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6

THE PRICE OF CONQUEST

You would think that after the ordeal of 1953, Charlie Houston would never have wanted to go near K2 again. On the contrary, the tragedy only deepened his fixation on the mountain. His passion for K2 was the equal of Mallory’s for Everest. Houston applied for and received a permit to put together yet another expedition in 1955.

In the meantime, however, Pakistan granted the Italians permission for the summer of 1954. After three expeditions, Americans may have come to feel that K2 was “their” mountain, but the Italians had a proprietary stake themselves in the world’s second-highest peak. On top of the pioneering effort by the Duke of the Abruzzi’s team in 1909, Italy had fielded a massive exploratory expedition to the region in 1929. Led by another nobleman, the Duke of Spoleto, this campaign remains somewhat mysterious. In K2: The Story of the Savage Mountain, Jim Curran calls it a “debacle,” and summarizes its history in a few pithy sentences:

Originally planned for 1928 to mark the tenth anniversary of the end of the First World War, the expedition was also to coincide with one to the North Pole. K2 and/or Broad Peak were to be the objectives but internal strife caused the grandiose project to be modified, and then postponed for a year. In the end it became lamely designated the “Italian Geographical Expedition to the Karakoram,” with no mountaineering objectives at all.

The leader of the 1954 expedition was Professor Ardito Desio, a geologist teaching at the University of Milan. (Desio would always insist that “Professor” be prefixed to his name.) Fifty-seven years old that summer, he was a tireless explorer of remote regions who had already led eleven scientific expeditions to Asia and Africa. His climbing résumé was distinctly thin, but, as he bragged in his thumbnail bio in the official book about the 1954 expedition, he was “the author of three hundred publications on geology, geography and paleontology.” Desio was also a veteran of the 1929 Karakoram adventure, during which he and a single companion had hiked up the Godwin Austen Glacier to its head, as they carefully studied the Abruzzi Ridge.

When the French team led by Maurice Herzog climbed Annapurna, in 1950—the first 8,000er ever to be ascended—that triumph had a gigantic impact on the people of France. The climbers returned to wild celebrations that diminished not at all over the subsequent months. It is not an exaggeration to say that Annapurna meant to France what putting the first man on the moon meant to America. And the reason for that frenzy had everything to do with France’s emergence from World War II as a battered country that had been occupied by the hated Nazis for four and a half years. The victory on Annapurna gave a whole nation an incalculable boost of self-esteem.

In its own way, Hillary and Tenzing’s ascent of Everest in 1953 had a comparable impact on the British public, especially when (thanks to a brilliant system of couriers and coded messages organized by the Times reporter James Morris) the news arrived back in England just in time to be announced in the middle of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. (One wag later called it “the last great day of the British Empire.”)

The 1950s were an intensely nationalistic decade, and the politics between countries inevitably crept into the world of sports. I wasn’t born until three years later, but some of my elders had vivid recollections of the 1956 Olympics, when the Russians and the Hungarians tried to kill each other in their water polo match.

Like France, but for different reasons, Italy was a battered country after World War II. Everyone old enough to have lived through it would never forget the sting of losing the war, climaxed by Mussolini’s body being hung upside down on a meat hook from the roof of a gas station in Milan. Professor Desio was thus fully aware of the potential value in national pride should Italians make the first ascent of K2.

But Desio was a