The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 (11 page)

Before leaving Srinagar, they were joined by their last teammate, Lt. George Trench, who would serve as the British liaison officer assisting their passage through the tribal areas of the wild and lawless Northwest Territories. Tall and lanky bordering on gawky, Trench towered nearly a foot over the rest of the team and had a pinched face, narrow eyes which often squinted through his round glasses, unkempt blond, curly hair, and what Sheldon considered the usual “insipid” mustache of the British. After some amiable joking about there being one too many Georges on the team, Trench agreed to the moniker “Joe” for the summer to keep things simple. It was agreed that while he would help ferry supplies to the low camps on the mountain, he would not climb much above Camp IV, at around 21,000 feet.

Finally, the team’s nine Sherpas arrived from Darjeeling. An invaluable addition to any Himalayan expedition, the tireless climbing Sherpas had enabled generations of Western explorers and climbers to reach remote areas and heights on the mountains barely imagined. But, unlike the sahibs, they were there not for the glory of climbing a mountain but to earn a wage. While they were respected and admired for their hard work and ability to carry heavy loads at high altitude, it was strictly a master–servant relationship; they too were often referred to as “coolies.” With this power structure firmly in place, the Sherpas had proven on other expeditions that they were often unable and unwilling to assume control or to make crucial decisions on their own. It simply wasn’t in their understanding of the dangerous and difficult job ahead: they were servants, hired to work for the sahibs, not to make decisions for them. Thus, the sahibs had to make sure the Sherpas were always under the direction of a consistent and strong leader, lest they too fall victim to the exhaustion and demands of a high-altitude assault.

The 1939 team was extremely fortunate in having not only five of the Sherpas who had been with the 1938 team, but 1938’s
sirdar
—head Sherpa—as well, Pasang Kikuli, considered to be the best Darjeeling climber of his day. He had been Charlie Houston’s right-hand man in 1938 and had survived the deadly 1937 season on Nanga Parbat, albeit with badly frostbitten feet. As a result, Kikuli had to take special care to avoid prolonged exposure to the highest altitudes because, once frozen, the affected tissue remained susceptible to further injury. When he and the other eight Sherpas posed for their team picture, they looked gravely at the camera, proud and fit in their Western clothes and new climbing boots.
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Unlike the liaison officer for the 1938 team, who was fluent in the local dialects, Joe Trench was not, so Fritz set about finding someone who could act as the team’s interpreter with the porters. Hadow recommended Chandra Pandit, a teacher at a local mission school and a member of the nascent Kashmir Climbing Club. Fritz immediately signed the man on, and, at Chandra’s suggestion, included one of the school’s students, a young man named Amarnath.

On their last night at Hadow’s, the team enjoyed a final party in honor of Colonel D. M. Fraser, the Resident of Kashmir, at which Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s financier whom they’d seen on the passage over, appeared. Again, Dudley thought him very curious, and thought the British were also a bit confused by his attendance. While Fritz, Dudley, and Tony held court with their diplomatic guests, and Chap spoke in French to Schacht’s nephew the entire evening, George and Jack spent the afternoon and then the evening drinking themselves into stupors, eventually passing out in their “monkey suits” until pounding headaches and sour stomachs awoke them in the morning. (When he sobered up, Jack realized that Schacht had “swiped” all of his best photos of Dot Dunn taken on the
Biancamano
.)

Dudley was beginning to feel like the team’s unwanted chaperon as he watched them become distracted and exhausted by late nights and too many bottles of champagne.
Why wasn’t Fritz corralling their irresponsible behavior?
he thought. “There was too much to do to get this expedition off on the right foot,” he wrote Alice, to see it compromised by parties and drunken frat-house pranks. In one, Chappell expelled gas at the same time as the chair collapsed beneath him, splaying him on the ground in a pile of splinters, much to the glee of Jack and George. Again feeling like their disapproving uncle, Dudley sat back and watched their antics, his natural instinct for being a loner only isolating him more.

