by Wade Davis
On July 12, they set out at 5:45 a.m. with great hopes. Exhilarated at last to be walking, as Mallory wrote, “under a clear sky,” they crossed much of the glacier with ease, “delighted to think that a large part of the task was accomplished when the sun rose full of warmth and cheerfulness.” Then they ran literally into a wall, “a stream of white ice, so narrow” they expected to get through in thirty minutes. They entered by way of a bay with “high white towers and ridges” all around. A side passage led to another, and another. To escape the maze Mallory finally cut steps up an ice wall, which landed them on the crest of a sheer precipice that dropped 100 feet to the moraine. Having wasted nearly three hours, they were forced to backtrack; weather set in, and the only option was an early return to camp in anticipation of better luck the following day.
It was a crushing blow to their morale. They had taken four and a half hours to cover little more than a mile. That evening the mail came up, and Mallory wrote to his old friend Rupert Thompson:
I think of you as especially a civilized man with somehow the capacity of sympathizing with the barbarous life and habits of a poor devil like myself, you may even be able to tell me why I embarked on an adventure such as this. Here in this outlandish spot we two—Bullock is the other—sit in a tent listening to the fine grains of sand beating against its sides, content, in so far as we can be content simply in the fact that we are writing letters to our wives and friends and that a coolie will bear them away on the first stage of their journey tomorrow … I sometimes think of this expedition as a fraud from beginning to end, invented by the wild enthusiasm of one man; Younghusband—puffed up by the would-be wisdom of certain pundits in the A.C.; and imposed upon the youthful ardour of your humble servant. Certainly the reality must be strangely different from their dream. The long imagined snow slopes of this Northern Face of Everest with their gently and inviting angle turn out to be the most appalling precipice nearly 10,000 ft high. It is a great rock peak plastered with snow, built of gigantic arêtes, which enclose impossible faces. The prospect of ascent in any direction is about nil and our present job is to rub our noses against the impossible in such a way as to persuade mankind that some noble heroism has failed once again. And the heroism at present consists in enduring the discomforts of a camp at 19,000 ft in company of a band of whose native tongue I can scarcely understand a syllable, in urging these good folk to rise before daylight, and by the same token urging oneself, in the most usually vain hope that by the time we have got somewhere something may still remain unhidden by the clouds.
Mallory had inadvertently anticipated precisely the outcome of their next foray. Leaving camp at 4:20 on July 13, again a fine morning, they traversed the glacier in just ninety minutes, successfully avoiding the worst of its hazards. Clinging to the edge of the moraine, they moved steadily around the shoulder of Lingtren, west and then south, coming back onto the ice just as the clouds rolled in from Nepal, obliterating everything. They continued on a bearing, walking blind. Mallory could sense the unknown peaks even as he felt the presence of “yawning crevasses as dim labyrinths on every side.” At 9:30 they reached a crest of snow, what they assumed to be the col, but they could scarcely see each other, let alone the mountains of Nepal and the valley of the Western Cwm. Yet again they were forced to retreat.
For three days they regrouped at their high camp. After resting on July 14, Bullock with two porters made another stab at reaching the mysterious col, only to be again stymied by clouds. Mallory climbed alone the next day, July 16, setting out in the middle of the night to scramble up a spur of the Lingtren massif, directly across from their camp, reaching the top at sunrise. He struggled with his Kodak, though what he saw was illuminating. He confirmed that, as suspected, there were two approaches to the Western Cwm: one at the head of the main Rongbuk Glacier, which he had already identified as the Lho La, and the second, known to Tibetans as the Nup La, which had been their elusive goal for the past week. He remained on the summit until 7:00 a.m., exposing altogether a dozen photographic plates, before returning to camp in time for breakfast, astonished by what a clear sky could yield. With Bullock resting after his own photographic excursion, Mallory spent a pleasant morning collecting flowers, “not a great variety but some delicious honey scents and an occasional cheerful blue poppy.”
