rapid progress, which suggests Wilson had
rediscovered the lost crampons — although
he never notes this important detail in his
diary. Rinzing hastily erected a tent and
Tewang, still weak, collapsed into it.
Rinzing brought a box of food back with
him from stores abandoned by a previous
expedition and cracked it open.
Wilson described what happened next:
“Well talk about a Santa Claus party outside
my tent. Plum jam, honey, butter (hadn’t
seen any for weeks), cheese, assorted
biscuits, Bournville chocolate, anchovy
paste, Nestle’s milk, and other treasures
from heaven. Too late and too cold to do any
cooking, so had biscuits and choc, and went
to bed on that.”
At daybreak he felt within touching
distance of the summit. Rinzing went back
for another box from the expedition dump,
and more marvels appeared. When Wilson
saw that some of the food in the expedition
stores had been bought at Fortnum &
Mason he was thrilled. He stuffed himself.
At the end of a gourmand Tuesday he
wrote: “Eaten everything about the place
today ... soup, ovaltine, and heaven knows
what. Maple sugar, cake, and vegetable
ration. You couldn’t guess what I’m
wallowing in as I write? A 1lb box of King
George chocs! Shall be off tomorrow if
weather good.”
But he didn’t strike out for Camp IV the
next day. The night before his proposed
climb up the North Col his head began to
ache. The weather was also rotten. For the
first time since conceiving of his adventure
he admitted to feeling fear. The upper
slopes of the mountain now looked very
real and daunting. No longer the fabric of
dreams and visions.
A blizzard overtook the party that Friday.
They had no choice but to stay in their
tents. A stay of execution.
Eventually, on Monday, May 21, Wilson
set out from his tent, to make what he
believed would be his final attempt to reach
the summit of Everest. Rinzing climbed
with him for most of the day. He showed
the amateur how to cut steps in the ice, and
the most prudent route to take, out of the
path of the avalanches that frequently
cascaded down the ice wall. They made it
about halfway up the col together before
the Bhutia turned around, as planned, and
returned to Camp III. Wilson scrambled
a little farther up the steep face before
pitching his tent for the night.
The next day he pushed on again,
with little success. He spent much of
Wednesday, May 23, in his sleeping bag,
perched in a tent on a narrow ledge halfway
up a rock face. On Thursday, despite sunny,
windless conditions, he again could not
summon the energy to make another
assault on the col. It was as if, at this
moment, he realised that willpower alone
could not deliver him the victory he craved.
“Had a horrible job yesterday and
whoever selected that route ought to be
poleaxed,” he wrote. “Am parked at an angle
of 35 degrees, but have shaped the snow to
my carcass. Had 5 dry biscuits yesterday
and nothing since, as there is nothing to
have. Camp IV is somewhere within a ½
mile radius of here so should be on the eats
again by midday tomorrow.”
The next day, having run out of food and
realising that he lacked the skill to climb
alone, Wilson decided to attempt a return to
Camp III. His descent of more than 1,000ft
of steep ice and rock wall on that Friday was
a miracle of deliverance. He fell, twice, and
tumbled down long stretches of the North
Col. Both times he managed to stop himself
before suffering serious damage or falling
into a crevasse. Eventually he staggered
towards the camp. Rinzing ran to Wilson
and held him in his arms. “Wasn’t I glad to
see him,” he wrote that night, before falling
asleep for a long time.
Tewang and Rinzing were desperate to
return to Rongbuk. They could see that
Wilson was physically beaten. But when he
emerged from his sleep, he endeavoured to
persuade the men to come with him, back
up the mountain, at least as far as Camp V.
They refused, quite properly. To press on
would be to sign one’s own death warrant.
But this was exactly what he wanted to do,
and he wanted them to accompany him.
On Monday, May 28, Wilson wrote
in his diary that both men had agreed to
accompany him to Camp V. But they had
done no such thing, as became clear to him
later in the day. They had agreed to wait for
him for a period of days in Camp III before
returning to Rongbuk via the glaciers.
That night, now feeling utterly alone, he
recorded in his diary a hallucination, or a
spiritual encounter, or a potent yearning.
“Strange,” he wrote, “but I feel that there is
someone with me in tent all the time.”
The next day he set off alone for Camp IV.The north wind was so hard and cold it
nearly cut him in two. He made it halfway
up the col, turned back, and pitched his
lightweight tent near its base. He had
enough food with him for a few days but
ate barely any of it. That night a blizzard
raged. He spent the entire next day in his
tent. His body was as weak as a kitten’s, but
his spirit remained strong. On Thursday,
May 31, Wilson made his final legible diary
entry. It read, in its entirety: “Off again.
Gorgeous day.”
Days passed and Wilson did not return to
Camp III. Tewang and Rinzing later claimed
that they remained in the camp, as they had
promised, for at least two weeks. It’s hard to
know exactly how long they stayed. Perhaps
they stayed a week; perhaps it was only a
few days. Eventually, assuming the worst,
they struck camp. The men gathered
Wilson’s meagre possessions, including
some Kodak film and some clothes, and
began the long journey home.On July 9, 1935, a new British expedition,
accompanied by a group of porters that
included Tewang and Rinzing, trudged its
way up the East Rongbuk Glacier to Camp
III. About 200 yards from the 1933 food
dump, Charles Warren, a doctor, found the
body of Maurice Wilson. He wrote in his
diary: “The body was lying on its left side
with the knees drawn up in an attitude of
flexion. The first boot I had found some 10
yards down the slope, the second was lying
near the man’s foot. The torn remains of the
tent were pulled out of the snow some few
feet down the slope from him.”
Wilson’s emaciated, stone-cold body lay
only a few hundred feet from where Tewang
and Rinzing had waited for him in 1934, at
the foot of an icefall.
Later the team found Wilson’s rucksack
and also retrieved the small green diary.
Eric Shipton, leader of the 1935 expedition,
took it for safekeeping. He and his
companions found a nearby crevasse,
where they buried Wilson’s body, which
disappeared out of sight the moment it was
dropped through the snow.
On the night after the burial the
expedition members gathered in one tent.
One of the climbers, Edwin Kempson,
began to read from Wilson’s diary, aloud.
As they huddled there, at over 21,000ft,
the climbing party listened in disbelieving
silence. “Isn’t she a darling? Not you — the
ruddy mountain, I mean ...” Kempson read.
After the final legible entry in the diary,
there was some unintelligible pencil scrawl.
It seemed clear to Shipton’s party that
Wilson had died of exhaustion and
exposure. Whatever his last thoughts were,
he was not able to share them nAdapted from The Moth and the Mountain:
A True Story of Love, War and Everest
by Ed Caesar, published on Thursday
(Viking £18.99) GETTYSTART LINE Wilson’s climb towards
Everest began at Rongbuk Monastery
Wilson made his final
legible diary entry. It
read, in its entirety: “Off
again. Gorgeous day”
38 • The Sunday Times Magazine