It sounds like the plot of a Wern­er Her­zog film: Aleis­ter Crow­ley, heir to a brew­ing for­tune and “flam­boy­ant, bisex­u­al drug fiend with a fas­ci­na­tion for the occult,” meets “son of a well-known Jew­ish Social­ist” Oscar Eck­en­stein, “a chemist turned rail­way engi­neer.” The two strike up a friend­ship over their mutu­al pas­sion for moun­taineer­ing, and, in four years time, co-lead an expe­di­tion to reach the sum­mit of K2, the sec­ond high­est moun­tain in the world.

The descrip­tions of these char­ac­ters come from Mick Conefrey’s The Ghosts of K2: The Race for the Sum­mit of the World’s Most Dead­ly Moun­tain, a book detail­ing the many gru­el­ing attempts, many deaths, and few suc­cess­es, in over a cen­tu­ry of climbs to the mountain’s peak. Crow­ley and Eckenstein’s expe­di­tion, under­tak­en in 1902, was the first. Though unsuc­cess­ful, their effort remains a leg­endary feat of his­tor­i­cal brav­ery, or hubris, or insanity—an ascent up the face of what climber George Bell called “a sav­age moun­tain that tries to kill you.”

In an inter­view with Nation­al Geo­graph­ic, Cone­frey sums up the doomed expe­di­tion:

 In those days, nobody had a clue about what it was going to be like. They thought they would go to the Himalayas and knock off K2 in a cou­ple of days. But as the expe­di­tion pro­ceed­ed, it start­ed falling apart. Eck­en­stein, the leader, had a bad res­pi­ra­to­ry infec­tion. Crow­ley had malar­ia and spent most of the time in his tent with a high fever. At one point he got so deliri­ous, he start­ed wav­ing his revolver at oth­er mem­bers of the team. 

There are many oth­er Her­zo­gian touch­es. In his book Fall­en Giants, Mau­rice Isser­man describes the team—also con­sist­ing of a novice Eng­lish­man, a Swiss doc­tor, and two expe­ri­enced Aus­tri­an climbers—as “unrea­son­ably bur­dened by three tons of lug­gage.” Some of that unnec­es­sary bur­den came from a “sev­er­al-vol­ume library” Crow­ley “intend­ed to haul onto the glac­i­er.” The oth­ers “object­ed to the super­flu­ous weight, but Crow­ley had read enough Joseph Con­rad to know what hap­pened to those who let go of their hold on civ­i­liza­tion in the wild.” The library stayed, and a train of 200 porters hauled the team’s lug­gage to Bal­toro Glac­i­er. (See Crow­ley in a pho­to from the expe­di­tion above, pre­sum­ably strick­en with malar­ia.)

Pri­or to set­ting off for K2 Eck­en­stein and Crow­ley had climbed vol­ca­noes in Mex­i­co, then the lat­ter had trav­eled to San Fran­cis­co, Hawaii, Japan, Sri Lan­ka, and India—along the way hav­ing affairs, learn­ing med­i­ta­tion, and devel­op­ing a “life­long devo­tion to Shi­va, the Hin­du god of destruc­tion.” While it takes a cer­tain rare per­son­al­i­ty to sub­ject them­selves to the rig­ors of scal­ing a moun­tain almost five miles high, Crowley—notorious for his “mag­ick,” sex­u­al adven­tures, drug use, lewd poet­ry, and found­ing of a reli­gious order—is arguably the most out-there per­son­al­i­ty in the his­to­ry of a very extreme sport.

But moun­taineer­ing “is not a nor­mal pur­suit,” writes Scot­tish climber Robin Camp­bell, “and we should not be too sur­prised to find its adepts show­ing odd behav­ior in oth­er spheres of life.” Like all devo­tees of stren­u­ous, death-defy­ing pur­suits, Crow­ley “want­ed extreme expe­ri­ences,” says Cone­frey, “where he pushed him­self to the lim­it.” It just so hap­pened that he want­ed to push far beyond the nat­ur­al and human worlds. After the failed K2 attempt, he would only make one more dar­ing expe­di­tion with Eck­en­stein, in 1905, a climb up the Himalayan moun­tain of Kangchen­jun­ga, the third high­est moun­tain in the world.

On the trip, Crow­ley, the leader, report­ed­ly treat­ed the local porters with bru­tal arro­gance, and when three of them were killed along with one of the expe­di­tion mem­bers, he refused to help, writ­ing to a Dar­jeel­ing news­pa­per, “a moun­tain ‘acci­dent’ of this sort is one of the things for which I have no sym­pa­thy what­ev­er.” He left the fol­low­ing day and gave up moun­taineer­ing, devot­ing the rest of his life to his occult inter­ests and the exploits that earned him the tabloid rep­u­ta­tion as “the wickedest man in the world.”

