Into The Silence

by Wade Davis

  This patronizing response from a man who had never climbed higher than a desk only further enraged Mallory. In his letter to Geoffrey Young of March 9 he had acknowledged Morshead’s anticipated involvement, which he welcomed: “I’m very glad Morshead is coming. I know two of his brothers; they are a nice family and from what I have heard I feel sure he must be a good chap.” But this recognition did not change the fundamental issue. Having joined the expedition somewhat reluctantly, Mallory—Hinks’s opinion notwithstanding—now found himself alone, the only climber fit for the task in terms of age, experience, and physical and mental conditioning.

  His solution was to go around Hinks and draft to the team an old friend from school, Guy Bullock. On March 31 he pitched the idea to Younghusband:

  The facts about G. H. Bullock are briefly these: I knew him at Winchester where he was a scholar and a very good runner, the best long distance runner that anyone remembered in my time, good at all games and stolid, a tough sort of fellow who never lost his head and would stand any amount of knocking about … He seemed to me then to have extraordinary stamina and looking back I can think of no one else about whom I have felt in the same way that he would probably last longer than myself … I feel that he would be a valuable man in the party, level headed and competent all round—a man in whom one would feel confidence in an emergency as one of the least likely of men to crack.

  Guy Bullock was no George Finch, but if there had to be a substitute, he was an inspired choice. Like Mallory, he was a protégé of Graham Irving, their schoolmaster at Winchester, and they had climbed together as boys, reaching the 14,293-foot summit of the Dent Blanche, for example, in the Pennine Alps in the summer of 1905. Elected to the Alpine Club at the age of twenty-two, in 1909, a year before Mallory became a member at twenty-four, Bullock was a solid climber, as organized and efficient as Mallory was chaotic and forgetful, with a generous disposition and an even temperament that would prove to be a perfect foil to Mallory’s volatility on the mountain. Impervious to the cold, willing and able to sleep anywhere in virtually any conditions, he was calm in a crisis and placid in the face of conflict. His father had been a diplomat, an authority on China, and later a professor of Chinese at Oxford, and Guy had followed him into the consular service in 1913. His first assignment had been New Orleans, where he dealt mostly with British refugees of the Mexican uprisings of Zapata and Pancho Villa. Leaving Louisiana in April 1914, he was assigned to Fernando Póo, where, with the coming of war, he orchestrated operations against the German colony in the Cameroons. A posting in Marseille brought him back to Europe in November 1916, and the following year he was dispatched to Lima.

  With Mallory and the others scheduled to depart within a fortnight, Younghusband wrote immediately to the Foreign Office requesting that Bullock, still stationed at the time in Lima, be allowed to join the expedition. Turned down initially on the grounds that a man as experienced as Bullock could not be spared for eight months, Younghusband took his plea directly to the foreign secretary, who happened to be Lord Curzon. With Curzon’s support and intervention, Bullock was freed from his duties in Peru and even kept on half pay for the duration of his absence. On April 1 he was formally invited to join the Everest expedition. Granted leave until December 31, 1921, with no chance of renewal, Bullock would have only one go at the mountain.

  THERE REMAINED one minor challenge to overcome before the expedition could with confidence sail for India: money had to be found to fund it fully. In January, Younghusband with considerable fanfare had launched a formal appeal to fellows and friends of the Royal Geographical Society to contribute to the Mount Everest Fund. “In other days,” he noted, “the Society would have been able to contribute largely from its general funds. But subscriptions to the Society have fallen. We have scarcely recovered the losses of the war.” General revenue to the RGS had declined significantly simply because so many fellows and members had been killed in France. The Alpine Club faced the same dilemma; hence the general appeal. The goal was to secure £10,000, the estimated cost of a two-year effort. The Alpine Club did well, raising roughly £2,000 by March 4. The RGS attracted less than half that amount, though it had a far larger membership, leading Younghusband to issue a second appeal on February 25. The response improved somewhat, especially after March 16, when it became known that the Prince of Wales had pledged £50 and his father, King George V, twice that amount.

