Into the Silence by Wade Davis

Author:Wade Davis [Davis, Wade]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-40185-4
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2011-09-26T16:00:00+00:00

THAT SAME EVENING found Mallory and Bullock well up the Kharta Chu, camped on a grassy shelf at 16,500 feet. Ahead of them they could see that the valley forked. Both arms would need to be explored. But after three exhausting marches, and with Mallory still ill with what he now feared to be tonsillitis, August 12 would be a day of rest. Bullock dispatched the men to gather firewood, while Mallory turned his thoughts toward home. He wrote to Ruth, proposing that she meet him upon his return in Marseille for a walking tour of Provence, or in Gibraltar, or in Italy, which he could reach by train. If Marseille, she was to stay at the Hôtel Louvre et Paix. If he did not find her at the hotel, he would leave a note at the post office and, as an added precaution, he would go there “every three hours beginning at 9 am and wait five minutes outside the main entrance.”

Mallory’s other proposal was perhaps more unsettling: he intended to bring back one of the expedition porters as a servant. His choice, he wrote, was Nyima:

I don’t know what his age may be, about 18 … He has the perfect temperament for what I propose he should do. He would naturally be turned on to all scullery work and floor scrubbing, carrying coals, cutting firewood, lighting the kitchen fire at as early an hour as you like, washing clothes … He could learn to bring in meals and wait at table … The boots, knives, swill pails, cinders and greenhouse stove would all be his province … And he would fetch and carry—he is a coolie whose job is to carry; and if you want a box weighing 70 pounds brought from the station, you would simply send him … He would save many a taxi drive by carrying luggage to the station … His present diet is chiefly flour and water, rice, occasionally meat and as luxuries a little tea and butter … He might inhabit part of the cellar or the outside coal shed might be freed by storing coal in the cellar … Would the other servants like him? Well, he is a clean animal and though he would look a bit queer to them at first they couldn’t help liking him. He is not very dark skinned like a plainsman.

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