017 CHAPTER 3 HÉCTOR CASTELLS NOW HERE, LHASA, TIBET, 1922 “He was a man who radiated a sort of positive goodness, a true man of God, and it was impossible to conceive of his having an evil thought. He told us that great harm would come if we killed any of the animals or birds, which wandered tamely in the lower reaches of the Rongbuk. Everest, itself, the lama said, was the home of demons, but he did not fear that our activities would disturb them; they were sufficiently powerful to look after themselves. For his part he would intercede with them not to harm us. But I knew he couldn’t: I could see it in his eyes” (John Morris, British mountaineer of the 2nd Expedition to Everest). —Excerpt of John Morris’s Journal about the 13th Dalai Lama. (As quoted in Wade’s Davis “Into the Silence)”. John Morris (1895-1980) was the most versatile orphan of the Second British Expedition to Mount Everest, and the only member of the mountaineering crew genuinely touched by the grace and vision of the 13th Dalai Lama. On April 29th of 1922, the leading members of the climbing party had visited the spiritual leader of Tibet to ask for his blessing in their mission, but only Morris took his words to the T. A prestigious anthropologist, photojournalist, and future professor of Literature and Zen master, Morris was the only member of the climbing party fluent in Nepalese and Tibetan. A Western man trapped in an Eastern mind, he had famously refused to assume the privileges of a British officer fighting in the legendary Gurkha regiment —the Nepalese fearless Army that had eradicated the artillery of English and Indian failed invasions by just using their lethal knives, the Khukhuris. The English were so impressed with their toughness that instead of fighting them, they had the brilliant idea of signing them up, a key movement for their bloody successful invasion of India. In 1922, after their encounter with the 13th Dalai Lama, Morris intensified his work as a photographer and became the shooter of the iconic portraits that were about to turn the top mountaineer of the expedition into one of the greatest British martyrs of the 20th century, George “Baby Face” Mallory. NOWHERE: NOT FAR AWAY FROM HEAVEN: 1922. During his last but one summer on Earth, George Mallory became the hottest poster boy in the UK thanks to Morris’s portraits and to his decisive acrobatics above 8000 metres: he had survived an avalanche that had claimed the lives of seven of his nine Nepali porters. It happened shortly after the leaders of the climbing party had landed in Lhasa to ask for the blessing of the Dalai Lama, downstairs from Mallory’s future graveyard, on the North Col, the base camp to Mt. Everest —discovered a year prior by his fellow colleague Sam Wollaston. As Wade Davis chronicles in Into the Silence (2013), the seven deaths were the result of Mallory’s hasty and suicidal effort to crown the summit after finding out that two other fellow mountaineers, George Finch and Geoffrey Bruce, had reached a higher altitude than him after he had deserted them on the way up.
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