by Wade Davis
It was all they could do to pitch seven alpine tents in a shallow basin in the snow that afforded only slight protection from the battering winds. Each man crawled into his hole. Bullock and Wheeler shared a Meade, as did Howard-Bury and Wollaston. Mallory and Morshead had a Mummery; the porters packed into the four other tents. Howard-Bury later compared it to climbing into a valise, but it was the only way to survive the cold. The very effort of crawling into the funnel of the tents, as if “entering a dog kennel,” left the men breathless and exhausted. Though they were bivouacked at close quarters, not a word passed among them. Cooking was out of the question. Within mere minutes, Mallory wrote, “all was still … no hand stirred for a thought of comfort; only rest, not sweet but death-like, as though the spirit of the party had died within it. And so it had; we buried it next morning.”
Through a long and cheerless afternoon the wind howled and the flaps of the tents, as Morshead recalled, rattled and beat like machine gun fire. Wollaston could not stand being confined. “We are all very stupid and muddle-headed,” he wrote. “It’s a wonder that we don’t bite each other’s heads off.” Howard-Bury had no physical complaints, but “owned to feeling rather lazy” and had difficulty concentrating. He retained his appetite, but it was not until after sunset, when the temperature plummeted and the wind temporarily lulled, that Wheeler was able to light a spirit stove and heat some consommé, which they all shared, along with biscuits and tins of cold ham. Of all the men, only Mallory slept through the night, having wisely cut two slits in the roof of his tent. The others dozed fitfully or lay awake on the hard snow, unable to breathe freely in the suffocating enclosures and the impossibly thin air of 22,350 feet. By morning, Howard-Bury recalled, their “faces and hands were all a curious blue colour,” which Wollaston diagnosed as cyanosis of the blood, caused by oxygen deprivation.
Everything was frozen, but the sky was clear and the winds, which had blown hard all night, once again moderated with the dawn. Wheeler managed to brew a little tea, which remained in a liquid state as long as drunk immediately. Mallory melted sardines. As the sun rose higher, the camp gradually thawed out and, Mallory wrote, “we all became more alive.” The porters, however, did not. Of the twenty-nine who had set out from the lower camp the previous day, only eight remained capable. All felt the effects of altitude; several were severely ill. Just to assemble a team of ten, it was necessary to draw lots, with two of the debilitated men being forcibly recruited to carry.
It was clearly both impossible and dangerous for the entire expedition to continue to push on. At what Wheeler described as a “bit of a conference,” it was decided that Wollaston, Morshead, and Howard-Bury would retreat. Only Mallory, Bullock, and Wheeler would go on. The decision made, Wheeler set off. The day before, even in the madness of the wind, he had deciphered the topography from the crest of the Lhakpa La. “As soon as I got to the top,” he recalled in a letter to Dolly a week later, “I was able to recognize many old friends in that valley and got the geography completely straightened out which I had been very hazy about before.”
Now, with Morshead’s help, he set up a photographic station at the height of the Lhakpa La that allowed him to connect everything he had done on the East Rongbuk with the survey points of Kharta. It was not easy. The wind by this late hour of the morning had returned. He positioned his camera, and found that even with the snow so soft that one sank in “half way to the knee … both theodolite and camera would remain steady with the tripod resting either on ice axes or bags of grain.” In this way Wheeler recorded the highest point ever achieved by the Survey of India.
Once the decision had been made to divide the expedition, Howard-Bury, Morshead, and Wollaston struck their tents and made haste to abandon the Lhakpa La, taking with them most of the porters and all of the gear that could be carried. Among the ten porters who remained were all three of Wheeler’s men, Ang Pasang, Lagay, and Gorang, who stood silently, stiffly in the snow, watching their friends depart, before turning to the task of packing away the survey instruments, which were to be left behind on the pass. Mallory encouraged a slow start for the climbing party. Everything in the wind and cold took time: sorting out loads, deicing the ropes, caching emergency supplies for their return. They eventually got off around noon (half past eleven by Wheeler’s notes), encumbered with light packs holding just the essentials: tents, sleeping bags, blankets, and a minimum of food. Water was a serious problem. Even Wheeler, acknowledged by Howard-Bury as their one expert with the Primus stoves, could not manage to ignite them at such altitude. Melting ice by spirit lamp was adequate for tea, but hardly sufficient for their needs. They set out suffering from thirst, Mallory and Bullock on one rope, Wheeler tied in on another. Mercifully, at the base of a bit of scree, Wheeler found water and was able to fill all of the bottles, “a great help provided it can be kept from freezing.”
