by Wade Davis
IN THE EARLY predawn hours of June 27, from their camp just beyond the monastery, Mallory and Bullock set off by moonlight with five porters to explore for the first time the Rongbuk Glacier. They reached the terminal moraine after ninety minutes, and then, crossing in the darkness the torrent that poured out of the ice, made their way across a basin of massive boulders and hummocks to a dry streambed that ran up the western side of the glacier. The sun found them around 7:00, as they paused for breakfast in the lee of a great dark stone. Another hour of hard walking left the porters exhausted. They had climbed barely 2,000 feet, Mallory noted, and already their spirits were gone, their laughter displaced by grunts of fatigue. Bullock, too, was suffering. In this altitude, they were all like infants in a new world, learning to breathe for the first time. They had set out from a camp at 16,000 feet, a modest height by Himalayan standards but still higher, as Mallory noted, than the summit of Mont Blanc. He decided to test his own endurance, informally, walking steadily faster as one of the porters remained at his heels. The man was slightly built, Mallory would write, “strong and active, compact of muscle; but he had not yet learnt the art of walking rhythmically and balancing easily from stone to stone.”
Mallory raced ahead, still following the lateral edge of the glacier, which gradually seemed to be trending to the west. He waited for the others, and then, leaving the porters to rest, he and Bullock scrambled up the mountainside to have a look. As suspected, they were coming to the mouth of a lateral valley where a second glacier came in to fuse with the Rongbuk from the west. They were now at 18,500 feet. Clouds obscured the source, but this new sheet of ice, named by Mallory the West Rongbuk, seemed to rise higher and higher, reaching toward a broad basin that, if anything, challenged the scale of the main glacier at the foot of Everest. Clearly, this would all in due time have to be explored.
But it was 11:00 a.m. and the sun was getting hot. They had been walking for well on eight hours. Rather than retracing their route, Mallory and Bullock elected to return to camp by crossing the main glacier to explore its opposite bank. This was something of a miscalculation. In the Alps, glaciers, unless severely crevassed, offer the easiest route of approach to or egress from a mountain. In the Himalaya, they are a climber’s slow route to purgatory, difficult to traverse, generally impossible to descend, a maze of meltwater ponds and giant seracs of unworldly scale and constant danger. For three hours Mallory cut steps in the ice as they struggled through a “jumble of surprising pinnacles, many of them over 50 feet high.” It was good training for the men, none of whom were familiar with a climbing rope. But it was exhausting for Mallory, who twice fell through the ice, soaking his clothes. The direct sun reflected off the white surface, leaving them weary with a lassitude that hinted at heatstroke. When finally they reached the far side, having in all that time crossed little more than a mile of ice, they halted for an hour to rest. Then, following a shelf that ran above the lateral moraine, they trudged back toward their camp, arriving utterly spent at 8:15 p.m., seventeen hours after setting out.
The following morning, somewhat humbled, they rested. Bullock fitted the men with crampons for the ice. Mallory spent much of the morning glassing the upper reaches of the mountain. The long, gentle snow slopes suggested by early photographs taken from afar most assuredly did not exist. “We’ll want climbers and not half dazed ones,” he later reflected, “it’s a tougher job than I bargained for … The mountain appears not to be intended for climbing.” Bullock dismissed the West Ridge as simply impossible. Mallory was less pessimistic. But clearly the preferable route ran up the Northeast Ridge. The key would be to get closer to the mountain, first to scout the North Col, and second to get around to the west and south, with the hope of encountering a side of Everest less intimidating than the North Face. The decision was made to leave one man behind at base and advance the rest of the party four hours farther upvalley to establish an alpine camp about a mile below the mouth of the West Rongbuk. From there they would explore the upper reaches of both glaciers, all with an eye to the summit. Mallory, his mind in motion, was elated. “My darling this is a thrilling business altogether,” he wrote to Ruth later that day. “I can’t tell you how it possesses me and what prospect it is. And the beauty of it all!”
That afternoon around 5:00, in part to secure their supply lines, Mallory and Bullock paid a visit to the Rongbuk monastery. They saw the central shrine and an ornate, newly constructed prayer hall, but the place did not impress. “Not particularly interesting, after Shegar Dzong,” Bullock noted in his diary. “No prominent monk appeared to show us around. In the morning the lama, who is seeing no one for one year, sent us presents of flour, salt and milk.”
