by Wade Davis
After a week in the East Rongbuk, Wheeler had a sketch of the actual geography in hand. To establish new stations would require crossing the full length of the upper glacier, an impossibility given the condition of the men. His own clothes and boots were riddled with holes. One of the porters, a Pashtun, was dangerously ill. Wheeler had little choice but to return to the main Rongbuk Valley, where, at any rate, much work remained to be done. After a long slog, he arrived back at his base at the snout of the Rongbuk Glacier late on the afternoon of August 7, some hours ahead of the porters. Two of them finally arrived just after 8:00 p.m. with his bedding, just as, he noted, he had “settled down to make the best of it with my spare underwear, socks under me and myself wrapped in the waterproof cover of the sleeping bag Mallory had given me.” The following day, or possibly as late as August 9, he sent a letter by dak courier to Howard-Bury, with the map that revealed the most direct and efficient route to the eastern base of the North Col. It was not through Kharta, but via the main Rongbuk Valley, and the ice-studded moraines of the East Rongbuk Glacier.
Wheeler remained in the Rongbuk Valley for another sixteen days, cursed on every one by inclement conditions. He awoke each morning hopeful, only to pound up some ridge and be frustrated by clouds. On Thursday, August 11, he ran out of food. By Saturday, though resupplied, he was despondent; on August 18, from his highest camp on the glacier, he nearly broke down. “Weather, weather, weather!” he lamented. “It is this infernal Nepal frontier again; the monsoon clouds simply pour over—but this time the passes are in the main Everest ridge and I’ve got to stay till I map them. I must admit I’m fed up with this uncomfortable camp and this small tent (9 days in it now) and short rations. I’m smokeless! It was bad smoking mildewed stuff but infinitely better than nothing. I used the last this morning when I broke up three remaining stubs and rolled them into a fresh cigarette. Somewhat rank but smokeable.” Two days later, in the middle of the night, a blizzard blew through, crushing his tent under three feet of snow. The following morning he retreated down the ice in a blinding storm, three hours to his main camp, where he arrived drenched, hungry, tired, “but fit thank the Lord.” There was a message waiting from Howard-Bury, telling him to come down and around to Kharta, where much work was to be done and the climate was temperate. There were fruit trees and meadows, glaciers flowing down to 12,000 feet, and wonderful views of Makalu and Everest. On the morning of August 22, a Monday, he sent back by courier a note to Howard-Bury: “It is cold and cheerless now the clouds down. I’ve never seen such weather. Hopeless for survey work.” With that Wheeler finally abandoned the Rongbuk Valley, making his way down to Chöbuk, where he, like Mallory before him, took immense delight and pleasure from green fields and creeks running through glens, with no ice in sight.
MALLORY’S FIRST REACTION to Wheeler’s map was to question its accuracy. While it clearly showed, he wrote, a “glacier of enormous dimensions running north from Everest and draining into the Rongbuk Valley … its obvious inaccuracies in some respects had made us discount his conclusion perhaps too much … In my case I had little hope it would be of service to us.” The map was indeed just a sketch, intended only to brief Howard-Bury as to the significance of the East Rongbuk Glacier. But Wheeler was a skilled professional surveyor, an engineer who would one day become the surveyor general of India and later be knighted for cartographic work during the Second World War. His abilities as a topographer and mapmaker were exceptional, as Morshead and other members of the Survey of India acknowledged. Mallory’s real concern, beyond his lingering disregard for Wheeler and the possibility that he had been trumped, was his sense that the expedition, firmly entrenched in Kharta, could not possibly pull back and reposition for an assault on the mountain from the Rongbuk side. Time and the advancing seasons would not permit it. Nor would the morale of the men tolerate such a move. Everyone was exhausted and nerves were frayed. If they were to have a chance at Everest this season, it would have to come from Kharta, where supplies could be had and comfort found as the men prepared for the ultimate test.
On the morning of August 15, having seen Wheeler’s map, Mallory, Morshead, and Bullock set out to reach the high saddle at the head of the southern arm of the Kharta Glacier, the wide col beyond which they had seen the summit of Changtse, the North Peak. They expected to get there in a day. It took four, and from the start things went poorly.
