— Still jet-lagged, sir?
The doorman wears a frock coat and necktie. A top hat is perched over his gray hair.
— I’ve got it pretty bad.
— Best to go for a walk, get yourself nice and tired.
I walk up Albemarle Street, zigzagging my way up to Marble Arch. On the way back I sit on a bench at the edge of Grosvenor Square and take my notebook from my jacket pocket. In large caps I write down two columns of research, ASHLEY and IMOGEN. Under these I make a list of subjects: Great War. Everest Expedition. London. Sweden. I draw arrows and connect the subjects to libraries. Alpine Club. War Archive. Recheck British Library. Newspapers. Most of these subjects lead to Ashley. I circle Imogen’s name twice and connect it to Charlotte. Then I add Eleanor.
I put the notebook in my pocket and walk back to the hotel. Hopefully I can get some sleep now.
I start with Ashley in the morning. In the dim basement of the Alpine Club in Shoreditch the archivist lets me hold Hugh Price’s ice axe, brought back from Everest in 1924. It is heavier than it looks. A well-balanced tool of wood and steel, its handle bears the double notches that Price carved to mark it as his own. I lift the axe to the light of the barred window. The steel head is engraved with the manufacturer’s name: CHR SCHENK, GRINDELWALD.
— What about Walsingham’s axe?
The archivist shrugs. — They never found it.
But this is only the beginning. I spend four straight days in archives from morning until closing time, allowing myself an hour break for lunch. I visit the reading rooms of the Imperial War Museum in Southwark; I page through the typewritten catalogs of the Royal Geographical Society on Kensington Gore, filing requests to see every surviving scrap of paper from the 1924 expedition. The librarian warns me that some documents might take days or weeks to be brought up from storage facilities, but I request them anyway. In hushed chambers I study yellowed letters and battered diaries, collecting stacks of memoirs as I flip through accounts of wars and climbs and expeditions. I learn of trenches and parapets and fire steps, of couloirs and moraines, of cwms and bergschrunds.
On Saturday I ride the Northern Line to the British Library’s newspaper collection at Colindale. All morning I flip through tall red-bound volumes of musty newsprint, reviewing the press coverage of the expedition to make sure I haven’t missed anything. Then I wheel through the endless microfilm collection, scanning carefully through June 1924. The same material appears again and again: headlines about the expedition’s failure; vague accounts of Ashley’s death; grainy reproductions of a snapshot taken at Everest base camp; the impersonal eulogy from the king. Only one article interests me, a small column of print that appeared seven weeks after Ashley’s death.
EVEREST VICTIM
STORY OF A GRAND LAMA’S WARNING
(FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT)
KALIMPONG, N. BENGAL
The death of Mr. Walsingham during his attempt to reach the summit of Mount Everest is stated here to have been foretold by the Abbot of Rongbuk, a High Lama with the physical deformity of immensely large ears, and who is regarded throughout the country as possessing second sight.
It is stated that he warned the porters when they left Rongbuk, near the expedition’s base camp, that should they again attempt the ascent of Mount Everest disaster would follow.
He stated that the Spirit of the Mountain had up to that time been merciful, but should his solitude be again disturbed he would surely wreak his vengeance on the disturbers of his eternal peace.
Whether this statement had any effect on the morale of the coolies is not known, but it is a fact that after this warning cases occurred of porters making excuses to avoid going higher on the mountain.
I try to find more about the abbot of Rongbuk, but he doesn’t appear in any other articles. So the next day I visit the British Film Institute on the South Bank to watch the official cinematic record of the Mount Everest expedition, directed by a man named J. B. L. Noel. I sit in front of a screen and pull headphones over my ears. The film begins with an unsteady placard, white letters flickering on the scratched black negative.
A story of adventurous explorers in a far-off land and their endeavour to reach the top of the world.
The clouds part to reveal a boundless range of mountains, the great peak hovering above them all. Then a telephoto image of the pyramidal summit, vignetted like a view through a telescope, the plume of wind and snow streaming past.
The film is silent, so I remove my headset. The second placard appears.
There is nowhere here any trace of life or man. It is a glimpse into a world that knows him not. Grand, solemn, unutterably lonely, the Rongbuk Glacier of Mount Everest reveals itself.
Pinnacles of ice appear, then the knife ridges of the mountain, the vapor pouring over windswept cornices from Nepal into Tibet. Tibetan villagers in soiled robes gawk at the camera from rough door frames. Sherpa porters walk past, freshly clad in windproof smocks and snow goggles. Finally the British, always shown from a distance: trekking in dense Sikkim jungles in short pants, swinging walking sticks; hiking in pairs on the bleak windswept Tibetan plain, among trains of laden yaks. Two climbers sit in the sun under pith helmets, their sketchbooks on their laps, squinting out portraits of villagers. A group of men take breakfast seated upon crates in the open air, behind them a dozen monks spinning prayer wheels in the wind. No one looks at the monks.
Into the heart of the pure blue ice, rare, cold, beautiful, lonely — into a fairyland of ice.
The glacier is pictured: a ponderous river of ice sailing down the mountainside. The party walks into a valley of ice, winding through a maze of frozen pinnacles, dwarfed by them, craning their necks to spy the summits. The British run mittened hands along crystal blue seracs, questioning their age or composition or provenance, or things even more unknowable. A climber snaps a huge icicle off a pinnacle and appropriates it for a walking stick, leaning on the glassy spire for uncertain support.
I search each frame for Ashley, but none of the figures is shown close up, so I click a button to fast-forward the footage.
Above the great mountain frowns upon us, angered that we should violate these pure sanctuaries that had never before suffered the foot of man.
The porters heft incredible loads on their backs; they scramble up rope ladders and pace over icy slopes. Ascending steep faces of slabbed limestone, the British bend gasping over their ice axes, straining to breathe in the rarified air. I fast-forward again. The image of the peak returns, the streamer blowing past, the clouds closing in.
Now could it be possible that something more than the physical had opposed us in this battle where human strength and western knowledge had broken and failed? Could it be possible we fought something beyond our knowledge?
The screen fades to black. I rewind the film, scanning backward and then forward. Suddenly I see the climbers and I hit the play button.
Eight men stand before the mess tent, sunburned faces with weathered half-beards, their mouths moving, their voices lost. The colonel stands at the center looking bemusedly at the camera. He is taller than the others but of equally lean build, his ice goggles perched over his hat brim. Beside him a handsome bareheaded man talks, hands stuffed in jacket pockets, leaning back to the colonel and laughing. This is Hugh Price, the celebrated mountaineer. Behind Price a slim figure stands holding a pipe, someone’s arm draped over him. I recognize the face from the newspapers. It is Ashley.