The Tenant of the Col

by Aleister Crowley, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

I have known a number of men who were said to live alone with God. Most of them, on inspection, were living alone with a cook. Ambrose Hurrell lived alone with a Primus stove, a theodolite, a shelf of books and a stone wall, on a col at nineteen thousand two hundred feet on the watershed between Sikkim and Tibet, and it took me the better part of a night to find out whom else he lived with.

Pasang and I came up to him on the twenty-sixth of September 1911, out of a cloud that had sat on the glacier for three days and then lifted all at once, like the lid of a dish. The hut stood where the herdsmen below the moraine had said it would, in the lee of a rock rib at the lowest point of the saddle, and it was larger than I had expected. Someone had taken trouble over it. The walls were dry-laid, a good four feet thick at the base and chinked with moss that must have been carried up from the yak-grounds, and the roof was a tarpaulin stretched over bamboo and weighted with slabs. A thread of smoke came out of a tin chimney. There was a door, of packing-case deal, on leather hinges, and above it someone had painted in white the figure 19,200.

"He has measured it again," said Pasang. "Last year it said nineteen thousand one hundred and eighty."

Hurrell opened the door before we reached it. He had been watching us, I suppose, for an hour; there was nothing else to watch. He was a tall man who had once been heavy, and the weight had gone off him in the way it goes at altitude, from the face first, so that he looked like a good portrait of himself with the varnish cleaned off. His beard was cut square. His lips were split in three places. He carried his hands against his chest in grey mittens, and when he drew off the right one to greet me I saw that the first and second fingers ended at the middle joint, and that the ends were black and dry. They did not hurt, he said. They were like the ends of good cigars.

"You'll be from the Alpine Club," he said. "No, you won't; they would have written first. Come in. You'll have tea. It isn't good tea. Nothing is good up here except the view, and one stops seeing that in a week."

The tea was made at something under a hundred and eighty degrees, which is the heat at which water consents to boil when it has only half the air on top of it that it is used to, and it tasted of the kettle. I drank it as one drinks the first cup of anything after three days in a cloud. Hurrell watched me with the courtesy of a man who has not had a guest since June.

The inside of the hut was very orderly. There were two bunks of canvas laced to poles, a table made from a biscuit case with READING still stencilled on its side, the theodolite on its legs under an oilcloth hood, and a shelf of flat stones on which stood a Euclid, a Thomas à Kempis, two volumes of Boswell, a Whitaker for 1909, a Greek Testament and a Bradshaw. I could account for all of these except the Bradshaw, and he would not account for it either. Beside them stood four volumes bound in green buckram, and a fifth lay open on the table with a pencil in the gutter.

"You've come for the mountain," he said.

I said that I had.

"Everybody does. That is to say, three people have, in five years, and two of them went home from here. The third was a Swiss who wanted to photograph the north face. His plates froze in the slide and he went home from lower down, in a temper." He folded his ruined hand inside the good one. "You'll stay the night, of course. You'll want to look at the ridge in the morning light, and then you'll want to go home. Everyone wants to go home after they've looked at the ridge."

Pasang came in then with the loads, and Hurrell's manner changed; not much, a degree or two, as the boiling point changes. He spoke to Pasang in a Tibetan rather better than mine and told him where to put the loads, which was not where Pasang had been about to put them. Pasang put them there.

"You keep men of your own up here?" I asked.

"Four. They come up from the yak-grounds every ninth day with oil and tsampa and my letters. I pay them twice what you are paying yours. Last year they built a chorten for me below the moraine; you'll have passed it. I asked them not to. The Political Officer in Gangtok writes to me about the state of the passes, and the Tibetans at the dzong write to me about the Political Officer, and I answer both, and neither of them knows I answer the other." He smiled, and one of the splits in his lip opened, and he touched it with the mitten. "It is a small see. But I am its bishop."

---

He told me about the ridge after we had eaten, with the lamp lit and the wind beginning to move over the roof like a hand feeling for a loose slab.

"I went up it in the October of 'oh-six," he said, "with a man called Rennie, who is now a dean. We came to the gap at twenty thousand six hundred, a little before noon. You'll see it from the door tomorrow with the glass. The ridge simply stops. There is a notch in it twenty-odd feet deep, as if something had taken a bite out of the rock, and the near wall leans out over the bottom. The far wall is a staircase. From the bottom of the notch to the summit is four hundred feet of snow that a curate could walk up in galoshes."

"And you didn't go down into it."

"I looked into it. I looked into it for an hour and ten minutes; Rennie timed me, being that kind of man. There was no reason to go down. One does not climb a mountain by going down it." He took a brass telescope from the shelf and put it into my hands, as one gives a child something heavy to keep it quiet. "I have taken the height of the summit from this hut two hundred and twelve times. It is twenty-one thousand and forty feet, give or take the cornice, which grows in the winter and breaks off in May. I have its angles from four stations. I know at what minute the sun reaches it on every day from April to November. I have the state of the snow on that last slope for every morning since the fourth of April. Nobody has ever known a mountain as I know that one."

