The expedition arrived in Kalimpong in the early afternoon and Sandy at once set to work on checking the oxygen stores, the stoves and the ladder bridge, all of which had arrived in advance of the party. Others were equally busy checking stores and adjusting to the thought of a five-week march where they normally would spend only a single night in one any location. Bruce had explained to the team that they would be split into two parties, walking one day apart, because the bungalows that they had arranged en route for Phari would not accommodate the whole expedition. After Phari they would all join up and continue together, sleeping in tents as they made their way over the Tibetan plateau. Sandy was in the second party, which as he had informed Lilian, comprised Mallory, Hingston, Shebbeare, Odell and Norton.
In keeping with the tradition he had established in 1922, General Bruce and the other members of the expedition visited Dr Graham’s Home in Kalimpong where he instructed Nepalese children in the tradition of the Boy Scouts. Bruce bore a message from Sir R. S. Baden-Powell and made an inspection of the ranks of children, who were beautifully turned out in their scout uniforms, complete with badges but bare feet. This was one of Bruce’s most pleasant duties as he reported with great pride and delight in his next Times dispatch: ‘A parade of the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides at the Kalimpong Homes was extremely attractive, and we were all immensely struck with their very remarkable appearance and the general enthusiasm and happiness of everyone. We had a charming meeting with them all and a great send-off.’ Duties thus dispensed the first party set off from Kalimpong and over the border into Sikkim. On the frontier they encountered a border guard who clearly tickled Bruce’s sense of humour: ‘When we had finished the necessary official documents, “Right hand salute” roared the guard at himself and duly saluted with the right hand; “left turn” he bellowed, and turned to the left; “quick march” he shrieked, and straightway took himself off. He was a Gurkha, and all Gurkhas love drilling themselves if they cannot get anyone else to drill them.’
After the first party left for Pedong the second party was obliged to spend a further day in Kalimpong. From the outset, whenever there was a break, Sandy would turn his attention to the oxygen apparatus and anything else that required his engineering skills and ingenuity. I have a sense that this first day of forced inactivity was something of a burden to him, for as Norton and others socialized with the MacDonalds, Perries and Waights, all local worthies, he hid himself away in his room with the excuse that he had things to fix, such as his watch. He was not yet feeling confident in the company and he preferred to keep away from events which would bring him into contact with yet more strangers. He wrote three long letters to friends in England, including his old rowing partner Geoffrey Milling, and Audrey Pim, Evelyn’s close friend from school.
Once he was on the march the next day Sandy’s spirits improved and the irritation of his broken wrist watch, which he’d only made worse the previous afternoon, paled. The road from Kalimpong to Pedong was one of outstanding scenery although the views were somewhat obscured that year owing to the mist which appeared to be as a direct result of an unduly dry season and thus a great number of forest fires. Kanchenjunga, the great mountain that dominates Sikkim and whose name means ‘Five Treasures of the Great Snows’ was only dimly visible through the mist. ‘It’s perfectly wonderful being able to go about in a bush shirt & shorts all day’, he wrote to Milling:
& get every damn thing done for you & be able to ride when ever you get tired of walking & through the most pricelessly wonderful glades in the jungle. We are under 6,000 ft here so the forest is pretty thick still; the only pity is that the visibility has not been good just lately – not for distances over 2 miles or so, otherwise the scenery would be wonderful. This is a remarkable place: it’s pitch dark now & it was bright sunlight when I started this letter – at least very nearly! … I say old Man Odell is just the same as ever! He longs to have you here the other members are getting quite fed up with our side illusions to you & Spits. They get such a lot of them.
But Odell was not the only person Sandy was talking to. He had gained confidence in Mallory’s presence and right from the beginning I sense that Sandy took considerable pride and delight in the fact that Mallory often chose to ride or walk with him. He invariably notes this in his diary and even mentions it on a couple of occasions in his letters home. I know from the photographs of the trek that he and Odell frequently road and walked together as well, but apart from a reference to Odell in this letter to Milling and the occasional reference to him in his diary, usually in connection with his health, the focus of his attention was Mallory. It is clear that if he were going to have any chance at getting himself onto a summit party Sandy would have consistently to impress Mallory and this he set out to do from the word go. If Odell had been a role model for him in Spitsbergen, how much greater a role model was Mallory on this expedition. With his knowledge of the mountain and his reputation as the best climber of his day and the man with the greatest chance to reach the summit it is hardly surprising that Sandy switched his allegiance. Odell was never going to be in contention as a lead climber in the present company, and Sandy realized this immediately. Sandy had set his sights no lower than the summit of Everest before he even left England and he was going to make sure that he got his chance at the top when the time came. Some ambition for a twenty-two year old. Whether or not this was hurtful to Odell is difficult to say but he did observe that Sandy ‘could not readily be drawn out to say much unless the environment was sympathetic. The high altitudes of Tibet perhaps a little emphasised this’. If there was a little friction it was never noticeable to the others and Odell and Sandy worked together for hours on end in respect of the oxygen apparatus and later, on the mountain, where they became a formidable relief team to climbers coming down from higher camps. Norton even referred to them as the well-known firm of ‘Odell and Irvine’.