The drop from the Lhakpa La to the head of the East Rongbuk was longer and the distance across the glacier farther than anticipated. After an excruciatingly slow march, they made camp around 4:00 p.m., a mile from the base of the North Col, which now loomed above them. Their elevation was 21,500 feet. The spot was bleak, isolated, and bitterly cold. The snow stretched endlessly, and the scale of the relief intimidated even Mallory. “It was so flat,” he wrote, “and the world was so big … the great cliffs on three sides of us were a felt presence.” They had hoped at least to find in the shadow of the mountains, the depths of the basin, “tranquil air and the soothing, though chilly calm of undisturbed frost.” But this was not to be: “The wind found us out and there was never a more determined and bitter enemy.”
They struggled to pitch five tents. Mallory and Bullock shared a Meade. Wheeler was alone in another that also served as their kitchen. The porters huddled in two Mummerys and a Whymper. Wheeler was “chief cook,” but all he managed to heat was tea, cocoa, and broth. Ham, biscuits, chocolate, figs, dates, and raisins they had cold. None of them had much appetite. “One does not eat very much,” Wheeler noted, “at these heights and in that discomfort.”
Night came. Fierce squalls battered their camp, threatening to tear the tents from their moorings. Wheeler lay awake, certain that his tent would collapse. Bullock spent “a rotten night,” his feet cold, his body stiff, and his mind incapable of rest. “The atmosphere,” noted Mallory, “discouraged sleep,” but, in fact, he rested surprisingly well, as he had the night before at the Lhakpa La. The porters, however, did not, and as the sun broke over the glacier at 6:00 a.m. only three were fit for duty: Gorang, Lagay, and Ang Pasang, Wheeler’s team.
The cold precluded an early start, and Mallory chose to wait for the sun. Wheeler heated water for tea and thawed several tins of sardines. Bullock wrapped himself in clothes for the climb, “3 prs of drawers and 3 shetland sweaters.” Just after 7:00 a.m., the three ethnic Tibetans and three British set out on a single rope. Within thirty minutes they reached the rising slopes at the base of the North Col. In order to conserve the strength of the climbing party, Mallory instructed Ang Pasang and Lagay to take the lead and break trail. They moved across a broad debris field at a rising angle, climbing steadily over firm snow up to the right, or northwest, side of the face, and then turned left for a long traverse toward the crest of the col.
For Mallory, in particular, it was not technically a difficult route. “Nothing very remarkable remains in my mind about the ascent to the North Col,” he later wrote, “except perhaps Wheeler’s black beard coming up behind me.” Aside from a few steps hacked into the ice to overcome the corner of a deep crevasse, it was a “matter of straightforward plugging.” Naturally his eyes strayed to the bare face of Everest, over the immense rounded shoulder that rose from the col to the final rocks below the Northeast Ridge. From the first days of the reconnaissance he had recognized this as the only possible line of attack. Now that it was within his sight, he saw that not only was it viable, it looked easy—at least as far as the Northeast Ridge. The sheer scale of the mountain distorted pers
pective; the summit seemed near, within striking distance, and in truth it was close, little more than two miles away and 6,000 feet above. “If ever we had doubted whether the arête [Northeast Ridge] was accessible,” he later wrote, “it was impossible to doubt any longer. For a long way up those easy rock and snow slopes was [sic] neither dangerous nor difficult.”
Exhilarated by the prospect, and feeling supremely fit, Mallory moved into the lead to attack the only serious hazard they would face on the route up to the col, a passage of steep and soft snow just below the rim, “deep enough to be disagreeable.” It was, as Wheeler recalled, “very hard work indeed,” five hundred exhausting steps that lifted them at last to heights they had sought for so long. Their elevation was just over 23,000 feet. Mallory estimated the time to be shortly before 11:30 a.m., implying a climb of just over four hours. Wheeler wrote that they arrived at 10:00, “only 2½ hours from camp.” Both could be forgiven for a lapse in judgment and precision, for what greeted them on the col shattered their senses.
