The World Beneath Their Feet

This is a book about a period of time, not so long ago, when significant portions of the Earth were still cloaked in mystery. Long before the invention of the internet or cell phone technology, it was also an age when real-life heroes went about their work far from the glare of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, and were often cut off from the rest of the world for weeks, if not months, at a time.

The individuals who populate this story were a complicated lot. Some were principled, steadfast, and tenacious. Others were devious and cowardly. A handful were brilliant, others foolhardy. Like you, however, most of them were avid readers. On the highest mountains on the planet, where every additional ounce might determine the difference between victory and defeat, they brought along dog-eared copies of Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, and The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in their rucksacks. Two thousand feet below the summit of Mount Everest, inside a tiny tent pitched along a murderous ridge, a British climber named Eric Shipton tried to read, by flickering candlelight, Thorton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey , a novel which questioned the meaning of life in the face of the sudden and deadly collapse of an ancient rope bridge in eighteenth century Peru.

Many people believed that mountain climbers, as a whole, were mad.

Some undoubtedly were.

One dark, drizzly evening, while I was doing research for this book, I found myself walking along the back streets of Darjeeling, a mystical hill town perched along the edge of the eastern Himalayas. With the help of a local guide, I was trying to locate the former home of a legendary Sherpa, named Angtsering, who had worked on mountaineering expeditions back in the 1930s. While the old man was deceased, I had heard that his daughters still had a box of his climbing paraphernalia. Such materials, I’d reasoned, might help me to tell the story of the forgotten men and women who, decades earlier, had set out to climb the highest and deadliest mountains on Earth.

Finally, the guide and I found the house, a low-slung affair, painted a bright aqua with red gutters and windows trimmed in white. His elderly daughters met us at the door, dressed in long, coatlike sweaters and floor-length, patterned dresses. Clearly nervous, and uncertain of exactly what we wanted, they nevertheless invited us in and out of the rain. But as soon as the conversation turned to their father, their eyes brightened, cups of hot tea suddenly materialized, and from a battered wooden box came out old photographs and copper medals and newspaper clippings yellowed with time. Sitting in the sisters’ snug living room, for a couple of brief, magical hours we were transported to another age, a time when awe and wonder lived on mountaintops, and the world was still fresh and new. I hope you will find some of that in these pages as well.

During the darkening decade of the 1930s, as the winds of war began to gather in the chanceries and defense ministries of central Europe and the Far East, and dictators began to trace lines on maps with their fingers, there was a race like no other. It had no fixed starting point, no single finish line, no referees, and no written rules. And while it would ultimately involve men and women from ten nations, capture front-page headlines around the globe, and claim dozens of lives, its most remarkable feature was that this was a race to a place that no human being had ever been before.

In truth, there weren’t many such places left.

For the world had already grown perilously small. The North and South Poles had already been conquered. Explorers and scientists, armed with quinine, Colt .32-caliber automatic pistols, and gabardine jackets from Abercrombie & Fitch, had hacked their way into the highlands of New Guinea, uncovered a lost city in Peru, and gazed with awe and wonder upon Alaska’s Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. A Frenchman had driven a modified Citröen automobile two thousand miles across the Sahara Desert, while a sixteen-year-old ranch hand in New Mexico, mistaking a plume of bats for a funnel of smoke, discovered the most magnificent cave system on Earth.

Even former President Teddy Roosevelt, overweight and nursing an infected leg, had, in 1913 and 1914, ridden a dugout canoe hundreds of miles down the piranha-infested Rio da Dúvida—the River of Doubt—into the far reaches of the Amazon basin. And one long day in June 1928, a former Kansas tomboy turned Cosmopolitan editor had flown in a Fokker Trimotor from Newfoundland to Wales, becoming the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an airplane. When she returned home to the United States, Amelia Earhart was given a ticker-tape parade on Broadway and a private audience with President Coolidge in the White House. Even the remotest island in the vast Pacific Ocean had, at one time or another, felt the scrape of a boat keel against its shoreline. There was no place on earth, it seemed, that was beyond the reach of humankind.

Except for one.

Stretching for more than two thousand miles from the Hindu Kush of eastern Afghanistan to the far reaches of western China, the Himalayas are the tallest and mightiest mountain range on the planet. But the tops of its highest peaks, some fourteen in number, all of which stand more than eight thousand meters, or 26,246 feet, high, had never felt the weight of a human being. Mount Everest, of course, was the best known, but the others, like K2, Annapurna, and Kangchenjunga, were equally majestic and foreboding. The southern face of Nanga Parbat, along the edge of Kashmir, shot up nearly ten thousand vertical feet—roughly the height of ten Empire State Buildings stacked end to end. Twice as high as the Alps or the Rockies, these were true geographical monsters, behemoths of rock and ice so large that they created their own weather systems.

Here was a landform so vast and impenetrable that it had altered the very course of human history, keeping Hinduism out of China, Genghis Khan out of India, and turning the fabled Silk Road to the north, bringing spices and Chinese silks to ancient Greece, and Roman coins and sturdy Russian ponies to the imperial court of the Han dynasty. But despite centuries of off-and-on exploration, from the wanderings of Marco Polo to the Great Trigonometrical Survey, the Himalayas had not given up her secrets easily. By the closing years of the nineteenth century, much of the range had still not been adequately mapped, and not a single one of its highest peaks had been climbed. Subsequent efforts, in the first decades of the twentieth century, to climb to the top of Everest, Kangchenjunga, K2, and Annapurna, all ended in failure. The roof of the world was still untouched.

