by Wade Davis
The return trek for Mallory, Bullock, and Wheeler had not been easy. After a second bitter night of wind and cold camped on the glacier, with Wheeler in considerable pain, Mallory buried any lingering thought of returning for another go at the North Col. No one, save perhaps he, was fit. Several of the porters struggled to walk. Wheeler’s condition was uncertain. That Mallory waited until dawn on September 25 to make the final decision was perhaps a measure of a growing obsession that in time would dominate his life and mark his death. In the moment, it was all he could do simply to assemble the men and strike the camp. They got away, according to Wheeler, at 8:15 a.m., with Mallory in the lead. With high winds evident on all the heights, he headed for a rock ridge just south of the Lhakpa La, where the porters might find better footing. Slowly they climbed toward the pass, step by step, each man buffeted by violent gusts that only grew in intensity the higher they reached. Dorji Gompa fell behind, forcing Bullock and Gorang, in their exhaustion, to retrace their steps to rescue the man. Wheeler and Mallory went ahead, leading the porters on two ropes.
When finally they reached the summit, nearly five hours after setting out, they encountered a whirlwind of snow so intense it caused them to stop in their tracks and gasp for air, uncertain whether to go forward or back, stiff with fear. Several of the men were on the verge of collapse. Mallory urged them into the shelter of the basin on the site of their old camp. As they shivered with their backs to the wind, he pointed to a cache of supplies, loads left behind by the other party. “Suddenly,” he later wrote, “with one will we dragged them to the edge, hurled them down the slope, and stood there laughing like children as we watched them roll and roll, 600 or 700 feet down.” It was an inspired gesture that gave courage to the men, even as it signaled the end of the expedition.
All tracks down the slopes from the Lhakpa La had been buried in drifts. The snow was deep, the descent from the saddle long, and a final rise of 300 feet from the glacier to the British camp excruciating. Wheeler got in “about 4 p.m. very tired but very pleased with life.” Bullock turned up just before sunset. Mallory arrived shortly after. “I enjoyed the jaunt,” Wheeler wrote to Dolly later in the evening, “but were I going again I would make proper provision for my feet.” Bullock reflected in his journal on the warm camaraderie in the camp. “We spent a pleasant evening, being the last before the expedition finally broke up.” And Mallory to Ruth: “I doubt if any big mountain venture has ever been made with a smaller margin of strength. I carried the whole party on my shoulders to the end.”
AFTER SUCH EXERTIONS one might have expected the party to rest and regroup at the 20,000-foot camp before returning to Kharta and making plans for the long march back across Tibet to India. Instead, the men simply dispersed like players at the end of a long match. The following day, Monday, September 26, Wheeler, Wollaston, and Howard-Bury slipped away, crossing the divide to the south by way of the Karpo La to descend into the Kama Valley. Wheeler had yet to go there; damaged feet and all, he nevertheless persevered in his duty, establishing survey stations at the height of the Karpo La and on the Shao La and at points in between. For Howard-Bury something radiant and powerful drew him back to the valley, and though Mallory had doubted it could be done, he climbed to the summit ridge between Makalu and Everest, reaching 22,000 feet, helping to establish firmly his own credentials as a mountaineer in the process. Wollaston went for the plants, of course. He, in particular, had been delighted to abandon the heights. “The air in Tibet is fine and exhilarating,” he later wrote, “but it is not my country and I don’t want much of it.”
Bullock remained at the high camp for a day, even as the last of the porters straggled down from the Lhakpa La and twenty-one additional men required to evacuate equipment and supplies arrived exhausted from Kharta, having slept under a rock ledge in the wind and sleet the night before. On the morning of September 26 Mallory and Morshead bolted for Kharta, where Bullock and Raeburn caught up with them, arriving just in time for lunch on September 28.
Bullock had long planned to travel back across Tibet with Mallory, taking the shortest and quickest route, south from Kampa Dzong across the Serpo La to the Teesta Valley and down to Gangtok and Darjeeling. But even he was surprised by Mallory’s plan to leave on the morning of September 30. Bullock had but a day to bid farewell to the dzongpen, pick up a few souvenirs (a silver prayer wheel, an old sword, and a Buddhist painting), and pack his kit for the three-week journey. It was, as Mallory scribbled in a hasty note to Ruth on September 29, “now homeward with all speed.”