A first sign appeared even below the rim: each man began to glow with a frigid halo, an “aureole of spindrift” and whirling snow. Then, as soon as they crested the height, a wind like nothing they had ever known plunged them into a maelstrom as mad and disorienting as anything Wheeler had experienced in France in all the noise, chaos, and shell blast of battle. At first, he confessed to his wife, he was “scared stiff,” certain that they would all die, suffocated by swirling eddies of snow. Scarcely able to stand, he focused on his breathing, drew his hands around his face, and, with a discipline long ago honed in terror, slowed down the world until a new rhythm could be found, inhaling during the lulls between the blasts of the gale.
Bullock and Mallory fared no better. As they approached the crest, Mallory became aware of the presence of the devil, “dancing in a sudden tourbillon of snow which took away my breath.” He turned his head away, reflexively, inclining it at an angle to the wind that allowed him to regain his center and discipline. He looked to the men—Gorang still strong, Ang Pasang and Lagay exhausted, huddled in the snow—waiting for orders. At once they disappeared behind a veil of spindrift. “A sudden gust of violent wind,” Mallory later wrote, “made a miniature cyclone of blown snow which caught us in its vortex just below the crest.” What saved them was the physical structure of the col, a double shelf with a higher band of ice and snow traversing its length and offering at least some protection from the wind, which pounded from the west. They had yet to feel the complete force of the storm. Mallory drew the party together and, in a sheer act of will, moved them into the lee, where, he recalled, “we halted before exposing ourselves to the full blast, under the shelter of an ice wall.”
The men took the measure of each other. Mallory was sound and felt good for another 2,000 feet of elevation, far higher than anyone had ever climbed. His reserves of strength astonished Wheeler. “Mallory was in the best shape of all of us,” he wrote that night, “apparently perfectly fit. Bullock about cooked. I was fairly fit except for my feet. No bleeding from the nose or heart doing funny things.” Wheeler had, in fact, lost all feeling in both legs and could not possibly continue. Willpower and grit could propel Bullock higher, but as Mallory recognized, his old schoolmate, “though admirably game, had clearly no reserve of strength.” Bullock himself confessed in his journal, “I was prepared to follow Mallory if he wished to try and make some height, but was glad when he decided not to.”
In the end the issue was decided by the wind. As the men rested, Wheeler gnawing on a frozen fig, drinking the last of his water, Mallory focused on the mountain soaring above them. He strained his eyes to find a single impediment on the great shoulder that rose from the col to the Northeast Ridge. “We looked up at the flat edge ascending at no very steep angle,” he later wrote to Sir Francis Younghusband, the old explorer who’d first sparked the British dream of Everest, “easy rocks and snow all the way to the north-east crest. All we had seen before to build hopes on was confirmed now by the nearer view. No obstacle appeared, none so formidable that a competent party would not easily surmount or go around it.”
Transfixed by the mountain, Mallory appeared to Wheeler oblivious to the fierce gusts that still swept over them, despite the modest protection of the wall. Ice formed in his hair and frosted his eyelashes. His eyes seemed as if settled in another realm. In truth, Mallory was tempted to go on, even alone. But as he studied the slope, his hopes sank. “It was impossible,” he reported to Younghusband, “to look long without a shudder. From top to bottom this ridge was exposed to the full fury of a gale from the northwest.” Violent blasts of wind-whipped snow shot across every slope. “The powdery fresh snow on the great face of Everest was being swept along in unbroken spindrift,” he wrote, “and the very ridge where our route lay was marked out to receive its unmitigated fury. We could see the blown snow deflected upwards for a moment where the wind met the ridge, only to rush violently down in a frightful blizzard on the leeward side.”