BULLOCK AWOKE on June 29, a Wednesday, to cloud and low mist coming off the glacier. He had not slept well, and he had a slight headache that would linger through the day. Mallory was irritable. A task that ought to have been completed the night before—the filling of small tins of kerosene and alcohol for the Primus stoves—had been neglected. Gyalzen Kazi, the translator, felt his ire and, being Tibetan, responded with passivity. “Loads must be arranged better if anything is to be done efficiently,” Mallory wrote. “Gyalzen’s response to being hustled is to tie knots or collect tent pegs—with no idea of superintending operations.” They finally broke camp at 8:00 a.m., an hour later than planned, and with thirteen heavily laden porters, along with Dukpa the cook, began a slow, ponderous walk to an uncertain destination. They carried two Whymper and two Mummery tents, with rations and fuel for four days for only six porters. Mallory’s plan was to establish the higher camp, dispatch most of the men back to base, and then in the coming days divide them into three parties, rotating each group through the advanced alpine camp, where they might be trained as mountaineers, while those at base camp maintained the flow of food and fuel.
He again underestimated the difficulty of the terrain. The men reached the glacier in good order, but climbing up its face left several deeply fatigued. By the time they reached the spot where Mallory and Bullock had paused for breakfast on the morning of June 27, four hours from base camp, several of the older porters in particular, including one named Nyima, were coughing badly. The loads, Mallory noted, would need to be lightened. He ordered a halt, permitting the men to eat while he and Gyalzen went ahead, climbing a steep moraine to a high shelf, which he followed for forty minutes, looking for water and a good place to establish the camp.
He had given up, and already turned back, when he spotted a beautiful pond and a spring, an ideal spot sheltered from the wind, with good ground for the tents. The elevation was 17,400 feet, much higher than Rongbuk and, more important, six hours closer to Everest. “It should now be possible to carry reconnaissance well up the main glacier and to the basin Westwards without moving further,” he wrote, “once we get accustomed to this elevation.” The porters, who stumbled into camp as late as 4:30 p.m., long after the sun had been lost to shadow, were less sanguine. Bullock’s diary entry for the day concluded with a single phrase: “All coolies remained the night contrary to plan.”
During the night it snowed, and the morning dawned cold, with no sun. No one felt fit. Mallory and Bullock took an easy day, leaving the new camp as the weather cleared around 9:30 a.m. and making their way along the shelf that led, in little over a mile, to the junction of the Rongbuk Glacier and its western branch. They could see that where the two rivers of ice collided, a bank of stones had piled up against the pinnacles and seracs of the main glacier, forming a causeway leading across the entire width of the West Rongbuk. This path they followed, crossing in little more than an hour, and returning at a leisurely pace late in the day, having found, to their satisfaction, a route to the upper reaches of the Rongbuk Glacier and the North Face of the mountain. They returned exhilarated but exhausted in a cold rain that left bits of ice on the stubble of their beards.
Bullock, who had felt poorly all day, decided to rest and took to his bed for a dinner of tinned chicken and peas. “Pretty fair e
specially the peas,” he scribbled in his diary. “Probably better cold in jelly.” Mallory, who preferred his food hot, nearly burned down the mess tent attempting to light the Primus stove; the following morning he did it again.
While Bullock remained in camp chasing butterflies, catching three species as well as some flies and bees, Mallory took five porters back to the ice, with the goal of reaching the head of the main glacier at the foot of the North Face. After traversing the West Rongbuk with ease, they soon became bogged down in soft snow, which they fought for three hours, even as the weather closed in. “In a race against clouds,” he later wrote, “we were beaten and failed to find out what happened to the glacier at its Western head under the North-west arête.”
Despite this setback, the day was a considerable success. They reached 19,100 feet and were within a mile of the one feature that had obsessed them since first setting eyes on the Rongbuk Valley. Though the visibility was limited, Mallory was able to look up to the shoulder coming down off the Northeast Ridge and make out the outline of what he now called the North Col, the Chang La in Tibetan—the saddle between Everest and the ridge that ran away to the north, the highest point of which was Changtse, the North Peak. Mallory had already seen enough of the Northwest Ridge to dismiss it as an option of last resort. The broken ice and steep slopes leading up to the North Col from the west seemed equally uninviting. As Mallory led his exhausted party back to camp, he knew without doubt that if the North Col were to be the opening to the mountain, the chink in its armor, as he had come to believe, he would have to find a way to approach it from the east, a task of exploration easier said than done.