Howard-Bury returned from the Kama Valley late in the afternoon of September 30 and was appalled to learn that Mallory and Bullock had left only hours before, after an early lunch, without so much as a proper farewell. He had charged them with the duty of evacuating all stores from the high camps of the Kharta Valley, a task they had evidently abandoned to Gyalzen Kazi and Chheten Wangdi. As expedition leader, he was in a less than charitable mood when he wrote to Arthur Hinks at the RGS on October 2, “Mallory and Bullock have been perfectly useless to me. They have never attempted to help in anything and now they are in such a great hurry to get back to civilization that they have rushed on ahead. They both dislike Tibet and the little discomforts incidental to travel.” In a second letter that same day, he shared these sentiments with Francis Younghusband as well.
Mallory could not have cared less. He had been away from his family for five months. His daughters, Clare and Beridge, were six and four, both born during the war, when he had been at the front for many months. While in Tibet he had missed his son John’s first birthday, as well as those of both girls, just three days apart in September. He had indeed carried the climbing party on his shoulders, and had done everything in his power to achieve success. In a manner that only time and history would reveal, he had attached his destiny to the mountain. But as he left Kharta on the last day of September, his only thought was of home.
THE REMAINING MEMBERS of the expedition went their separate ways as they wrapped up their work or satisfied a last-minute urge to see new country. To Wollaston’s horror, the less than robust Raeburn set off on October 1 for a four-day jaunt in the Kama Valley. Morshead left Kharta on the following day, heading up the Phung Chu with Gujjar Singh to complete survey work north of Tingri on the southern flanks of the Brahmaputra. Heron, too, had gaps to fill in his geological survey. Both he and Morshead would catch up with the returning expedition at Shiling, on the Tibetan Plateau, four days short of Kampa Dzong.
On October 5, the day after the return of Raeburn, the main party, under Howard-Bury’s command, left Kharta, altogether four sahibs and 150 porters. At Kampa Dzong, Wheeler, Heron, and Raeburn would head south, following Mallory and Bullock over the Serpo La to Sikkim. Howard-Bury and Wollaston, with the bulk of the stores, would continue east to Phari, returning to Darjeeling by way of the Chumbi Valley and Yatung, the British trading depot where, little more than a year before, on August 14, 1920, Howard-Bury had met with Charles Bell and sought initial support for an exploratory reconnaissance of Everest. As he passed through Yatung on the return journey, the entire detachment of the 90th Punjabis turned out in full dress to present arms and salute his achievement.
One by one the members of the 1921 reconnaissance found their way out of Tibet and home via India. Bullock met his wife, Alice, on October 8 at Lachen, the mission post in the upper Teesta Valley where the nuns had nursed Raeburn back from near death. Morshead arrived in Darjeeling on October 16 to find a young son with no memory of his father and a wife, Evie, pregnant with a second child. Wheeler was reunited with his wife, Dolly, on October 19 and spent a night with her at Pashok, in a dak bungalow eighteen miles outside Darjeeling, before heading into town the next morning. Raeburn and Heron drifted in that same day. Howard-Bury and Wollaston were the last to arrive, not reaching Darjeeling until October 25, twenty days after having set out from Kharta.
By then Mallory was long gone. He wrote to Ruth on October 20 from Benares, the midpoint o
f the rail journey from Darjeeling to Bombay, confirming that his ship, SS Malwa, would sail on October 29, expected to dock at Marseille on November 12. He spoke of small things—sightseeing along the Ganges, shopping for silks, the petty ailments he suffered: chills and swollen glands, a sore throat, rheumatic legs, stiff and painful. He said nothing of Everest, though he knew there was already talk of another expedition to the mountain. In the four days he had lingered at Darjeeling, “a very gay time,” as he recalled, he had been feted at garden parties and singled out at a formal dress ball. Howard-Bury’s reports to the Times, fifteen altogether, orchestrated in London by John Buchan, had been brilliantly effective. Sent from exotic Tibet by courier and telegraph, arriving intermittently, which only increased the suspense, they fired the British imagination as surely as a serial novel by Dickens. The fact that the Times had a window of exclusivity on each story only drove the rest of the press, in both Britain and India, to embellish and invent, which merely elevated the adventure in the public mind.
