Into The Silence

by Wade Davis

  Before renewing their quest, they had to wait for the sun and the cold to form a crust on the fresh snow of the glacier. But rather than rest, they made immediate plans to take advantage of the decent weather. On Saturday, September 17, Wheeler and Heron established two new stations at close to 20,000 feet. That same day Mallory, Morshead, and Howard-Bury set out just after 2:00 a.m. to climb Kama Changri, a dominant peak to the south, overlooking the Kama Valley. They began by the light of a full moon. There was, Howard-Bury later wrote, everywhere an intense stillness. To the south, lightning flashed constantly through the night and the mountains—Kangchenjunga in the east, Makalu and Everest closer at hand—emerged as islands above the clouds. “All of a sudden a ray of sunshine touched the summit of Everest, and soon flooded the higher snows and ridges with golden light, while behind, the deep purple of the sky changed to orange. Makalu was the next to catch the first rays of the sun and glowed as though alive; then the white sea of clouds was struck by the gleaming rays of the sun, and all aglow with colour rose slowly and seemed to break against the island peaks in great billows of fleecy white. Such a sunrise has seldom been the privilege of man to see, and once seen can never be forgotten.”

  With the dawn, however, “the climbing became more unpleasant,” Howard-Bury noted. It took them more than six hours, much of the time in soft snow under a bright sun, to traverse the glacier and reach the summit at 21,300 feet. The heat was intense, and there seemed not to be a breath of air. Mallory and Morshead both felt the altitude, and that did not bode well for what was to come. They rested on the summit for three hours, then returned by an easier route down the glacier, reaching camp in time for dinner and, as had become their habit, a pleasant game of bridge. They had climbed more than 4,000 vertical feet, taking sixteen hours to do so, on the eve of the day they hoped to begin their final assault on Everest.

  The next morning, Sunday, September 18, as it turned out, was a write-off, with snow and sleet rendering any movement pointless. Wheeler and the others played cards all day, setting, as Howard-Bury quipped, an altitude record. Mallory was in no mood for levity. “I am clearly far from being as fit as I ought to be,” he confided in a letter to Ruth. “It’s very distressing my dear but at this moment and altogether my hopes are at zero.”

  His latest plan, as outlined in a letter to Geoffrey Young, was straightforward, though in hindsight still impossibly optimistic. From their current position they would push up to their 20,000-foot camp, already established on a stone terrace and well supplied with wood, light tents, and food. From there they would advance as soon as possible over the heights of Windy Gap, the Lhakpa La, cross the head of the East Rongbuk Glacier, and establish a third camp, he wrote,

  at about 24,000 feet, I hope somewhere near what we call the “north col” between Everest and the first part of its north ridge—an easy stage. It’s an easy slope up from there to a great shoulder of the N.E. arête which must be 27,000 ft or thereabouts, and from there to the summit there should be no obstacle unless on the steep final up, which looks all too formidable. Naturally much depends upon how high we can get the coolies up from the “north col” on the 3rd day from our first camp. And we still have to find a place where a tent can be pitched. If we can get them 2,000 ft [above the col on the Northeast Shoulder] we shall have a chance I believe, a bare outside chance perhaps of crawling to the top.

  Precisely who would make this supreme effort, and how it might be logistically supported, preoccupied Mallory for much of the day. Both Morshead and Wheeler were now pledged to mountaineering, as was Bullock. In a divided camp, they had forged a unit and were getting along well. Morshead, Bullock, and Mallory shared a Whymper tent, and Wheeler joined them for meals with “plenty of talk and good cheer,” while the “rest,” as Mallory noted, referring to Wollaston, Howard-Bury, and Raeburn, “have lordly meals round a table in a pukka mess tent.” Yet despite this new camaraderie among the climbers, Mallory retained doubts about Wheeler. “Wheeler still strikes me as not a fit man,” he wrote to Ruth. “Unless he shows more stamina than I expect I can’t take him with us on the final day.”