  With the subscription drive less than fully successful, the Everest Committee turned to other means of financing the expedition. Arthur Hinks, to his credit, aggressively and quite remarkably took the lead, setting aside pride and any personal reservations he might have had to cobble together support from any source, through virtually any means. As a result the expeditions, though conceived in the gentlemanly traditions of Edwardian England, became surprisingly modern in execution, underwritten ultimately not by the government of India or the Foreign Office or private societies such as the RGS but, rather, through a combination of endorsements, discounts, and exclusive marketing arrangements for media, film, lecture, and book rights that would later become the norm in the mountaineering world. Hinks, despite his prudish sensibilities, cut deals and drove bargains with mercenary zeal, securing free passage on the Darjeeling railway, reduced fares on the shipping lines, and the suspension of import duties on the vast stores of equipment being sent to India. He made arrangements for the sale of botanical and zoological specimens to the Natural History Museum and obliged the Royal Horticultural Society and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, as well as wealthy private individuals, to bid for the rights to the first seeds, whether they arrived viable or not. Lionel de Rothschild offered £100 for rhododendrons and magnolias, while an A. K. Bulley of Birkenhead subscribed a similar sum for the rights to alpine wildflowers.

  To equip the expedition, Hinks sourced goods and services from no fewer than thirty-three major suppliers. He sought discounts from each one: Benjamin Edgington, makers of camp equipment, sleeping bags, and the Meade and Whymper tents; the Army and Navy Stores, which packed and shipped all food supplies; the Hudson’s Bay Company, provider of woolen blankets; and W. H. Smith, the source of the expedition’s letterhead and stationery. Hinks’s parsimony enveloped even the members of the expedition. Aside from leaning on Wollaston and Howard-Bury to pay their own costs, he shamelessly attempted to squeeze money out of virtually every other member of the expedition. When in 1922 Tom Longstaff, who had also agreed to finance his own way, sought £10 to pay for a scientific illustration for a publication celebrating achievements on the expedition, Hinks responded with miserly indignation, “It seems a sad state of affairs when no one but the Mount Everest Committee can pay for a colour plate of a species they have been responsible for collecting.”

  In addition to marketing virtually every aspect of the adventure—cablegrams reporting progress of the party, magazine articles by expedition members, articles about the effort by experts in the United Kingdom, photographs, special maps, cinematographic film—Hinks ruthlessly protected the back end, ensuring that the Mount Everest Committee would control and benefit exclusively from every commercial opportunity. Lectures promised to be particularly lucrative. When first Ashley Abraham, former president of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club, and later Sir Martin Conway, then director of the Imperial War Museum, asked to borrow a few images for their public presentations, they were categorically turned down. The Bible Society and the Regimental Journal of the 17th Lancers fared no better. The same fate awaited a publisher of children’s books. The National Geographic Society was told in no uncertain terms to bid high, if only to obtain the right to publish images after they had appeared in Britain. In four years, Hinks would give away only two items: a small packet of seeds to the king, and a single photographic image of Everest to the son of the maharaja of Nepal, who intended to use it for his Christmas card.

  In Hinks’s view, not a penny could be spared that might otherwise support the expeditions. In 1922 a letter reached him from a Miss
Jessell of the Invalid Children’s Aid Association, whose patron was Her Majesty the queen, seeking permission to set up a collection box for the children outside a Christmas Day screening at the Philharmonic Hall of the Everest film of 1922. On December 28, Hinks responded: “I venture to think that in general it is inconvenient and undesirable that such collections should be made at lectures of this kind … I am sorry therefore to have to refuse your request.”

  Hinks’s ruthless pursuit of the commercial both pleased and horrified members of the Everest Committee. On February 26 Norman Collie wrote to Hinks with a modest proposal, suggesting a possible sponsor. “Go to Lord Leverhurlme [sic] and say give us 1000 pounds and we will take a large cake of Sunlight Soap and a flag also with Sunlight Soap emblazoned on it and we will plant them on top of Everest. Than he will be able to say 1) Sunlight Soap beat the record. 29002 tablets sold hourly 2) Sunlight Soap towers aloft, and dominates the Kingdoms of the Earth 3) Avoid worry use Sunlight soap and for Ever-rest.”

