The steep hills were terraced here and there and green with rows of plants grown about as far apart as in a good vineyard, but much shorter. I caught glimpses of men and women in wet cotton saris and shirts working along the endless green rows that followed the curves of the hills like curving parallel lines on a topographic map. The shades of green were almost overwhelming.
After about twenty minutes, we turned off the steep dirt-rut road onto a long, rising lane of white gravel. I’m not sure what I expected at the end of that long driveway—perhaps another stone estate like Lady Bromley’s in Lincolnshire—but while Reggie’s home was appropriately large and surrounded by stables and other well-constructed outbuildings, it was more in keeping with the colors and style of a large Victorian-era farmhouse. The trucks followed us to the broad driveway but turned off toward the stables and garage before the Silver Ghost reached a wide gravel circle in front of the house, its center and fringes green with wet tropical plantings of all sorts. We stopped, and Edward rushed to open the door on Reggie’s side.
To this day, that remains my only ride in anyone’s Rolls-Royce.
The tropical darkness has fallen, we’ve eaten an excellent meal of veal along a dining room table even longer than the fourteen-foot reading table where we’d left the maps, and by the time all four of us—five if one counts the tall, silent form of Dr. Pasang—retire to that same library with brandy for everyone and cigars for J.C. and me, the Deacon is puffing away on his pipe and obviously still silently attempting to come up with some argument or reasons why Reggie cannot accompany us when we leave in 36 hours or so. Rather than gather around the map table again, we’re sitting at the hearth of a giant fireplace where the servants have lit a fire. It’s chilly above 8,000 feet here at the plantation.
“It’s simply out of the question, taking a woman on to Everest,” the Deacon is saying.
Reggie looks up from rocking the brandy in her snifter. “There is no question involved, Mr. Deacon. I am going. You need my money and you need my Sherpas and my ponies and my saddles and Pasang’s medical skills and my permission from the Tibetan prime minister—and you would need me to gain access to Tibet this year even if there weren’t the crisis of the lice and the dancing lamas.”
The Deacon shows a sour expression. At least she’s no longer calling him “Dickie,” I think.
“Crisis of the lice and dancing lamas?” inquires Jean-Claude between sips and puffs.
I’ve almost forgotten that J.C. hadn’t spent the autumn and winter in London as the Deacon and I had. I look to the Deacon to explain, but he shrugs and gestures for me to speak.
“You remember,” I say to Jean-Claude, “that the Deacon’s friend we met at the Royal Geographical Society, the photographer and filmmaker John Noel, paid the Everest Committee eight thousand pounds for all cinema and still photo rights to last year’s expedition.”
“I remember because I thought it was an extraordinary amount of money,” says J.C.
I nod. “Well, Noel was sure he could make a profit if the expedition were successful last year, but he couldn’t really make a dramatic film showing Mallory’s and Irvine’s disappearance since there was only one photograph taken of them before they left Camp Four, and clouds got in the way of Noel’s long twenty-inch telephoto cinema lens, so Noel made one of the cinema releases more of a travelogue—The Roof of the World, he called it. The Deacon and I saw it in January before you returned from France.”
“So?”
“So there were things in the film—including a scene where an old man is finding fleas in a beggar child’s hair and then crushing them between his teeth—that the Tibetan government evidently objected to. Others objected to a bit where Mallory’s widow is quoted in titles as saying that she regretted the whole enterprise. But mostly the Tibetans have been objecting to the dancing lamas.”
“Dancing lamas?” repeats Jean-Claude. “Noel filmed them at Rongbuk Monastery?”
“Worse than that,” says Reggie. “John Noel paid a group of lamas to leave the Gyantse Monastery and to perform—live in cinemas in London and other British cities—what Noel in the film calls a ‘devil dance.’ The monks have turned into quite the performing troupe, some dancing while others play drums and blow on thigh-bone trumpets. It’s been very popular with English cinema-going audiences. Quite different from the usual fare. At the same time, the lamas were introduced as ‘holy men’ to the Archbishop of Canterbury. The uproar between Tibet and His Majesty’s Government has been ample enough for the Everest Committee to be turned down, by Tibet, for its proposed 1926 Everest expedition. It may be a decade or more before the British Alpine Club and Everest Committee receive another climbing permission.”
“Ahh,” says J.C. “I can see why the Tibetans feel humiliated. But how did the Tibetans learn what was happening in English cinema houses?”
Reggie smiles as the Deacon irritably repacks his pipe. “It isn’t really the Tibetans who are causing this moratorium on British expeditions to Everest,” she says. “It is Major Frederick Marshman Bailey.”
“Who the devil is Major Frederick Marshman Bailey?” I ask. This is the first I’ve heard of either the man’s name or the fact that it was he, not the Tibetans, who were throwing a spanner into the Everest Committee’s efforts to get a future climbing permission.
“He’s Political Officer for Sikkim,” says the Deacon from around his pipe stem. He sounds very angry. “Remember our maps? The easternmost province of the Raj in India, the one we have to trek through to get to Tibet? It’s a quasi-independent kingdom called Sikkim. Bailey got the Dalai Lama at Lhasa to back him on all this ‘the Tibetans are outraged’ nonsense, but in truth, it’s Bailey who’s stopping all British climbing permits except ours. He’s stopping German and Swiss permit attempts as well.”
“Why would he want to do that, Ree-shard?” asks Jean-Claude. “I mean, I see why a British Political Officer would try to head off the Germans and Swiss, to keep Everest an English hill, but why on earth is he stopping permission for English expeditions?”
The Deacon seems too angry to speak. He nods to Lady Bromley-Montfort.
“Bailey is a former climber, having achieved some lower summits here in the Himalayas,” Reggie says. “He’s far past his prime—and he never got close to Mount Everest even in his prime—but many of us believe that he’s stirring up and exaggerating the Tibetan anger over the dancing lamas as a pretext to save the mountain for himself.”
I have to blink rapidly at this news. “Will he try this spring or summer?”
“He’ll never try,” says the Deacon through gritted teeth. “He just wants to spoil it for the others.”
“Then how did Lady…Reggie’s…request get approved by the Tibetan prime minister and the Dalai Lama at Lhasa?” asks Jean-Claude.
Reggie smiles again. “I went straight to the Dalai Lama and the prime minister for personal permission,” she says. “And ignored Bailey completely. He hates me for it. We shall have to transit Sikkim as quickly and quietly as we can, before Bailey finds some way to block us. He is a malevolent man. Our only advantage is that I’ve done several things by way of misdirection to make him believe that our expedition will be attempting transit to Chomolungma in August, post-monsoon, rather than now during the pre-monsoon months, and that we would be using the direct northern route—over Tangu Plain and up over the Serpo La—rather than the traditional route farther east.”
“Why would Bailey be so foolish as to believe that someone would attempt Everest in August again?” asks the Deacon. His 1921 recon expedition had done just that, only to find how deep the snow could be in August. But then again, it had been June 5 when Mallory, Somervell, and the others—minus the Deacon, who thought the snow conditions too dangerous—had lost seven Sherpas and Bhotias in an avalanche during Mallory’s stubborn attempt to return to Camp III on the North Col after heavy early monsoon snows.