by Wade Davis
With the return to Kharta of Howard-Bury and Wollaston on the evening of August 29, Mallory and Bullock took advantage of what appeared to be a slight break in the weather to make immediate plans to move up the valley to establish the base camp at 17,300 feet. Bullock sent his mattress and spare clothes on August 30, keeping only his suitcase. He and Mallory set off the following day on ponies, with three porters to carry the rest of their kit. After two hours, they had to walk, and it was midafternoon before they reached the site for the new advanced base. Mallory felt ill. Leaving Kharta so soon was a mistake, as Howard-Bury had anticipated in a letter to Arthur Hinks on the first day of September: “Bullock and Mallory left yesterday for the upper camp, foolishly I think for they can do nothing in this weather, but I am afraid they are getting impatient and anxious to get back to their wives.”
The locals had predicted one last blizzard before the turn of the season. For several days the weather stabilized, but there was little for Mallory and Bullock to do save wait as the porters, one load at a time, thirty altogether, supplied the upper camps with wood. The two climbers at the advanced base camp remained essentially idle for five days, in the damp and discomfort, when they could have been resting and conserving their strength down below at Kharta. Bullock passed the time by playing with two young buntings he had captured, letting them run about on a string, and taking great delight whenever the mother came to feed them. He made a cage from a basket, and they began to take seeds from his hand. But then on the night of Monday, September 5, wet snow fell and by morning the birds were dead.
At Kharta, meanwhile, Wheeler had been working intently on his photographic collection, processing the glass plates and printing the best of the images to be dispatched by dak courier to Darjeeling and ultimately to Arthur Hinks at the RGS. Wheeler was disappointed in several of the exposures. Clearly he had underestimated the brightness of Tibetan light even when filtered by clouds. On the afternoon of September 1, he’d left the darkroom and gone outside to get away from the chemical fumes and have a cigarette when suddenly he saw a short, ghostlike figure stumble toward their camp. To the utter surprise of all, it was the irascible Scot, Harold Raeburn, whom they had not seen or heard from since Wollaston had left him in the care of the Moravian nuns at Lachen in Sikkim on June 12. At the age of fifty-six, he had walked across Tibet to rejoin the expedition.
Stunned, they gathered in the mess tent to hear the tale. At the missionary post Raeburn had indeed come close to death. But, mercifully, his fever had broken on the evening of June 18. The maharaja of Sikkim had been kind enough to dispatch his personal bearers, who carried the invalid in a dandy three days across the mountains to Gangtok, where he convalesced at the British Residency. Regaining his strength by the end of July, he purchased four ponies and headed for Tibet. Accompanied by a single interpreter, he crossed the Serpo La and reached Kampa Dzong on August 15. He rested for a day, paying his respects to Kellas’s grave. He then set out for Kharta, though neither he nor the dzongpen of Tinki had any idea where to find it. But he recalled from the account of the pundit Sarat Chandra Das, published in 1885, mention of a bridge, said to be just a few strands of twisted hide, that crossed the Phung Chu some thirty miles east of Everest. He walked for five days, only to find the river swollen by the monsoon, a sea of water and quicksand. There was no sign of a bridge, save the trunk of an old tree poking out of the water. Backtracking, he found all the rivers swollen in flood, and it was only after several arduous days that he reached a possible ford. The men stripped naked and joined hands. Raeburn recalled, “The crossing was most painful and hard from the cold and the water and wind and the heavy quick sands. It took me up to the shoulders and in a small man up to the chin. On getting over I shivered for two hours.” Only by good fortune did he then meet a native to the area, one of Morshead’s porters from Kharta, who directed him to the valley.
In the official expedition account, the return of Harold Raeburn, the titular leader of the climbing party, was cause for celebration. “We rejoiced,” Mallory wrote, “to see [him] again.” Private thoughts were less charitable. “To our great surprise Raeburn turned up yesterday after a three month absence,” Howard-Bury reported in a note to Sir Francis Younghusband. But his sin was unforgivable: “He passed five bags of our mails near Tinki … Can you imagine anyone being such a fool!”
Mallory spoke the harshest words, in a letter some days later to Geoffrey Young: “Raeburn turned up … looking extraordinarily old and grizzled and being no less old than he looks. When he is not being a bore I feel moved to pity. But that’s not often. He takes no part luckily … Was he always such a very stupid man? It’s impossible to understand how ever he can have got a party up a mountain.”