  How the porters would perform at severe altitude also remained a great unknown. If the British were to have a chance at the summit, they would have to establish a final camp at an elevation higher than any human had ever reached, let alone slept. From the North Col, Mallory estimated, it would take ten fifteen-pound packs, half the normal load, merely to position tents, sleeping bags, and food for a four-man climbing party. This implied fourteen porters reaching the highest camp, with four to remain with the climbers and ten returning to a lower camp at or below the North Col. Unescorted, these porters would nevertheless need shelter, which meant that six tents at least, along with food and fuel for eighteen men, would have to be carried over the Lhakpa La, across the head of East Rongbuk Glacier, and then up the unclimbed face of the North Col. The expedition had nineteen porters experienced on ice. Sixteen had been with Mallory and Bullock; Wheeler had trained another three. But not all were well, and the expedition did not have enough high-altitude boots to equip even those still sufficiently fit to attempt the ascent. The math did not compute. The plan had no chance of success, but at this point in the expedition, the mountain and the weather dictated events.

  AFTER A FRIGID NIGHT, sixteen degrees of frost, Mallory, Bullock, Morshead, and Wheeler left advanced base at 8:30 a.m. on Monday, September 19, to make their way in four hours to the 20,000-foot camp. That evening the sky cleared, and Wheeler described in his journal a glorious sight, Makalu and the whole of the ridge leading to Everest, and to the east a “false sunset, great pink beams of light across a purple sky.” There was later a beautiful halo around the moon, and in its light Mallory and Morshead, along with sixteen porters, set out at 2:30 a.m. for the Lhakpa La, carrying with them fourteen loads to provision an upper camp there. Bullock remained with Wheeler, traversing the ice that morning to establish a survey station at 20,000 feet on a saddle overlooking the Kama Valley.

  For Mallory and Morshead, initially all went well. The night was colder than the last, twenty degrees Fahrenheit according to Wheeler’s journal, and the surface of the snow “crisp and solid.” Mallory and Morshead walked ahead, along with Sanglu, acting now as sirdar, and one spare porter, Dorji Gompa, who carried no load. The fourteen laden porters came in their wake. There was no need for snowshoes—which, at any rate, had been left behind; there were not enough pairs to go around.

  In less than an hour they reached the icefall that had blocked Mallory and Morshead on their first attempt at the Lhakpa La precisely a month before. Mallory had avoided it in August by scaling the rocks above the lateral moraine. Now, with men weighted down with loads, he was determined to find a way through. He pressed ahead, following a smooth and promising corridor in the ice that ended abruptly in a series of crevasses, dangerous to negotiate in the dim light. “We plunged into the maze and struggled for a little time,” he later recalled, “crossing frail bridges over fantastic depths and making steps up steep little walls, until it seemed we were in serious trouble.” The men, weighted down with loads, grew fearful, and Mallory’s decision to leap across an especially formidable crevasse did not inspire confidence. The party halted on a “sharp little crest between two monstrous chasms” as Morshead and Mallory “discussed the situation.” They decided to scout the ground to their left, whereupon they found another corridor leading up and through the final hazards of the icefall.

  Dawn broke, and Mallory called a halt, giving the men a chance to rest and “knock a little warmth into chilled toes.” The sun revealed a vast expanse of snow reaching toward the skyline of the Lhakpa La, but the conditions above the icefall were very different, and worse than anything Mallory had deemed possible. There was no crust, only deep powder so fine that every step they took was almost immediately obliterated by the wind. Dorji Gompa, the strongest of them all, led the way, plowing into the drifts—exhausting work that did little to relieve the porters coming up b
ehind, each of whom, burdened by a thirty-pound pack, had to find his own way through the snow. The party, as Mallory recalled, “straggled badly.” One porter, Kitar, and then two others, Nim Dorji and Angdanel, fell out and refused to go on. Mallory sent Dorji Gompa back to get one of the loads, while he, Morshead, and Sanglu pressed on, taking turns in the lead. Step by step the men made their way toward the saddle, with each porter setting his own pace. At one of the frequent halts Mallory and Morshead looked back and saw at some distance the last porter coming on, and beside his moving figure a dark hump in the snow. This was the dazed and nearly spent body of Dorji Gompa, who had retrieved not one but two of the abandoned loads.

