Last Hours on Everest

by Graham Hoyland

In a paper published in the Geographic Journal in 1917 Kellas wrote that in his opinion ‘a man in first-rate training, acclimatised to maximum possible altitude, could make the ascent of Mount Everest without adventitious aids, provided that the physical difficulties above 25,000 feet are not prohibitive’. By adventitious aids he means bottled oxygen. The advances made during the First World War in aircraft-engine design meant that pilots struggled to stay conscious at the higher altitudes being achieved, and there were greater losses of pilots as a result of hypoxia than enemy action. This led to the design of lightweight oxygen sets, which Kellas soon realised could be carried up high mountains. There soon followed a vigorous debate about this.

  History has shown that Kellas was right, in that the very strongest climbers can just reach the summit of Mount Everest without supplementary oxygen, providing the air pressure is not too low on that particular day. Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler did exactly that in May 1978, Habeler racing down from the summit to the South Col in just one hour, terrified by his fear of brain damage. Creationists might ponder the fact that the highest summit on earth is just achievable with the strongest pair of human lungs. However, I was very glad to sleep on oxygen just before my attempt, despite the fact that the actual climb was dogged by an intermittent supply. On the summit I found that it was perfectly possible to take off my mask and move about, although climbing would have been much harder without it.

  In 2007 I filmed a medical research expedition to Mount Everest that was trying to identify the genes that enable certain people to survive at high altitude while others deteriorate and suffer from hypoxia. We conducted the most comprehensive medical-expedition tests ever attempted at altitude, using over 200 subjects and taking arterial-blood samples near the summit. It was remarkable that the partial pressures measured in live climbers were so low that they had only previously been seen in corpses. In other words, you are not only dying on the summit – you are very nearly dead.

  Kellas had to suspend his mountain research during the First World War while he worked for the Air Ministry, and his letters reveal that he suffered a breakdown, possibly brought on by overwork. He experienced hallucinations and wrote that he heard malicious voices threatening death, speculating that a sensitive microphone could make these voices audible to others. This suggests that he believed they were real, and today he would be diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia.

  This condition is difficult to live with, and it may be that he felt more comfortable with Sherpas than with his colleagues. He had to resign from his post at the Middlesex, possibly because he was behaving oddly. In Sikkim he would remonstrate with the voices in his tent at night, but the Sherpas assumed that he was talking to the spirits of the dead and accorded him respect. After travelling in the area I am staggered that a man labouring under such a disability could have achieved so much with such slender means.

  His Himalayan record won him a place on the 1921 expedition. He was 53, with more high-altitude experience than anyone alive and he knew the effects of altitude on the body. Furthermore, he had good relations with the Sherpas. He was given the job of designing and testing oxygen equipment for the expedition. He had carried out oxygen trials at altitude during the previous climbing season but had concluded that the cylinders were ‘too heavy for use above 18,000 feet, and below that altitude were not required’. In the end the equipment was simply too heavy to use that year.

  Sandy Wollaston was another interesting character. He had led two expeditions to New Guinea, very nearly getting to the top of Carstensz Pyramid – now considered one of the Seven Summits – in 1913. He was only 500ft from the top, which must have been infuriating, particularly after his lengthy disputes with the Dutch authorities, followed by the difficulties of penetrating dense forest. He, too, was a keen botaniser, and like Howard-Bury he discovered a new primula on the 1921 trip. It was subsequently named after him as Wollaston’s Primrose, Primula wollastonii. Like several others on that expedition he was to meet a violent end. After Everest he was invited to be a tutor at Cambridge by John Maynard Keynes, but he was murdered in his rooms in 1930 by Douglas Potts, a deranged student who first shot Wollaston and then a police officer, before turning the gun on himself.

  The individual members of the 1921 Everest reconnaissance expedition made their own separate ways to India, and over a period of a few weeks in April and May they assembled in Darjeeling. By the time they were ready to leave, there was already discord in the party. Howard-Bury, the Tory, and Raeburn, who was rather insecure in his role as climbing leader, clearly didn’t get on. Mallory, who could be a charming man, tried to smooth things between them.