Wollaston, the expedition doctor who had personally escorted Raeburn to safety in Sikkim, was appalled that he had returned. He felt that Raeburn was a serious liability to all, noting, “His internal trouble is at an end … But he is definitely an old man, in mind as well as in body, and I very much wish he had not come, as there is nothing whatever for him to do … He is become quite senile since his illness.”
IN CLOUDS and drifting snow Wheeler and Morshead left Kharta on Saturday, September 3, keen to map the approaches to the Lhakpa La. It was their first opportunity to work together, and Morshead was eager to learn the Canadian photographic survey technique that had allowed Wheeler to accomplish so much, so close to the mountain. They walked seven miles up the valley, making camp at the last bridge. That afternoon they climbed 4,000 feet to scout a survey station, an exertion they repeated the following day, with Morshead setting the pace. On September 5 they moved eight miles farther up the Kharta Valley, past the last village, establishing a camp roughly five miles this side of Mallory and Bullock’s advanced base. This same day, Howard-Bury, Wollaston, and Raeburn moved up from Kharta, making their camp two miles below that of Wheeler and Morshead. There were now three parties on the advance, all ultimately heading to the ice and wind of the Lhakpa La.
Howard-Bury, Wollaston, and Raeburn pushed through in the morning, joining Mallory and Bullock at their 17,300-foot camp by midday. On September 7 Morshead walked up to visit them, returning to Wheeler in the afternoon with word of Mallory’s plan: Mallory and Bullock would wait at the advanced base until the first clear day and then immediately ascend to the 20,000-foot camp, where they would remain for four days, bringing up wood and supplies, before heading to Windy Gap at 22,200 feet. Mallory expected Wheeler and Morshead to follow on command. Wheeler was delighted, for the schedule gave him time to complete his work and still get up the mountain to join the assault, with twenty-four hours to spare for acclimatization.
Morshead also brought gossip from the upper camp. “Apparently Bury and Wollaston and Raeburn live in one mess alone,” Wheeler confided in his journal, “and Mallory and Bullock in another! Rather funny. Bury and Mallory don’t hit it off—nor do Raeburn and Wollaston, so if the weather lasts there may be some squabbles.” Morshead also brought more important news, which Wheeler shared in a letter to his wife. Mallory intended for certain to cross the head of the East Rongbuk Glacier to establish a camp at “25,000 to 26,000 on the col joining the north to the main peak and so up the north ridge. Whether we shall be able to do all that is another matter. Anyhow Morshead and I are going to get in on that climb which is something!”
News that Mallory had included him and Morshead in the final climbing party inspired Wheeler, but what most lifted his morale that particular day had been his sighting of three heavily laden porters slowly making their way up the valley. “We examined them carefully through glasses,” he noted, “and eventually decided that they must be the mail!”
Dispatched from Darjeeling as early as July 1, the post had taken six to ten weeks to cross the flooded uplands of Tibet. At the advanced base camp Howard-Bury alone received two hundred letters, along with various packages and papers. For Mallory, waiting out the weather in the damp and cold with not a candle to heat the night, the news fr
om Ruth and home was nothing less than six “weeks of love” in envelopes. “It’s always a wonderful moment,” he later wrote, “when the mail comes and love flies in among us and nestles in every tent.”
In an age of letters, it was not only the receipt of correspondence that maintained a lifeline, it was the grace and comfort that came in the moment of reply, when each man could share private thoughts, vent frustrations, and express fears, knowing that convention demanded discretion, and that a private letter between gentlemen or an intimate note between man and wife implied an inviolable trust.
Among the many letters to arrive that day for Mallory was one dated July 20 from his old friend and mentor Geoffrey Young. It urged caution: “The result is nothing compared to the rightness of the attempt. Keep it right then; and let no desire for result spoil the effort by overstretching the safe limits within which it must move … The summit may, in any particular case, lie outside the course … Good Fortune! And the ‘resolution to return’ even against ambition!”
