Last Hours on Everest

by Graham Hoyland

  In this context it can be seen that the climbing of Mount Everest was more of a political decision than a ‘wild dream’. In its way it was the British Empire’s moon-shot, with similar political motivation to the United States’ moon-shot of the 1960s. Crucially, it would plant the British flag on the northern bounds of India. The problem was that the Tibetans didn’t want to talk to the British and pursued a policy of splendid isolation, keeping foreigners at an arm’s length. Myths arose about this forbidden land, and the desire to explore it grew.

  Then in 1893 Captain Charles Bruce of the Gurkhas, who had climbed with Martin Conway in the Karakorum the previous year, met Younghusband at a polo match. He put the idea of climbing Mount Everest to him and between them they started a train of events that was to prove unstoppable. Younghusband was then Political Officer in Chitral, and the idea fermented within him, particularly as he knew that he could count on the support of the establishment. In the meanwhile Curzon became more anxious about Russian influence in Tibet and decided to do something about it. His chance came when a small group of Tibetans crossed the border and stole some Nepali yaks. This incursion was the excuse for the infamous Diplomatic Mission to Lhasa of 1904, led by Younghusband, who, on his way to Lhasa, saw the mountain at last:

  Mount Everest for its size is a singularly shy and retiring mountain. It hides itself away behind other mountains. On the north side, in Tibet … it does indeed stand up proudly and lone, a true monarch among mountains. But it stands in a very sparsely inhabited part of Tibet, and very few people ever go to Tibet.

  Younghusband certainly did go to Tibet, and in some style. He was leading a force of British soldiers carrying Maxim machine-guns and cannon. A force of 2,000 Tibetans attempted to resist at Gyantse with matchlock muskets, spears and swords. Their lamas assured them the British bullets would not harm them, but when the smoke cleared over 600 of their number had died. By the time the British reached Lhasa the casualties were nearly 3,000 Tibetans killed, compared with only 40 British soldiers. This was a lesson on the effectiveness of machine-guns as devices for cutting up men, a lesson that was initially ignored by the First World War generals.

  Britain gained privileged access to the closed country, and eventually set up telegraph poles all the way to Lhasa. Trading could begin, although some in Europe were sad that one of the last veiled mysteries of geography had been ripped aside so brutally. Curiously enough, the belligerent Younghusband had a mystical experience on his way back from Lhasa and later became a spiritual writer. He saw Mount Everest from one of his camps ‘poised high in heaven as the spotless pinnacle of the world’. In later life he said he regretted his invasion of Tibet.

  By Mallory and Somervell’s time the new breed of alpinist was thinking about even higher mountains than those in the Alps and the Caucasus, and were organising the first Himalayan expeditions. However, because both Nepal and Tibet were closed to foreigners Mount Everest seemed an impossible dream. This opinion changed subtly after the geographical poles were reached, and particularly after the tragedy of Scott’s expedition to the South Pole in 1912.

  Scott’s endeavour was an example of serious exploration in the old style; that is, exploration with a strong scientific purpose. When his last camp was found it was only 11 miles from the next food dump that might have saved his party. And yet they had man-hauled 30lb of rock samples behind them all the way from the Pole.

  There was another example of this serious scientific interest. The palaeobotanist Marie Stopes had applied to join Scott’s second expedition. She had been turned down on the grounds of her sex, but following her advice Scott had looked for a specimen of a coal-forming, fossilised fern named Glossopteris. The discovery of this specimen in the dead explorer’s collection established that Antarctica had once formed part of the first super-continent of Gondwanaland.

  In his diary entry for 8 February relating to this discovery near the Beardmore Glacier, Scott writes that they spent ‘the rest of the day geologising … under cliffs of Beacon sandstone, weathering rapidly and carrying veritable coal seams. From the last, Wilson, with his sharp eyes, has picked several plant impressions, the last a piece of coal with beautifully traced leaves in layers, also some excellently preserved impressions of thick stems, showing cellular structure.’