  To avoid difficulties with accommodation on the long march, the 1921 Everest reconnaissance expedition set off in two groups on 18 and 19 May through Sikkim, heading for Mount Everest. However, Kellas was weakened by his recent expedition around Kangchenjunga, where he was trying to get further pictures of the approaches to Mount Everest, and soon contracted dysentery. On 5 June he insisted that his countrymen went on ahead, possibly as he did not want them to witness his misery. He died as he was carried over the pass by his Sherpas into Khampa Dzong.

  The official cause of death was heart failure, as it often is in the last stages of dysentery, but this was possibly to avoid embarrassment to his family. The other members of the expedition were appalled at this disaster. Mallory was mortified: ‘He died without one of us anywhere near him.’

  They buried him in a place looking south over the border into Sikkim at the great mountains he had climbed. Mallory described the scene:

  It was an extraordinarily affecting little ceremony burying Kellas on a stony hillside … I shan’t easily forget the four boys, his own trained mountain men, children of nature, seated in wonder on a great stone near the grave while Bury read out the passage from Corinthians.4

  We now commit his mortal body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  The very next day the expedition caught the first sight of the summit of Mount Everest, although it was still over 100 miles and many days march away. George Mallory’s description of that first view enchanted me as a schoolboy:

  It may seem an irony of fate that actually on the day after the distressing event of Dr. Kellas’s death we experienced the strange elation of seeing Everest for the first time … It was a prodigious white fang excrescent from the jaw of the world. We saw Mount Everest not quite sharply defined on account of a slight haze in that direction; this circumstance added a touch of mystery and grandeur; we were satisfied that the highest of mountains would not disappoint us.5

  Now Raeburn was not feeling too well either, after contracting dysentery, and then twice being rolled on by his mule, and then twice kicked in the head. The doctor Wollaston, no doubt made anxious by Kellas’s death, advised that he should return to Sikkim. I suspect Howard-Bury was privately relieved, but now the expedition had lost the only two climbers who knew anything about Himalayan mountaineering. After a long, gruelling trek across the Tibetan plateau the men of the 1921 reconnaissance were at last rewarded with their first view of the Rongbuk valley.

  I have spent many long months there and to me it now feels like a home from home, although at first the air seems thin and the sun painfully bright. The sky is electric blue and the surrounding hills are rusty brown. At the head of the valley stands the great three-sided pyramid of their quest. Now they were closer and the whole mountain was going to be revealed. Mallory’s description reads like a monstrous strip-tease:

  We caught a gleam of snow behind the grey mists. A whole group of mountains began to appear in gigantic fragments. Mountain shapes are often fantastic seen through a mist; these were like the wildest creation of a dream. A preposterous triangular lump rose out of the depths; its edge came leaping up at an angle of about 70 degrees and ended nowhere. To the left a black serrated crest was hanging in the sky incredibly. Gradually, very gradually, we saw the great mountain sides and glaciers and arêtes, now one fragm
ent and now another through the floating rifts, until far higher in the sky than imagination had dared to suggest the white summit of Everest appeared. And in this series of partial glimpses we had seen a whole; we were able to piece together the fragments, to interpret the dream.6

  Wheeler, a tenacious and highly skilled surveyor, was using a new photographic survey technique and he did a remarkable job. He would eventually become Surveyor-General of India and be knighted for his cartographical work in the Second World War. Along with Morshead he filled in a huge blank on the map around the mountain. Meanwhile, Mallory and Bullock undertook a close-up reconnaissance of the peak. They covered hundreds of miles and took scores of photographs from minor peaks around Everest. However, Mallory had put the glass plates in the camera the wrong way around and had to repeat many of his shots. He clearly had little mechanical aptitude.

