Last Hours on Everest

by Graham Hoyland

  Dear Noel, We’ll probably start early tomorrow (8th) in order to have clear weather. It won’t be too early to start looking for us either crossing the rock band or going up skyline at 8:00 p.m. Yours ever, G. Mallory

  Most authorities accept the ‘8:00 p.m.’ as a mistake for ‘8:00 a.m.’ Although this note has been quoted many times, no one seems to have questioned why Noel, although equipped with a powerful lens at Camp III, did not see the pair climbing that day. We are therefore reliant on evidence of artefacts taken from Mallory’s body, and those unearthed at Camp VI by the 2001 search team, to guess what happened next.

  None of the early British expedition summit attempts began before sunrise at 4:45am. In fact 5:30am was the earliest that anyone set off, and Norton and Somervell, leaving from the very same tent a few days earlier, left at 6:40am, having been delayed by a leaking vacuum flask. They lost an hour melting snow to replace the water. This, by modern standards, is dangerously late. Modern-day climbers start leaving their tents well before midnight, and my colleagues on an expedition in 2011 on the same route left at 10:00pm from a higher camp.

  In another note, this time to Odell, Mallory said that they would ‘probably go on two cylinders – but it’s a bloody load for climbing. Perfect weather for the job. Yours ever, G. Mallory.’

  There are three points here. First, if they did take only two cylinders, they were not going to have sufficient capacity to get to the summit and back safely. Second, three cylinders would have been an even bloodier load. And third, it was not going to be perfect weather for the job, as we have already clearly seen.

  The sun rose at 4:45am. A candle-lantern and electric torch were found in their tent, so they had not left during the hours of darkness. At the earliest they would have left at 5:30am, by which time most modern-day climbers would be approaching the summit. They were already far too late.

  We know what cooking stove they had, the one left in the camp by Norton and Somervell: a Meta solid-fuel burner. Oddly enough, I was given one of these by my grandmother in the 1960s and they were utterly useless. Using solid fuel, they took an age to bring a cupful of water to the boil, even at sea level. Trying to melt snow or ice to give them enough liquid to avoid dehydration would have been a lengthy process, even if they could supplement it with water from a Thermos flask. Imagine attempting to unfreeze two pairs of giant leather boots at the same time, crouched in a cramped tent. Our modern butane–propane gas stoves are far more effective.

  We even know how the stove would have been lit, as a box of Bryant and May’s Swan Vestas matches was discovered on Mallory’s body. And the loose tea leaves were found stored in an Army & Navy Stores tin that had originally contained acid drops.

  At Camp IV on the North Col their last breakfast had been cooked by Odell and Hazard: fried sardines, biscuits, tea and hot chocolate. It is unlikely anything so lavish would have been prepared at Camp VI. I ate a bar of chocolate just before crawling out of the tent for my own summit attempt, and I wasn’t hungry. They may have had a little lukewarm tea, and perhaps biscuits or chocolate.

  We know exactly what Mallory was wearing, and how his clothing would perform in the prevailing weather. We know that the suit would feel rather less cumbersome than today’s down suits, and with no hood he would have had rather better peripheral vision. We also know what he was carrying: a thin 9mm white cotton rope, with a red tracer thread, and an extraordinary collection of junk in his pockets: a pair of nail scissors with a leather holster, a pencil, a tin of Brand & Co. Savoury Meat Lozenges (similar to modern-day stock cubes), and a selection of letters and bills. He had remembered sun goggles and petroleum jelly, but we know that he had forgotten to take his compass with him. As he set off from the camp his boots would have felt lighter and less cumbersome than today’s better-insulated versions. Irvine’s clothing was broadly similar, except that he had sewn zip fasteners into the pockets of his jacket. These were the latest thing in 1924, and might help future researchers to identify his remains.

