Roberts I'll Climb Mount Everest Alone

The Story of Maurice Wilson
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30670-1
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 174 Seiten

This is a sad, strange and touchingly heroic book. It tells of a mad, misguided adventure: one man's attempt to conquer Mount Everest. Maurice Wilson belonged to the 'lost generation'. He fought in the First World War, winning the Military Cross, but found the transition to civilian life difficult. He led a restless, rootless life and suffered ill-health. This changed mysteriously in 1932 when through, it would seem, a combination of prayer and fasting he cured himself. His Mount Everest ambitions started to take shape. They could not have been more ambitious. His odyssey was to begin in Britain. He bought himself an airplane. He couldn't fly, was a poor student, but finally learnt the rudiments. Despite all the odds, and much official obstruction, he managed to fly to India. More obstacles followed, but on 21 March, 1934 Maurice Wilson and three Sherpas slipped out of Darjeeling disguises as Buddhist monks. Wilson's first attempt on Mount Everest was solo. It failed. He tried again this time with the three Sherpas. They made better progress initially. From the base camp, Wilson made two more attempts on the final ascent. A year later Eric Shipton's reconnaissance party found his body at the approaches to the North Col. They also found his diary: the final entry read, 'Off again, gorgeous day.' The diary provides an astonishing record of persistence, courage, and a faith that never wavered in the face of appalling hardship and adversity. Although this is a chronicle of failure, the achievement can still be marvelled at. Here was a man with no flying or mountaineering experience whatsoever who managed to fly from Britain to India and then nearly conquers Mount Everest : there are even those who speculate he might have done so but even without that fanciful embellishment it is an extraordinary story. This book, first published in 1957, has been out of print for a very long time. Its renewed availability will delight not just those interested in mountaineering but also connoisseurs of adventure stories.

Dennis Roberts

Autoren/Hrsg.

Roberts, Dennis

Leseproben

CHAPTER THREE

THE MOUNTAIN

IT WAS a fantastic idea, and in it were all the elements of tragedy. For Everest could not be climbed, by any man, alone; yet it was not in Wilson’s nature ever to give up. The end of the venture was, from its very beginning, inevitable.

But he set about his task with optimism and a fair amount of common sense. His first need, he realized, was to find out all he could about the mountain he was challenging; and in the next couple of months he borrowed and studied every book and map on Everest that the London libraries could lend him.

There has in the last few years been such a spate of books about the Himalaya—and Everest in particular—that it is difficult for us to realize how little was known about the mountain in 1933. Even so one might have thought that a careful study of the existing information would have shown Wilson his task was utterly impossible. For already the mountain had taken terrible toll of those who had challenged her. Yet perhaps the very difficulty of his self-appointed task spurred Wilson on. If only he could achieve the impossible then surely the world would listen to him.

It was a fascinating story he gradually pieced together from the books that began to pile up in his “digs” near Maida Vale, and soon he had in his mind a complete picture of Mount Everest and its history.

He read first how the highest mountain in the world was discovered.

He learned that in 1849 the Indian Trigonometrical Survey started to take, from the plains of India, a series of observations on the Nepalese peaks. These often had Indian names, but they were so numerous and thronged and towered so closely together, that some mountains were nameless even to the Indians and Nepalese. These were therefore distinguished by numbers, and among these nameless peaks was one listed simply as Peak XV. It was three years later that a Bengali computer, working out a series of calculations, suddenly realized for the first time the true height of Peak XV. He rushed into the office of the Surveyor-General, Sir Andrew Waugh.

“Sir,” he cried, “I’ve discovered the highest mountain in the world!”

After careful checks had been made it was established that Peak XV was over 29,000 feet high—29,002 was the exact mean height arrived at—and it was decided to name it after Sir George Everest who, as Waugh’s predecessor, had set in motion the machinery of the Trigonometrical Survey. Only later did the Everest expeditions discover, when they pushed into the heart of Tibet, that the mountain had in fact a native name—Chomolungma: Goddess Mother of the World.

But though the highest peak was discovered as long ago as 1852, it was many years before it was explored. For Everest rose on the borders of Nepal and Tibet, and both countries denied foreigners permission even to approach the mountain. How the Himalayan peaks were reconnoitred and their rough positions plotted is one of the greatest untold sagas in the history of exploration.

It was impossible for any white man to enter Tibet: the few who tried were quickly and inevitably captured, tortured and returned to India in a condition terrible enough to discourage others from following in their steps. But in 1860 an officer of the Indian Survey, Captain Montgomery, hit on the idea of training a number of intelligent Indians in the use of scientific instruments, and then using them as explorers. These men, known as the “Pundit Explorers” were specially instructed in the technique of making route traverses by compass bearings and the pacing of steps; then, travelling in disguise, they set off into the vast 2,000-mile belt of the unknown Himalaya. Often they were away for years before returning with the precious geographical knowledge that they had, with such danger and physical hardship, so laboriously collected. Every step they took they recorded by the revolution of their prayer-wheels or by the beads on their rosaries; then at night they would write up their notes on tiny rolls of paper which they hid inside the prayer wheels. They recorded compass bearings of the mountains and rivers they passed by using miniature compasses cleverly disguised as amulets. Inside their hollow walking sticks they carried boiling-point thermometers to measure the altitudes. Most of these men whose incredible labours earned them only a few rupees a month, went disguised as pilgrims, priests, or traders. And the danger and hardships they endured were so phenomenal that no single man could accomplish more than two, or at the most three, journeys in his lifetime.

The “Pundits” were indeed brave men, and for nearly half a century the little that was known about Everest was pieced together from their observations. But none of them ever succeeded in penetrating to within more than fifty miles of the summit; for Everest lies half-hidden behind a covering wall of other mountains—great 22,000-foot peaks—which, until they are passed, look higher than the most distant summit. No Pundit ever found his way to Everest’s great glacial valleys, though two of them brought back vague rumours of Chamalung—“the Sanctuary of the Birds”, and of an age-old “Lamasery of the Snows” whose priests were said to keep watch over the Goddess Mother of the World.

The actual opening up of the approaches to Everest came as a result of Sir Francis Younghusband’s military mission to Lhasa. This was in 1904; and one of the concessions extracted from the Dalai Lama was that occasional British expeditions should be allowed to explore and climb in the Tibetan Himalaya.

In the next decade a number of tentative explorations were made. Rawling and Ryder surveyed the Tsampo Valley in the upper reaches of the Brahmaputra. Dr. Kellas patiently plotted a first tentative route from Darjeeling, along the Terta Valley; and he too began the training of Sherpa porters. Then in 1913 Captain John Noel, a young army officer, entered Tibet on an unauthorized journey, and disguised as a native penetrated to within forty miles of Everest.

Wilson may not have paid special attention to Noel’s journey when he first read it, but later, when forced to adopt similar methods himself, he doubtless recalled many of its details.

Then in 1914 the Great War put a temporary stop to the exploration of Everest.

In 1919 Sir Charles Bell, the British envoy to Lhasa, obtained permission for two exploratory and climbing expeditions to approach Everest in 1921 and 1922; and the same year the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club combined forces to form the Mount Everest Committee. The fight was on. And soon out of ignorance came knowledge; out of darkness, light.

For early in 1921 there assembled at Darjeeling a reconnaissance expedition under the leadership of Lieut.-Colonel Howard-Bury. And this first expedition was perhaps the most outstandingly successful of all those that ever came to the Himalaya. For not only did it find the way to Everest, it reconnoitred a possible route to the very summit.

The expedition assembled at Darjeeling in early May. The direct route is impossible to follow, being barred by Kangchenjunga and its subsidiary peaks and ranges, and the expedition were soon to find themselves journeying some 300 miles, threading their way slowly through the vast passes and gorges of the Eastern Himalaya, before they reached even the foot of their objective.

On May 18th the great caravan of explorers, porters and pack-animals were ready for the start.

They headed first through the humid jungle and deep valleys of tropical Sikkim, then up and along the broad Chumbi Valley toward the wilderness of the high Tibetan plateau. At first their route was obvious, but after some hundred miles the valley petered out and they had to blaze a trail across the little-known plateau. Their first and most distressing setback was the illness of Dr. Kellas, the expedition’s recorder-in-command. Day after day he grew gradually weaker, until as they were crossing a 17,000-foot pass near Kampa Dzong, his heart failed him and he passed quietly away. The following afternoon they saw Everest for the first time, and Kellas was buried within sight of the mountain he had so longed to set foot on.

A couple of days later Harold Raeburn also became ill, and he and Wollaston returned to the lower reaches of the valley. The loss of two members of the climbing party was a serious blow to the expedition, and the task of probing Everest’s defences fell almost entirely on the shoulders of Bullock and young Leigh-Mallory. They rose to the occasion magnificently.

The party, after following many a false lead, worked their way gradually to within sixty miles of the north-east face of Everest. Then across the windswept plateau they suddenly had the first real glimpse of the mountain that any European had yet been vouchsafed. It is only fitting that George Leigh-Mallory should describe so great a moment: “We were now able,” he writes, “to make out almost exactly where Everest should be; but the clouds were dark in that direction. We gazed at them intently through fieldglasses, as though by some miracle we might pierce the veil. Presently the miracle happened. We caught the gleam of snow behind the grey mists. A whole group of mountains began to appear in gigantic fragments. Mountain shapes are often fantastic seen through a mist, these were like the wildest creation of a dream. A preposterous triangular lump rose out of the depths; its edge came leaping up...