by Wade Davis
The angle grew steeper. With Bullock fading, Mallory took the lead. “We moved very slowly,” he later reported, “keeping up muscular energy and overcoming lassitude by breathing fast and deep. It was a colossal labour.” They reached the rock ridge, and from that point Mallory’s memory faded, as the summit itself seemed to recede with each step, even as the slopes on either side of the ridge became more exposed. His pace faltered as his body defied his mind, forcing an endless series of halts simply to breathe.
At last they reached the base of an ice wall. It took all of Mallory’s remaining strength to cut a way back up to the crest of the ridge. With a few more steps, they found themselves on the summit. It was already 2:45 p.m. Weather threatened from the southwest and north, and at his feet a thunderstorm hung over the Rongbuk Valley, darkening the glacier with clouds. Bullock’s aneroid, though it had been reading low, recorded an elevation of 23,450 feet, which implied a vertical ascent from their camp of over 5,500 feet, a remarkable achievement at such altitude. “We puffed out our chests as we examined it,” wrote Mallory a day later in a letter to Ruth. “Longstaff climbed one 23,600. After a week at our camp I consider this a good performance.” If the figure was accurate, they had just knocked off the second-highest peak ever climbed. Mallory wanted to call it Mount Kellas, but the Tibetan name, Ri-Ring, would prevail. As it turned out, its true elevation was only 22,520 feet.
But height records in the moment were of little concern. They had had no water all day and little food, and Mallory felt “distinctly mountain-sick.” Below them six porters had been huddling in the snow for over three hours. Mallory allowed just fifteen minutes on top, and he made the most of it. As a crow flies, he was only ten miles from the summit of Everest. Looking to the west, he saw the great peaks of Gyachung Kang and Cho Oyu and for the first time grasped the geographical alignment of the Ra Chu and the Kyetrak Glacier, where Wheeler was working, and the valley of the Rongbuk, which lay at his feet to the east. To the south he could see that beyond the Northwest Ridge of Everest there was indeed a second, equally massive ridge running parallel to it. This arête, he estimated, soared above 25,000 feet for much of its length, with individual peaks, including one he named Nuptse, rising higher. What’s more, it buttressed not Everest but, rather, a second enormous summit, “a fierce rock arête,” which he dubbed South Peak. In Tibetan this was Lhotse. Between the two ridges lay the Western Cwm, a valley of ice, and between the rocky black crest of Lhotse and Everest was a dramatic saddle, the South Col, which offered a line to the summit, “the easiest we have seen.” This indeed would be the route followed by Hillary and Tenzing in 1953. But from Mallory’s perspective on Ri-Ring in 1921, it was not at all clear how one could reach the South Col itself. It was “almost certainly inapproachable from the east side,” he would write to Ruth. “We have yet to find out whether it can be approached from the west.” He would not know for certain without a closer examination of the Western Cwm, the base of which could not be seen from Ri-Ring.
His attention turned east. It was at this point, with a storm gathering, that he made a fateful miscalculation. He was by now familiar with the basic structure of Everest, certainly the architecture of the Northeast Ridge. His eyes quickly scanned from the summit pyramid down to the shoulder that fell away steeply to the North Col. Beyond the saddle rose Changtse, or North Peak, the highest point on a ridge running away to the north and forming the eastern flank of the Rongbuk Valley. This wall, he could see, was broken at a single point, perhaps a mile or two from their camp, across the glacier and up the valley, where a stream pierced the mountains from the east. Mallory knew the spot. Returning to base camp late on June 27, their first day on the glacier, they had come upon the draw, dangerously swollen with snowmelt, impossible to cross. In their exhaustion they had been obliged to follow the stream down to its confluence with the glacier, where it disappeared under the ice. Mallory intended in due course to explore the headwaters, but it was not a priority. The valley seemed too small and narrow to be of serious consequence, an impression now only reinforced in his mind by what he could see from the summit of Ri-Ring. As it turned out, he was deeply mistaken.