By the beginning of the 1930s, however, enough had been learned about the extreme challenges that the Himalayas posed that a new generation of mountain climbers, armed with new ideas, new equipment, and new techniques, concluded that the summits of the world’s highest mountains were, in fact, within reach. So they decided to find out.

The men—and women—who tried to do so aren’t household names today. Indeed, many of them had been considered to be failures during their lifetimes, misfits and odd ducks who never settled down, never got real jobs, never joined the ranks of everyday society. Some had spent their twenties bumming about the Alps with baguettes and Baedekers in their rucksacks, climbing vertical granite spires in shorts and street shoes—and they are the spiritual ancestors of today’s dirtbag rock climbers and rope bums. Others were accomplished professionals who, despite the pressures of their careers, found ways to keep climbing as a part of their lives. Altogether, they encompassed cockeyed dreamers and sober realists, college graduates and illiterates, pacifists and combat veterans, a beekeeper, a large number of physicians, a Wyoming cowboy, and a New York playboy.

By contemporary standards, the equipment they used was shockingly primitive. Today, the climbers who queue up to climb Mount Everest are armed with personal avalanche beacons, real-time satellite weather reports, carbon-steel ice tools, and state-of-the-art oxygen systems. They pull on thousand-dollar insulated boots with silicone soles and moisture-wicking uppers, and they sleep in laboratory-rated down-filled sleeping bags on closed-cell foam pads. And while the specter of death still haunts the great peaks of the Himalayas—witness the long lines of climbers hoping to summit Everest, a tragedy waiting to happen—twenty-first-century climbers can monitor their pulse rates on their Apple Watches, and fuel their bodies with energy bars and isotonic sports gels. After the climbing is done, they can download YouTube videos of themselves that they shot with GoPro cameras on the summit, and post them on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.

The climbers of the Great Race had none of these things.

They wore cotton parkas and scratchy woolen sweaters, and they climbed five miles into the sky wearing leather hobnailed boots while carrying wood-handled ice axes and heavy coils of manila rope. They slept in drafty canvas tents and tried to cook their meals on fickle kerosene-fueled stoves. They drank brandy and smoked cigarettes, read Doestoevsky and Dickens at 24,000 feet, and they gutted out restless nights only to discover, in the dim light of dawn, that a foot of snow had sifted on top of their sleeping bags during the night. They had virtually no decent maps, few detailed photographs, and little idea as to what lay above them.

Except, of course, for the possibility of their own demise.

For these were killer mountains. Here were avalanches so massive that blocks of ice the size of two-story houses could suddenly come crashing down. Rockfall was a near constant danger, while weakened cornices and unstable wind slab were far from uncommon. On the great peaks of the Himalayas there were murderous winds and blinding whiteouts, while temperatures could plunge downward toward life-threatening levels in a matter of minutes. And while no one in the 1930s fully understood this yet, once climbers reached a certain altitude, their bodies began to break down. On the roof of the world, death was never far.

Today that is still true. For despite the advancements in climbing equipment over the past three-quarters of a century, fatalities are far from uncommon on the highest mountains on earth. According to one estimate, one out of every four climbers trying to summit K2 has died. On Annapurna, the number is one in three. On Everest, so many bodies of climbers remain on the upper reaches that they are used as route markers.

There are new dangers as well, especially in the Karakoram, the westernmost of the great Himalayan ranges. On the morning of June 22, 2013, a group of sixteen armed militants, shouting “God is great,” ambushed a group of Chinese, American, and European climbers at their base camp on Nanga Parbat. Chen Honglu, a climber with dual American and Chinese citizenship, tackled one of the militants as they entered camp. He was killed immediately. The other climbers had their hands tied and, according to a Pakistani who survived the ambush, were told to turn their faces away. Then they were shot to death.

Afterwards, the killers had breakfast.

Viewed from today’s perspective, the Himalayan climbers of the 1930s have a David-versus-Goliath quality about them, and rightly so. But that is not the whole of their story. Because these forgotten mountaineers didn’t just push the limits of what the human body could endure, and extend the reach of humankind to the very edge of the sky. In their triumphs and in their failures, they also stirred the aspirations and imaginations of millions of ordinary citizens.

In its heart center, the saga of the Great Himalayan Race is a story about dreamers and dreams, hard work and determination, and of never, ever giving up. For as they scraped up against the stars, these overlooked heroes remind us of what mere human beings, armed with courage, tenacity, training, experience, and resolve, can accomplish in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. In an age of pessimism and division, their story is one of teamwork and common purpose, lofty goals and earthbound solutions. But theirs is also a story of good and evil, of treachery and heroism, and a world changing beneath their feet—all to the incessant drumbeat of the approach of the most destructive war in human history.

This is a book about mountains.

But it is also a book about the men and women who dared to match them.

It begins in London on a late spring morning.