Arthur Hinks, secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, the Svengali of Everest, privately railed against the survey team, pestering Wheeler and Morshead to deliver maps. “We have nothing to go upon,” he fumed to Morshead on October 12, “but rather vague accounts in telegrams and equally unsystematic titles penciled on the backs of photographs, and at present we cannot unravel the confused geography of the east Rongbuk Glacier and the head of the Kharta Valley and the several cols of the north ridge and its extension and the north east arête.”
Morshead responded, “I fear you have perhaps scarcely grasped the difficulties under which we were all labouring at the time, owing to the appalling weather conditions … In August last we ourselves on the spot had by no means completely unraveled the geography of the East Rongbuk and Kharta Valleys, and we could scarcely send you information which we did not ourselves possess.”
This did not stop Hinks, who replied five days later: “We are beginning to despair about the map from you.”
Publicly the story was very different. The expedition and the surveyors, in particular, were hailed for what was in fact a remarkable achievement. Twelve thousand square miles of unexplored territory had been mapped on a quarter-inch scale, and an additional four thousand square miles of land previously surveyed had been revised with far greater accuracy. Wheeler and his photographic technique had documented the six hundred square miles of the immediate vicinity of Everest, the heart of the mountain, on a one-inch scale. This alone represented a considerable technical breakthrough. The cost to the Survey of India was measured with bureaucratic precision: 3.9 rupees a square mile—a bargain for the Raj that even Hinks, notoriously parsimonious, appreciated.
Even before the expedition sailed from Bombay, a preliminary six-color map was sent to the Everest Committee. By the end of November, Wheeler, still in Darjeeling, completed a rough half-inch-scale map of the Everest core. Over the winter months, stationed at Dehra Dun, he worked furiously to prepare a final map at a one-inch scale. When the three map sheets arrived in London, along with all numerical results, coordinates, and azimuths, it was noted that his intersected points were accurate within one to two seconds of latitude and longitude and within 50 feet of height. Given the conditions on the mountain, Wheeler’s acuity was astonishing. His map would be the basis for all future endeavors. Wollaston, thinking of Hinks and other armchair members of the Everest Committee, deliberately wrote in his public report to the RGS, “Only you who have been at those great altitudes can realize the immense labour involved in this effort.”
Of all the many achievements of the expedition—the discovery of new species of plants and insects, the far-reaching implications of Heron’s geological survey, the extension of the British presence along the entire northern flank of the Himalaya—there was one revelation that Mallory could not get out of his mind as he made his way home across the great Gangetic plains of India. Rather naively, with perhaps the European climbing season in mind, the expedition had set off for Everest in May, reaching the mountain in mid-June, the height of the monsoon. This was the worst possible season in which to attack the mountain, with the possible exception of late September, when the hurricane winds blow. They had confronted both, and it was remarkable that they had all, save Kellas, come back alive. As Morshead wrote to Jack Hazard, his second-in-command at the Somme and a fine climber who had been kept from the 1921 expedition because of war wounds that would never completely heal, “It looks like May and June are the months for a successful climb and I doubt there’ll be time to organize an expedition for May ’22.”
As Mallory half feared, this was precisely what the Everest Committee had in mind. Younghusband was keen to ride the wave of public interest, which he thought might wane should the next expedition be put off until 1923. Hinks was concerned that the opening to Tibet made possible by Charles Bell might close. Bell was still in Lhasa in the midst of secret negotiations, as he had been for the entire duration of the expedition. Though supported by His Holiness the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, he was bitterly opposed by a conservative faction of monks. Posters in the Tibetan capital called for his assassination.