Thirteen hours in the snow left the men spent, and with Bullock still feeling low, Mallory had little choice but to rest on July 2, despite the fair weather. While his companion pursued more butterflies, four new varieties caught by noon, and Gyalzen brought up supplies—the high climbing box, two tins of biscuits, and, by error, Bullock’s leather bag—Mallory took advantage of the respite to write a long report to Captain Farrar at the Alpine Club.
“You will be wanting to know,” the letter began, “something of the mountain and in one respect it is very easily told. It’s a colossal rock peak plastered with snow, with faces as steep as any I have ever seen.”
Their camp, he continued, was positioned above the left bank of “a surprisingly narrow glacier, whose right bank is the North Ridge of the mountain. This glacier runs itself up into a cwm like the charge of the Light Brigade, up under a 10,000 ft precipice and, as I saw it yesterday, round to the left towards something like the Col du Lion on the Tiefenmatten side. The slopes of the first peak on the north ridge (Changtse it is) beyond the col are impossibly steep except perhaps near the col. I could not make that out through the mist.”
Turning his attention to the other rim of the great basin of ice that formed the head of the Rongbuk Glacier, Mallory noted, “the west side of the cwm is formed by a huge buttress (the northwest arête) coming steeply down from a snowy shoulder to a low broad col where the glacier presumably sweeps around into the WNW bay into which we have not penetrated.”
This second col, the Lho La, Mallory had not reached on July 1, and for most of the day it had been obscured in cloud. Yet he anticipated correctly that beyond the saddle would be found another basin of ice, running along the opposite side of the Northwest Ridge of Everest. This was, in fact, the Western Cwm, the route that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay would ultimately follow in 1953 when they successfully climbed the mountain from the south. In 1921 it was formally off-limits to the British, as Nepal remained closed. Political considerations alone would not stop Mallory from seeking every avenue to the summit. Even as he wrote Farrar, he was making plans to reach the Western Cwm, either by means of the Rongbuk and the Lho La, or via the West Rongbuk, the head of which, he believed, might be contiguous with the ice fields of the Western Cwm. If this meant crossing the Nepalese frontier, so be it.
Still, the immediate prospects for Everest were not good. The entire arc of the North Face was, he wrote,
completely unassailable. The WNW face is impossible near the top; and the same, roughly speaking, though with less certainty, must apply to the northeast and southeast faces—all this from a number of distant views. There remain the arêtes. The west ends in very steep rocks—we have seen no more. The northwest could be ascended to the snowy shoulder I mentioned if we met it in the Alps—a crampon job, I should say. Above this a long stretch of snow ridge leads to a steep pitch of rocks; and there is a further but shorter steep pitch where one of the vertical bands meets the ridge; but in both places the rocks appear broken by gullies, and I don’t think them impossible. The actual summit is rock at a moderately easy angle. The North arête does not come down from the summit but from the E arête, which is comparatively flat and snowy above the point. I think it might go if one could reach the col between it and the 1st peak to the North.
Well, that is about all we know of the mountain from the point of view of attack … All the faces on the north are frightfully steep, so I doubt there being an accessible col on this side near Everest, even should the west arête be a line of attack … You’ll understand from this that we have a formidable job. I’ve hardly the dimmest hope of reaching the top, but of course we shall proceed as though we meant to get there.
Mallory closed his report with a quick review of the men. The porters received high praise, as did Morshead, who, regrettably, had yet to join the climbing party. Mallory added, “Bullock is feeling the height at present. Wheeler continually suffers from indigestion and I’ve no hope of him being any use to us. Personally I’m as fit as can be.”