"Except from the top."

"The top," said Hurrell, "is the one place from which you cannot see it."

He had been waiting a long time to say that to somebody. I gave him the pleasure of not answering.

"Look here," he said after a while, and leaned forward so that the lamp put his face into planes. "There are two bunks. I built two. I didn't know at the time why I was building two. You could stay the winter; I've stayed through the monsoon, and the winter can be no worse, only colder, and I've oil for both of us if the men keep coming, and they will keep coming. You would have that mountain as I have it. Not one afternoon on it, puffing like a grampus, and then down to Darjeeling and a paper to the Club, and nothing. All of it. Every morning of it. I would teach you the instrument." He stopped, and I saw him notice that he had said more than he meant, and decide that he had meant it after all. "Your man will go down. They always go down. You'd have mine."

"That's very handsome of you," I said.

"It's nothing of the kind. I want company. One gets so tired of being right without a witness."

---

Pasang and I went out before we slept, for the reason men go out of a hut at night. The cloud had gone off the whole range. The stars at that height scarcely trouble to twinkle; there is too little air above them to make them, and they stand still and hard and so many that the constellations are lost among them, as a man's face is lost in a crowd of faces. Pasang looked at them for a moment as if checking that they were all there.

"Tomorrow I go down," he said. "That was the bargain. To the col."

"Yes."

"The barley at home is ready. My brother cannot cut it alone; his back is bad."

"Then you'll go down."

He considered me in the starlight. "You will go up alone?"

"Very probably."

He thought about this as he thought about everything, without hurry and without the least wish to change my mind. "Then take the long rope," he said. "I will take the short one. There is nothing on the glacier that needs a long rope." And he went in to sleep, and slept, I believe, at once. I have known very few men who were as sure of their road as Pasang. He did not need a mountain to tell him where it ran.

I did not sleep at once. At that height the breath goes in a fashion of its own: five or six deep pulls, then none at all, a long pause in which the body seems to consider whether to bother, and then a gasp that wakes you, certain that you have died and been sent back on account of some clerical error. Each time I woke the lamp was still burning. Hurrell sat at the biscuit-case with the green book open and the pencil in his good hand, not writing, looking at the dark square of the window where the mountain was.

---

In the morning he went out at six to take his reading, and I did what any guest would do and read his diary.

It was a meteorological journal, very neatly kept. The left-hand page of each opening gave the date and the hour, the readings of a thermometer and an aneroid, the wind, and the bearing of the sun on the summit. The right-hand page was for remarks. I turned back from September through August, through the monsoon, through July and June and May, to the fourth of April, and the remarks were nearly all the same.

Wind W., light. Summit clear. Cornice stable. Not today.

Wind W.N.W., strong. Plume from summit. Not today.

Summit in cloud. Not today.

Wind nil. Summit clear. Snow on upper slope firm, excellent. Not today.

I took down the first of the four green volumes and opened it at October 1906. The hand was steadier and larger, the hand of a man with ten whole fingers. Left camp 5.10 with R. Ridge in good order. Reached gap 11.40. And underneath, in the same pencil, in the same hand, perhaps added that night, perhaps added years later; there was no way of telling: Not today.

I put the books back as I had found them, the pencil in the gutter, and went out.

Pasang had his load on already. He had divided the rope as he had said, and the long one, a hundred and twenty feet of good Alpine Club line, lay coiled on my sack. I paid him, and added something, and he took it without fuss and put it inside his coat, and touched his forehead, and went off down the snow towards the glacier at the steady pace of a man walking to his work. He did not look back. There was nothing behind him that concerned him.

Hurrell had come round the end of the hut with his notebook and was watching him go.

"You let him go," he said.

"He was going."

"I'd have kept him. I could have kept him, you know. One more week. They'll do anything for me down there."

"I know," I said.

He looked at me sharply, and then up at the ridge, and pointed with his good hand to the summit, where a small white feather of snow stood out from the cornice against a sky the colour of a gas flame. "Wind," he said. "You see? It's no good today. That's twenty miles an hour at the top; more in the gap. Wait a week. Wait the season. There's no hurry here. That is the whole merit of the place."

I strapped on my irons. They were ten-pointed, made for a friend of mine by a smith in Courmayeur, and they were the only pair of their kind east of Suez. Hurrell watched me buckle them as a bishop might watch a man take out a cigar in the nave.

"You'll come back," he said.

"Certainly. I'll want my tea."

