Ed Caesar - The Moth and the Mountain: A True Story of Love, War, and Everest

ALSO BY ED CAESAR

Two Hours

A VID R EADER P RESS

An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2020 by Ed Caesar

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Avid Reader Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Avid Reader Press hardcover edition November 2020

AVID READER PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or .

The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

Interior design by Kyle Kabel

Maps by Jeffrey L. Ward

Jacket design by Pete Garceau

Jacket Photographs: Mountain by SAIKO3P/iStock/Getty Images Plus; plane by Claudiostocco/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Author photograph Gail Secker

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-5011-4337-3

ISBN 978-1-5011-4339-7 (ebook)

For my mother, Janie Caesar, and in memory of my father, Lieutenant Commander Ben Caesar, Royal Navy (19381982)

Have we vanquished an enemy? None but ourselves. Have we gained success? That word means nothing here. Have we won a kingdom? No and yes. We have achieved an ultimate satisfaction fulfilled a destiny. To struggle and to understandnever this last without the other; such is the law.

George Mallory, Mont Blanc from the Col du Gant by the Eastern Buttress, Alpine Journal, 1918

Then, with many other men,

He was transported in a cattle-truck

To the scene of war.

For a while chance was kind

Save for an inevitable

Searing of the mind.

Herbert Read, Kneeshaw Goes to War, 1918

Keep smiling.

Maurice Wilson, letter to Enid Evans, 1933

March 20April 10, 1934

B efore he began his trek to Mount Everest, Maurice Wilson changed into a magnificent costume. He was thirty-five years old. The fine blond hair of his youth had run to silver and thinned to a widows peak. Two or three machine-gun scars blotted the skin on his left arm and back, like pitch marks on a golf green. His arm still ached, every day. So did his kneesthe legacy of an inexpert parachute jump made more than a year earlier. Nevertheless, he was fit, strong, and rail thin after months of training, intermittent fasting, and long periods of sober living. Wilson was not a handsome man. Not exactly. The features were too pronounced, the picture was hung a little askew. But even in his current unkempt state, when a scruffy new beard carpeted his usually smooth cheeks, he was beguiling. Many women had fallen hard for Wilsons blue-green eyes, and his boyish grin, and his percussive Yorkshire accent, with its sonorous vowels and dropped aitches. He was unlike other men. He was difficult to ignore.

Night had fallen. Wilson dressed in his hotel room, in the hill town of Darjeeling, which lay in the northeast of Britains vast Indian empire. In a few hours, Wilson would start to walk more than three hundred miles to the north side of Everest, in Tibet. He then planned to climb the mountain, aloneand, in doing so, to become the first person ever to reach its summit, the highest place on earth.

The idea was mad any way you looked at it. No climber from four separate official British expeditionsthe first in 1921, and the latest only the previous year, in 1933had reached the summit of Everest. Those parties comprised the best alpinists of their generation and were supported by teams of porters carrying bountiful supplies. The odds of a novice such as Wilson succeeding where those missions had failed were vanishingly long, as every pundit had told him. But Wilson was not interested in expert opinion, otherwise he would have turned back long ago. He was interested in the power of human will, and the motions of the soul. Everest was a job he felt was within him.

Wilson had been expressly forbidden by the British authoritiesboth in India and at home in Englandto make the journey. The Tibetan government had not given him permission to enter their kingdom, and the British were anxious to avoid a diplomatic incident. If Wilson was discovered at any point on his trek, he would be arrested. He knew he was in most danger of apprehension on the first part of his journey: out of Darjeeling, and through the British protectorate of Sikkim, with its leech-infested rivers, verdant forests, and sparkling waterfalls. For that reason, he had paid his hotel bill six months in advance, to throw the police off the scent. He also planned to leave Darjeeling at midnight, in disguise as a Tibetan priest.

Wilson had hired three Bhutias, Sikkimese men of Tibetan ancestry, to accompany him to Everest. The most senior of them, an experienced climber and porter named Tsering, helped him into his outfit. The disguise was dazzling: a Chinese brocaded waistcoat in gold, with gold buttons at the side, which Wilson thought made him look like a circus trainer; dark blue cotton slacks; a bright red silk girdle. To finish the look, Wilson wore a fur-lined Bhutia hat, with large earflaps to cover his white mans hair, dark glasses to hide his white mans eyes, and he carried a decorative umbrella. Somewhat ruining the effect, he also wore a pair of hobnail bootshuge, high, heavy items with nails driven into the soles for extra grip. A ludicrous outfit. Wilson loved it. He and Tsering had laughed themselves silly when Wilson first tried on the disguise.

Before Wilson left the hotel, he wrote a final letter to Enid Evans, his soul mateand the only person who believed from the very beginning of the adventure that Wilson would succeed in reaching and climbing Everest. Enid was slim, winsome, brown-haired, stylish, vivacious, and married. Wilson was cripplingly in love with her, and not just because of her faith in his mission. She, too, was enraptured by the ebullient adventurer, and his wild stories. Recently, their affair had flourished in letters.

Now, Wilson was leaving Darjeeling. With no more opportunities to send mail before his climb on Everest, he wrote to Enid for a final time, telling her about his beautiful, absurd outfit, and about when he might return from the mountain. He wrote that she would be with him, in his thoughts, the whole way. Before he signed off, he told Enid, if she were with him, I might let you kiss me.

With his letter finished and addressed, Wilson made his final preparations. He carried with him much of his climbing equipment, disguised in what looked like bags of wheat. He had also sewn many pockets into his outfit. In one, he placed a small emerald-green diary, made in Japan, upon whose cover the words Present Time Book were embossed. His entries in the diary would eventually resemble a long and intimate letter to his lover alone. (Of course, he wrote, Im writing all this to Enid, shes been the golden rod from the start.) In another pocket, he stashed a pistol, to ward off brigands in Tibet. Around his neck was a gold cross with RITA engraved on one side, and AMOR VINCIT OMNIA on the other.