Reggie’s surprised at this. She’s always had a good relationship with the monks and chief Holy Lama at the Rongbuk Monastery, she says. But when she asks a priest she knows why the Dzatrul Rinpoche is refusing to see us, the bald old man answers—in Tibetan, which Reggie translates for us—“The auspices are bad. The demons in the mountain are awake and angry, and more are coming. The Metohkangmi on the mountain are active and angry, and…”
“Metohkangmi?” asks Jean-Claude.
“Yeti,” the Deacon reminds us. “Those ubiquitous hairy manlike monsters.”
“…your General Bruce assured us three years ago that all the British climbers belonged to one of England’s mountain-worshiping sects and that they were on a holy pilgrimage to Cho-mo-lung-ma, but we know now that General Bruce lied. You English do not worship the mountain.” Reggie is interpreting as fast as the old monk is speaking.
“Is this about the dancing lamas and Noel’s damned motion picture?” asks the Deacon.
Reggie ignores the question and does not translate it for the monk. She says something in singsong Tibetan, bows low, and all five of us, including Pasang, back out of the monk’s presumably holy presence. The old man returns to spinning a prayer wheel.
Outside in the wind again, she lets her breath out. “This is very bad, gentlemen. Our Sherpas—especially our chosen Tiger high-climbers—very much want and need this blessing. We’ll have to set up Base Camp and then I’ll return and try to convince the Holy Lama that we do deserve a blessing for the mountain.”
“To the Devil with him if the old man doesn’t want to grace us with his damned blessing,” growls the Deacon.
“No,” says Reggie, gracefully swinging herself aboard her tiny white pony. “It will be to the Devil with us if we don’t get that blessing for our Sherpas.”
It was back in late March when we were camped just past the first major Sikkim village of Kalimpong that the Deacon had his visit from the Mysterious Stranger.
I’d noticed the tall, thin man when Dr. Pasang led him into camp and Reggie started chatting with him, but between the traditional Sherpa-Nepalese clothing, the brown cap that was really more turban than cap, the brown skin and huge black beard of the stranger, I assumed that this was an unusually tall Sherpa, or perhaps a relative of Pasang’s, visiting us. I did note that he was wearing solid, if very worn, English hiking boots.
It turned out not only to be a white man, an Englishman, but a very famous Englishman.
Before a whisper of the stranger’s identity started buzzing around the camp, the Deacon’s personal Sherpa, Nyima Tsering, had come to fetch our friend. “A sahib is here to see you, Sahib,” said Nyima to the Deacon with his habitual giggle.
The Deacon and J.C. were both fiddling with the oxygen apparatus flow valve. When he looked up toward our visitor, the tall, bearded man in Nepalese peasant clothing but wearing solid English hiking boots, the Deacon leaped to his feet and jogged over to shake his hand. I assumed that the Deacon would bring the stranger over to the fire and introduce him to Jean-Claude and me, but instead the two men—rather rudely, I thought—walked away toward the nearby stream that flowed into the Tista River we’d just crossed. There we could just see through the screen of trees that the stranger squatted in a Sherpa-like manner, the Deacon sat on a small river boulder, and the two immediately became lost in conversation.
“Who is that?” I asked Reggie when she finally strolled over to see if we wanted some more coffee.
“K. T. Owings,” she said.
I couldn’t have been more dumbstruck if she had announced that the stranger was the Second Coming of Christ.
Kenneth Terrence Owings had been one of my literary idols from the time I was twelve years old. The so-called “climber-poet” had been one of the top five living British alpinists before the Great War, but also one of England’s more celebrated free-verse poets, easily ranking with Rupert Brooke and even the other great poets who’d died in the War—Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Charles Sorley—or those few who’d survived to write about it, including Siegfried Sassoon and Ivor Gurney.
K. T. Owings had survived the War, after being promoted all the way from lieutenant to major, but he’d never written a word about the fighting. In fact, as far as I knew, Owings had never written another word of poetry since the War. In that sense he was very much like the Deacon, who’d been rather famous for his verse before the War but hadn’t published—or evidently written—a word since the fighting began. Nor had Owings returned to the Alps, where, like George Mallory and the Deacon (and often in the company of the Deacon), he’d become so famous as a climber before the War. K. T. Owings had simply disappeared. Some newspapers and literary journals reported that Owings had gone to Africa, where he’d climbed Mount Kilimanjaro by himself and simply refused to come back down. Others were certain that he’d gone to China to climb unnamed mountains and been killed by bandits there. The most recent authoritative word was that K. T. Owings—to cleanse himself of his experiences in the Great War—had built a small sailing ship, attempted to sail around the world, and drowned in a terrible storm in the South Atlantic.
I looked through the branches again. There was K. T. Owings, dressed in something like clean rags, black beard with swatches of gray in it, squatting on his haunches and chatting away a mile a minute with the Deacon. It was hard to believe.
I stood, took my metal water bottle, and began walking toward the stream.
“Mr. Deacon wanted to be left alone with him,” said Reggie.
“I’m just going to get some water,” I said. “I shan’t bother them.”
“Make sure you boil it before drinking,” said Reggie.
I all but tiptoed down to the stream, keeping a thick screen of branches between me and the two men. Leaning to my left toward the screen of branches, the better to eavesdrop as I filled my large metal water bottle, I realized that the Deacon was speaking too softly to be heard but Owings’s voice was a deep rasp.
“…and I’ve reconnoitered high enough to see that there’s a serious step in the ridge, a rock face about forty feet high, just below the summit ridge…I can see it from the valley with binoculars and caught another glimpse climbing above the Cwm…”
What was this? Owings seemed to be warning the Deacon about the First or Second Step…probably the Second Step, since the summit ridge lay just beyond…on the North East Ridge of Everest. But we all knew about the First and Second Steps, although no one—with the possible exception of Mallory and Irvine on the day they disappeared—had yet gone high enough on the ridges to tackle them (especially the larger, steeper-looking Second Step). The two Steps had been visible in photographs taken since the 1921 expedition. Why would Owings be cautioning the Deacon about such an obvious thing now? And for some reason he’d used the term “Cwm” rather than Col for the North Col. Perhaps the poet-climber had his own names for various features that had been named since the 1921 recon expedition. Had Owings tried to climb Mount Everest on his own and been turned back by these formidable rock-step obstacles high on the North East Ridge? The Steps were a main reason—along with the terrible winds along the ridgeline—why Norton and others had moved onto the North Face to try ascending the near-vertical Great Couloir.
“…with fixed rope perhaps…” was all I could hear of the Deacon’s hushed reply.
“Yes, yes, that might work,” Owings concluded. “But I can’t promise a camp or cache right below that…”
The Deacon said something in low tones. He might have warned Owings to keep his voice down, since the famous poet-climber’s words were barely audible when the conversation resumed.