K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [40]
I’m so used to calling the world’s highest mountain Everest that it’s hard for me to stop and think whether it’s a good name or not. Everest has been the official name for so long that it just seems to fit. But long before the British surveyed it, the great peak was known to Tibetan natives as Chomolungma. (That name first appears in print on a 1733 French map of Tibet, drawn after a group of monks returned from a quarter century of work in Lhasa to report their findings.) It’s a great name, full of the reverence Tibetans feel for the mountain: it translates to “Goddess Mother of the World.” There have been efforts over the years to change the official name, or simply to use Chomolungma unofficially rather than Everest, in the same way that climbers now universally refer to Mount McKinley as Denali, even though McKinley is still the official name. But that revisionism hasn’t taken hold on Everest. Only the Chinese regularly call the mountain Chomolungma.
After the survey discovered the great height of K2, there was a sincere effort to find a native name for the mountain. Montgomerie himself wrote, “Every endeavour will be made to find a local name if it has one.” Somebody learned that the Balti people living south of the Karakoram called K2 Chogori. The problem is, Chogori means simply “Great Mountain.” As K2 historian Jim Curran sardonically puts it, “Chogori … is likely to have been the sort of bemused answer given to the question ‘What’s that called?’”
Instead, through the rest of the nineteenth century a number of names honoring British pooh-bahs were tried out. None of them came close to sticking, except Mount Godwin Austen, the name honoring another tireless worker for the Great Trigonometrical Survey, Lieutenant Henry Haversham Godwin-Austen, who was one of the first Westerners to explore the Baltoro Glacier. Thank God that name never won the day! (The branch of the Baltoro that sweeps under the Abruzzi Ridge, however, is officially named the Godwin Austen Glacier.)
The fact is, K2 turns out to be a memorable name. There is no better defense of it than the one mounted by Fosco Maraini, whose 1959 chronicle of the first ascent of Gasherbrum IV, Karakoram, is one of the best expedition books ever written. Maraini argued,
K2 may owe its origin to chance, but it is a name in itself, and one of striking originality. Sibylline, magical, with a slight touch of fantasy. A short name but one that is pure and peremptory, so charged with evocation that it threatens to break through its bleak syllabic bonds. And at the same time a name instinct with mystery and suggestion: a name that scraps race, religion, history and past. No country claims it, no latitudes and longitudes and geography, no dictionary words. No, just the bare bones of a name, all rock and ice and storm and abyss. It makes no attempt to sound human. It is atoms and stars.
Remote from civilization though K2 is, the first attempt to climb it came as early as 1902. That’s nineteen years before the first attempt on Everest. The main reason for this discrepancy is that throughout the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, both Tibet and Nepal were virtually closed to foreigners, whereas K2 lay in what was then British India.
The 1902 expedition was the joint brainchild of Oscar Eckenstein, a superb German climber who had immigrated to Britain, and Aleister Crowley, one of the strangest men ever to become a mountaineer. Crowley would later grow famous as “the Beast 666”—his own nickname for his identification of himself with the devil. He was a magician, a drug cultist, an advocate of complete sexual freedom, a poet, an egomaniac—and a climber. In the early 1970s, his autobiography, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, first published in 1929, became a hippie cult classic.
Crowley unabashedly referred to himself as the best rock climber in Britain. In reality, he wasn’t even in the same league as George Leigh Mallory and several other contemporaries. But Crowley and Eckenstein’s assault on K2 was conceived