  Mallory and Bullock climbed up to the watershed between Tibet and Nepal, and peered down on to a vast icefall tumbling down a great, silent, icy valley. Mallory named it the ‘Western Cwm’, an echo of the Pen-y-Pass days in Snowdonia. This would be the way that the successful British expedition of 1953 would eventually go, but to him Nepal was still a forbidden country. It must have been so exciting, with the feeling of elation one has when going well in the mountains. Bullock, however, was beginning to feel unhappy about Mallory’s attitude to safety. His widow, writing many years later, reported:

  My husband considered Mallory ready to take unwarranted risks with still untrained porters in traversing dangerous ice. At least on one occasion he refused to take his rope of porters over the route proposed by Mallory. Mallory was not pleased. He did not support a critical difference of opinion readily.7

  This is a foretaste of the dreadful accident of 1922, when seven inexperienced porters were killed, and of the accident in 1924, when the novice Irvine was involved. As a climber I would suggest that Mallory perhaps did not know how good he was, and it should be noted that as a schoolmaster his manner of teaching was to assume equality with his pupils. This might have led to a climbing style that did not take the ability of the novices into consideration, an important point that bears on the solution to our mystery.

  On the plus side theirs was a good effort, considering the climbing party had lost Raeburn and Kellas. It might have gone down in climbing history as the most effective mountain reconnaissance ever undertaken, but Mallory and Bullock have been criticised by historians for their failure to spot that the outlet of the East Rongbuk glacier would provide a direct route up to the foot of the North Col. This is a swooping saddle that connects the North Ridge to Changtse, Everest’s neighbour to the north, and seemed to be the key to their attempts to climb the mountain from the north.

  In Into the Silence Wade Davis levels a serious accusation at George Mallory. He points out that the surveyor Wheeler had already found the crucial East Rongbuk glacier, and had sent a rough map to Howard-Bury. But Mallory suggests in the official account that it was he who found the key to the mountain by his approach from the Kharta valley, and even ‘spun the story’ to his wife Ruth in his letters home. At the very least Mallory did not give a fair acknowledgement of Wheeler’s contribution, and if Davis is right it certainly is a black mark against his name.

  From personal experience I know that people are very quick to claim all the credit on Everest expeditions. The stakes are high, and one’s better instincts are sometimes overcome by competition and bitterness. However, the historians are wrong if they think the East Rongbuk route is obvious. I was with a young climber in 2004 who had read the literature and attended the briefing at Base Camp given by the leader, who carefully explained the route the team should follow the next day. The next day I hiked up the Rongbuk valley and turned left as usual up the small glacial outflow of the East Rongbuk valley, which is a small breach in the great east wall of the main valley. I rested that evening at an interim camp. There was no sign of our youngster and we all became worried. As night fell we mounted a search party, and retraced our steps. Then came the radio call from a group of Russian climbers camped below the North Face: ‘Have you lost a climber? We have him here.’

  He appeared the next day, shamefaced. Determined to get up the mountain first he had marched straight up the Rongbuk valley, just as Mallory had done, bypassing the small river that seems too small to drain the North Col basin. He had eventually come up against Everest’s huge North Face. These things are only too easy to do.

  Incidentally, this route up to Advanced Base Camp is a gruelling start to the expedition. After the turn, one walks past the dry-stone walls that still remain from the British 1920s expeditions’ Camp I. There is a hurried traverse under the dangerously crumbling orange rocks of the cliffs above, then on to the glacier itself through the extraordinary ice sharks’-fins that alpinists call penitentes. These were up to 100ft high in 1990 when I first saw them, but now they have melted to around 60ft. The classically educated Norton called the next section the ‘Via Dolorosa’, after Christ’s route through Old Jerusalem, which is somewhat less steep and icy – and where you find another kind of penitent. After this comes a view of Kellas Peak, which the members of that 1921 reconnaissance named in honour of the extraordinary man who holds the unenviable record of being the first to die on an Everest expedition.