K2 was final­ly con­quered by two Ital­ian climbers in 1954, who reached the sum­mit, frost­bit­ten and half-mad, as Joan­na Kaven­na puts it in a review of Cone­frey’s spell­bind­ing book, “in a moment of sub­lime anti­cli­max.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sur­re­al Paint­ings of the Occult Magi­cian, Writer & Moun­taineer, Aleis­ter Crow­ley

Aleis­ter Crow­ley: The Wickedest Man in the World Doc­u­ments the Life of the Bizarre Occultist, Poet & Moun­taineer

Aleis­ter Crow­ley & William But­ler Yeats Get into an Occult Bat­tle, Pit­ting White Mag­ic Against Black Mag­ic (1900)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Think of our­selves though we may as liv­ing in a noisy era, none of us — not even mem­bers of sta­di­um-fill­ing rock bands known specif­i­cal­ly for their high-deci­bel inten­si­ty — have expe­ri­enced any­thing like the loud­est sound in his­to­ry. That sin­gu­lar son­ic event came as a con­se­quence of the explo­sion of Kraka­toa, one of the names (along with Vesu­vius) that has become a byword for vol­canic dis­as­ter. And with good cause: when it blew in mod­ern-day Indone­sia on Sun­day, 26 August 1883, it caused not only 36,000 deaths at the very least and untold destruc­tion of oth­er kinds, but let out a sound heard 3,000 miles away.

“Think, for a moment, just how crazy this is,” writes Nau­tilus’ Aatish Bha­tia. “If you’re in Boston and some­one tells you that they heard a sound com­ing from New York City, you’re prob­a­bly going to give them a fun­ny look. But Boston is a mere 200 miles from New York. What we’re talk­ing about here is like being in Boston and clear­ly hear­ing a noise com­ing from Dublin, Ire­land. Trav­el­ing at the speed of sound (766 miles or 1,233 kilo­me­ters per hour), it takes a noise about four hours to cov­er that dis­tance. This is the most dis­tant sound that has ever been heard in record­ed his­to­ry.”

Any­one who writes about the sound of Kraka­toa, which split the island itself, strug­gles to prop­er­ly describe it, see­ing as even jet mechan­ics lack a com­pa­ra­ble son­ic expe­ri­ence. Bha­tia quotes the cap­tain of the British ship Norham Cas­tle, 40 miles from Kraka­toa when it erupt­ed, writ­ing in his log that “so vio­lent are the explo­sions that the ear-drums of over half my crew have been shat­tered. My last thoughts are with my dear wife. I am con­vinced that the Day of Judge­ment has come.” Kraka­toa’s rever­ber­a­tions – not heard, but felt and record­ed as changes in atmos­pher­ic pres­sure – passed across the whole of the Earth not once but four times.

The sound of the explo­sion aside, “the rest of the world heard such sto­ries almost instant­ly because a series of under­wa­ter tele­graph cables had been recent­ly laid tra­vers­ing the globe,” writes the Inde­pen­dent’s San­ji­da O’Con­nell. “This new tech­nol­o­gy meant that Kraka­toa also gen­er­at­ed the first mod­ern sci­en­tif­ic study of a vol­canic erup­tion.” A Dutch sci­en­tist named Rogi­er Ver­beek turned up first to gath­er details for a detailed and pio­neer­ing report, fol­lowed by geol­o­gists from Lon­don’s Roy­al Soci­ety, whose 627-page The Erup­tion of Kraka­toa and Sub­se­quent Phe­nom­e­na you can read at the Inter­net Archive.

Since nobody would have got the explo­sion on tape in 1883, such ver­bal descrip­tions will have to suf­fice. Not that even today’s high­est-grade record­ing tech­nol­o­gy could with­stand cap­tur­ing such a sound, nor could even speak­ers that go up to a Spinal Tap-lev­el 11 repro­duce it. And no oth­er sound is like­ly to break Kraka­toa’s record in our life­times – not if we’re lucky, any­way.

via Nau­tilus

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Destruc­tion of Pom­peii by Mount Vesu­vius, Re-Cre­at­ed with Com­put­er Ani­ma­tion (79 AD)

The Web Site “Cen­turies of Sound” is Mak­ing a Mix­tape for Every Year of Record­ed Sound from 1860 to Present

The British Library’s “Sounds” Archive Presents 80,000 Free Audio Record­ings: World & Clas­si­cal Music, Inter­views, Nature Sounds & More

Down­load 10,000 of the First Record­ings of Music Ever Made, Cour­tesy of the UCSB Cylin­der Audio Archive

Map­ping the Sounds of Greek Byzan­tine Church­es: How Researchers Are Cre­at­ing “Muse­ums of Lost Sound”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.