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Dr. Jules Jacot-Guillarmod Diary Entry Sunday, 25 May 1902
The expedition arrives in Askole, at the end of the inhabited world. The Baltoro Basin, a maze of granite cathedrals and huge glaciers, defending the entrance to an almost unknown group of mountains, grouped around the second highest peak on the globe, Chogori or K2, 8611 m. Only Eckenstein [Oscar Eckenstein] briefly explored this white spot on the map, 10 years ago with Martin Conway. Here the terra incognita begins.
The distribution of the loads on the 150 porters is a real headache. Since the coolies also carry their food and firewood, each carrier also counts as a mouth to feed, and finally you have to count three men to get a load to the foot of the mountain. Eckenstein, head of the expedition, settles down for a whole week in the sand plain of Paiyu, at the foot of the glacier tongue, to organize the logistics and distribute the three tons of material and food. Crowley claims to have threatened to leave the expedition rather than remove a collection of Milton's poems from his suitcase.
One by one the six alpinists ascend over the chaotic surface of the Baltoro Glacier, following the increasingly unclear indications of the map produced ten years ago by the Conway expedition. Crowley, who speaks Hindustani best, leads the way as a scout. Every evening he sends one of the Baltis back with a message. Let's let him enter the unknown world and stay with Jules Jacot Guillarmod, who follows a few days later with the majority of the bearers, climbing higher day by day to almost reach the height of Mont Blanc in a tangle of sharp points, teeth, horns, of everything that the rugged and vertical could invent. The excitement of discovery seeps from every page of his diary. One evening, he is left chatting for a long time with Pfannl [Heinrich Pfannl] about a tuft of aniseed, following her dreams and watching the stars in the very clear sky. (At times, he writes, I think I'm having a nice dream. I am afraid that I will not always be able to keep the beautiful impression of this trip).
The porters fascinate him. He watches them as they arrive at the destination, take off their shoes and walk barefoot through the steep slopes looking for wood. He observes how they set up their camp (in no time at all), leveling platforms with their T-shaped poles. (They are), he writes, (very gentle people, shy, screaming and gesticulating a lot, but they never hit each other).
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