  Scott’s last words, written as he lay dying in his own lonely tent, made a powerful impression on me as a schoolboy:

  For my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past. We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of providence, determined still to do our best to the last … Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.

  There seems to be something in the English psyche that celebrates the concept of heroic failure. One doesn’t see it in Scottish culture, nor do the Americans have any truck with losers. It is hard to disentangle, but both Scott and Mallory are examples of this phenomenon. Franklin of the North-West Passage is another. I’d suggest it might have to do with the English public schools’ paradoxical injunction to try your very hardest, but not to boast of any success. Bragging is considered one of the cardinal sins. The top winning strategy in this contradictory game is therefore to die heroically trying to reach some impossible goal. I believe heroic failure may have played a small part in Mallory’s psychology, as well as in the minds of his predecessors.

  Scott and his party had been beaten by the Norwegian polar explorer Amundsen, who pipped them to the post by employing more effective dog-teams, keeping his attempt secret and treating his expedition as a race. Scott thought it was unsporting to use dogs and insisted on man-hauling the sledges, rather as later explorers thought it would be unsporting to use supplementary oxygen to climb Mount Everest. British moral indignation rose in step with Scott’s elevation to heroic status. ‘Amundsen even ate his dogs!’ they cried. Edward Whymper had referred to Everest as the Third Pole, and this term now gained currency. British pride had to be assuaged, and the ascent of Everest would do as well as anything else.

  So, after more years of negotiations and the intervention of the First World War, the Dalai Lama reluctantly gave permission for Mount Everest to be reconnoitred in 1921, with a climbing party to be led by General Bruce the following year. This turn of events was largely thanks to the persistence of Younghusband. By then president of the Royal Geographical Society, he was determined to get an expedition out to the mountain. His 1920 presidential address hints at why people still want to climb Mount Everest:

  The accomplishment of such a feat will elevate the human spirit and will give man, especially us geographers, a feeling that we really are getting the upper hand on the earth, and that we are acquiring a true mastery of our surroundings … if man stands on earth’s highest summit, he will have an increased pride and confidence in himself in the ascendancy over matter. This is the incalculable good which the ascent of Mount Everest will confer.1

  Before Younghusband’s address the Royal Geographical Society had staged a talk in March 1919 from a truly remarkable Everester. John Baptist Lucius Noel was another one of those privileged soldiers, his father being the second son of the Earl of Gainsborough. Noel was a handsome man and something of an entrepreneur, as later events revealed. I have an interest in Noel because he was the first man to film on Mount Everest, predating my own filming there by some 70 years.

  He stood up to read a paper entitled ‘A Journey to Tashirak in Southern Tibet, and the Eastern Approaches to Mount Everest’. Noel described how, when stationed in Calcutta as a lieutenant, he would take his leave in the baking summer months up in the hills to the north, searching for a way to the highest mountain on earth. As with so many of us he became captivated by Everest. Eventually he crossed the Choten Nyi-ma La, a high
pass in Sikkim to the north of Kangchenjunga (I saw this pass in 2009, which is now heavily guarded on both sides by soldiers from China and India). Unseen, Noel slipped across, disguised as an Indian Muslim trader:

  To defeat observation I intended to avoid the villages and settled parts generally, to carry our food, and to keep to those more desolate stretches where only an occasional shepherd was to be seen. My men were not startlingly different from the Tibetans, and if I darkened my skin and my hair I could pass, not as a native – my colour and shape of my eyes would prevent that – but as a Mohammedan from India.2

  His plan was to find the passes that led to Mount Everest and, if possible, to come to close quarters with the mountain. Unfortunately, as I too saw in 2009, there is a difficult tangle of high country between that north-west corner of Sikkim and Everest, and Noel could not get closer than forty miles before he was intercepted and turned back. But it was the closest any Westerner had been, and Noel would play a key part in the 1922 and 1924 expeditions.