  The next we know of them is the mitten found in 2001 by Jake Norton on the exit from the rock band, which suggests they were using much the same route as present-day climbers. It might have been dropped on the way up or the way down. They then took the crest of the ridge to a point 600ft short of the First Step, where they left us their next clue: the empty oxygen cylinder spotted by Eric Simonson. This suggests that they took around four hours to get from Camp VI at 26,700ft (8,140m) to this point on the ridge at 27,800ft (8,475m). So they were already running slower and later than hoped. What took place over the next couple of hours is unclear. Believers in a successful summit attempt like to think Odell saw them on the Third Step at 12:50pm, but as I have suggested, this sighting seems unreliable.

  They might have looked at the Second Step; they might have taken the Norton–Somervell traverse. I have explained why Mallory is unlikely to have risked attempting the Second Step with no belay and an inexperienced second man.

  But what we do know for sure is that a storm started at around 2:00pm and, with the new evidence from the barometric readings, we can be confident in stating that the air pressure was as low as during the 1996 storm. It was not a minor, localised storm, as the optimists contend. I suggest that this shows that further upwards progress was going to be very difficult, and that a successful summit climb is extremely unlikely. From the ice-axe evidence it looks as though Mallory and Irvine descended the way they had come, a logical thing to do in poor visibility.

  I think the pair reached the slippery slabs of the ice-axe site, that the slabs were covered with fresh snow, and that Mallory slipped and fell. Experienced climbers know that the descent is the most common time for this sort of accident to occur; exhaustion and hypothermia are setting in, concentration has been lost as a result of a false sense of security and, because of the slope, you cannot see your next step as clearly as you can on the ascent.

  After Mallory fell, Irvine dropped his axe to grab the rope, but was pulled off in a similar way as occurred in the John Hoyland accident. I think they then fell together in the curious, alternating fall that is often the fate of roped men: one falls, pulling off the other. The first slows down briefly, only to be pulled off again by the continuing fall of the second. And so on and on. What we do know is that the thin rope snapped near Mallory and that he sustained severe bruising, which needed 20 minutes to one hour of continued circulation to form.

  His injuries are not consistent with one continual fall down to the place where his body was found; his bruises needed time to form, and his body does not appear to be in line with a fall from the ice-axe site. It seems, therefore, that he picked himself up and staggered onwards towards Camp VI, only 900ft (275m) away. Blood stains on the left cuff of his blue and white flannel shirt suggest that he may have wiped a bleeding injury, then fell for a second, fatal time.

  Now, this is all of course supposition, but it seems consistent with the tangible evidence that we have looked at, and with the experience others have had in the same place. I now think that Mallory and Irvine didn’t get much higher than Norton and Somervell, and that they died in a double fall off the boiler-plate slabs.

  It’s very hard to prove a negative – that the pair didn’t get to the top, but Occam’s Razor demands that the more simple theory (that Mallory and Irvine fell off and died before reaching the summit) trumps the more complex theory (that they somehow reached the summit, beating the lack of oxygen, the dangerously low air pressure and their marginal clothing).

  When I digested the results from my clothing, weather and route researches, I reluctantly had to change an opinion I had held for some 30 years. If these facts and figures were true, and if the 1924 blizzard was as serious as that of 1996, I’m afraid that in my opinion there is no way in which Mallory and Irvine, confronting the Second Step in their marginal clothing, could have reached the summit of Mount Everest on that fatal day.

  For years I was a believer. I tried to prove that Mallory and Irvine had climbed
the mountain, and I was driven by a romantic notion of what was due to them. When I found that Mallory’s clothing was adequate for the job in good weather I was delighted.

  But writing this book made me assemble and weigh the evidence dispassionately. You have to change your mind when confronted with new evidence, and a slowly growing realisation that Mallory and Irvine had too much against them was buttressed by the new weather data. Wishful thinking can only take you so far. It was difficult to let go of a faith that had sustained me for so many dangerous and uncomfortable expeditions, but I could see no other choice. So I am now quite sure that Hillary and Tenzing were the first to climb Mount Everest, and that Mallory and Irvine could not have succeeded.