Mallory responded immediately, even before writing to his wife:
Long before you get this you will know the result, which may make my speculations look foolish; but I must make them, I can think of nothing else. The excitement of the reconnaissance is over—it was exciting—and we have found a good way to the mountain …
The whole thing is on my shoulders. Bullock follows well and is safe; but you know what it means on a long, exhausting effort to lead all the time … Morshead and Wheeler are both joining us for the assault. M is wonderfully stouthearted, but hasn’t the lungs for this job I fear. Wheeler hasn’t been out with us as yet, but … I don’t expect much of him. If they don’t come on from the final camp I shall take coolies; one or two of them are wonderful good goers … It’s all a question of lungs.
Lord, how I wish you were here to talk it all over. It has been rather a strain Geoffrey altogether … Relations with Bury have not been easy—they’re reestablished pretty happily now I believe after a day’s scrambling yesterday along an amusing little rock ridge; he’s a queer customer as I’ll tell you one day, and I don’t support friction easily. Altogether it’s a trying time …
Geoffrey at what point am I going to stop? It’s going to be a fearfully difficult decision and there’s an incalculable element about other men’s physical condition, and all the more so under these strange conditions. I almost hope I shall be the first to give out!
I shan’t be sorry to get back to civilization and know again what’s going on in the world; it’s a poor world perhaps but it remains interesting even here—if only as a contrast to Tibet, which is a hateful country inhabited by hateful people. The great mountains give their flashes of beauty; Makalu is indescribably impressive; but on the whole they are disappointing and infinitely less beautiful than the Alps.
Mallory, of course, shared none of these private doubts and misgivings with the men. But he did feel the burden of the expedition upon him, and he watched everyone for signs of weakness. His opinion of Howard-Bury had indeed softened. The post had brought word of a truce in Ireland, for which they both rejoiced. Their “most agreeable little scramble” the day before was actually the first time they had climbed together, and they had confronted a number of sharp pinnacles with some exposure. “I found these gymnastics at a height of over 19,000 feet to be very exhausting,” recalled Howard-Bury, “but Mallory did not seem to mind them in the least.” Of Howard-Bury, Mallory later wrote, “He went quite well, walked strongly and was by no means so clumsy on rocks as one might expect of a novice of 40.”
Still, despite Howard-Bury’s evident strength and fitness, Mallory did not trust him for the actual assault, any more than he did Heron and Wollaston, both of whom he genuinely liked. He promised the ever “cheerful and good natured” Heron “a bit of rock from the summit of Everest.” Wollaston amused him, but he was no climber: “Wollaston, I find, a rather solitary bird, posing over his collections—a most varied assortment they must be ranging from dead rats of which he has an incredible number to poppy seeds and butterflies. He is always jolly and friendly to talk with, but I’ve an impression that he is more tired of the expedition than the rest of us. Of course, just now we are all drifting as the clouds drift, forgetting to number the days so as to avoid painful thoughts of the hurrying month.”
Time was the challenge—and, of course, the weather. On September 10, Mallory rather impetuously decided to advance the schedule, sending a chit to Wheeler and Morshead, summoning them to the advanced base for a move to the 20,000-foot camp the following day. “2 days instead of 4!” Wheeler scribbled in his journal. “He [Mallory] changes his plans pretty frequently. There is nothing for it but to chuck this and come up to the base camp tomorrow. How I shall finish work in this valley I don’t know.”
The next morning, a Sunday, they headed up, a 2,000-foot rise over five miles. They arrived at noon only to find that Mallory and Bullock had pushed on to the 20,000-foot camp. “It is distinctly colder here,” Wheeler noted, “raw and beastly. Temperature 39 at lunchtime.”
Mallory’s haste was for naught. Within twenty-four hours he and Bullock were forced back from the higher camp. Four feet of fresh powder had fallen, and nothing could be done until they had sun by day and frost by night to harden the surface. On the descent in the sleet and snow, Bullock put up his pink umbrella. Mallory wore his shepherd’s overalls, airplane wing fabric oiled to a dirty yellow sheen. He took two hours to get down to the advanced base, Bullock slightly longer. In that time an additional six inches fell. “Having only brought one coat which was wet,” Bullock wrote in his journal that night, “Spent the evening in a sweater. Luckily I had two.”
Inactivity now became a curse. “I’ve done precisely nothing since I left Kharta,” complained Wheeler, “9 whole days gone to pot. It is disgusting. Mallory of course is bored to tears. He is such an excitable person.”