  The secretary of the RGS was not amused, and neither was Collie when he learned of Hinks’s boldest scheme. In connivance with John Buchan, Hinks arranged to sell the exclusive rights to the Everest story to two newspapers, the Times and the Philadelphia Public Ledger, with the photographs going to the Graphic. According to the deal, any dispatches or news from Tibet would be released to the media twenty-four hours after having been reviewed by the Times. Predictably, the other papers went ballistic, both in Britain and in India, where a vibrant press would have to wait for Everest stories to be first wired to London and then telegraphed back to Calcutta. The viceroy intervened and put pressure on Colonel Ryder, the surveyor general of India, to have the members of the survey team, which was not funded by the Everest Committee, supply reports directly to the Indian papers. The news blackout, it was maintained, would simply compel the other papers to print wild speculations that could do a disservice to the expeditions, not to mention relations with Tibet.

  Hinks, in response, professed his lifelong disdain for the media, a “rotten lot … all sharks and pirates.” In a letter to Howard-Bury, he wrote, “No one regrets more sincerely than I do that any dealings with the Press was ever instituted at all. I was, as you remember, always against it but I am not in a position to do more than make the best of the instructions from the Committee.”

  Hinks was indeed ambivalent about the press. Even once the deal had been signed, he gave the media no more than absolutely necessary, denying it basic biographical material on the climbers, refusing access to the men or their families, even going as far as to slip the men out of England without allowing any interviews or photographs to appear in the press. To Mallory in India he wrote, “We were very proud of our success of getting the whole party off without interviews and photographs and cinematograph films and we are anxious to repeat this success. Please use a little cunning in making your return. It would be a great pity if we let reporters in now when we have kept them out with so much success.”

  But whatever their reservations, Hinks and Younghusband were not about to give up the money: £1,000 secured from the Times in the initial deal, with the promise of an additional £2,000 should the summit of the mountain be achieved. On April 28 Hinks was able to report to Howard-Bury that, after paying all expenses in Britain and sending £2,000 to India, there remained a reserve in a London bank of some £1,000.

  The expedition was on its way. Alexander Kellas was already in India, as were the survey officers Henry Morshead and E. O. (Oliver) Wheeler, as well as the geologist Alexander Heron. Harold Raeburn had left England from Birkenhead in mid-March on SS City of Lahore. By April 13, after a rough and cold journey across the Mediterranean, Howard-Bury was already off Port Said on the deck of the SS Malwa. Three days later, Sandy Wollaston and Guy Bullock sailed from Marseille on SS Naldera of the P&O line, destined for Bombay. Mallory went out on his own with much of the expedition gear and equipment on April 8, one of forty-three first-class passengers on SS Sardinia, bound for Calcutta.

  In London Percy Farrar remained pessimistic, writing Geoffrey Young on April 12, “I do not expect they are going to do much this season. The party, to my mind, is not strong enough, nor has it any but scant experience of winter conditions.” To the Everest Committee he had gone further, naming names: “Mr. Mallory and Mr. Bullock, whose mountaineering experience is limited and not of recent date, do not form a party sufficiently qualified to continue with safety the reconnaissance beyond the point at which Mr. Raeburn finds himself unable to lead.” Young knew little of Bullock, but had no doubts about George Mallory, who most assuredly would not restrict his own ambitions to those of Raeburn. At the same time, Young remained haunted by an image of Mallory conveyed to him by Farrar and Younghusband. When first offered a place on the expedition at a luncheon on February 9, Mallory had accepted, as Younghusband noted, “without visible emotion,” as if a weight of destiny had landed on his shoulders.

  On April 26 a wire arrived in London from Charles Bell in Lhasa. It included a translation by Bell of a decree promulgated by the supreme Tibetan authority, His Holiness the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, and addressed the dzongpens of Phari, Tinki Dzong, Kampa Dzong, and Kharta, all forts and settlements on the route through Tibet to Everest. It was this document that would serve as their passport to Everest, once the expedition crossed the Tibetan frontier. The decree stated:

  The British Government has deputed a party of Sahibs to see the Chha-mo-lung-ma mountain [as the Tibetans referred to Everest]. They will evince great friendship towards the Tibetans. The Great Minister Bell has asked us to issue an order to the effect that these Sahibs may be supplied with riding ponies, pack animals and coolies. So on the arrival of these Sahibs and servants you should supply them with all the necessary transport, the rates for which should be fixed to the mutual satisfaction according to the prevailing rates in the country. Any other assistance that the Sahibs may require either by day or by night, on the march or during halts, should be faithfully given in the best possible way, in order to maintain friendly relations between the British and Tibetan governments. Issue the necessary orders to those in your jurisdiction. Dispatched during the Iron-Bird Year, Seal of the Sha-pes.