  The 1921 reconnaissance expedition found that the North Col was indeed the key to climbing the mountain, providing both some shelter from the westerly winds and a ridge route attractive to that early generation of climbers. It is still used by the vast majority of climbers who approach from the north side of the mountain. Although the expedition was now well into the monsoon, and therefore too late for a realistic attempt on the summit because of heavy snowfall, they pushed a team of climbers and porters over a high pass and got Mallory and Bullock up to the top of the North Col at 23,000ft (7,010 m).

  It is wonderful place, a giant hammock of snow and ice, with the vast wall of Everest’s North Face rising up behind. The route to the top looks deceptively easy, but in fact foreshortening disguises the fact that the summit is a terribly long way off.

  As regards personal relations it was an unhappy little expedition, with almost a curse laid upon it in the same way that Tutankhamun’s tomb, opened two years later, was supposed to be cursed. Each one of the members seemed to dislike someone else. Kellas was the first to die, then Raeburn had a mental collapse on his return home and died shortly afterwards, thinking he had somehow murdered Kellas. Morshead was murdered in Burma in strange circumstances in 1931, and, as we have seen, Wollaston was murdered by a student in his rooms in Cambridge in 1930. And then Mallory was to die violently on the mountain in 1924.

  6

  The Expedition of 1922

  The 1921 expedition established that there was a route to the top, and Mallory had not only performed his reconnaissance with Bullock, he had also taken the first steps on the mountain proper. Moreover, thousands of square miles of uncharted territory around Everest had been mapped by the surveyors. It was a hugely impressive achievement, and preparations raced ahead so that a serious attempt could be made the very next spring. This time they planned to arrive on the mountain well before the monsoon.

  To his delight Somervell was informed that he had been chosen by General Bruce for the next expedition, probably because of his recent tally of Alpine routes. It was also a cunning ruse on Bruce’s part to increase the number of strong climbers, while appearing to recruit a doctor. I am sure they felt an extra doctor wouldn’t go amiss, considering Kellas’s fate the previous year. Somervell would have to pay his way to Darjeeling, but from there all costs would be met by the organisers. He replied that as his salary from University College Hospital, London, was £150 a year he would indeed be able to pay his way. He would even contribute something to the expedition by the sale of paintings of the mountain.

  Somervell’s father William had himself been a painter, and he encouraged his son from early on. Howard had only exhibited nine works to date, but he was al
ready showing great talent – and great self-confidence and he wasn’t too impressed by rank. His son David, who was doctor to Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales, remembered his father having a meal with Prince Philip, who enquired after dessert, ‘Do you fancy coming back to my place for a drink?’ He meant Buckingham Palace, the residence of the British monarch. Somervell thought for a moment, and then shook his head. ‘Sorry, no. I promised my wife I’d be back early tonight.’

  (I had my own Royal encounter when I did a lecture at Ludgrove, the prep school attended by Princes William and Harry. My cousin Philip was their English teacher, and when he greeted me at the door I heard some rustling noises in the shrubbery. ‘What’s that?’ I asked. ‘Oh, the bodyguards, I suppose.’ At the end of my talk I gestured to the pile of oxygen equipment and climbing gear in front of me: ‘and if any boy would like to come and try on any of this …’ There was a stampede of small boys to the front, led by Prince Harry, who started wielding an ice axe. I noticed that William, the future King, remained sitting soberly in the dark.)

  Somervell was fairly comfortable in any social situation, which was normal for an upper-middle-class Englishman of his time. He also had a good eye for a practical joke. At Cambridge in 1911 he and two other undergraduates organised a spoof Futurist exhibition and then secretly painted suitably modernist art works. They then booked a hall and invited the London critics. The bait was taken, and the critics swooned. But, having satirised modern art, Somervell later took it up. His painting style was a sort of muscular cubism, with very well-drawn mountains, although he wasn’t as abstract as Picasso or Braque, the pioneers of the movement. Historian David Seddon considers that ‘probably no other artist applied cubism to the high mountains in such a consistent and authoritative way as Somervell’. And Somervell himself said: