— What’s this?
— Three hundred and fifty krónur. Around four euros. It’s all I’ve got left in the world—
— That’s not true.
Mireille puts the coins in her pocket. I put my arm around her.
— What’s the winter like here?
— Dark and cold, she says. But we’ll survive.
EPILOGUE
The storm that killed Ashley Walsingham was not related to the monsoon. It had formed three weeks earlier as a low-pressure disturbance above the jewel-green waters of the eastern Mediterranean.
The storm traveled far to meet the expedition. It sailed eastward over the arid plateau of northern Arabia; it crossed Afghanistan, brewing above the snow peaks and Silk Road passes of the Hindu Kush. It skirted the formidable summit of K2 along the border of the Republic of China and the Princely State of Kashmir and Jammu, continuing southeast over the glaciated ranges of the Karakoram.
In late May the disturbance swept east over the immense Himalayan massif, flowing above the peaks now known as Annapurna and Ama Dablam and Makalu. None of these mountains had yet been climbed or even set foot upon by a European. The storm released thick snowfalls and howling blizzards throughout the ranges of the western Himalaya. On June 7, 1924, the storm’s full measure reached the northeast face of Mount Everest in the self-proclaimed sovereign Kingdom of Tibet. Mount Everest was the tallest known mountain in the world.
On the same day at the Alipore Observatory in Calcutta, 385 miles south of Mount Everest, the resident meteorologist Dr. S. N. Sen walked outside to take the afternoon’s temperature readings, pencil and logbook in hand. It was six minutes until four. The air was sweltering.
Crossing the observatory’s back lawn, Sen patted the sweat from his neck and brow with a linen handkerchief, glancing skyward. A few threads of cirrus fibratus strung the eastern sky; the rest was a crystalline azure.
Sen’s thoughts returned to the onset of the Asian monsoon. Each day he telegraphed the Mount Everest Expedition with new data, forecasting the probable date of the monsoon’s arrival. It was a difficult question. He had to take into account, for instance, the complex interaction of Himalayan and African and equatorial air masses; the retrograde motion of cyclones near the Bay of Bengal; the passage of western disturbances across the subcontinent. One such disturbance ought to reach Mount Everest very soon. Sen had taken lunch at his desk to study the problem, the morning weather telegrams fanned out before him, freshly wired from a dozen surface and upper-air weather stations throughout the Himalaya.
— The fourteenth of June, Sen murmured. No earlier.
Sen reached the Stevenson screen where the thermometers were held, a case of enameled pine with double-louvered walls. He opened the padlock and squinted at the four thermometers inside, appraising tiny gradations between the black bands of the temperature scale. It was 91.2 degrees Fahrenheit.
At the Mount Everest Expedition base camp at the foot of the Rongbuk Glacier, at an altitude of 18,190 feet, Dr. Hingston took the afternoon’s meteorological measurements at 4:00 p.m, as he did every day. Hingston was the expedition’s medical officer, but he was also a naturalist who observed the climate with genuine interest.
Hingston kept a pair of maximum and minimum thermometers on a wooden provision box under his tent fly, the thermometers fitted in a snap case of morocco leather. He eyed the floating index inside the glass cylinder of the maximum thermometer, the wind lashing the canvas tent fly against his back. Earlier the thermometer’s filament had been pushed up to 33 degrees, but the mercury had since fallen to 11. Hingston logged the figures in neat numerals on the green-columned sheets of the meteorological diary.
Next he cradled the cold tube of a Kata thermometer under his armpit for several minutes. He hobbled out among the dirt and gravel, watching the red fluid dive in the wind with one eye on the sweep hand of his pocket watch. Finally Hingston placed a swatch of dark fur on a large stone, suspending a black-bulb thermometer above it. He rested the toe of his boot on the fur and waited for the mercury to rise.
Hingston surveyed his surroundings. The boulders around him had been sculpted by wind over centuries, their surface scarred and striated on the windward side, smooth and glassy on the lee side. They reminded him of coral. Hingston marveled at the diverse conditions that shaped animate and inanimate objects, the legion adaptations of mammal and insect and bird life to this hostile world.
The signs were everywhere. The finches and sparrows that shelter between stones or village walls, or in the warm underground dens of mouse hares, protecting their delicate plumage from the wind; the red-billed choughs that stand with their heads facing scouring gales, anchoring themselves long enough to pick at meager grass. Himalayan butterflies inhabited the most godforsaken places, barren wastelands up to 17,000 feet: these species of Parnassius were ill-suited to such elevations, save that they could cower their wings low against the wind, and knew to only fly when the air was calm. Hingston had even seen Pseudabris beetles that played dead. Thrown off green stalks of vetch or iris by gusting wind, the beetles would collapse upon the soil as if dead, only to spring buzzingly to life when the weather abated.
Hibernation was a rule here. When the expedition reached the Tibetan plateau in April, the country appeared gray and moribund. But it was only sleeping. A minute universe was saving itself for fairer climes, and Hingston had shown this to the climbers, lifting stones and turning soil to reveal curled caterpillars; dozing colonies of ants; arachnids reclined in hollow snail shells. The design of nature was flawless; the signature of its perfection pervasive.
He raised the thermometer to his face, squinting to read the scale.
— Thirteen point three.
Hingston was very cold. He would soon call for Kami to brew tea.
At Camp III, four thousand vertical feet above Hingston, Colonel Norton lay in his quilted eiderdown sleeping bag composing dispatches to be couriered and telegraphed to The Times of London. The wind outside was howling. Suddenly the colonel glanced at his wristwatch.
— Four o’clock, he bellowed.
— Bloody freezing, Somervell called from the next tent. Isn’t that specific enough?
— Not for South Kensington.
Somervell hacked out a cough in reply. He crouched in the tent’s flapping vestibule and studied a pair of thermometers. He glanced at the red sliver of fluid in the bottom thermometer, then inverted the case to reset the instruments. The metal indices plummeted in the glass.
Somervell recorded the temperature as minus seven degrees Fahrenheit. He estimated the wind speed at fifty miles per hour, which according to Beaufort’s numbers would be a force nine gale. It was a blind guess. Somervell knew that winds at sea were hardly comparable to those on a mountain, just as low temperatures in the Arctic were not half so severe as those on Mount Everest, where the oxygen-starved body had no power to warm itself.
Somervell lifted his face to the mountain above. Fractocumulus clouds had swirled over the upper pyramid, sheathing everything in white. Walsingham and Price were somewhere among those clouds. Somervell thought the high camps would drop to at least twenty below in the nighttime, which meant fifty degrees of frost, excluding the tremendous wind.
Several hours later Hugh Price staggered down the north ridge of Mount Everest, searching for Camp VI in failing light and whirling snow. At 26,800 feet the camp was the highest bivouac ever made by men. Price’s vision was blurred and doubled by a mild case of snowblindness, and he did not see the tent until he was very close, a sagging blotch of green canvas on a shelf of jagged rocks. Price tore open the tapes and dived inside, panting. There was snow everywhere. The canvas walls were screaming in the wind.