One of the particular delights on the first few days of the march through Sikkim were the bathes Mallory, Odell and Sandy took in the rivers along the route. ‘I had 3 most delightful bathes yesterday & 2 today’, he wrote to Lilian, adding that unfortunately he had still not succeeded in acquiring the swim suit he had hoped to buy in Port Said, ‘though I manufactured quite a good one out of a belt & 2 handkerchiefs. It is a very bad thing indeed to be seen naked by any one in the country – just the opposite to what I expected.’ The water was deliciously warm and they even succeeded in finding a pool deep enough for a shallow dive. Later they found a spot where the river ran fast over rocks in small rapids and they spent a happy hour or so sliding over the warm rocks and small waterfalls, although Sandy did this once too often and scratched his bottom. Mallory was enjoying the bathes as much as Sandy. All the anxiety and impatience he had felt up to this point seemed to have dissipated. He was on the way to Everest in good company and he was quite relaxed. He wrote to Ruth extolling the virtues of the bathing and added: ‘We couldn’t be a nicer party – at least I hope the others would say the same; we go along our untroubled way in the happiest fashion.’ Everyone did indeed seem to be very happy. Shebbeare spent a great deal of time chasing and catching butterflies, Norton sketched and painted the scenery, Mallory read and planned with Norton the assault on the mountain, Odell was fully occupied with matters geological and Sandy was having a delightful time, watching and observing closely everything he saw in the villages they passed through, swimming whenever the occasion permitted and, in any spare time at the end of a march, fiddling with the oxygen apparatus. Despite his real enjoyment of the trek the apparatus was causing him some anxiety. He was appalled by how badly the cylinders leaked and how fragile they were. In the letter to Geoffrey Milling from Pedong he concluded: ‘The oxygen has been already boggled! They unfortunately haven’t taken my design but what they’ve sent is hopeless – breaks if you touch it – leaks & is ridiculously clumsy & heavy. Out of 90 cylinders 15 were empty & 24 badly leaked by the time they arrived at Calcutta even – Ye Gods! I broke one taking it out of
its packing case!!’ The anguish over the oxygen apparatus is a recurring theme in Sandy’s diary and by the time he got to Base Camp he had completely lost his sense of humour. At this stage, however, he was still examining what Siebe Gorman had sent and discovering to his increasing disquiet the extent of the task that lay ahead of him.
The route through the forest from Pedong ‘was very delightful through sunlit glades over roads of stone full of mica which looked like silver in the sun’. From Rangli the road began to rise and the bathing stopped, much to Sandy’s regret. The route led up towards the first of the high passes the expedition would encounter and it was on this road through the forest that Sandy had his second incident with his pony. He was in the process of trying to overtake a mule loaded with cotton when it was nipped in the bottom by another mule from behind. The loaded mule did not take kindly to this aggressive nibble and leapt forward, dislodging a bale of cotton which knocked into Sandy’s pony and sent them both tumbling down the hill from the narrow rocky path. Fortunately there was a ledge some ten feet below which broke the fall and the pony scrambled at the edge just long enough for him to jump clear before they both rolled down the hillside together. ‘Fortunately the beast came off with only a slightly cut hock & I got away with a scraped knee.’ In a similar incident some days later Odell did not come off so well and had his knee badly crushed in a fall from his pony. Riding seems to have been altogether one of the main hazards of the trip.
Another, unseen hazard was the stream water. They had been given a long lecture before they left Darjeeling on the dangers of drinking from the streams and rivers. One of the recurring themes of the previous two expeditions had been the debilitating gastric problems that had afflicted several members and which had contributed to the death of Kellas in 1921. General Bruce, mindful that he needed the very fittest and strongest team of climbers available when it came to making the assault on the mountain, asked Hingston to make every effort to keep the men as healthy as possible. Thus, when confronted with thirst and a fresh stream, they all felt a great deal of guilt as they broke the pledge and drank from the waters.
As the route rose out of the valleys they reached their first pass, above Sedongchen. At 5500 feet it was the same height as the peak Sandy climbed in Spitsbergen with Odell the previous summer. They stopped at the little tea house at the top of the pass and agreed that this march was the most beautiful one they had done up to now. The forests were of rhododendron all mauves, pinks, cerise, cream and white with butterflies and birds darting in and out above their heads. The march passed through several villages with their mud-lined huts and rush roofs. Sandy thought the people to be very cheery and friendly, much more so than the folk in the Indian villages closer to Darjeeling. He couldn’t resist a familiar comparison: ‘some of the women look just like Aunt T.D. in spite of the rings in their noses’ and the very pretty girls pleased him greatly as they knew ‘how to turn themselves out to the best advantage’. As if to reassure his mother that it was not only the girls who fascinated him, he went on to describe in some detail his feelings about the religion, which he found very romantic. ‘Most of the houses have tall bamboo poles with a strip of flay all the way down with prayers written all the way down in their strange hieroglyphics. The idea is that the wind wafts the prayers off to their gods … I think it’s a shame that missionaries come and put strange and far less romantic ideas into their heads.’ Naïve and innocent as this remark might seem, I don’t think it would have gone down particularly well at Park Road South, where several Irvine relatives had worked as missionaries in India. With the knowledge that he was several thousand miles away from home he probably felt comfortable at making a gentle dig at his family’s devout religious beliefs. This theme recurs again, later in the trek, when he gets to Shekar Dzong.