Bullock’s porters, slow withdrawing his equipment and supplies from the northern arm of the glacier, delayed the advance, and the climbing party was obliged on the first evening to make camp on an awkward slope of rock, in whirling snow. Thick mist obscured the terrain the following morning, and they elected to leave the ice and scale the stony ridge immediately behind their camp, with the hope of finding a way to traverse to the col at elevation. Instead, having climbed 1,700 feet by 6:30 a.m., they discovered that only by dropping 1,000 feet might they regain the glacier, which they did, taking another two hours to do so. Exhausted, blinded by clouds, they trudged on snowshoes until late morning when, confronted by an ice wall impossible to turn or, in their weakened condition, to scale, they reluctantly gave up the day. Efforts to resupply and move their camp farther up the glacier, thwarted and compromised by the muddling incompetence of the sirdar, lost them another twenty-four hours, during which time snow fell constantly. Not until late in the afternoon of August 17 had they established a high camp at close to 20,000 feet.
That night—actually, 3:00 a.m. on August 18—the three Englishmen, accompanied by a single porter, the strong and dependable Nyima, departed for what Mallory would later describe as the most critical foray of the whole reconnaissance. He had long determined August 20 to be the cutoff, the date by which a final route would have to be known, or all the expedition’s efforts to climb Everest abandoned. In his mind, they had but a day, possibly two. A lingering hope that the cold might have hardened the surface of the snow slipped away the moment they moved onto the glacier. The snow was deep, and even with snowshoes they sank to their knees. Every step registered. Their greatest enemy, however, was not the fresh powder but the impossible heat that rose from the ice once the sun broke the horizon. In all their time in Tibet they had never experienced anything like it. Mallory tried to describe it in a letter to Ruth: “We were enveloped in a thin mist which obscured the view and made one world of snow and sky—a scorching mist, if you can imagine such a thing, more burning than bright sunshine and indescribably breathless. One seemed literally at times to be walking in a white furnace.”
Morshead compared it to the unbearable heat of the Indian plains, only far worse, mist that became steam, enveloping and exhausting the body. To halt for even a moment was to be overcome with inertia. One could only plod on. “Never before had our lungs been tested so severely,” Mallory later recalled. Even with Mallory taking the lead, breaking trail in the snow, Morshead could not keep up and was forced to fall out just below their goal. Mallory went on, in what he would later describe as the toughest push he had ever done on a mountain. With Bullock and Nyima behind, he finally crested the saddle at half past noon, after a steady climb of more than nine hours. To their delight, the indomitable Morshead joined them after fifteen minutes.
Clouds obscured the view, and the wind was fierce. The entire ridge from Everest to Changtse and beyond, all the peaks above the Rongbuk Valley, were hidden in white. But they could look down upon the head of the East Rongbuk Glacier and across at last to the face of the Chang La, the North Col, a sight that after so many weeks of effort, discipline, and longing must have left Mallory shaking with relief. He guessed that the drop from where they were to the glacier was 800 feet; it turned out to be closer to 1,200 feet and more difficult than his initial assessment. Still, it could be done, and crossing the head of the glacier to the base of the North Col would be a walk. The actual face of the col, which he guessed to be 500 feet—again an underestimate—presented at least from afar no insurmountable challenges. What lay beyond the col, on the shoulder rising
to the North-east Ridge, remained to be seen. All of Everest was veiled in cloud. Still, success seemed potentially at hand. “We saw what we came to see,” he later wrote to Ruth. “We have found our way to the great mountain.” The Lhakpa La, a pass soon to be dubbed Windy Gap by the British, offered without doubt an avenue to the foot of the North Col, to Mallory the only viable route to the summit of Everest.