---

I shall not describe the ridge at length; ridges are tedious to everyone who is not on them. It went up in a series of steps, rock and snow alternately, and the rock was good grey granite, cold enough to burn, and the snow was as firm as Hurrell's journal had promised it would be, which is to say that he had been right about it every morning for six months. The wind was what he said it was. It came over the crest from Tibet in long, deliberate pushes, and between pushes I moved and during them I lay against the mountain and counted my breaths, which at twenty thousand feet are the only things worth counting, and are always fewer than one would like.

I came to the gap at a quarter to twelve.

It was exactly as he had described it. I had the impression, looking into it, that he had described it to himself every night for five years, and had worn it smooth. The ridge simply ended in a lip of rock. Below the lip, the near wall dropped twenty-five feet, leaning outward, so that from the edge one looked straight down on to the floor of the notch, a narrow trough of old snow; and the far wall rose from it in broken ledges, a staircase indeed, to the bottom of the last white slope. I could see the cornice at the top of that slope, curling over like the crest of a wave that has decided to wait.

It was very plain that one could not climb back up the near wall. Whatever went down into that trough without some means of returning would have to find another way off the mountain, and there was no other way off the mountain.

There was a spike of granite a yard back from the lip, as thick as a man's thigh. I put the long rope round it and knotted it, and then I lay on the rock with the wind pushing at me, and tied loops into the free end, a loop every two feet, my fingers getting stupider at each one, so that whoever came back to that place would have something to stand in. I made eleven loops. Then I threw the rope over, and it hung clear of the wall and moved a little in the wind, and I sat on the edge for a while with my legs over it.

I do not know how long I sat there. Not an hour and ten minutes; I had no Rennie to time me. The difficulty was not the climbing. The rope would hold and the wall was not long. The difficulty was that I had come up the whole ridge with my face to the summit, and the next movement had to be made with my back to it, downward, into a trough from which nothing could be seen but its own walls and a strip of sky. Every step of the morning had been a gain. This was a loss, and it had to be paid for in full before anything else could be bought.

Then I turned over on to my chest and went down the rope.

The bottom of the gap was out of the wind. That was the first thing, and it was so complete, after five hours of being shoved, that I stood in the trough with the rope still in my hands and could not think what was wrong. There was no sound at all. The walls rose on either side of me, grey, close enough to touch with my two hands, and above them was a strip of sky so dark a blue that it was nearly black, and in the middle of it, at noon, what I took for a star. I had come down twenty-five feet. I had no idea, for a space I cannot measure, who had come down them. There was a pair of hands holding a rope, and a pair of boots with ten iron points standing in old snow, and breath going in and out of a body, and it would have been an impertinence to claim any of them.

Then the breath stopped, as it had been stopping all night, and came back with a gasp, and I was a man in a hole with frozen fingers, and I let go of the rope and went to the far wall and up the staircase.

The last slope was what he had said it was. A curate could have walked up it, given a curate's lungs, which I had not. I went up it twenty steps at a time and then ten and then five, and stopped below the cornice, because a cornice is a ledge of snow with nothing beneath it, and I have known men stand on one to get the view and become, for a moment, part of the view. I stood a yard below the crest at a quarter past two. There was the brown of Tibet going away for ever under the wind, and the ranges standing up out of it, white, one behind another, and the great mountain to the south-west with its plume, and nothing whatever on the summit where I stood. It was a quite ordinary place, and that was what I had come for.

I looked down at the col. The hut was a fleck of grey on the saddle with its thread of smoke, and in front of it, small and very clear in that air, a figure stood with something held to its eye that caught the sun. I raised my axe. The figure did not move. After a moment the glint went away, and the figure went into the hut.

---

The return through the gap took me forty minutes and the remainder of my breath. I stood in the loops one after another with my face against the leaning rock, and there were eleven of them, and I counted each one, and at the top I lay on the granite and could not untie the knot round the spike for a long while because my hands would not believe it was a knot. I got it undone in the end. I coiled the rope and came down the ridge in the long blue light of the late afternoon, and reached the col as the last of the sun went off the summit, at the minute, I have no doubt, that Hurrell's tables said it would.

He had the lamp lit. The kettle was on the Primus. He was sitting at the biscuit-case with the green book open and the telescope lying beside it, uncapped.

"You'll want tea," he said.

I said that I would. I sat on my bunk and took off my irons and could not get the straps through the buckles, and he did not help me, and I did not expect him to. He made the tea and set it by me. He did not ask me anything. I sat with the cup between my hands and drank tea at a hundred and seventy-eight degrees, and watched him.

He picked up the pencil in his good hand. He looked once at the black square of the window, where the mountain was. Then he bent over the journal, and wrote, in a hand that had not changed since morning:

Wind W., moderate. Summit clear. Not today.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ab Aleisterō Crowleiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Aleister Crowley, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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