A certain Jewish savior once declared (or at least is credited with declaring) that mountains can be moved by faith. Twenty centuries later, a strange character named Maurice Wilson attempted to test the accuracy of that statement. Including fasting to supplement prayer as the basis of his understanding of theology, Wilson, a British veteran of the Great War and enthusiast in the field of sacred activity known as Daydreaming - decided to climb Mount Everest in 1934...It would not have been anything particularly spectacular, expeditions to conquer the highest peak on the planet had been undertaken since the late 19th century. Although all of them up to 1934 had failed, often with fatal consequences for the climbers - this did not deter Maurice. Even less so that his greatest mountaineering experience was climbing the sixth floor of a building in Leeds...
As a war veteran, Morris, in addition to several serious wounds, also suffered from a mental illness, in modern terms Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Unable to settle down in one place, his life turned into a nomadic one, including such destinations as the then exotic New Zealand, on the very edge of the British Empire. He was engaged in various things, no one knew exactly how, but Mr. Wilson managed to acquire a small but significant fortune. Tormented by physical and mental ailments, he decided on mystical therapy proposed by a certain mystical Mystic in London, a mixture of Christian and Hindu beliefs and practices that, according to him, could change human destiny for the better.
And things really did get better for Morris. The pain had almost stopped, his psyche had begun to heal, and extremely euphoric thoughts about conquering Mount Everest, one of the last barriers unsurpassed by man at that time, began to swirl in his mind.A great relief from his suffering was caused by wearing women's clothing (!?) in the privacy of his home, and especially women's underwear in the privacy of his pants. Much like another war veteran and enthusiast who twenty years later would `conquer` the world of B-movie production with his `worst films of all time`, the legendary Ed Wood. No one would pretend to find a correlation between the suffering of veterans and the corresponding relief through wearing women's panties, but the thing is, the brain looks for patterns everywhere anyway...
The journey by boat to Hindustan and then by rail and horse-drawn carriage to Nepal or Tibet seemed unnecessarily slow and tedious, so Wilson decided to fly there. Again, nothing special for 2016, but in 1934 there were no air routes between Europe and the Himalayas, so Wilson decided to fly there himself, piloting a plane! The fact that he had only seen planes in pictures or seen them flying far in the sky did not stop him from planning to fly from Yorkshire to Nepal! Planes tended to be an expensive means of transport in general, but fortunately Maurice had enough money to buy a de Havilland DH-60 Mott, in this case the `Gypsy Moth` or Gypsy Moth in our language, a plane weighing about 450 kg `dry` and with a 100 horsepower engine, more suitable for short flights and basic training than for transcontinental epics. The Gypsy Moth was renamed Ever Wrest, a sexy variation of the noun Everest meaning `eternal fight` or something similar...
Although it took him twice as long as the standard one to obtain a pilot's license, Maurice's persistence paid off and here he is as a pilot! The other side of the plan, the mountaineering one - was taken nonchalantly, Maurice simply did not expect that climbing mountains would be something complicated and began to `train` by walking around the surrounding Yorkshire hills that rarely exceeded 600 meters above sea level or fifteen times lower than the 8848-meter high summit of the world. The fine weather, ham sandwiches, thermoses of tea and other comforts of 'training' were a total contrast to the harshness of the Himalayan glaciers, ravines, avalanches and sharp cliffs but Morris did not bother too much with all that...
Wilson's plan, if one can speak of a coherent plan, was to fly to the Himalayas, crash-land on a glacier and continue on foot to the summit. When reading his plan, the terms `irresponsibility`, `naivety`, `absent-mindedness` and `stupidity` come to mind, but I would add something like `admirable simplicity` that is not found even in cartoons. Not having permission to fly through various countries in which he had to land and refuel, Morris set off from Bradford for India in April 1933...and landed within a few minutes due to bad weather conditions. Determined and fanatic, after a small repair of the plane, he prepared for the mythical flight. At that time, the tabloid newspapers somehow joined the event, introducing the public to the ``madman`` who wanted to conquer Everest, presenting him as a combination of a character who built a ``Perpetuum Mobile`` and a sectarian stuck in mysticism.
Despite the flight ban issued by the British Ministry of Transport, Morris flew again on May 21, 1933 and this time he easily left British airspace and continued to Cairo and from there to Persia, today's Iran, an independent kingdom where the local authorities rarely showed good will towards the adventurer Morris. From there, he tried to fly to Bahrain but the colonial authorities refused to allow him to fly to India, after which he returned to Persia and with new supplies of fuel headed for the subcontinent.
And he succeeded! After a nine-hour flight, riding on the last fumes of fuel in the tank, against all predictions and expectations, like Leicester City in the Premier League in 2016, he managed to do the unthinkable - he somehow reached the city of Gwadar in western India from where he was supposed to head to Nepal or Tibet. But here the bureaucrats decided to put an end to his ideas of flying to the top and his plane was seized...
Not losing heart due to the new blow of fate, Morris decided to "winterize" in northern India and with the first days of spring to head for the goal. He hired three Sherpas with whom they disguised themselves as Buddhist monks to avoid the authorities and controls and with very modest equipment and supplies they set off for the goal. But Wilson proved to be overenthusiastic even for the experienced Sherpas - veterans of several previous unsuccessful expeditions. Wilson ignored their warnings that he was going to certain death, and this resulted in him being left alone because the Sherpas decided to return and postpone his death to another time and place, not then and there by sending the unequipped and inexperienced amateur-pilot-transvestite-do-it-yourself-pseudo-mountaineer...
And that was unfortunately the last time he was seen alive, sometime around the end of April 1934. What happened next is only partially known from his diary, which was found the following year by an ``official'' British mountaineering expedition, quite close to his frozen corpse. What is known is that he reached at least 7,000 meters (if not a little more), that old and new pains began to torment him, food and water began to melt and the Grim Reaper somehow reached the brave Maurice Wilson. It is not known exactly when he died, but the last entry in the diary was on May 31st when Maurice wrote: ``A beautiful day. I'm moving on!''.
The members of the expedition were amazed by the female clothing of the male corpse and the absence of basic mountaineering tools on him, but despite this they buried Maurice with dignity. Later theories emerged that Morris was the first to climb Mount Everest, especially after the discovery of an empty tent at 8,500 meters by Sherpas accompanying a Chinese expedition in 1960. The Sherpas claimed that the likelihood that Morris had died while descending from the summit rather than climbing was a scepticism. Whose mysterious tent was just 350 meters from the summit remained an enigma, and whether it was the first unofficial conqueror, the transvestite Wilson - or whether it was a remnant of the even more mysterious Soviet expedition of 1952, which was also speculated to have reached the summit a year before the famous Hillary and Tenzing - will remain in the realm of the unknown. In any case, no one survived the Soviet expedition, and they died in icy death walking towards or below the summit like Morris... so the truth will never be known...
But that ultimately doesn't matter... I find this story incredibly endearing, I wish Maurice had succeeded in his intention and been the first, at least he had gone to his death comforted by the knowledge of his success in his intention, he is one of those unknown but incredibly pleasant historical characters, completely forgotten as only such a person could be.
If there is an `other world`, I hope that Maurice is there in some custom built part of heaven, dressed in warm hiking clothes with women's panties peeking out from under it...
(Roger Mortis, 138)
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