Their return to base was a long, anticlimactic trudge, with Morshead utterly played out. They were not off the glacier until after dark. They lost the route, and only the “faint misty moonlight” allowed them to retrace their steps, a long, arduous ascent up a steep slope, stepping from boulder to boulder, until finally, just after 2:00 in the morning, fully twenty-three hours after setting out, they reached the safety of their lower camp. It had been an extraordinary triumph, marred perhaps only by Mallory’s stubborn, even unseemly, refusal to acknowledge Wheeler’s contribution. “The expedition was a success,” he wrote to Ruth on August 22. “There, sure enough, was the suspected glacier running north from a cwm under the northeast face of Everest. How we wished it had been possible to follow it down and find out the secret of its exit. There we were baffled.” In truth, even as he spun the story to his wife, making a second reference in the letter to the “glacier whose exit we have yet to find,” Mallory knew where the East Rongbuk flowed. Wheeler’s map had told him, more than a week before.
EVERYTHING NOW DEPENDED on the conditions, and the hope that the monsoon would break, as anticipated, at the end of the month and bring on a stretch of fine weather in the first days of September. Mallory, Bullock, and Morshead returned to Kharta on August 20. The geologist Heron had reached Kharta the previous day, having walked all the ranges north of Tingri and Shegar as far as the Brahmaputra drainage. Howard-Bury and Wollaston were already at base, and Wheeler was expected any day. Of the original party that had set out from Darjeeling three months before, almost to the day, only Harold Raeburn, invalided to Nepal, and Arthur Kellas, resting in his grave at Kampa Dzong, were missing.
Any question of returning to Rongbuk to reach the North Col via the newly discovered East Rongbuk Glacier had been rendered moot by the advancing season. There was no time. It would be the Kharta Valley or nothing. Mallory’s plan, endorsed by Howard-Bury, was to establish a supply stronghold in relative comfort at 17,300 feet. From there they would reoccupy their advanced base at 20,000 feet and place two, possibly three, additional tent camps on the mountain, one sheltered to the extent possible at Windy Gap, the Lhakpa La, at 22,200 feet, a second at the foot of the North Col, what they hazarded to be an elevation of some 21,500 feet, and finally a third beyond the North Col itself, “somewhere under the shoulder,” as Mallory anticipated, “at around 26,500 feet.” From there they would go as high as possible, hoping at the very least to reach the junction of the Northeast Shoulder rising from the col and the Northeast Ridge, which leads to the summit pyramid of the mountain. “We saw no reason,” Mallory wrote, “to exclude the supreme object itself.”
In retrospect, these were wildly ambitious, quixotic goals, revealing how little the climbers actually knew about the mountain, the scale of the endeavor, the danger of the undertaking, the power of Everest’s wrath. They were like knights who had endured impossible hardships to reach the mouth of the dragon’s cave, still to discover what it really means to enter and confront the creature. The quest nevertheless preoccupied Mallory, who spent hours at Kharta calculating loads, anticipating rotations of porters, constructing in his mind a ladder of logistical support that would rise from a broad base to the ultimate rung, a single step upon the summit of the world.
With the expedition now focused on the climb, Mallory’s voice within the group grew, and leadership shifted his way. The day after returning to Kharta, he wrote to Arthur Hinks at the Royal Geographical Society. The letter’s tone was both brash and defiant, as if to remind the secretary at his desk in London that the climbers on the mountain now controlled the narrative. He began with the practical, cutting a lecture deal for money, and closed with the essential:
As things have turned out it seems to me I am rather the obvious person to enlighten the public about the mountaineering part of the expedition; it is a good story, I think, so far, and I have every reason to expect the climax to be no less interesting … I suppose, before you receive this you will have heard our news in some other way and will know whether we have got to the top or how far we have reached “Height record beaten by two daring Englishmen,” or some balderdash of the sort. Meanwhile, “as flies to wanton dogs are we to the gods.” It’s a very big game; we’ve been foiled ever so often merely in finding out the shape of the mountain, the nature of the approaches … We’ve a chance of getting up; one can’t say more. Farewell. I hope we may meet sometime in December.