ON JULY 3 Mallory decided to test the porters on ice. Leaving camp just after 5:00 a.m., they made their way up the shelf to the West Rongbuk, and once having traversed the glacier, continued up its southern side. Their training goal was a snow saddle between two high, unnamed peaks, both of which were, according to Bullock, “continually dropping stones.” The col itself was protected by “steep ice and shabby shales” and a crevasse, or bergschrund, that ran across the entire slope at 21,000 feet. Mallory tied two ropes together and, while Bullock waited below the bergschrund with the men, proceeded to cut steps in the ice, a steep traverse that brought him in a hundred feet to a rock island in the snow.
The men followed, inching their way up the staircase, with Bullock in the fourth position. None of the Tibetans had ever been on hard ice. One slipped, the man behind Bullock, and would have plunged to his death had Bullock not arrested his fall. Mallory agreed to forgo the exercise and retire. The descent, he wrote, was a “better performance.” Bullock made no further mention of the incident in his diary, save to say that they were both pleased by their overall fitness at high altitude. But it may well have been the beginning of tension between the two climbers. Writing some forty years later, in 1960, Guy Bullock’s widow, Alice, recalled, “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 over pleased. He did not support a critical difference of opinion readily.”
Mallory’s singular goal was the summit, and the next step, as he saw it, was to get high, away from the valleys with their impossible glaciers to elevations where he might make further sense of the land. He had in mind an isolated peak rising above the confluence of the glaciers, just west of their camp. They were about to set off on the morning of July 4 when word reached them that other Englishmen were in the valley and climbing toward their camp.
Howard-Bury and Heron, having departed Rongbuk at dawn, had enjoyed a most pleasant scramble up and over the snout of the glacier, a seven-mile walk in bright sunshine, which landed them at the alpine camp around 9:30 a.m. for what turned out to be a short but, as Mallory recalled, “very pleasant visit.” Howard-Bury commented on the curious lodgings they had passed, small monasteries perhaps, as well a
s the numerous cells where “hermits and recluses were living in retirement and meditation.” Bullock was more interested in what Heron could tell him of the rocks. “Black rock here is a hornblende schist. Lower is granite,” Bullock noted that night in his journal. They compared their aneroid altimeters, remarking that Bullock’s seemed to be reading a bit low. Howard-Bury was delighted to see the camp well established, the exploration under way, and the porters being properly trained for ice. He had no word of Wheeler, still alone high on the Nangpa La, though he did report that the weather on that side had been horrific. To the delight of Mallory, he and Heron had brought some wild meat, gazelle: “a fine leg of goa—very much better than the skin and bone which passes for mutton in these parts.”
The main purpose of Howard-Bury’s visit was to inform Mallory and Bullock of his plans to proceed east in search of Kharta, where they would establish a base for the second phase of the reconnaissance, the exploration of the Kangshung Face and the eastern approaches to Everest. Should all go well, Howard-Bury expected to return to Tingri around midmonth in order to shut down the compound there and begin the transfer of the entire expedition to Kharta. He instructed Mallory and Bullock to be ready to move by July 20, though the date might change. He and Heron took their leave late in the afternoon, just as the light became beautiful. The summit of Everest, Howard-Bury recalled, soared high above the clouds, silhouetted against a perfectly clear night sky. They reached Rongbuk just after dark, met by a number of monks seeking medical attention; the same monks appeared the following morning with a large bowl of fresh eggs as a parting gift.
MALLORY AND BULLOCK left the following morning, July 5, at 4:15, climbing up the steep scree that rose immediately behind their camp. They halted briefly at dawn to photograph a glorious sunrise, but otherwise kept up a steady pace, climbing 2,500 feet to reach a high shoulder by 7:00 a.m. After roping up, they traversed a broad and exposed south-facing slope of rock and ice, taking fully three hours to attain the security of a snow saddle beyond which rose the ascending ridge of the peak. Two of the men, including one who had been carrying the quarter-plate camera, were played out and, despite a forty-minute rest, could not proceed. Bullock instructed them to remain at the col. Mallory, meanwhile, looked ahead to the route, a long curving snow ridge, slightly corniced, leading to a rocky shoulder that rose to a snow-covered peak, beyond which stood the true summit, slightly higher and perhaps fifty yards farther along the ridge. They set off up the snow. Within an hour each of the four remaining porters, one by one, succumbed to exhaustion and had to be escorted back to a point where they could retrace their steps down to the saddle to join the others.