  Mallory, with Morshead and Sanglu just behind, finally reached the Lhakpa La at 11:20 a.m. The porters followed, dropping altogether eleven loads in a hollow between great flanks of snow, as sheltered a place as any on the windswept saddle. For the first time Mallory had a completely clear view of the Chang La, the North Col, less than three miles away across the head of the East Rongbuk. All his imagined plans, detailed in letters and discussed in huddled meetings, blew away in an instant. The North Col was itself a far more formidable barrier than he had anticipated, a steep and imposing wall of ice and snow at least 1,000 feet high, broken across its face by enormous bergschrunds, great crevasses formed as the glacial ice falls away from the underlying rock of the mountain. Climbing the slopes of Everest to the south was out of the question. The North Col was the only chance, and as he glassed its every approach, he decided that it could be done, but not as he had envisioned. “It would not be work for untrained men,” he later recalled, “and to have on the rope a number of laden coolies, more or less mountain sick, conducted by so small a nucleus as three Sahibs, who would also presumably be feeling the effects of altitude, was a proposition not to be contemplated for a moment.”

  There would be no further talk of establishing camps high on the Northeast Shoulder—or anywhere else, for that matter, beyond the base of the North Col. The first challenge would be simply to find a route up its daunting face, and for this, Mallory concluded, he would have to assemble “as strong a party as possible.” Only later, should their efforts prove successful, could they consider bringing up a camp, and only as a quite separate operation. As Mallory led his tired porters away from the Lhakpa La, back down over the Kharta Glacier and through the treacherous icefall to their highest camp, he knew exactly who should be in the final party. Howard-Bury and Morshead might still be of use on subsequent efforts, and certainly Wollaston, as expedition medical officer, would need to reach at least as high as the Lhakpa La. But “only Wheeler,” Mallory wrote, “had sufficient mountaineering experience, and it was decided that he alone should accompany Bullock and myself on our first attempt to reach the col.”

  Even as Mallory and Morshead retreated from the Lhakpa La, the rest of the expedition moved up the mountain. Bullock and Wheeler, of course, were already at the 20,000-foot camp, and they would return from their survey work just after noon. That same morning, September 20, a Tuesday, Howard-Bury, Raeburn, and Wollaston, leaving Gyalzen Kazi, the Tibetan interpreter, in charge of the supply line back to Kharta, set out from the advanced base shortly after 8:30 a.m. Howard-Bury pushed too hard, reaching the upper camp in four hours; Wollaston and Raeburn struggled in just after 3:00 p.m. All three men were exhausted. “I had a thorough feeling of lassitude all the way,” recalled Howard-Bury. “It required, indeed, some effort to walk at all, and a strong effort, both of mind and body, to reach camp.” The challenges were the elevation and the heat, the scorching sun on the ice and, with it, the constant danger of dehydration. Frigid nights gave way to blistering days. “The sun at these great heights,” he wrote, “is one of the great foes that we contend with. The whole climate is trying and the extremes are so great that your feet can be suffering from frost-bite while you are getting sunstroke at the same time.”

  Mallory and Morshead returned just after 4:00, with the last of their porters shuffling into camp just before dark. It was a beautiful, clear evening. As the sun fell behind Everest, a ring of clouds surrounding the summit glowed in amber light. The mountain itself was in shadow, save for great streamers of snow that blew off every face “the whole length of its crests,” Howard-Bury recalled. The men stood silently “and watched this extraordinary sight for some time, devoutly hoping that the wind would die down. Unfortunately we were soon to experience what a strong wind meant at these heights.”