One other observation compounded the error. His obsession remained the North Col, the only viable route that he could see to the summit, which he had determined could not be climbed from the Rongbuk side. But from Ri-Ring he saw that from the top of Changtse, on the northern flank of the col, there was a second ridge, heading to the east and forming, he assumed, “the side of whatever valley connected with the Arun River in this direction.” In this unknown valley, logic suggested, would be another river of ice flowing to the east but also leading at its head to the desirable side of the North Col. Changtse and its ridge appeared to bar any access from the west or north. Unable to anticipate the serpentine flow of glaciers in the Himalaya, Mallory concluded that to have a chance at Everest, they would have to abandon Rongbuk and approach the problem from the east. Half blinded by certainty, he retreated from the summit of Ri-Ring, exhilarated at the prospects. Howard-Bury had been right to press on for Kharta. “Fortune favoured us,” Mallory later wrote. “The wind was no more than a breeze; the temperature was mild, the storm’s malice was somehow dissipated with no harm done. We rejoined the coolies before five o’clock and were back in our camp at 7:15 pm, happy to have avoided a descent in the dark.” Bullock did not get in until 7:30, the last to arrive. At 21,000 feet, he had seen “a handsome black butterfly with red markings.”
ON THE night of July 6, the monsoon broke in earnest. Snow blanketed the camp, leaving the climbers tent-bound for two days. Mallory’s spirit dampened. His letter that day to Ruth began, as always, with a description of the mountain. These short passages had become like mantras, each a perfect reflection of his mood. “As to the general shape of the mountain,” he began, as if for the first time, “in the first place it is a great rock peak plastered with snow and having prodigious precipices … a rock peak a little blunted at top, but white from the fresh snow which seems never to melt—immeasurably bigger and higher than any mountain I have seen in the Alps, not a slender spike but built up on its great arête with the limbs of a giant, simple, severe and superb. From the mountaineer’s point of view so far as we have seen it no more appalling sight could be imagined.”
Toward the end of the letter, which for the most part reads as a mountaineer’s account, he apologized for the formal tone and wrote more personally:
And what of my thoughts about it all? Well, in the first place all the driving power comes from me and it makes me a little dispirited sometimes to be giving out so much … I could do without the coolies and the problems with rations and supplies from base camp. I weary of the discomforts, the cramped style in this tent and the sand which blows in and the little problems every night of arranging one’s bedding comfortably and the cold of evenings. I began this letter in the sun among the rocks; now I am sitting on my rolled up bedding with my sheepskin boots on. Two months or more of such a life let alone the discomforts at higher camps seem a long stretch in front of me and I look forward to the time when we shall be trekking back to Darjeeling and I shall be drawing nearer to you. However you mustn’t think I am depressed. It is an exhilarating life on the whole and I am wonderfully fit—never a moment’s trouble with my digestion … There’ll be something to be told even if we don’t climb Everest, as I can hardly think we shall … Well, now I must write a report to Howard-Bury to send along with this letter tomorrow. Good night and great love to you. We see the same stars.
MALLORY WAS NOT the only man sitting out the weather with thoughts of home. On the Nangpa La moraine, things could not have gone worse for Wheeler, who had been camped alone with his porters for twelve days. June 30 had brought such rain that there had been nothing to do, he’d noted in his journal, “but stay in bed and make the most of it.” The following morning, July 1, Canada’s Dominion Day, he and two porters had climbed for several hours to reach the shoulder of Chorat-Sung, lugging the th
eodolite and all the gear past “rock hopelessly rotten, blocks weighing several tons ready to slip at the slightest touch.” At noon, just as they finally reached a spot suitable as a surveying station, it began to snow, “a beastly wet storm until 3:30.” He had just cached all of the instruments when the weather “cleared in a miraculous fashion.” Then, just as he was measuring the angles, another blizzard struck. He headed home defeated in the dark, having wasted the entire day, “tired and just about ready to drop.”