  His lecture stirred up public debate about the possibility of climbing the mountain, which of course it was intended to do. After many years of wheeling and dealing, of encouragement from Lord Curzon and obstruction by Lord Morley, the Secretary of State for India, an expedition was mounted.

  As a result, the 1921 Everest reconnaissance was highly political. The leader was the posh Lt Col Charles Howard-Bury, wealthy and well connected. He was just the man for the job. He moved easily in high diplomatic circles, and proved his worth in helping to secure permission for a reconnaissance in 1921 and a climbing attempt in 1922. He had a most colourful life, growing up in a haunted gothic castle at Charleville in County Offaly, Ireland, travelling into Tibet without permission in 1905, and being taken prisoner during the First World War. He was a keen naturalist and plant hunter (Primula buryana is named after him), and he was the first European to report the existence of the yeti. He never married and during the Second World War he met Rex Beaumont, a young actor with whom he shared the rest of his life. Mallory didn’t care for his high Tory views, nor for the way he treated his subordinates, but Howard-Bury got a difficult political job done, then led the expedition off the map.

  The Mount Everest Committee, a joint committee of the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club whose purpose was to fund and organise the reconnaissance, chose the team members on the basis that they had to be able to provide a thorough survey of the massif and give a good assessment of the climbing possibilities. The committee was run by Arthur Robert Hinks.

  Hinks is an excellent example of why bureaucrats should not run expeditions. He was a mathematician specialising in map projections and the weight of the moon, but he had no field experience whatsoever. He was contemptuous of those he regarded as intellectually inferior to him, and he was a snob. He failed to be open-minded about climbing talents such as Finch, and his ability to rub people up the wrong way annoyed everyone. Even though the press and film-makers paid for all the Everest expeditions, he was full of loathing for journalists. They were a ‘rotten lot … all sharks and pirates’. Hinks’s pernicious influence as secretary of the Mount Everest Committee probably helped to put back the climbing of the mountain by thirty years.

  As with Scott’s Antarctic expedition, there was strong emphasis on the scientific value of the expedition, with the geographers keen to travel around the mountain and draw maps. The surveyors were Henry Morshead, Oliver Wheeler and Alexander Heron. The climbers were drawn from the ranks of the Alpine Club, which was desperate to get a man to the top. Harold Raeburn, a 56-year-old Scottish climber with an impressive record of guideless climbing, was appointed mountaineering leader, but proved to be prematurely aged and, struck down by illness, didn’t perform well. Then there was Alexander Kellas, who had huge Himalayan experience gained during his studies of high altitude, and Mallory. George Finch, another talented alpinist, was dislodged at the last minute by skulduggery within the committee, and so Mallory proposed his school-friend from Winchester, Guy Bullock, who had limited climbing experience. The team doctor was Sandy Wollaston.

  Of all the climbers, Alexander Kellas brought most experience to the expedition. Even contemporary climbers owe him a huge debt, as he discovered the techniques necessary to climb the mountain. In 2009 I filmed and climbed in an area of Sikkim north of Kanchenjunga that was his high-altitude testing ground. This politically sensitive mountainous region had not been visited by Westerners since Frank Smythe’s climbs there in the 1930s, and it was hard to reach. I had gone there to learn about Kellas’s work on human physiology at high altitudes.

  The ancient Greeks knew that the body would deteriorate at high altitude but it wasn’t understood why until the late 19th century, when it was realised that low levels of oxygen led to a condition known as hypoxia. Kellas spent the war at the Air Ministry, working with Professor J. B. S. Haldane on the high-altitude oxygen deprivation suffered by pilots who were flying higher and higher. Before that, he taught chemistry to medical students at Middlesex Hospital, combining laboratory experiments with tests on his own body while climbing high Himalayan peaks during the holidays.