Finally, after the skiing, the girls, the parties, and the pranks, on May 2 the men shouldered their loads and began their month-long march to base camp. After being driven the short distance to Srinagar’s Woyjil Bridge, the men said goodbye to their last mechanical transport for months, and found themselves in some of the harshest, most spectacular and variable landscape on earth: arid desert plains, lush apricot orchards and poppy fields, cannabis growing as thick as azalea bushes, deep valleys blanketed in ethereal mist, thunderous rivers coursing with run-off from the glaciers, bus-sized boulders tumbling through the rapids, narrow canyons, crumbling rock walls, and, all around them, towering snow-capped peaks jutting into the bluest sky any of them had ever seen. In one particularly lovely grove of apricot trees outside a village called Oling Thang where the men camped in an open field, Jack felt “as near to heaven as I will ever be,” and quietly sang to the North Star as he lay in his sleeping bag that night. As beautiful as the landscape was, the villages were dirty and impoverished, usually nothing more than a collection of mud huts where goats and people lived together in one smoky, flea-infested room. The scenes had remained largely unchanged since Alexander the Great explored the region in the third century BC: idle men drank tea and smoked their hookahs in open-front shacks, boys with dirty faces watched with curiosity as the light-skinned strangers walked through their village with a foreign sense of purpose, and, far off in the fields, women and girls tended the crops, bent heavy with infants on their backs—and always, everywhere, what George labeled the “wherever the urge calls” sewage system, which left the streets and yards littered with human feces, dead animals, and rotting food. Having marveled at the irrigation systems which for generations had brought the water down from the mountains to nourish the plains hundreds of miles away, the men couldn’t get over the filth in which the people lived.
If they could invent these intricate terraced orchards, why couldn’t they figure out an outhouse and hot water bath?
The men made sure all of their drinking and cooking water was thoroughly boiled. Because of the filth and lack of medical care—as well as generations of polyandry
^*
which had spread venereal disease like fleas—the sahibs were approached in each village for treatment of ailments ranging from gangrenous wounds to goiters the size of footballs hanging under chins to abscessed teeth which had been ground nearly to the gums by poor care and food. Usually “prescribing” an aspirin and a bath and giving the villagers a “few coins,” the men could do little to help as they walked through.

From village to village, the local men would address them with respect, murmuring “Salaam, sahib,” as they passed.
^†
One man shocked George when he gave them a curt “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” in precise, clipped English. The rare woman they saw was covered head to toe in a
shalwar kameez
and George, ever ready with a cutting observation, remarked that he was “beginning to see why; they are ashamed of their ugly pusses.” The men learned fast the taboo of photographing Muslim women and once had to run for cover from a screaming mother who demanded they destroy the film with her and her child’s image.

As the men got into their own rhythm on the trail, Jack and George often lagged, taking pictures and making sure none of the porters was skirting off trail to hide portions of his load for later use. With close to thirty exploratory expeditions having traveled through the region over the centuries, the porters from Baltistan had gained a reputation for thievery and, once on the trail, for crippling expeditions by calling strikes in demand of more money. What Jack and George failed to understand was something that is as true today as it was seventy years ago: poverty in the region is deep and rampant, and when the local porters see the largesse of food and warm clothing they think,
Surely a bag of rice or sugar won’t be missed when these men have so much and can easily order more.
Instead, the two Dartmouth men thought the porters “filthy beggars” and had great fun teaching them English profanities. They laughed delightedly each time the “Kashmere [sic] genius” would innocently wave and holler “Fuck you!” thinking he was offering the sahibs a cheerful greeting.

The team’s long days began before daylight, when they were awoken by the cacophonous squabbling of the porters who fought to claim the lightest load for the day. Temperatures often reached 140 degrees (there was almost no shade), and the men tried to breathe through their noses because their mouths and throats were painfully parched. Each day ended with the sun disappearing behind a cathedral of peaks which the famed photographer Galen Rowell once called the “throne room of the mountain gods” and painting their summits in gold. Tired as they were, the men each took note of the unspeakable beauty around them before finally closing their eyes, many nights sleeping on the outskirts of villages in polo fields where the game had originated centuries before.

After only a few days, the team rose at 11:45 p.m. in order to traverse the Zoji La,
^*
or pass, before the midday sun made the avalanche danger too great. With the porters chanting a prayer to Allah for safe passage, they climbed 2,500 vertical feet in four miles under a full moon, in the almost ethereal beauty of the whitewashed 20,000-foot peaks on either side of them. Reaching the top of the pass at 11,570 feet, they felt as if they were on the world’s highest football field, the moonlight-drenched Zoji La a flat meadow stretched out in front of them, before gradually descending on the other side. Although it was minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit on the pass, they stopped and watched in silence as a total lunar eclipse passed above them.

