Pasang was one of the richest non-maharajas in all of India, and he used his wealth well. Lady Bromley died in 1935, and the full wealth from the former Bromley Darjeeling tea plantations came to Pasang and his family—he had seven children, all of whom were successful later in life and three of whom, including a daughter, served in India’s parliament. Pasang passed much of his wealth along to the Indian people, endowing hospitals, hospices, clinics, scholarships, and grants for young Indian students with dreams of becoming doctors. The Lady Bromley-Montfort Research Hospital—specializing in treating and finding new ways to treat war wounds such as those from the land mine explosions in the Third World that have crippled so many children—is famous and thriving to this day.
Pasang died in 1973. His name and legacy are still revered not just in Darjeeling but across India.
Our correspondence over the decades was intermittent but rich with memory and emotion, and I’ve left word that our letters are to be sent to you, Dan, along with these notebooks and the Kodak Vest Pocket camera.
Ah, yes, the camera. George Mallory’s camera. I brought two important things back from the 1925 Everest trip—the Deacon’s Webley revolver, which I used in the Greek isles and elsewhere during World War II, and Mallory’s little Vest Pocket Kodak that we found on Sandy Irvine’s body above 27,000 feet on that May day in 1925.
I never developed the film in the camera—indeed, never removed the film from the camera—but years ago, in 1975, I believe, I was talking to a researcher from the Kodak Company who was doing some basic climbing with me in the mountains around Aspen, Colorado, and I asked him if film from such a camera left in the Himalayas (“at a high altitude” was my only other description) might still be developed…might still have images on it.
“Almost certainly,” said the expert. “Especially if it spent a good part of that time in the cold, dry air of the Himalayas.” Then he squinted at me almost slyly and said, “I bet you’re talking about the Kodak Vest Pocket camera that George Mallory had when he disappeared and which has never been found, aren’t you? I know even though you don’t talk about it that you once went to the Himalayas—K2, wasn’t it? You’re wondering if that camera were ever found, whether we could recover prints of Mallory and Irvine on the summit…come on, Jake, fess up. You were thinking of that camera, weren’t you?”
Sheepishly, I confessed that I had been. I didn’t mention that it was in my small apartment in Aspen just a mile or two from where we were scrambling at the time.
So I bequeath George Mallory’s Vest Pocket camera to you, Dan Simmons, with apologies for not letting it remain in the film-healthier conditions below zero at nearly 28,000 feet. I admit that I’m curious what the photographs will show, but not curious enough to develop them while I’m alive. I have my own opinions about whether Mallory and Irvine made it to the summit or not, just as I have my opinion on whether the Deacon and Lady Bromley-Montfort summited one year after Mallory and Irvine attempted it. I always hate to confound quite solid opinions with mere facts.
I apologize for the length of this endless manuscript—all these dozens of scribbled-in notebooks for you to strain your eyes reading—but I’ve found in the last six or eight months that a death sentence, by cancer or any other means, tends to focus one’s mind wonderfully on who and what have been important in one’s life and what has been dross. I’ve been blessed with many experiences and with knowing many people—some of the experiences were terribly painful at the time, since they entailed losing the people, but none were ever dross.
The three men and one woman I’ve written about in these scrawled pages were important, as were the brave Sherpas whose names I remember to this day.
I confess that I hurt too much to write any more of this amateurishly sentimental “epilogue” letter to you, so I’ll close now with these simple words—
Your friend,
Jacob (Jake) Perry
April 28, 1992
Dan Simmons’s Afterword
Even before finishing Jake Perry’s last handwritten notebook last year, I put in a shamefully desperate call to Mr. Richard A. Durbage (Jr.) in Lutherville-Timonium, Maryland—the son of the lady to whom the package with the notebooks and camera had mistakenly been mailed almost twenty years earlier in 1992.
Mr. Durbage Jr. was very pleasant and tried to be helpful on the phone, although I sensed that I was taking him away from something important on TV—a football game, I thought I heard in the background. Did Mr. Durbage Jr. know of such a camera in the package accidentally mailed to his mother, Lydia, Jake Perry’s grandniece? I asked, my voice almost shaking. It should have been with the notebooks. It had also been meant for me, I added, hearing the possessive—almost obsessive—tone in my own voice. I didn’t tell the gentleman in Maryland that the camera mailed to his mother almost certainly would tell the world whether Mallory and Irvine made it to the summit of Mount Everest in June of 1924.
Mr. Durbage Jr. did remember the camera lying in that box in the basement with Mr. Perry’s scribbled notebooks—it was an old thing, he said, like some sort of camera from the 1800s—but he was sure he no longer had it. He’d moved from that house just that year, 2011, and his daughter and son-in-law had pitched away a lot of junk in preparation for his move to “a smaller place.” But mostly Mr. Durbage Jr. was almost certain that his mother, Lydia Durbage, had sold that old camera at one of her weekly garage sales, perhaps shortly after she’d received the junk from Mr. Perry, probably back in the early 1990s. He distinctly remembered that there’d been a heavy old pistol in the box as well—not loaded, thank God—and his mother had personally taken it to the Lutherville-Timonium police department for them to get rid of the horrid thing.
But, yes, now that Mr. Durbage Jr. thought back on it, the more sure he was that his mother had sold the ancient camera at a yard sale, probably that same summer of 1992, when the package had arrived from the nursing home in Colorado. He had no idea who’d bought it during her yard sale, though he thought he remembered that she said she’d gotten two dollars for the old thing. Could he be of any other help?
“No,” I said. “Thank you.” And I hung up.
A little bit of research on the dates of the Alaska, Nanda Devi, and K2 climbs quickly showed me that Jake’s climbing friend, the doctor he called “Charlie,” must have been Dr. Charles Houston, a famous American mountaineer, eleven years younger than Jake Perry, who had died in September of 2009. Houston had been one of the four fallen men held onto the slopes of K2 by the now legendary belay hold by Pete Schoening in 1953. This belay is beautifully described in Houston’s now classic 1954 book about that expedition, K2, the Savage Mountain, co-written by Houston’s expedition partner Robert H. Bates.
Most of Houston’s books written and published solo were scholarly medical works on the effects of hypoxia—high altitude—on the human body and brain.
Although I’m fairly good at getting information from the government through the Freedom of Information Act (much of the information I culled about Ernest Hemingway’s wartime Cuban exploits as a spy for my novel The Crook Factory had been classified until I liberated it through FOI requests), in the past year I haven’t been able to turn up a single page of redacted official reporting about Jake Perry’s years in the OSS during and just after World War II. I have no doubt, however, as hard as it is for me to imagine that old gentleman as an assassin, that he was where he said he was and had done what he said he did.