Their lines of communication back to base were also tenuous in the extreme, reaching from this desperate position on the col at 23,000 feet back down across the East Rongbuk Glacier and then over the 22,200-foot Lhakpa La to the camps of the Kharta Valley. The men were too weak for heroics. What good could come from achieving another 2,000 feet, even were it possible? A height record for Hinks and the Everest Committee, imperial glory for Younghusband and the British press; nothing could motivate Mallory less. It was folly to continue. Still he hesitated, and gathered Wheeler and Bullock to his side. By all accounts not a word passed between them. Then Mallory decided to challenge the wind. Leaving the porters, the three British sahibs went on, stumbling more than walking, making their way up the col to the upper ledge “to put the matter to a test.” They continued for perhaps two hundred yards, and “for a few moments exposed ourselves on the col to the full blast, and then straggled back to shelter. Nothing more was said about pushing our assault any further.” No man, Mallory ventured, could have survived such exposure for more than an hour. “No one,” Wheeler wrote very simply, “could have existed on that ridge.”
With disappointment and relief, but not a shadow of doubt in their mind, the first climbers ever to set foot on Mount Everest turned their back on the wind and began a long and agonized retreat. As they dropped over the lip of the col, they struggled to make their way down the steepest pitch. The steps cut into the snow with such effort were gone, obliterated by an avalanche. In the wind they had not even heard the ice break off from the mountain. Mallory took note of the instability of the snow and recognized that the face of the North Col would be ever changing. As the route to the summit, it would present different challenges every year, every season, and always would be dangerous. That it would within months sweep away seven of his men to their death, and leave even the British wondering about the true power and mystic endowment of the mountain, remained beyond the moment.
He had five men to get back to camp. Wheeler had no circulation below his knees, and stumbled as if walking on stumps. When they finally reached the base of the col, Bullock told the others to go ahead. They did, reaching their flimsy tents just after 1:00 p.m. It was nearly two hours before Bullock turned up. Disoriented by fatigue, dehydrated by the sun, he had only with great difficulty found his way to the camp. Mallory’s attention was on Wheeler, whose feet were raw, “very nearly gone with frostbite.” For more than an hour, Mallory stayed by Wheeler’s side, rubbing his legs with whale oil, bringing them back around. In his journal Wheeler credits Mallory with saving his feet and, indeed, his life. Through a long, cold night, Mallory stayed by the invalid, while Bullock, unable to sleep, sat to one side, at last able to “smoke a pipe with pleasure.”
HOWARD-BURY, WOLLASTON, and Morshead had without incident returned from the Lhakpa La to the 20,000-foot camp on the afternoon of Friday, September 23. The drop of just over 2,000 feet of elevation made for a different world, as did the luxuries of expedition life: proper mess tents and camp beds, de
cent food and plenty of it. All had slept soundly, save Howard-Bury, who was awakened by one of the Tibetan porters chanting prayers in the middle of the night. In the morning, there was some tension in camp as they waited the outcome of the climb. Wollaston, as expedition doctor, had from the start had great misgivings about the drive to the North Col. Raeburn, who had remained behind and not accompanied the others to the Lhakpa La, still indulged delusions that he had a role to play. The normally unflappable Morshead had been grieved by a number of frantic and petulant letters from Hinks at the RGS, suggesting that he focus less on climbing and more on his survey work: the Everest Committee was desperate for a map. Howard-Bury simply worried about the men. He glassed the mountain throughout the day, and could see how the wind mounted, growing much stronger by the hour, blowing huge clouds of snow off the slopes and all the adjacent ridges. The Lhakpa La disappeared in great wisps of white, and he could only speculate about the conditions on the North Col.
The following day was warm and bright, and the men ate all their meals outside at a table in front of their tents. Howard-Bury set off for a rise west of their camp, where he had “superb views of Everest and Makalu with their appalling cliffs and beautifully fluted snow slopes.” But the wind clearly remained desperate on the upper slopes, and “every ridge of Everest was smothered with clouds of blown snow.” Only later would he realize that they were experiencing weather typical of the season. As the monsoon fades, gale-force winds pound the Himalaya from the northwest, striking especially violently at elevations above 23,000 feet, obliterating every major summit in a whirlwind of ice and spindrift snow. In climbing the North Col in the last week of September, the British, in effect, had walked directly into the face of a hurricane.
After a pleasant glissade back to camp, Howard-Bury basked in the sun, enjoying a cup of tea, still glassing the upper slopes of the Lhakpa La. Suddenly black specks appeared on the skyline and began to make their way steadily down the glacier. Wollaston counted and was relieved to discern thirteen figures spread out in the snow. He and Howard-Bury tracked their progress throughout the early afternoon, eager to learn of their fate.