If they had learned one thing for their troubles, it was the predictability with which the weather rolled in every day as the sun approached the zenith. To have any chance of reaching the Nup La and the Western Cwm before the clouds, they would have to begin from a higher point on the ice. Mallory instructed the sirdar to assemble rations for two days for ten men. On Monday, July 18, the same day that Wheeler returned to Tingri, Mallory and Bullock, equipped with snowshoes and carrying their own gear, accompanied by eight porters, moved up to establish a spike camp at 18,600 feet. In a flimsy Mummery tent that evening they waited for the moon. At 3:00 a.m., with black shadows on the snow, they set out for the col, keenly anticipating the dawn. As they came near, Mallory recalled, “the whole scene opened up. The North Ridge of Everest was clear and bright even before sunrise. We reached the col at 5 a.m., a fantastically beautiful scene; and we looked across into the Western Cwm at last, terribly cold and forbidding under the shadow of Everest.”
After all their long struggles to lift the veil, what they saw provoked only disappointment. On the skyline the great white peaks stood out, radiant in the morning sky. At their feet, however, was a 1,500-foot drop, a “hopeless precipice” of ice. Mallory scouted the length of the crest, seeking in vain a traverse that might lead safely down to the valley. “That, too, quite hopeless,” he lamented.
But as he and Bullock studied from on high the contours of the glacier of the Western Cwm, their disappointment quickly turned to relief. “We have seen this Western glacier,” Mallory later wrote, “and are not sorry we have not to go up it.”
From their vantage they could look directly into the basin of ice that swept to the South Col and the summits of Lhotse and Everest. The Lhotse Face has a pitch of seventy to eighty degrees; even today, with fixed ropes and modern equipment, it is a grueling three-hour climb. The front-pointed crampon was not invented until 1929, so for Mallory the only way up would have been an ice stairway, cut step by step with his own power, an impossibility. Even more intimidating was the fierce tangle of ice at the entrance to the Western Cwm, the Khumbu Icefall. The glacier, moving at an astonishing speed of four feet per day, literally tumbles 2,000 feet off the mountain, creating an unstable maze of crevasses and ice towers the size of small buildings. Mallory had never seen a glacier so “terribly steep and broken.” Even had they been able to reach the floor of the valley, the route to the mountain, as Bullock concluded, was “out of the question.”
. . .
“WITH THIS EXPEDITION of July 19,” Mallory wrote, “our reconnaissance of these parts had ended.” By nightfall of the following day they had broken camp and retreated, bringing all stores and gear back to their base at the snout of the main Rongbuk Glacier. They had both succeeded and failed. If Everest were to be climbed, Mallory concluded, “the route would not lie along the whole length of any of its colossal ridges.” Their sharp crests and towers would bar the way. Nor would it be found on any of the approaches from the south, west, or north, all of which had now been explored, or so he believed. Only one side of the mountain remained. “The great question before us now was one of access. Could the North Col be reached from the East and how could we attain this point?”
At base camp near the Rongbuk Monastery word awaited Mallory that Howard-Bury would soon be making the move to Kharta, leaving Tingri on July 23 and, two days later, passing through Chöbuk, where he proposed they rendezvous. This gave Mallory five short days to pull his men out of Rongbuk, even as events, in a fateful way, spun out of his control. Weather shrouded the camp for two days, rain and sleet; the snow lay a foot deep and down to 16,000 feet on the morning of July 23. The porters were exhausted. There was a small cris
is of organization and logistics. In the official expedition account, Mallory famously blamed the sirdar, “a whey-faced treacherous knave whose sly and calculated villainy too often, before it was discovered, deprived our coolies of their food, and whose acquiescence in his own illimitable incompetence was only less disgusting than his infamous duplicity.” These were strong words indeed to describe a man Mallory had personally vetted and who by definition had kept the expedition running in the most difficult of circumstances for a month. Had he been so truly incompetent, why had action not been taken sooner? In truth, Mallory was spinning a moment of intense humiliation.