Among the men at Kharta, there were numerous tensions. Bullock and Mallory shared a small tent, and despite the soft weather, as wet and temperate as an English summer, they had been companions for too long. “We had rather drifted into that common superficial attitude between two people who live alone together,” Mallory wrote to Ruth, “competitive and slightly quarrelsome, each looking out to see that he doesn’t get done down in some small way by the other. I have been thinking B too lazy about many small things that have to be done, as a result of which I have sometimes tried to arrange that he shall be left to do them; and he has developed the idea that I habitually try and shift the dirty work onto him; and so we have both been forgetting Christian decency and even eyeing the food to see that the other doesn’t take too much—horrible confession!”
Mallory and Howard-Bury remained at odds, in conflict now about food and compensation for the porters. From their own pockets Mallory and Bullock had been buying meat and tea for their men in the high camps. “Bury will allow nothing outside their base rations. He has economy on the brain and I can’t bear his meanness,” Mallory reported. For his part, Howard-Bury had had enough. On Tuesday, August 23, three days after the climbers had returned to Kharta, he and Wollaston took off for the Kama Valley to explore its lower reaches. Mallory was relieved. “Frankly I was quite glad Bury was away,” he wrote. “I can’t get over my dislike of him.”
In six days Howard-Bury and Wollaston did wonderful things. They crossed the heights and descended into the Kama Valley, passing through the abandoned trading depot of Sakeding, ghost-riddled and haunted by demons, and then went down the gorge. They dropped more than 4,000 feet from the valley floor, following the Kama Chu for three days to its confluence with the Arun, where they stayed in a grove of blue pines and broad-leafed alders in a camp thick with leeches. They got away early the next morning and climbed high through black mud to reach the summit of the Popti La, at 14,000 feet a seasonal pass overlooking Nepal. There they found an ancient border stone, inscribed in Chinese characters. They remained at the pass for an hour, as Nepalese women trudged by silently in the rain, each burdened by eighty-pound loads of salt. That night they camped again in the wet forest, with a roaring fire of rhododendron and juniper wood to keep the leeches at bay. The following morning, they encountered langur monkeys in a valley scarlet with mountain ash and barberry. For both Howard-Bury and Wollaston, it was an inspired week away from the daily challenges of responsibility and leadership. As naturalists, they took delight in the fauna and flora, ignored all inconveniences, and found any number of new species. But by the time they retraced their steps, regained all the elevation lost, and crossed back over the divide to Kharta on August 29, the expedition and the story of Everest belonged to Mallory.
WHEELER HAD ARRIVED at Kharta two days earlier, on August 27, just before noon, looking “quite fit,” Bullock noted that night in his journal. In ninety-three days, he had rested nine. When not moving camp, he had climbed every day, on one occasion going up to a 20,500-foot station three days in a row only to secure an indifferent photograph on the third attempt. Delighted at last to be back with the main party, he naturally offered to help. Mallory was uncertain. “
Wheeler is intending to give us his service on the mountain,” he wrote to Ruth, “while using our camps to some extent for his surveying; but he’ll find it difficult to work the two objects together and I can’t believe he’ll be much use to us. He is continually complaining of a disordered inside and he doesn’t look fit. Besides he won’t be trained to the extent that B and I will be. Though he’s done a good deal of walking and plenty of living at high altitude he’s never been up more than 2000 ft in a day and hasn’t gone on enough I should imagine when it requires a real effort to go on—which is the essence of training. However, we shall see.”
Wheeler, having been alone for so long, was simply glad, he wrote, to “feed off a table again and to sit and swap lies after meals!” He missed Heron, who had set off again for another ten days on August 26, but shared what he had learned with the other men. “Wheeler was able to confirm,” Morshead later wrote, “the important fact that the glacier on to which we had looked down from the Lhakpa La, drained into the Rongbuk valley, through a narrow gorge which had been overlooked by the mountaineers in the mists and clouds during their first reconnaissance of the Rongbuk glaciers.” The sketched map had been correct, as Mallory now recognized. “But this certain knowledge,” he wrote, “could have no bearing on our plans; we remained content with the way we had found and troubled our heads no more for the present about the East Rongbuk Glacier.”