  Every May I pray that someone will find Irvine and the camera to prove me wrong. For now, though, in this matter I am an atheist. It was hard to give up the faith of a lifetime, but I feel better by acknowledging the truth of the evidence, and I feel even more admiration for those two pioneers. My failed quest to find Somervell’s camera and prove Mallory’s success was not a huge disappointment. I now realise I was seeking something else: a purpose to my life. That enlightenment might not have come had I been successful.

  I have been on a trajectory of belief. A suggestion fell on fertile ground in my childhood, and I found the idea motivating and a focus for my energies. I strove to prove the suggestion true in the face of increasing evidence against it, but in the end I have had to give up and admit that I was wrong. My grandfather Jack and Uncle Hunch believed in the existence of a perfect God – and I tried to believe in the perfect adventure story.

  Postscript: Goodbye to Everest

  What do you do after you’ve climbed Mount Everest? For most climbers it seems to mark a turning point in their lives, a point when things get better. Some use it to further their careers. Few relax. Edmund Hillary drove Ferguson tractors to the South Pole on one expedition after Everest. Bill Tilman, leader of the 1938 Everest expedition, took up sailing in his 50s.

  Somervell decided that his life’s work lay among the poor of India. He operated on thousands of people in his hospital at Neyyoor, and it is interesting to see what the most common cases were. The first was, unexpectedly, duodenal ulcer. He wrote:

  This is an agonising condition, which if not treated properly leads to continual vomiting and gradual starvation. Every meal, though it removes the pain for an hour or so, is followed with awful regularity by intense pain that lasts until something else is eaten.

  Duodenal ulcers used to be treated by the local quack doctors by the application of red-hot branding irons to the stomach, which caused more agony and extensive scarring. Somervell started operating for the condition, cutting the anterior vagus nerve to the stomach, which reduced the flow of acid. It became known as the ‘Somervell operation’, and he performed it 2,500 times in ten years, usually watched by an audience of relatives of the patient from a gallery at the end of the operating theatre.

  Although this relieved much suffering, Somervell would be amazed to learn that all along it was being caused by a bacterium. Australian scientist Barry Marshall suspected that most stomach ulcers were caused by Helicobacter pylori and not by the eating of spicy food, as previously thought. To prove this he drank a Petri dish full of the organisms and developed symptoms. His wife complained of his bad breath, but he won a Nobel Prize for the discovery. Suitable antibiotics would not have been available to Somervell, but it is interesting that one can labour over a problem for a lifetime and have the hidden answer in your hands the whole time. This is what happened to me with the Mallory mystery and the meteorological readings. And Sherlock Holmes was strangely blind to fingerprints.

  What happened to our cast of characters?

  After retiring to England from India, Howard Somervell became the Alpine Club president from 1961 to 1964. A pacifist all his life he died in 1975, aged 85, and was buried in his beloved Lake District.

  Gandhi, a rather more famous pacifist, came to a violent end in 1948 when, on his way to address a prayer meeting, he was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist.

  Jack Hoyland, his disciple, died at home in 1957, his arm held out and his hand clasped in the hand of Jesus Christ. He firmly believed that he would meet Billy, his favourite dog, in heaven.

  Ruth Mallory brought up her three children on her own for a while, but eventually re-married. Unfortunately her new happiness did not last long, and she died of cancer in 1942. Her daughter Clare married an American climber who was killed in a climbing accident, and so, like her mother, she was widowed by mountaineering, and left with three children to bring up alone.

  George Finch became Professor of Chemistry at Imperial College, London, and gave up climbing after an accident in the Alps in 1931 killed three fellow-climbers. He took up sailing instead.

  In 2007 I finally came to grief on Mount Everest. I went back to the southern, Nepali side of the mountain to make a BBC Horizon film about a group of doctors studying hypoxia. The subject interested me, as I had often wondered over the years why some individuals did so much better at altitude than others. I was also interested in the physical changes to the mountain itself. Here is my diary entry for 21 April:

  In the 21 years I’ve been coming to Mount Everest I’ve never seen the mountain looking so dangerous. The reason is the notorious Icefall. In the 1950 reconnaissance expedition Bill Tilman pronounced this obstacle unjustifiably dangerous, but since then thousands of ascents have been made through it, and this year we continue. It is the only way up the mountain from the Nepali side. Two days ago we in the climbing team climbed through the Icefall to spend a night at Camp I, and so we were able to reacquaint ourselves with this great natural feature.