  On April 28, 1921, Sir Francis Younghusband sent a wire to Howard-Bury in Darjeeling, saying, “We shall drink to the expedition at the Anniversary Dinner (May 31) and hope to have a telegram by that time to say you have reached Tibet.” A fortnight earlier Younghusband had written the expedition leader a long letter with precise instructions as to the importance of the dispatches from the mountain, noting, “You will literally have the whole world for your audience.” To Colonel Ryder, surveyor general of India, Younghusband sent a more cautious note: “To make the affair successful they will have to work together like a band of brothers.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Enter Mallory

  THE MORNING OF April 12, 1921, found George Mallory alone, a shadowy figure peering through the blue half-light of dawn into the rising ocean mist from the upper bow deck as SS Sardinia slipped through the Strait of Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean Sea. A reluctant traveler, he had had a miserable time since embarking at Birkenhead, on the Mersey, four days before. The passage down the flank of Europe to Cape St. Vincent had been cold and wet, the Sardinia old, slow, dank, and claustrophobic. In England he had left behind a beloved wife, Ruth, and three young children, daughters Clare and Beridge, six and four, and his youngest, John, an infant only seven months old. In a letter home, he compared his quarters on the ship unfavorably to what he had known in France for sixteen months on the Western Front. With the groaning of the ship’s hull, the clanging of its engine, the light shining into his room at all hours, there was no privacy, “no sense of remoteness or isolation.” The dugouts and trenches had been a subterranean existence, but at least, rats and mice aside, “one was alone, alone as almost nowhere else with the silence of the dumb earth.”

  He found no comfort in his fellow passengers. “At the present,” he wrote to h
is wife after but a day at sea, “I hate the sight of them—worse, Bon Dieu, I hate them.” Meals were particularly trying, with dinner invariably a low point. “I found myself between one Colonel Frazer and a very undistinguished man called Holyoake, who has not originated a single remark to either of his neighbours at table since the voyage began—but his table manners are not in any way disgusting. The Colonel is a tall gaunt Anglo-Indian of rather forbidding appearance—but the mildest of human beings and also I should say the slowest. I feel he has a really nice character but absolutely not the faintest glimmer of an idea as to how to get any interest from conversation—he smashes a leading remark with dreadful truncheon blows or stamps them in the dust. I gasp.”

  The captain, a “gay raconteur,” offered some relief, as did a returning veteran of the Indian Army, a soldier who had been captured by the Turks at Kut and somehow survived the death march through the deserts of Mesopotamia, where Arabs in every settlement stoned the prisoners and scavenged the clothing from the wounded, stuffing sand into their mouths to stifle their cries. Mallory recoiled from such images and, in describing the man in a letter to Ruth, retreated into condescension, a protective armor he had cultivated since his first years at Cambridge. “In an ill bred and too hearty way, he is good natured,” Mallory conceded, but “the trouble with him is not that he is repulsively ugly or a cannibal, as one might suppose, but simply that he is a bore.”

  Mallory found relief only in the open wind, in his aerie on the ship’s bow, or in the release of physical activity. He paced the deck, thirteen circuits to a mile, and worked out to a set of exercises designed to render the muscles, as he wrote to Ruth, “supple and ready and elastic.” As he had periodically since first conceiving the project when an artillery subaltern at the Somme, he revisited the manuscript of his “Book of Geoffrey,” a compendium of moral and patriotic lessons intended to inspire a new way of teaching the young, a text that would never be published. He read Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit, dabbled in Santayana, and devoured Queen Victoria, written by his friend and former suitor Lytton Strachey. But mostly he thought of Ruth and home.