by Wade Davis
CHARLES BRUCE, by chance, was in London on leave in late 1906 just as events came to a head on the first serious proposal for an attempt on the mountain. The Alpine Club had enthusiastically embraced Lord Curzon’s Everest initiative but had authorized a meager £100 toward its support. Curzon had suggested a budget of £6,000, half of which might be provided by the government of India. Upon hearing of the shortfall, an affluent member of the Alpine Club, the publisher A. L. Mumm, offered to make up the difference, provided he was allowed to become a member of the expeditionary party. The tradition of wealthy individuals purchasing a place on Everest climbs began from the inception of the dream.
But Mumm was not simply a wealthy patron. He was a real climber and an entrepreneur who in a very modern sense grasped the symbolic power and economic potential of the mountain. He was the owner of Edward Arnold & Co., the literary firm that would publish all the seminal early works on Everest, including the official reports of the 1921, 1922, and 1924 expeditions, and the subsequent personal accounts of several of the climbers. In 1907 he saw an assault on the mountain as a proper and honorable way of celebrating the Golden Jubilee of the Alpine Club, which had been founded in 1857. The first party on Everest was to be Mumm himself, he hoped, accompanied by the highly regarded British climber Tom Longstaff, a team of Swiss guides, and Charles Bruce with nine of his Gurkha soldiers in support.
The immediate problem lay in access. Nepal was out. Despite Lord Curzon’s efforts the maharaja would not budge, and British political interests recoiled against too severe a push. The only other route of approach lay through Tibet, across the very passes traversed by the Younghusband Mission. Sir George Goldie, president of the Royal Geographical Society, endorsed the campaign, and hopes ran high when Lord Minto, another climber and a member of the Alpine Club, was selected to succeed Curzon as viceroy in 1905.
Unfortunately for the Everest initiative, the Liberal government that came to power in 1905 sought to distance itself as far as possible from both the aggressive forward policies of Curzon and the legacy of the Younghusband Mission, which it viewed as an embarrassing and futile imperial folly. The point person for the government was the secretary of state for India, John Morley, an austere, joyless, empty shirt of a man known to his own cabinet colleagues as “Aunt Priscilla” or, with equal affection, the “petulant spinster.” Reluctant to do anything that might offend the Chinese or the Russians, particularly in the wake of the signing of the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention, Morley decided to forbid all nonessential travel to Tibet, which in his mind most assuredly included mountaineering expeditions. When Goldie, on January 23, 1907, wrote on behalf of both the Alpine Club and the RGS to seek cooperation from the government of India for a climbing party to enter Tibet, Morley categorically withheld consent, citing issues of national interest and security.
Morley’s stubborn refusal to cooperate provoked public scorn. At a general meeting of the Alpine Club on March 3, 1908, Curzon, an honorary member, was called upon to address the government’s recalcitrance. His scathing criticism of Morley was followed by acid remarks by Douglas Freshfield. “With regard to Dr. Longstaff’s expedition, Lord Curzon and I stood to it somewhat in the position of godfathers; he, as Viceroy, started the idea, and I found the men. At the last moment, however, as so often happens in stories, there appeared a malignant fairy who was not invited to the christening. His Majesty’s government discovered reasons why no British expedition could be allowed to approach Mount Everest. It is not a little vexatious to see a Swede, Dr. Sven Hedin, even though he is one of our honorary members, wandering at will in territory forbidden to Englishmen.”
In truth, the government of India had far greater concerns than a mountain climb in Tibet, even of Everest. Not the least of these was a full-out Chinese military invasion of Tibet, under way by 1908, orchestrated by a murderous warlord and prompted by the power vacuum created in Lhasa by Younghusband’s destruction of the Tibetan army and subsequent and immediate abandonment of the country. Such geopolitical realities, oddly disregarded by Curzon, mattered little to most members of the Alpine Club, whose interest in getting to the top of Everest was heightened only by the failure of Britain to win the race to either pole.
In 1908 Bruce made another attempt to secure permission to attack the mountain through Nepal. A year later the Duke of Abruzzi tried unsuccessfully as an Italian to obtain permission for an approach through Tibet. In October 1911 Curzon once again, and to no avail, sought the intervention of the maharaja of Nepal. Two years later Cecil Rawling and Tom Longstaff secured the formal backing of both the RGS and the Alpine Club for a major two-year effort, an initial exploration and reconnaissance to be followed by a second climbing expedition, during which the mountain would be assaulted. The team would include, as naturalist, A. F. R. Wollaston, with whom Rawling had traveled in New Guinea, as well as Henry Morshead of the Survey of India, who had explored the lower reaches of the Tsangpo Gorge with F. M. Bailey, who, in turn, had been with Rawling on the survey expedition to the headwaters of the Brahmaputra. Also included in the roster were two remarkable men, one a medical scholar, Dr. Alexander Kellas, the other a maverick visual artist, a photographer and filmmaker with a flair for the dramatic, army subaltern John Noel. The expedition was scheduled for 1915, with the attempt on the summit to occur the following season, in what turned out to be the summer of the Somme. Needless to say, the proposal, never endorsed by the government of India, was overtaken by events.
IN THE ABSENCE of any immediate possibility of a legally sanctioned expedition to Tibet, the challenge of Everest, in what would turn out to be the last months of peace, was taken up by Kellas and Noel. Both were prepared to slip alone into the mountains, Kellas with the invisibility that comes to those for whom recognition and fame mean little, Noel with a cloak of intrigue carefully cultivated to enhance his personal narrative. Noel was stopped short of his goal, but still managed to get to within forty miles of the mountain, closer than Rawling, Ryder, or Younghusband himself. Kellas was never seen by anyone, and no one knew precisely where he had gone, or how he managed to achieve what he did. He came back with photographs composed in the Kama Valley on the eastern approaches to the mountain, images taken within ten miles of the glaciers that guard the Kangshung Face. One of these men would die, quietly, without fanfare, on the first expedition to Everest, in 1921. The other would outlive every other participant in the saga of 1921–24, and through his work leave a legacy that would forever seed the challenge of Everest in the public mind.
Alexander Kellas was born in Aberdeen in 1868 and as a young boy came of age rambling alone over the summits of Ben Macdhui and the blue ridges and mountains of the Cairngorms in the Grampian Range of central Scotland. A wanderer perpetually drawn to the unknown, he had by 1913 spent more time at extreme altitude than any man alive. What made him unique was the lens through which he experienced the world. He had no interest in records or first ascents. A solitary scholar, he considered himself less a climber than a scientist who frequently found himself on the summits of mountains. Trained at Edinburgh, University College London, and Heidelberg, he served as lecturer in chemistry at Middlesex Hospital Medical School from 1900 till 1919. His specialty was human physiology and the effect of altitude on the body. His classroom was in London, but his research laboratory lay on the highest flanks of the Himalaya. Between 1907 and 1921, with a hiatus for the war, he embarked on eight major expeditions to Asia, almost always traveling alone, save for a small party of dedicated Nepalese porters. In 1910 he spent four months in the field, rarely below 14,000 feet, and in a single season climbed no fewer than nine peaks 20,000 feet or higher. Kellas was the first to reach the summits of Chomiomo (22,430 feet), Pauhunri (23,186 feet), and Kanchenjhau (22,700 feet), all dramatic mountains marking the Sikkim-Tibet frontier. He did not simply climb these peaks; he traversed them, heading up one unknown face or ridge only to descend by yet another route never before trampled by a mountaineer. For a slight, modest little man, with spect
acles and an academic’s stoop to his back, it was no mean achievement.