The next day he had to rest the men, “so naturally it was a most beautiful morning.” Leaving camp alone, he scouted several possible stations and made the decision to move even farther up the moraine. A foot of snow fell that night. He woke on the morning of July 3 “simply loathing the idea of breaking camp and doing a day’s work.” All the cooking had to be done outside, and in the wind the Primus stove failed to ignite. He breakfasted without tea, and then, leaving camp by 7:45, spent the morning at a station south of what he called “Dirty Glacier.” He secured some useful photographs, but was still unable, because of the weather, to get a decent read on a defined survey point. “I must get something fixed!” he wrote in some desperation. Returning around 10:30, he revived his spirits with a bit of food and then, around noon, led the porters up the ice to establish the higher camp. They set up beside a small meltwater pool on a moss-covered moraine only two miles from the Nangpa La. The aneroid indicated an elevation of 18,500 feet, his highest and coldest camp yet.
A blizzard blew in the following day, confining him to camp. Fortunately, the mail had arrived the evening before, and he busied himself with correspondence. “My tent looked exactly like Xmas morning,” he noted; his wife, Dolly, had sent a box of ginger nuts, which disappeared “exceedingly rapidly.” Wollaston, ever loyal, had dispatched a box of food, special treats, along with the sad message that Wheeler’s orderly, Asghar Khan, had finally succumbed on June 27 from typhoid. “Poor devil,” Wheeler wrote. “He was very bad. Delirium for three days before he died. I shall have to do something for the family. Perhaps I can get a government pension for them.”
Wheeler expected to remain at the higher camp for four days. He stayed for eight, even as the monsoon storms poured over the Nangpa La from Nepal. On July 5 they climbed at dawn, only to spend all day on top of a shoulder doing nothing. On the way back they became disoriented in a whiteout, and wandered blind among the seracs and crevasses of the glacier. When the clouds did clear, the porters suffered from the sun, for they had neglected to wear their goggles and several became snowblind. “I rather lost patience with them,” Wheeler wrote, “for they will not do as they are told!” He threatened to dock their pay, to no avail. The bigger problem was food. His supply line stretched back to Tingri, twenty miles of flat, open ground followed by eight miles “of poisonous going” to reach his high camp on the Nangpa La. Out of goodwill, he had taken as his servant and cook a man Howard-Bury had exiled from headquarters: “one of the expedition’s scallywags,” Wheeler called him, a hopeless sort incapable of making a meal.
Wheeler’s luck changed the next day. It dawned bright and he was able to return to the high shoulder and a “glorious panorama at last for 2–3 hours.” He spent the afternoon plotting his work and establishing the height and precise geographical positions of two key peaks that became benchmarks of his survey. “Everything now fits around them ok,” he wrote that night. “Another two stations ought to do me here to get the pass and watershed and amphitheatre fixed. The watershed is a bit doubtful I think but tomorrow might settle it.”
The morning resolved nothing. He woke to a snowstorm, pushed off from camp in bright sun, and climbed to 21,000 feet to a spur that promised vistas to the east, south, and west, only to be enveloped in cloud, where he sat until 4:45 p.m. The next two days sleet and snow encased his tents. Things began to fall apart. “One can’t camp half clad men,” he wrote, “on a glacier 19,000 ft up with weather as it is now. I’ll need half a dozen primus stoves and gallons of fuel to feed them and Mallory and Bullock are using about all there are. The expedition is equipped to climb Everest, not to map it.”
Wheeler gave it one last go on July 10, climbing alone in light mist and terrible cold to another station. “The coolies as usual I had to leave behind … The weather is awful,” he recorded. “It snowed all afternoon and my station was in the clouds all day. It is the monsoon good and proper and with a vengeance … It’s still snowing this evening and seems likely to go on. I think the best thing to do is clear out … A beastly day … bitterly cold, a blinding snowstorm, damp snow all night, coat, breeches, puttees and boots simply soaked … 10 degrees of frost.”
After another day tent-bound by the snow, with four men sick and his own health failing, Wheeler finally headed down on July 12 to his lower camp, where a relay of porters awaited with mail and supplies. Howard-Bury and Heron, he learned, in anticipation of the major move scheduled for later in the month, were off scouting Kharta, leaving Morshead and Wollaston, “much to their disgust,” in Tingri. In the upper Phung Chu, Morshead and Gujjar Singh had “mapped some 3000 square miles of new country ¼″,” a singular achievement that only highlighted his own frustrations. “It is simply disgusting,” he wrote, “going up these infernal grinds to do nothing, but what can I do? Back home in Canada it would be nothing—a 2 hour grind, nothing at all; but here at these beastly altitudes it literally takes the life out of you.”