Bell had been willing to help once, but he was not about to compromise British interests or his own position and security for a mountaineering expedition. Complaints about the behavior of the climbers infuriated him. On October 13, rather late in the game, he ordered Howard-Bury, then a fortnight out of Kharta, to stop the killing of wildlife. Morshead’s general survey work presented enormous diplomatic challenges. Long before the Everest expedition set out from Darjeeling, Bell had issued specific instructions through the Foreign Office to the Survey of India that Morshead, in particular, do no survey work “off the beaten track and away from the vicinity of Everest to avoid arousing Tibetan suspicions.” On March 29, 1921, the head of the Survey of India, Colonel Charles Ryder, cognizant of Bell’s demands, wrote Younghusband, urging him to keep any reference to geographical exploration out of the press. Hinks and the RGS did quite the opposite, prompting a wry note from F. M. Bailey, which reached Younghusband a fortnight after the climbers returned to England: “Bell not exactly sympathetic. He thought it was pretty cool to get permission to climb a mountain and then go make a map.”
The geologist Heron had also seriously offended Tibetan sensibilities. On September 28, four days after the assault on the North Col, Charles Bell received a telegram from the Tibetan prime minister relaying a complaint from the authorities at Shegar. The constant movements of the British, it was claimed, had disturbed the monks and hermits at Rongbuk. There was evidence as well, the telegram suggested, that the climbers had dug from the ground and carried away precious stones, turquoises from the sacred valley of Rongshar and rubies from Shegar Dzong. “It was agreed that Mount Everest might be explored,” the prime minister wrote, “but if this is used as an excuse for digging earth and stones from the most sacred hills of Tibet, inhabited by fierce demons, the very guardians of the soil, fatal epidemics may break out amongst men and cattle. Kindly prevent officials wandering about and effect their early return.”
Bell knew that no precious stones or metals had been found, let alone stolen, by the British, but given his knowledge of Tibetan culture and his awareness of diplomatic sensitivities, he could not have been pleased by Heron’s explanation, especially in the wake of a scarlet fever epidemic that did indeed sweep Tibet in the last months of 1921. “I have to plead,” Heron wrote, “ ‘Not Guilty’ to the charge of being a Disturber of Demons. I did no mining and the gentle hammer tapping which I indulged in was, I am sure, insufficient to alarm the most timid of the fraternity. Perhaps it was Wheeler through his cairn-building propensity! However this time I shall exorcise them by the pious refrain of ‘kiki so so lha so lha’ to a hammer accompaniment.”
It was precisely such an attitude that enraged Bell, and ensured that no geologist, most especially Heron, would ever accompany a future Everest expedition. Nor, given Tibetan concerns, would any subsequent expedition i
nclude officers of the Survey of India. A naturalist might go, but only on the condition that not an animal, bird, or butterfly would be harmed.
Hinks and the Everest Committee, acutely aware of Bell’s influence both in Lhasa and in Calcutta, and within the Foreign Office in London, pressed ahead. On November 3, even as Mallory’s ship was crossing the Indian Ocean, Hinks wrote to Wollaston of the “urgent need to carry on in case situation in Tibet changes.” That same day he sent a letter to Mallory, sharing the news that there would indeed be a second expedition in 1922. Dates had been determined. In order to leave Darjeeling for the mountain on March 21, the climbing party would sail from England on March 1, in little more than three months’ time. Passages had already been secured. It would be a strictly mountaineering affair, all climbers, making a direct line for the East Rongbuk and the North Col, everything geared to reaching the summit. Hinks hoped not only that Mallory would return as a member of the climbing party but also that he would spend much of January and February of the coming year touring the country, lecturing and raising funds for the expedition. “We could not wait until 1923,” added Younghusband in a letter on November 9. “The public interest in the Expedition is now so extraordinarily keen we could not allow it to cool. So we are very much hoping you will be able to go out again next year.”
Mallory’s formal response was noncommittal. “I shall pay you a visit so soon as I get home,” he wrote Hinks on November 10. “But when will that be? My wife is to be amused first for a little time, as she so richly deserves, in the South of France. Entre nous, I’m tired of seeing sights, sick to death of traveling and travelers, of remote places, of trains and ships, of garish sun and foreign ports, and of dark skinned faces. The sights I want to see are my own little home, and after that, the solemn in Pall Mall, the stately beauty of St. James’s Square or perhaps Bloomsbury in a fog.”