Kellas’s research had a direct bearing on the prospects of any assault on Everest. It had been long known through experience in the Alps that at altitude climbers could become severely debilitated, incapacitated to the point of death. The symptoms of mountain sickness were well known: malaise; cyanosis, or the bluing of the extremities; lassitude; loss of memory and mental acuity; nausea; loss of appetite; and acute, paralyzing headaches. It was also recognized that the syndrome affected different people at different times and in different ways. Though it was evident that local people suffered less, there was no certain correlation between fitness and strength and resistance to the affliction. There was no specific elevation beyond which the body succumbed. The botanist Joseph Hooker, one of the preeminent scientists of the nineteenth century, described the ailment in simple but graphic terms. Above 14,000 feet, he wrote, it was as if he had “a pound of lead on each knee cap, two pounds in the pit of the stomach, and a hoop of iron around the head.”
For centuries, causation remained a mystery. The Jesuits who reached the Himalaya in the 1600s blamed poisonous weeds, strange minerals, a miasma of gases seeping from the earth. Others claimed that the syndrome was merely the result of indigestion from bad food, a disorientation sparked by electrical disturbances from lightning, or the psychic effects of nervous tension and stress, an affliction said to be common among cardplayers and miners in the gold towns of the American West. Astonishingly, it was not until 1878 that the actual culprit was identified: a lack of oxygen due to reduced atmospheric pressure at altitude. Despite this discovery, wild theories continued to gain notice. Some claimed the ailment was caused by the intensity of the sun’s rays. Others at the RGS and Alpine Club laid the blame on stagnant air inhaled by climbers as they traversed hollows and draws, away from ridgelines invigorated by the wind.
Kellas, by contrast, was the voice of scientific reason, drawing his conclusions from precise calculations based on empirical measurements and observations. Fatigue, cold, inadequate sleep, and diet, he argued, were contributing factors, but without doubt mountain sickness was precipitated by oxygen deprivation. The body through respiration draws air into the lungs twelve to eighteen times per minute. Air is basically oxygen and nitrogen. Pure nitrogen is highly toxic, and if inhaled alone causes unconsciousness within seconds, death within minutes. Oxygen is the gas of life. As elevation is gained, air pressure is reduced. At 29,000 feet, the summit of Everest, atmospheric pressure would be a third of that at sea level; thus, if a climber breathed normally, he would absorb only a third of the normal requirement of oxygen.
Would this be enough to survive? Many had their doubts. Kellas argued, however, that the body possesses astonishing adaptive capabilities. Tibetans thrived at 14,000 feet, he noted, the very height of Pike’s Peak, in Colorado, where unfit tourists regularly collapsed on trains carrying them to the summit. His studies of arterial oxygen saturation suggested that an ascent of Everest could be possible, but that two critical factors would be in play. First there would be an elevation—no higher than 22,000 feet, he predicted—beyond which acclimatization would be ineffective. One could keep climbing—in 1909, for example, the Duke of Abruzzi had set a height record by reaching 25,110 feet on Chogolisa, or Bride Peak, in the Karakoram—but for every moment spent above the limit of acclimatization, the body would be in decline. This was the second critical factor. A climber would have to get up and down the mountain as quickly as possible.
On Everest this promised to be difficult. Kellas ascertained from studies of oxygen consumption and energy expenditure that an individual’s maximum rate of ascent would drop dramatically the higher one climbed, from roughly 600 feet per hour at 23,000 feet on a moderate incline, to perhaps 360 feet per hour above 25,000 feet. This implied that, at the very least, an Everest expedition would have to establish one camp, if not two, at an altitude where no man had ever slept, at ominous heights that would become known to later generations as the death zone. More than anything, this inexorable reality distinguished the challenge of Everest from the quest for the poles. It was one thing to face conditions of extreme cold and bitter exposure; it was quite another to do so while moving not laterally across a landscape but vertically to heights where the very air itself could not sustain life.