Several of the villages had a form of merry-go-round which Sandy described as ‘the predecessor to the great wheel in Blackpool’ and on which he and Mallory were photographed by Odell. He made a sketch of it in a letter as it had clearly caught his eye, as had the Tibetan shrines which he also drew for his mother. ‘They are rather curious things to meet in out of the way places.’
Letter from Sandy to Lilian
Sandy pulling Mallory on ‘the predecessor to the great wheel in Blackpool’ photographed by Odell
From the very beginning of the march Sandy’s fair skin caused him great problems. He burned his elbows and knees badly in Sikkim but it was his face that was to cause him the greatest agony later on. By mid-April he had serious sunburn to his face and had lost several layers of skin around his nose and mouth. Most of the other members grew beards to protect their faces, but Sandy, for some reason, elected to keep himself free from facial hair. He was also painstaking about his daily washing and this did not go unremarked by the other members of the party. Norton, in a dispatch to the Times, went into some detail about the habits of the expedition members. ‘The effect of the sun and wind is less felt than previously, thanks to the early issue of lanoline and vaseline, and to the cautious avoidance of the ultra-English vice of cold bathing in the open. Thus we have retained a high average proportion of skin on the nose, lips and finger-tips. … In this respect a fair man offers the most vulnerable target, and the Mess Secretary seems to have hit on the expedient of growing a new face every second day, but then he is suspected of indulging in the said English vice, or why his frequent pilgrimages in the direction of a frozen stream, clad principally in a towel?’
The trek followed the route from Guatong to Langram where they encountered snow for the first time. ‘It was very curious’, Sandy wrote, ‘to change from almost tropical climate to above the snow line in 3 hours.’ The going was much rougher here than it had been up until now and several of the ponies slipped and fell. When they arrived in Langram Sandy settled down to another afternoon with the oxygen apparatus. More trouble. He found that all but one of the oxygen frames had been more or less damaged in transit and worked away well into the night repairing them with copper rivets and wire.
As the route gained height so the affects of altitude were beginning to be felt. On 1 April they crossed the Jelap La, at 14,500 feet, from Sikkim into Tibet. Sandy climbed 3000 feet in one morning and noted that he ‘felt a slight headache towards the top, especially if my feet slipped & shook my head much. I felt quite tired in my knees & panted a good deal if I tried to go fast. At the top of the pass put the largest stone I could lift on the cairn from about 20 yards away, just to make sure that the altitude wasn’t affecting me unduly! Anyway I was quite glad to sit down for a few minutes, the altitude being my record up to date, 14,500 ft.’ He took photographs of the cairn with its prayer flags fluttering in the wind and continued down from the pass into Tibet on foot. He was interested in the different characteristics of this side of the pass, where the tree line was some 2500 feet higher than on the other side. They had come from a valley of lush vegetation into a dryer and cooler valley in the lee of the pass where the trees were now predominantly pine.
Norton was very pleased to record in his diary that he had felt absolutely no effects at all from the same altitude, observing that his performance to this height was considerably better than it had been in 1922. This concurs exactly with Hingston’s later findings, that the climbers who had already been to altitude on previous occasions acclimatized far more quickly than those who had not. Whenever Sandy reached a new altitude record he was blighted with a headache. Odell, too, was suffering somewhat from the altitude, but he was also affected with a gastric complaint: ‘mountain trots, I expect’, Sandy noted somewhat disingenuously in his diary. A fall with his pony only added to his woes. It fell and landed heavily, crushing Odell’s knee and leaving him stiff and sore for a few days. Mallory, however, was full of energy and bounding ahead of the others on the march. When Sandy was not keeping up with Mallory he walked with Shebbeare. The two of them seemed to have a good understanding and Sandy described him as ‘a very fine specimen of a man & most awfully wise. He impresses me m
ore every day.’
They spent the night of 1 April in a ‘no good’ guest house where the first party had stayed the previous night and Geoffrey Bruce had left them a half bottle of whisky with a note saying that they had plenty with them. They were all delighted by the find and, with the prospect of five teetotal months ahead of them, spent quite some time discussing the best way to make the most of this unexpected gift. In the end they decided to take it in their tea and they all declared they’d loved it until Shebbeare tried a drop neat and discovered it was the dregs of the whisky bottle filled up with tea. It was only then that they recalled the date. ‘We’ll have to hush this up from the first party!’ Sandy wrote. Being only a few days into their march and still full of the beer and the benevolence of civilization, they thought it quite a good April Fool’s joke. ‘I doubt is we should have thought it funny a few weeks later when we were beginning to feel the strain.’ Shebbeare wrote, ‘There were times later on when we ran short of sweet things (we were never short of food) when an irregularly broken stick of chocolate seemed a premeditated plot to defraud us of our share.’
Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine Page 21