The following morning, Tuesday, September 13, the snow and cold grew worse, with a morning sun blackened by cloud by breakfast. “It’s distinctly raw in camp,” wrote Wheeler. “There really is nothing to do but stay in bed. My feet are nearly frozen in spite of 2 pr of socks, wooly bedroom slippers and the whole ensconced in the wooly legs of my long boots. It froze in my tent during the night. A glass of water was frozen solid—also my boots.”
That afternoon, with the temperature dropping to thirteen degrees, Howard-Bury, Mallory, Bullock, and Wheeler gathered in one of the tents to play bridge. “First time since March,” Wheeler recalled. “I enjoyed it thoroughly. Pretty even cards. We had one of two quite exciting hands too—5 hearts doubled which we just made and 4 diamonds doubled our opponents just made.” Outside, three feet of fresh snow had fallen. There was no fuel in camp, as every stick of firewood had to be carried up five miles from the valley below. The “raw cold cuts one to the marrow,” Wheeler acknowledged in a letter to Dolly, his mind drifting to a case of fine Madeira wine that had been promised to the expedition, something to celebrate the king’s birthday. Perhaps it was already in Kharta. “It would be nice—by Jove, it would! It just makes the mouth water.”
Heron arrived the following day, without wine but with another cache of mail, including recent letters, some of which had been posted in Darjeeling only a fortnight before. But with the cold came a growing lassitude. Even at their advanced base camp they were sleeping at an elevation nearly 2,000 feet higher than the summit of Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps. Climbers had never before spent so much time at such altitude, and they had no idea that with every hour they grew weaker. “Mallory has now switched,” Wheeler noted on September 14, “from violent hurry to waiting at least a week after the fine weather comes for the final ascent.” The notion of waiting out the weather may have made sense in Europe, but it would prove disastrous on the slopes of Everest. By day Mallory dreamed of returning to Ruth, meeting her quayside at some sun-drenched Mediterranean port. By night Bullock was forced to shake him awake, for Mallory often ceased to breathe for wh
at seemed like minutes at a time.
Morshead’s clothes were stiff with sweat and frost, and his face blackened from the wind and cold. Raeburn suffered the most. In a letter to Ruth, Mallory dismissed him as “a senile, babbling, insignificant, almost broken and heart breaking figure.” That night, in a curious gesture, Raeburn gave Wheeler a copy of his book Mountaineering Art, which had been published to strong reviews only a year before. It was a climbing manual as much as a book, and it summed up everything Raeburn knew and had experienced as a mountaineer. Wheeler enjoyed it, but was astonished that Raeburn had carried it all the way from Darjeeling.
Mallory sensed the gloom in the “strange bearded faces and teeth” of his companions. “The month is too late already for the great venture,” he wrote to Ruth. “We shall have to face great cold, I’ve no doubt; and the longer the delay the colder it will be. But the fine weather will come at last. My chance, the chance of a lifetime, I suppose, will be sadly shrunk by then and all my hopes and plans … will be blown to wherever the monsoon blows.”
Then, as if by a miracle, the weather broke and the morning of September 16 dawned with promise. “Wonder of wonders!” Mallory exclaimed in a note to Ruth. “We just woke and found it different—the sky clear and remaining clear—no dense grey clouds drifting up the valley, but a chill wind driving high clouds from the north.” Wheeler got away early and established, on a high hill across from their base, his best station yet, composing his first full circle of images, eight photographs in all, with every feature of the land illuminated by a cloudless sky. Mallory, Morshead, and Bullock scrambled up the same side of the valley, became separated for a time but returned together, swept into the camp by an afternoon snowstorm.
By evening it had again cleared, and the eight men posed for a group portrait, the only one taken of the entire expedition party high on the mountain. Mallory, pipe in hand, sits stiffly in a camp chair beside Wheeler, and hovering over both is Howard-Bury, dapper in tie, waistcoat, and checkered coat. Every face is grim. “The party has been gathered for the great assault,” Mallory wrote to his old friend Herbert Read. “Mountaineers and surveyors, the chief himself, the men of medicine, the geologist who demands a piece of the top, even old Raeburn who has rushed up again at the last moment—we’re all here waiting for the indispensible friend who never will show himself, the Sun, to melt the snow for us. And every day we wait, the poorer our chances become, the later the season, the colder the nights, the more uncomfortable the coolies … The puffs of smoke from the fire give the faintest of blue cheer to our desolation.”