All the while, Dudley remained a cheerful if quiet teammate and a stoic trekker. Like all of them he suffered shin splints, blisters, and aching muscles, but he faced these aggravations without a lot of drama, soaking his feet in a warm salt-water solution at the end of each day and riding one of the pack ponies when a sprained ankle slowed him down too much. At the end of every day he would massage his sore ankle and shins, and, like the rest of the team, he ate more than he thought possible. He had never been so hungry in his life. He frequently wrote to Alice and Clifford in chatty detail about his adventure. Even though the letters took three to four weeks to reach their destinations, during most of the journey being ferried by runners between the team and Srinagar, the three wrote often to each other throughout the summer. While Clifford and Dudley talked politics, Alice urged Dudley to be careful and Dudley assured her that all was well, even pleasant, though someone had severely misled him into thinking that they would be sleeping in “bungalows every night with porters preparing nice, hot baths every evening.” While the Sherpas did indeed set up their tents and blow up their air mattresses, it was hardly the luxury safari he told Alice it was.

One evening while lying in the sand along the banks of the lazy Indus in Skardu, he wrote to Alice in detail about their journey. After he finished, he scooped a handful of sand and poured it into the envelope with the postscript: “PS: This sand is from the Indus. Berg Heil!
^*
Dudley.”

Averaging ten miles a day, the men made steady progress toward the mountain. Most of the mileage they traversed on foot, but with several ponies on hand for loads and the occasionally lame team member, they took turns riding in order to rest their feet and sore legs. One day Sheldon named his “white hag, Rosie” after the girl who had accompanied them to the ski hut, evidently because the horse “greatly resembled” her.

Just as the skiing had become competitive above Srinagar, so became the trekking on the Deosai Plains of northern Baltisan. Each day, Jack and George in particular tried to outrun the other up the trail. With 25-to 35-pound packs and fighting the rigors of altitude acclimatization with every step, the men’s egos proved stronger than their common sense, and they ended up suffering headaches and insomnia more severely than their teammates in the ever-thinner air.

Every day, Dudley found himself walking further and further away from the boys. The scenery reminded him of Shangri-La and its silence was so wondrous that he found, when he stayed near the others, the majesty of where he was and what he was doing spoiled by the pranks between the other team members. Their shrieking laughter sounded like hyenas and their persistent game of tag invariably left them in a heap on the rocks, gasping and choking for air with histrionic exaggeration. Dudley wondered why Fritz didn’t warn them about wasting so much energy, but he kept his concern to himself and each day would either leave camp early or lag behind, content in his solitary marveling at the new sights around every corner. Because he was often alone during the day, he would set up his Kodak movie camera on his tripod, frame the shot, and then walk through the scene, enabling the viewer to see not only the landscape, but the action of the trek.

On May 17 the team said goodbye to the ponies and crossed the swollen Shigar River at Dassu on boats made of inflated goatskins used as pontoons. It was a wild ride made all the more so by the Muslim oarsmen shouting loud prayers to Allah as they navigated through the torrent. All the loads and men made it without even getting wet.

For the final ninety miles to base camp, the loads would be carried entirely by men. They soon discovered why. Not only had the wide river valley become a narrow gorge, but the only way to cross the raging river was on “rope” bridges actually made of woven twigs. With one rope for the feet and two ropes as handrails, the bridges had existed for centuries. Told that the rope twigs were replaced only after they broke, not proactively, the men watched with dread as the porters and their loads teetered across first. Only inches from the rushing currents beneath, the men’s feet and hands swung wildly as they tried to find the perfect balance between the three points of contact. A few lost their balance and flipped the bridge and themselves entirely over, hanging onto the twigs for dear life before righting the whole thing again. When the last porter was across, the men handed their packs off to the Sherpas in order to reduce their imbalance and inched across, clinging to the handrails, their hearts in their throats. Dudley went first so he could film everyone else’s traverse. On the other side, he filmed the team and urged each man to wave as he crossed, but only Jack would let go of the rope to do so. For one of the only times the men witnessed on the expedition, Fritz showed real fear when it was his turn, clutching the bridge with white knuckles and grinding his jaw as he inched across. Celebrating their successful crossing that night, Tony made them all rum toddies.