All-Highest

Highest place in the world is the summit of Mt. Everest, 29,140 ft. above sea level. If any man has set foot on that white pinnacle of the Himalayas none has returned to tell the tale. Up to last week 13 persons were known to have perished in 13 years of trying. Last week the world heard of a 14th victim when three Indian porters arrived in Darjeeling with the story of one man's lone assault.

Last year a plump-faced Briton flew from London to India. He was Maurice Wilson, 37, son of a Yorkshire woolen manufacturer, Wartime infantry captain, holder of the Military Cross. He wanted to land his plane on East Rongbuk glacier (see map try to reach Everest's top from there. The Indian Government refused to let him fly over Nepal, forbade him to make any attempt on the mountain at all, kept him under surveillance. Maurice Wilson held his peace, undertook a severe training regime. He believed that previous Everest expeditions had been overmanned, that the hardiest climbers had ruined their chances by holding back to aid faltering comrades. He believed that the fastest traveling was alone.

Late in March, clad in the rough padded jacket and conical cap of a Tibetan coolie, he slipped out of Darjeeling with three porters and one pack pony. When the authorities learned of his disappearance three days later, Wilson was already approaching the Tibetan border. Only the north face of Everest holds any hope of ascent, and the north face lies in Tibet.

Traveling in daylight and darkness he reached high, lonely Rongbuk Monastery in mid-April, beating by more than a week the time of the elaborate Ruttledge expedition. He rested one day, made a reconnaissance to Ruttledge's Camp No. 2, and returned to the monastery to gather strength for his supreme effort. The long-sleeved, yellow-hatted monks padding about in their cloth boots asked him no questions. Wilson drank their rancid butter-tea, watched the smoke of incense curling from bronze burners, rested. On May 17 he was at Camp No. 3 with his porters. He instructed them to wait two weeks, set out alone up the ridge with three loaves of bread, two tins of porridge, a camera. The porters lost him from sight at 23,000 ft., starting across the North Col. The porters waited two weeks, and two weeks more. Then, their food almost gone, they started back to Darjeeling.

Mt. Everest was named for Sir George Everest who measured its height by trigonometry in 1841. At that time, and for decades thereafter, Tibet was almost as remote from the world as Mars, and to this day its Buddhist priests look on Everest as the abode of potent gods. Not until 1920 was permission for a climb obtained from the Dalai Lama, religious and temporal monarch who ruled the bleak uplands from Lhasa. The first expedition spotted the rock shoulder zig-zagging down from the peak to the saddle which was later called the North Col, but wasted its time on a heart-breaking approach to the saddle before discovering the more feasible access from East Rongbuk Glacier.

The next party, under Brigadier-General Charles Granville Bruce in 1922, pushed a series of camps up from the glacier. Using oxygen, Capt. J. Geoffrey Bruce and another man reached 27,300 ft., turned back utterly spent. The wet monsoons came early that year, bringing heavy snow to the bare windswept rocks near the summit. When the snow had hardened somewhat a group of five started up across the precarious North Col where the temperature probably averages -50DEG. An avalanche swept nine porters into a crevasse. Only two were rescued.

Two years later the Britons returned to the attack. Dr. T. H. Somervell and Lieut.-Colonel E. F. Norton reached 28.200 ft. Somervell stopped, gasping horribly. Norton struggled on a few yards, reached the highest point from which any man has returned alive. He was snow-blind for days. The same year G. L. Mallory and A. C. Irvine started up from Camp No. 6. As they approached the peak a lone observer below saw them enveloped by a mist cloud. No one ever saw them again. It was Mallory who had answered for all Everest climbers when someone asked him why men risked their lives to scale the mountain: "Because it's there."

The next expedition was led by Hugh Ruttledge in 1933. It set up a camp higher than any previous climbers had done, fought valiantly against gales, blizzards and avalanches, turned back short of the Norton-Somervell mark. F. S. Smythe, who had conquered 25,447-ft. Mt. Kamet two years before, reached 28,000 ft.

While the Ruttledge expedition was struggling on the north face of Everest, the Marquess of Clydesdale and Flight Lieutenant D. F. Mclntyre took off in specially built planes with supercharged motors from Purnea, near the Nepal border, and flew a scant 100 ft. over the mountain from the south. In three hours they were back in Purnea (TIME, April 10, 1933).

The flyers who were the first to look down on the sacred mountain were careful to keep clear of Tibet, but the holy men in Lhasa fumed at the desecration. Last winter the gods of Everest seemed angry. The Dalai Lama died. A catastrophic earthquake shook North India, killing thousands. When news of Everest's latest victim reached Lhasa last week, there was grim and pious chuckling.

Sixth tallest measured peak in the world is 26,620-ft. Nanga-Parbat ("Mountain of Horror"), 900 mi. northwest of Everest.* A British army officer named A. F. Mummery tried to scale it in 1895. He and two Ghurka porters disappeared crossing a high pass. No one attacked Nanga-Parbat again for nearly 40 years.

Last spring crowds in a Munich railroad station threw flowers at a group of German climbers leaving to attempt the Mountain of Horror. The party was led by Willi Merkl, who had failed to reach the top two years before when his porters, mountain-sick and frightened, balked. This year pains were taken to find the hardiest and pluckiest hillmen obtainable. Last week came news of disaster.

The party set out from Srinagar on May 2. Early in July they had pitched a camp at 23,000 ft., in sight of the heavily buttressed summit. Here screaming gales caught Merkl and two others. They and their porters started down. The Germans stopped at Camp No. 7. Nine porters reached Camp No. 5. Two of these died and three others were abandoned before the four survivors, frost-bitten and exhausted, reached Camp No. 4. From that point a rescue party of three started up the Mountain of Horror to look for Merkl and his two comrades, hardly hoping to find them alive.

*The first five: Everest, Godwin-Austen (28,250), Kanchenjunga (28,146), Makalu (27,790), Dhawalagiri (26,795). All are in the Himalayas and none has been climbed to the top.

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