  He made many first ascents, culminating in an ascent of Pauhunri at 7,128m (23,386ft), and by 1921 he had spent more time at 7,000m than anyone else on earth. He realised that hypoxia led first to loss of appetite, then to loss of weight, reduced brain function and ultimately death. Above a certain altitude the body deteriorates faster than its natural ability to restore itself. Journalists like to call this the ‘Death Zone’, and fix it at 8,000m (26,247ft), but really it is any height above which people cannot sustain permanent habitation, which is around 5,100m (16,728ft). Climbers deteriorate steadily above this height, but it becomes marked on their summit days above the 8,000m contour, when their lungs are drowning in fluid and their brains are swelling with cerebral oedema.

  Kellas’s achievements as a scientist and mountaineer were remarkable enough, but it was his discovery in this remote Sikkim valley that revolutionised the sport of Himalayan climbing, and it is one without which no modern Everest expedition would even be able to leave Base Camp. After being disappointed by a pair of hired Swiss guides in Sikkim in 1907 he came across an ethnic group called the Sherpas. He recognised their natural aptitude for mountaineering and noted: ‘They seemed more at home in diminished pressure.’

  I worked with Sherpas in the very same area that Kellas first employed them, and their ability is immediately apparent; not only are they sure-footed on steep ground, they are remarkably strong and almost always good-humoured individuals – all vital characteristics on long mountain trips. I noticed a few years ago during blood oxygen-level testing on Everest that the Sherpas on the expedition had much the same or lower O2 levels than the rest of us, and yet they were able to climb much faster. How could this be? Recent research into why Sherpas do so well at altitude suggests that instead of having more haemoglobin in their blood stream than lowlanders, they have more capillaries to distribute the blood. As this ethnic group has only moved to high altitudes within the last 10,000 years, this research suggests that human evolution is still taking place.

  The Sherpas might wonder why we lowlanders bother to come and join them at altitudes that are difficult for us. I asked Thendup Sherpa, our cook on the Sikkim expedition, why he thought Westerners came to the Himalayas: ‘To get famous,’ he instantly replied.

  There is a danger in lumping together a disparate group of individuals as ‘Sherpas’. It is rather like the wider imperial designation of ‘natives’. In a recent obituary in the Guardian, there was a reference to two European women killed in 1959 in a Himalayan avalanche with ‘their Sherpa’. Imagine obituaries of two Nepalese men climbing in the Lake District with ‘their Englishman’. As with any group that seems homogeneous, a little time spent in their company reveals their differing characters.

  Traditional Sherpa culture consisted of a few wealthy individuals employing a poor majority in work such as porterage or agriculture. In return
they expected their chief to remain loyal and protect them, rather in the manner of the Scottish clan system. The switch to European employers was acceptable to them when they saw the money and equipment being offered. What they gave in addition was a degree of loyalty, even unto death, that surprised the foreign climbers. On the other side of the deal there was also ready acceptance of the Sherpas by British climbers. In the Alps British climbers were used to employing local guides and porters, and the historian Simon Schama suggests that mountain conquests were ‘a victory of imperial confidence over timorous native superstition’.3 The rulers were demonstrating to the ruled the virtues deriving from their muscular modernity, and by such demonstration they were legitimising their power. The whole imperial structure of the British Raj rested upon the sepoys of the Indian Army – the Indian soldiers themselves – and when they revolted in the Indian Mutiny, or Great Sepoy Rebellion, of 1857, all the vicious insecurities of the imperialists, and the resentment of the ruled, came boiling to the surface.

  So Kellas dispensed with the usual mountain porters, and employed Sherpas instead. This collaboration was not, however, appreciated by everyone. When Kellas was being considered as a possible expedition leader in 1919, John Percy Farrar, the President of the Alpine Club, sneered:

  Now Kellas, besides being fifty, so far has never climbed a mountain, but has only walked about on steep snow with a lot of coolies, and the only time they got on a very steep place they all tumbled down and ought to have been killed!

  This is an absolute travesty, and shows that the elders of this particular tribe were considerably less tolerant of outsiders than the young bloods. In fact, Kellas was doing the kind of climbing that is currently much admired by members of the Alpine Club.