He felt rotten, the weather remained bad, and the porters were on the verge of breakdown. He was also out of money, down to his last fifty tankas of silver and copper, with one gold srang and a five-rupee note, nothing to pay the men or purchase firewood and yak dung. “Time is moving on,” he noted. “Distances are so huge in this country. Of course, this is the real monsoon.”
He still had several stations to attempt on his way north, and it would be six days before he finally arrived back in Tingri, where his reward was a hot bath, a cup of whiskey, and the first decent food in nearly a month. Howard-Bury had returned with good news from Kharta, and the two of them stayed up late into the night of July 18 “swapping lies.” The next day Wheeler slept. “It is ripping,” he wrote, “to have nothing strenuous to do.”
WHILE WHEELER was still toiling on the Nangpa La, Mallory and Bullock fought the weather in the upper Rongbuk Valley. On July 8, with a fresh party of seven porters, taking the minimum of gear and food for just three nights, they set out into the face of the monsoon, hoping in a quick two-day thrust to solve the mystery of the Western Cwm. They followed the shelf to its confluence with the West Rongbuk and, rather than crossing the glacier, continued along its northern moraine, reaching a rare patch of grass and moss, exposed to the south and the sun, perhaps five miles from their alpine camp. They realized almost immediately, Mallory noted, the “error of our ways.” The Mummery tents, with their thin canvas and low profile, decent enough in fair weather, were hopeless in the snows of Everest. Mallory’s congenital incompetence with anything technical made a mess of the Primus stoves, leaving both him and Bullock nauseated by kerosene fumes. No one slept. In the morning, they found snow piled high around and over the camp. The weather forced them to rethink their scheme. Were they to reach the Western Cwm, and explore in a meaningful way what lay beyond the Northwest Ridge and the upper reaches of the West Rongbuk, they would need proper support.
Despite the heavy snow, on the morning of July 9 Mallory returned all the way down to their base near the Rongbuk Monastery. His plan was to move the base, including the men and adequate supplies, up to a point just below the snout of the Rongbuk Glacier, within a single march of their highest bivouac, or what he now called the Second Advanced Camp. Bullock, meanwhile, was charged with returning to the alpine camp, to shift the bulk of its equipment, most notably the Whymper tents, up to the higher camp. The alpine camp, stripped of much of its equipment and supplies and now dubbed by Mallory the First Advanced Camp, would serve, according to Mallory, as “a half-way house with our big 80-foot tent standing in sole
mn grandeur to protect all that remained there.” It was no simple task, as the notes in Bullock’s diary attest: “Beastly weather, cold sleet and snow, wind in our faces. Changed tents in driving snow. Coat and trousers wet. Water in pockets of waterproof. Cold night, snowing at four am.”
Within forty-eight hours the move was done, and by the evening of Sunday, July 10, they were established as a proper team, ready to advance, or so they believed. But that night the snowfall was the heaviest they had yet experienced, and in the morning they were unable to move. The porters could not kindle a fire, and men had to be sent down to the lower camp to fetch a sack of dried yak dung. Finally, late in the day the clouds broke and Mallory beheld for the first time the range of mountains on the Nepali frontier that anchored the head of the West Rongbuk, the highest of which was Pumori, which soared to nearly 24,000 feet. “The clinging curtains,” he wrote, “were rent and swirled aside and closed again, lifted and lowered and flung wide at last; sunlight broke through with sharp shadows and clean edges revealed—and we were there to witness the amazing spectacle.” Directly across the ice from their camp was Lingtren, a mountain massif rising to 22,025 feet. The head of the glacier stretched away to the west, but an arm branched south, wrapping around the flank of Lingtren and separating it from Pumori. The geography suggested that this southern reach of the West Rongbuk had to be continuous with the Western Cwm or at least separated from it only by a high saddle. Either way, for the moment, it held the key.