In the years before the war, Kellas made two other vital contributions to the Everest challenge. If Charles Bruce was the first to draw attention to the remarkable qualities of his Gurkha soldiers, Kellas was the one to elevate in the European mind the Sherpas, ethnic Tibetans who had settled in the Solu Khumbu region of Nepal, on the southern approaches to Everest, in the fifteenth century. With the commercial growth of the Raj, many had migrated to Darjeeling to work as porters or laborers; some had prospered as merchants. In a paper presented at the Royal Geographical Society on the afternoon of May 18, 1916, “A Consideration of the Possibility of Ascending the Loftier Himalaya,” Kellas reflected on the unique character and disposition of these remarkable people:
Of the different types of coolies the writer has found the Bhutia Nepalese superior to all others he has employed. They are strong, good-natured and as they are Buddhists there is no difficulty about special foodstuffs. The Lepcha and Kumaonoi are of inferior physique … The Kashmiri of the plains were not found reliable on mountains. The Gahrwali is inferior to the Bhutia at high altitudes, because he is a Hindu, and there is far more difficulty with food supply. The writer has had no opportunity of traveling with the Gurkha and Balti, who are highly spoken of by those competent to form an opinion. A solitary traveler might find it worthwhile to take a few carefully selected Bhutia Nepalese with him as personal servants to any mountain region.
Such passages, reading as if reviews of livestock, are disturbing to the contemporary ear, but in the context of the times come across as ringing endorsements. Kellas, more than any other British mountaineer of the era, placed his life in the hands of his native companions. For months at a time, year in and year out, he disappeared from the chemical labs of London to the freedom of the Himalaya. In the Sherpas he found friendship, camaraderie, and the trust that can come only to those who risk their lives together on glacial slopes and among the jagged ridges of unknown lands. In elevating the Sherpas he transformed, for better or for worse, their fate. Their capacity for endurance, their strength and ability to carry loads at altitude, their perseverance, loyalty, and discipline, together with a cultural disposition that led them to embrace with magnanimity and apparent calm all the vicissitudes of life, would make them the foundation upon which all of modern Himalayan climbing expeditions would be grounded.
Everest, for Kellas, was both a scientific challenge and a deeply personal mission. Like so many of his generation, he had been nursed on a mystic patriotism, a reflexive sense of belonging to something far greater than self, an empire destined to do justice in the world. This conviction, which fired the spirits of so many of the men who would be killed in the war, was in the first years of the century still alive, an impulse so powerful that it would sustain four years of carnage. Kellas himself would miss the war, having failed to secure a commission because of his age. For him, Everest took on a resonance of personal redemption.
On February 22, 1916, he wrote to a close colleague, A. F. R. Wollaston, the naturalist and explorer destined to serve as medical officer on the 1921 Everest reconnaissance:
I state my opinion of the problem as follows: We missed both Poles after having control of the sea for 300 years, and we certainly ought not to miss the exploration of the Mt. Everest group after being the premier power in India for 160 … I have not heard from Major Rawling since the war started and therefore do not know if Tibet is disposed to grant leave for a small expedition … I for one would be glad to go in with 2 to 10 coolies, or even solo, so as to secure this little bit of exploration for Britain. I’m afraid I regard the Himalaya as a British preserve at present … We must win this war and of course above expedition is
quite a secondary affair. At the same time we surely could spare one or two men over military age. I would consider myself free to go if hospital people gave me leave.
A journey to Tibet was out of the question for Kellas himself, but he found a way to send a surrogate. The full circumstances remain unclear, but undoubtedly involved his trusted Sherpa friends and companions. The jumping-off point for Everest, Kellas learned, was Kampa Dzong, which could be reached from Sikkim by traveling up the Teesta River and across the Serpo La, as Younghusband had done when he first entered Tibet, in 1903. From Kampa Dzong there was a route leading to the northwest where the Arun River, a key obstacle, could be crossed. From there a track ran south, along the Arun and past the settlement of Pharuk to reach the community of Kharta, located some twenty-five miles northeast of Everest. From Kharta, the nearest route to the mountain carried one up the Kharta Chu and across the Langma La, a high pass that led to the glaciers of the Kama Valley, flowing from the eastern flank of Everest.