  The fact is that it has changed. The Icefall is a great frozen river pouring over a cliff. In the past it seemed to break off in great slices that were relatively easy to climb. Now, perhaps due to less precipitation, it seems to have collapsed in on itself so that the break point occurs further up the valley, and the great slices of ice seem to have fragmented.

  As a climb it is full of interest. You start from your tent at Base Camp and put your crampons on as soon as the bare ice starts. Then, puffing hard in the thin air, you start climbing up and down the frozen waves of ice. You skirt round little ponds and haul yourself up icy crests. Soon you are hopping over crevasses in the ice, and then you will encounter your first ladders. Balancing over three ladders tied together across a bottomless crevasse is a nerve-wracking experience. Then the fixed ropes start. These are woven up the Icefall by a group of Sherpas, the ‘Ice Doctors’. They are thin white ropes attached to the ice by stakes and ice screws, and the idea is to clip yourself in as a sort of extreme stair-rail. If you fall off the ladder they might just hold you. After the three ladders there is a collapsed section of ice we’re calling Popcorn Alley, because the metre-wide blocks do look like a vast popcorn spillage down some giant staircase. It is very hard to find something solid to stand on in here. After this is The Hammer, a 50-tonne beam of cracked ice bridged across the route. As you try to rush under this you try not to think that one day soon it is going to fall. Unfortunately some joker has put a knot in the fixed rope right under the Hammer so you come to a twanging halt and have to unclip, then re-clip on the other side of the knot.

  After this comes Happy Valley, a collapsed section of such terrifying insecurity you only dare whisper to your companion for fear of dislodging the tottering blocks around you. Some are extraordinarily like blocks of ice cream, except that they are the size of a house. Other parts of the ice are exactly like a Fox’s Glacier Mint: hard and transparent.

  Climbing as quickly as we could in air that contained only half the amount of oxygen at sea level we eventually came up to the Great Slices: the top of the Icefall. Here we relaxed a bit, but Camp I was still hours away. Base Camp radioed a warning of bad weather, so we pulled extra clothes on and climbed up into a snowstorm.

  As we got out of the Icefall the terrain flattened out and we entered t
he Western Cwm, the huge valley under the peak of Everest. As we trudged along in the whirling snow I thought about my brother Denys, who is sailing around the Isle of Skye this week. I wished I was with him. Eventually ten tents loomed through the mist and we threw our gear into one of them. We dragged food out of the store tent and started melting ice to drink. One by one the rest of the climbing team came in to camp after us. After my worst night for years (the mats were hard and my sleeping bag soaked), we descended back to Base Camp. Running as fast as we could we got down in two and a half hours – half the time it took to come up. The Icefall is not a place in which to linger.

  After this first climb I had an accident and had to be helicoptered off the mountain. I’d caught a virus at Base Camp after the person demonstrating the masks forgot to tell us he had a cold. I felt awful, but when we in the production team heard of a rescue going on further up the mountain I headed up the mountain instead of down, as I had to film what was going on. The pressures on programme-makers often lead to bad decisions like this. I climbed alone through the Icefall once again, then plodded up to Camp II through the wonderful silence of the Western Cwm and promptly collapsed from exhaustion when I arrived mid-afternoon.

  Next morning I was just able to film the arrival of Usha Bista, the 22-year-old Nepali girl climber who had been found unconscious and alone at the Balcony. An old friend from my Mallory expedition, Dave Hahn, had discovered her after returning from his own successful summit attempt. Despite his weariness he gave her dexamethasone, a steroid that alleviates cerebral oedema, more oxygen, and organised her rescue. Members of our own expedition took over her medical care and looked after her evacuation. When I saw her she had some frostbite to fingers and toes, but what was upsetting was her rage at having been left to die by her teammates. We are very used to hearing stories about Western climbers walking past dying colleagues, but this was an all-Nepali expedition.