It was in October 1929—the week after the stock market crashed—that I received my postcard from Nepal; the small card had the exotic, never seen by most Brits or Americans Nepalese stamps on it, but overlaid with both Indian and British stamps, since it had been forwarded to me by officials in New Delhi and by the Royal Geographical Society in London, and on the back was a brief handwritten message:
Jake—
Hope you are well. The farm here in the Khumbu Valley is quite productive and we’re both very happy. Little Charles and Ruth-Anne send you their love.
Your friends forever
There were no names under that closing. Farm in the Khumbu Valley? The only Westerner I’d ever known of who had succeeded in living and farming in Nepal was K. T. Owings, but he had barely noticed my existence during his visit to our Sikkim camp in 1925, and certainly wouldn’t have closed a greeting with “Your friends [plural] forever.”
Who else, then, but the Deacon and Reggie? If “little Charles and Ruth-Anne” were children born to my two friends since they’d disappeared on the mountain in late May of 1925, I could understand their naming the boy Charles; it had been the name of Reggie’s cousin, Percy’s older brother so terribly wounded in the Great War and the Deacon’s childhood friend—but Ruth-Anne? It took me some digging in old London records years later to find that Charles Davis Deacon had had a younger sister, Ruth-Anne, who had died a month after her birth in 1899.
So I choose to believe to this day that Reggie and the Deacon married—or at least stayed together—and elected to live separate from the world in Nepal through the rest of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. But would the Deacon really have sat out the second war with Germany? Perhaps he felt he’d served enough.
I had various real jobs, but my climbing—especially with my friend Charlie—included an Alaskan expedition (along with another Harvard alumnus, Brad Washburn) to Mount Crillon in 1933, and another to Alaska’s Mount Foraker in 1934. It was during a third expedition to Alaska in the late 1940s that I spent nine days pinned down with four other men in a tiny snow cave at 17,900 feet. Two of the men died of hypothermia; I was lucky—losing only the last two fingers on my left hand to frostbite.
My first—almost reluctant—return to the Himalayas after my time with Byrd’s people in Antarctica was a reconnaissance of Nanda Devi, a beautiful mountain with a surrounding sanctuary protected by almost impenetrable cliffs, an amazing experience that I shared with my friend Charlie, Bill Tilman, Ad Carter, and other friends in 1936. In 1938 I also took a whack at K2—at 28,251 feet the second-highest peak in the world and, in my opinion, a far more dangerous one than Everest—along with some Harvard Mountain Club alums. (I believe I’ve mentioned that the club hadn’t quite come into existence when I was at school there.) No one summited that year.
I’ve also mentioned my work with the OSS during World War II and shan’t bore you with more details of that, other than to say that I used some classified channels to hunt for any mention of Reggie and Richard Davis Deacon—or even of Lord Percival Bromley and Kurt Meyer and Bruno Sigl—but nothing new came to light.
In 1953, at the advanced and decrepit age of 51 years, I accompanied my friend Charlie on my last Himalayan adventure—acting as support climber on their second attempt on K2. No one reached the summit that year either—K2 is an even harsher mistress than Everest and holds her secrets dear—but I did have the unique opportunity to watch one man, Peter Schoening, belay four of his fellow climbers (including my friend Dr. Charlie) who’d slipped and fallen on a fatally steep ice slope. To my knowledge, a four-man-belay save at such an altitude has never been done before or since.
Unfortunately, one of the men with us—Art Gilkey—had been injured on the descent, and during our group’s attempt to get Gilkey off the mountain, the other members of what Charlie later called his “Brotherhood of the Rope” had securely tied Gilkey off—wrapped in his sleeping bag—on a steep slope while we crossed a dangerous spot by chopping steps, when either an unheard avalanche or Gilkey himself (for unknown reasons) slipped the secure anchors we’d left him tied to, and he slid to his death.
I’ve mentioned before that such falls in the mountains are not antiseptic—they almost invariably leave behind a trail of blood, torn flesh, ripped clothing, rent limbs, brain matter, and more—and Charlie never really recovered from our down-climbing for hours past the blood and torn remains of his close friend. Years later, Charlie would have severe bouts of depression and hallucinations of the highway ahead of his car filling with blood, almost certainly a result of what doctors are calling, now in the implausible future of 1992, “post-traumatic stress disorder.”
After that second K2 adventure and Art Gilkey’s death, I was done with the Himalayas forever.
But I’ve neglected the most important event during those decades. Some epilogue writer I am.
In 1948 I was in Berlin as part of an OSS Nazi officials debriefing mission and was reading a German newspaper—I’d picked up the language during the war—when I came upon an article that made me put down my beer and stare for several minutes.
Four crack German climbers had been trying a midwinter climb of the Eiger following Heinrich Harrer’s first successful route up the Eigerwand—the ferocious and climber-devouring North Face of the Eiger—when they came across the frozen body of a solo climber at the top of the so-called Spider, above that white web of deadly vertical snowfields and just below the Exit Cracks that lead to the final summit ridge of the 13,022-foot killer mountain.
The climber—who appeared to be far too old to be attempting the Eigerwand, a man in his mid- or late 50s at least—had obviously been stopped in the last pitches of his climb by a terrible storm that had swept across the North Face, trapped the man in his solo bivouac on a six-inch-wide ledge where he couldn’t climb or descend because of the weather, and frozen him to death. The man had no ID, wallet, or other forms of identification on him, and no one in the nearby village or the Kleine Scheidegg Hotel in the valley at the base of the Eiger’s North Face remembered seeing him pass through. The article also said that the German climbers reported there had been a slight smile on the frozen middle-aged climber’s face.
Richard Davis Deacon would have been 59 in the winter of 1948—an insane age to attempt any serious mountain face, much less while climbing solo, much less the Eigerwand. Although the body was never identified (or even seen again, since an avalanche had carried it away before the next summit attempt reached that height again in the late summer of that year), and the German climbers had no camera with them when they found the body, I can clearly imagine the Deacon’s face. I can even imagine his thoughts as the storm stopped his climb so very close to the summit as hypothermia began to set in. He would not have blamed the mountain.
He had always said that his destiny was to die on the North Face of the Eiger.
Whether this solo attempt by the Deacon—if it was the Deacon (no evidence other than my inner certainty says it was)—was something that happened after Reggie died or returned to India, or whether she was waiting for him to return to Nepal from the mountain, I can’t be certain. I can’t imagine her allowing him to attempt the Eigerwand solo, in winter, so soon after the war in Europe, but then neither can I imagine the Deacon being stopped if he’d set his mind to do something. The Germans had reported that the man had graying hair but that his frozen body looked to be in tip-top athletic shape—the body of a serious climber.
Finally, I kept in touch with Dr. Pasang for decades after we parted in 1925 and went to see him twice in India, once in 1931 and again in the summer of 1948. I made the second trip largely to show him the newspaper article about the solo climber who had died on the Eigerwand that winter.