On the night of July 22 a note had arrived from headquarters at Tingri, indicating that every photograph taken by Mallory with the quarter-plate camera had been ruined. In a monumental gesture of technical incompetence, he had inserted the plates back to front. It was a crushing blow. “I knew nothing of plates,” he lamented in a letter that night to Ruth, “and followed instructions given me by Heron. I have taken enormous trouble over these photos; many of them were taken at sunrise from places where neither I nor anyone else may go again … However I’m determined to replace them as far as possible … It will mean two days spent in the most tiresome fashion, when I thought all our work in those parts was done.”
It was, of course, impossible to reproduce in two days what had been accomplished in thirty, though Mallory, to his immense credit, did his best. Bullock, meanwhile, was not idle. On Sunday, July 24, he pounded his way back up the entire length of the main Rongbuk Glacier, both to examine once more the North Col and to scout at last the Lho La, the saddle at the head of the basin that looked down into Nepal. He reached 19,500 feet and stared into mist, just able to make out the outline of the Khumbu Icefall at the foot of the Western Cwm. It did not look appealing. He returned to base camp, three hours in the sleet, arriving just before dark.
A heavy snow fell in the night, dispelling a vague notion Mallory had of crossing the mountains directly to reach Kharta. It would have been a horrendous passage, especially in such weather. But had it been attempted, there would have been only one possible route. Along the entire flank of the Rongbuk Valley, from Everest down to the North Col and from Changste along the full length of the jagged mountain skyline running to the north, there is but a single cleft that opens to the east. Mallory and Bullock had walked right by the narrow mouth of the valley on their first day on the ice. Its outlet stream, a torrent of meltwater, had forced them to detour onto the glacier. From the summit of Ri-Ring they had seen the drainage again and remarked upon it. Their achievements on the mountain had been considerable, even noble, but given that their primary task was reconnaissance, their failure to explore this opening, given the ease of access, was a remarkable oversight, if not a dereliction of duty, and ultimately far more embarrassing to Mallory that his struggles with the camera.
Instead, on the morning of July 25, exhausted from their efforts and keen to get a fresh start at Kharta, they hurried the porters down the Rongbuk, past the monastery, and along the track to Chöbuk. As they descended from the rock and ice, Mallory experienced an odd sensation: “The valley was somehow changed and more agreeable to the eye. Presently I discovered the reason. The grass had grown on the hillside since we went up. We were coming down to summer green.”
In his haste to leave the valley, Mallory had missed the key to the North Col and thus to the mountain.
CHAPTER 8
Eastern Approaches
AS MALLORY AND Bullock struggled in the snows of Rongbuk, and Wheeler, high on the ice of the Nangpa La, waited in vain for the sun, Charles Howard-Bury was making plans for the final phase of the 1921 reconnaissance: the exploration of the eastern approaches to Everest through Kharta and the unknown rivers that fell away from the glaciers of the Kangshung Face, a vertical wall of ice two miles high. On July 5, accompanied still by Alexander Heron, he had left Mallory and Bullock after the brief visit with them and began the long slow descent of the Rongbuk Chu, leaving behind what he later described as a “wild and gloomy but strangely holy valley.” From the monks at Rongbuk he had learned that Kharta lay but an easy two-day march from the monastery. Rather than returning to his headquarters at Tingri, he decided to scout the route directly, with the goal of identifying a site from which to base the expedition during what he knew would be the critical months of August and September. With the expedition stymied in the north and west, and with the government of Nepal precluding an assault from the south, all their hopes now lay to the east.
Howard-Bury and Heron started out on a cold morning after a night of sharp frost that left the summit of Everest radiant under a fresh cover of snow. With yaks for transport, the pace was slow and it was midday before they reached the first signs of cultivation at Chöbuk, rich fields of barley eighteen inches high and coming into ear. The crop had barely sprouted when they had first set out from Tingri; the season, Howard-Bury noted with some concern, was moving along far too quickly. He decided to increase the use of baksheesh, cash incentives that would entice the Tibetan herdsmen to break tradition and cover longer distances rather than changing animals in every village, which caused impossible delays. Still, it was not until well after 3:00 p.m. that they began the steep 1,200-foot climb over a high pass that rose above Chöbuk and marked the route to Halung, a prosperous hamlet of well-irrigated fields of barley and mustard where they would halt for the night. In a grassy meadow by a mountain stream, the villagers had pitched three tents, and gathered fuel, cushions, and food for the comfort of the men. At 14,800 feet, the air was temperate and warm, and they slept well for the first time in days.
