breathing apparatus. One could say it isn’t fair for the mountain, that it isn’t sporting and it isn’t alpinism.

And yet she might so easily beat us. This is the signature of her majesty.

Last night at dinner the expedition photographer Noel told a fantastic tale, evidently true, of how the highest lamas in Tibet are discovered after they have been reincarnated. After the lama has died the high monks use several methods to search for the new incarnation. They may dream of the lama, or some aspect of him; of a location where he may be found; they may note the direction the smoke travels from the previous lama’s funeral pyre & search accordingly; they may seek a guiding vision at a certain holy lake in central Tibet. Following these omens, they look for a youth born near the time of the previous lama’s death.

Once they have found a candidate, one of the tests is laying out the personal effects of the old lama amongst a selection of similar decoys. So they put out four sets of prayer-beads, one of which was the old lama’s; or three walking sticks, or five fountain pens. The rightful heir always selects his predecessor’s possessions.

Somehow this made me think of you. Perhaps the sense of the ordained wedded to the grandest caprice. To scatter the lama each time among the remote ranges of Tibet, only to find him anew every generation — that is to trust in something.

So I trust in the faithful Tibetan mail-runner — or is he faithless? — that he shall safeguard this letter so improbably across those savage peaks, evading flood & bandits & every manner of temptation, that these pages reach Darjeeling and, in time, Berlin. And then — shall this ever reach you? O Imogen, you would always have believed so.

You cannot imagine how I miss you.

Yours Ever,

Ashley

Ts-tsang

8 Apr 1924

My Imogen,

I write from the packed dirt floor of a roofless temple, only the firmament & a white-hot moon hanging over us for a ceiling. Somervell & I left Phari a day behind the party; we came upon this convent of Buddhist nuns and stopped for the night. We cannot speak a word to them, nor they to us, yet their hospitality is immense — they treat us like wayward sons.

Beside me snores Somervell, a kind & agreeable fellow who is a physician as well as an accomplished climber. We are flanked on all sides by prayer wheels, a few of them spinning loose in the wind. From the altar a dried-up billy goat gawks down at us, the victim of some long-forgotten sacrifice. It is very cold.

Two days ago at Dothak we saw a frozen waterfall, an elegant sliver of a river arrested in movement. We halted at Phari to re-organize. The town is set at 14,000 ft beneath a great peak 10,000 ft higher. It is never warm & never without wind. All the old hands claimed Phari is the filthiest place on earth. It is.

Rubbish runs through the street up to one’s knees. Crossing these rivers of flowing waste, it could be Ypres again, but for the laughing children & barking muddied dogs. They say the people go from cradle to grave without a single bathe; I saw a mother lovingly coat a naked little girl with yak butter, as proof against the merciless wind & sun & snow. Evidently Phari is the highest inhabited place in the world. The summer is too short for crops to ripen, so the people live off mean food and eat it raw: dried mutton, barley flour, tea mixed with rancid yak butter. And yet they smile sympathetically at us, knowing enough to pity us & our strange quest.