  Wheeler woke the following day determined to continue his work, and while the others rested in anticipation of the move to the Lhakpa La and the North Col, he established a station at 20,500 feet on a rounded hill just north of their camp. Howard-Bury spent the morning botanizing and was astonished to discover a dwarf delphinium and a delicate white saxifrage in full flower at such an elevation. That evening Wollaston monitored the physical condition of each man. Raeburn clearly was out and would remain behind at the 20,000-foot camp when the others pressed on. Wheeler’s pulse was also worrisome. It had been fluctuating between 86 and 98; now it registered 93, higher than the other climbers’ heart rates. “I seem to be pretty high,” Wheeler admitted in his journal, “most of the others being about 90 … Snow falling at 2:30 p.m.”

  The following morning, September 22, a Thursday, Wheeler and his three porters were the first away, setting out in twenty degrees of frost at 3:30 a.m. It was his intention to work his way to the Lhakpa La, while establishing photographic survey stations en route. The rest of the expedition—Bullock, Wollaston, Mallory, Morshead, and Howard-Bury—left an hour before dawn, with twenty-six porters, divided into four parties, each properly roped. The snow was stiff, and they moved steadily, with each man breathing as Mallory had instructed: one breath as hard and deep as possible, in and out, for each step taken, with a short pause every few paces. Sunrise found them on the broad flat of the glacier, with the light falling on the summit of Everest, which lay directly ahead of them. Bullock and Morshead led the way, retracing the route Mallory had pioneered through the icefall and continuing up the soft, powdery snow toward the high pass. Howard-Bury was astonished to see a red-billed chough, a blackbird flying overhead, and, in the snow, the tracks of foxes and hares.

  Among the tracks was one that appeared uncannily like that of a bare human foot. The porters knew precisely what it was: the mark of a yeti, Metohkangmi, the “wild man of the snows,” a monstrous creature known to descend upon villages to kill men, steal women, and drink the blood of yaks and children. Howard-Bury recognized the track as that of an animal, perhaps a wolf, and considered the yeti story folklore, similar to English beliefs in bogeymen or ghosts. But the mere mention of this quaint encounter in his report to the Times would spark wild speculation in London, adding fuel to the legend of the abominable snowman and reports of the reputed existence of a strange tribe of wild mountain men, “tall, muscular and very hairy,” descendants of a vanquished race that found sanctuary in the ice caves of the high Himalaya. Howard-Bury would be astonished in time to learn that of all the achievements of the 1921 expedition, this would be, according to the popular press, the discovery that “evoked considerable discussion in scientific circles.”

  It was most assuredly not the topic of conversation as the men slogged toward the heights of the Lhakpa La. Howard-Bury was the first to reach the saddle at 10:30 a.m., just over six hours after setting out. The sky was clear, but the northwest wind was impossibly fierce. Fine, powdery snow blasted the side of his face as he peered for the first time across the wide expanse of the East Rongbuk toward the North Col. The descent to the head of the glacier alone, he estimated, was a drop of at least 1,200 feet. Then they’d need to traverse perhaps two, maybe three, miles to the base of what seemed to him a “steep and unpromising” wall of ice. He tried to photograph the approach, but his hands froze to the metal of his camera. He wondered where to establish a camp, and whether to push the entire party beyond the Lhakpa La and down onto the glacier before doing so. Looking toward the h
eights of Everest, he saw great banners of snow spinning from every ridge and spur. The winds and the conditions would only get worse, he realized.

  As Howard-Bury turned his back on the mountain, Bullock and Morshead and several of the porters crested the rise. They had to shout to be heard. They had just passed Wheeler, but Mallory and Wollaston were well behind. “I found it hard work and went pretty slowly,” confessed Wheeler that night in his journal, though he did reach the top by 11:30 a.m. Mallory, too, had a miserable morning, feeling “excessively and unaccountably tired coming up the col.” He arrived to find the rest of his comrades, save Wollaston, who still struggled behind him, “sitting under the rim, the best shelter that could be found, and shuddering in the dry smother of snow blown up by every gust.” Mallory resisted the “suggestion of going down to encamp on the other side,” concerned about the condition of the men and the challenges of the return. He reported, “I observed no great sparkle of energy or enthusiasm among my companions; Sanglu was practically hors de combat, the coolies more or less exhausted.”