Pedong
Pedong
28 Mar 1924
My dear Imogen,
I hardly knew what to think when I got your telegram. It was right before I sailed & it nearly smashed my mind to pieces; I went through my last days in London & Liverpool in a fog. I thought about you the long weeks at sea, and tore up half a dozen letters, wondering all the while whether I ought to write or not. In the end I knew you hadn’t asked me to write, and so I would not.
But with you, I never could control my feelings.
This letter goes Poste Restante to the Berlin GPO and I cable you saying so; you shall collect it if you wish to, and I shall hope that eases my mind. In these spare moments near dusk, the other men take out pen & paper to write to wives & lovers; you are neither to me, but I write to you now anyway, too far away from civilization to give a straw what is proper. To me you are all that is proper.
From Bombay I travelled by train across the plains of India with two of the other climbers, Price & Somervell. The heat & dust were overwhelming, the train carriage a place of sweltering sleeplessness and ravenous mosquitoes, where I passed in & out of strange reveries and walked the corridors by night. The sole consolation was swinging open the carriage door and standing in the doorframe holding the rail, feeling the night breeze and watching the stars over the horizon, the woodfires burning in lonely huts below.
We came up to Darjeeling by the narrow-gauge railway, twisting through dense tropical forest, the track crawling to one direction & then the other. I craned my neck out of the window to watch the little blue steam-engine chug along. So steep was the climb that they stationed a man above the engine to throw gravel over the tracks for traction. Noel, the expedition’s photographer, sat on the top of the carriage running his cine camera, ducking flat at times to avoid branches and vines thicker than alpine rope.
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.