Morning broke bright and clear and, having moved their loads by hand across a rickety bridge, they drove the yaks and ponies across the ford and began a slow passage through a number of small villages laced together with irrigation ditches lined with an astonishing array of wildflowers, black and yellow clematis, monkshood, buttercups and primulas of a dozen hues. A change of transport delayed them at Rebu, a picturesque village that straddled a perfectly crystal river—a welcome relief, Howard-Bury later recalled, after the muddy glacial torrents of Rongbuk. When they paused for lunch, scores of small birds, all fearless and wonderfully tame, hopped about their legs, carrying off crumbs and small bits of food. It reminded Howard-Bury of the swifts and songbirds of France, which had always returned to alight on the torn and tangled branches of woodlands blasted apart by battle.
So much had been changed by the war, and yet so little had been won. Peace had given way to chaos, and everywhere the world of his youth was crumbling. Germany and Russia were engulfed in revolution. His beloved Ireland was a cauldron of violence and sectarian strife. A national uprising in Egypt in the spring of 1919 had been followed a year later by an Arab revolt in Mesopotamia that engaged thousands of British troops and left hundreds dead. In India, all the news was bad. On the North-West Frontier no fewer than 340,000 British and Indian soldiers, fully two-thirds of the entire military might of the Raj, were engaged in open war with Afghanistan and the Wazirs, Mahsuds, and Afridis. The air force bombed and strafed the tribesmen and there was talk of using poison gas, a proposal that horrified veterans of the Western Front.
More than 2.5 million Indians who had served with the British in the trenches had returned home expecting to be rewarded for their loyalty to the Crown. Instead, the Raj extended the laws that had suspended civil liberties during the war. Mohandas Gandhi called for a one-day strike, a boycott of British manufactured goods, and a national campaign of peaceful noncooperation. Invariably these protests, like all those initiated by the Mahatma, sparked the very violence and conflict he so earnestly condemned.
In April 1919 in the Punjab city of Amritsar an English missionary, a white woman, was brutally attacked and severely injured. In retribution the British military commander General Reginald Dyer ordered all Indians passing the spot where she had been assaulted to crawl on their hands and knees. This humiliation unleashed waves of demonstrations, which Dye
r promptly banned. On the evening of April 13, in defiance of martial law, a crowd of several thousand unarmed men, women, and children gathered in the Jallianwala Bagh, an enclosed courtyard adjacent to a holy shrine, the Golden Temple, the most sacred site of the Sikhs. Furious at this affront, Dyer marched a detachment of ninety Baluchis and Gurkhas into the square, arrayed them in battle formation, and ordered them to open fire. There was no warning, no mercy, and for the victims no escape. For ten minutes Dyer obliged his men to maintain a constant fire. Howard-Bury knew well what this implied. A British soldier armed with a .303 Lee-Enfield rifle was trained to hit a target three hundred yards away fifteen times a minute; many could double this rate. Dyer had commanded his troops to fire at point-blank range into a dense crowd with a weapon that could kill at two thousand yards. Single bullets passed through three and four bodies. The dead lined the walls of the enclosure in bloody piles ten feet deep. In the end, 379 were killed and four times as many severely wounded. Dyer ordered that no succor be given to the injured or dying. Leaving children to wail for their slaughtered mothers, husbands to untangle the corpses in search of their wives, he simply marched his troops out of the enclosure. Had his vehicles with their mounted machine guns been able to fit through the narrow entrance to the Jallianwala Bagh, it was later noted, he would not have hesitated to use those weapons on the mob.