Into The Silence

by Wade Davis

  Like Ponting and Sella, Noel would design or modify all of his kit for the mountain. In addition to cameras, tripods, and thousands of feet of raw stock, he brought along a lightproof tent for processing film; developing tanks and chemical fixers; and, for drying the negatives, a specialized stove designed to burn yak dung. His camera was modeled after the 35mm Newton-Sinclair model Ponting had used in Antarctica. Made of duralumin for lightness, it was eighteen inches long and a foot high, with special bearings that required no oil and a protective rubber cover that allowed him to press his face against the eyepiece without fear of his skin sticking to the metal. The magazine held four hundred feet of film, which could be advanced by battery or a hand crank. The lens was a twenty-inch Taylor Hobson telephoto, with optics honed during the war. Attached to the top of the camera was a customized six-power directional telescope to be used to locate and identify distant subjects on the mountain. Fully loaded, the camera weighed less than twenty pounds.

  Noel brought to the 1922 expedition not only state-of-the-art equipment but also a sophisticated and thoroughly contemporary aesthetic, informed by a rare understanding of what film implied as a new medium. The technology, and the commercial industry it spawned, was not yet twenty years old. The British public, in particular, did not yet have a preference for features over documentaries, which competed head-to-head in theaters, each format having in common this new and astonishing capacity to conjure out of the darkness flickering images of wild and unimagined worlds. The most popular film produced during the war was the officially sanctioned account The Battle of the Somme, released in August 1916, even as the battle raged. Though highly sanitized, its live footage and the graphic display of life at the front stunned a nation largely unaware of the reality of the war.

  With the peace, documentary films unveiled the promise of distant lands, the exotic allure of escape. While Noel and the others sailed for India, Frank Hurley was making his plans for New Guinea, a journey that would yield Pearls and Savages, and the most popular ethnographic documentary of all time, Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, was playing in sold-out theaters across Britain.

  Noel’s plans for Everest were very much part of a creative wave of adventure that throughout the 1920s propelled filmmakers to every corner of the world. It all fed into a greater quest, embraced readily by a tired and exhausted people, to show that the life and death of an individual could still have meaning, that the war had not expunged everything heroic and inspired. The image of the noble mountaineer scaling the heights, climbing literally through a zone of death to reach the heavens, high above the sordid reality of the modern world, would emerge first from the imagination and through the lens of John Noel. On the mountain, Mallory would famously complain to Noel that he had not come to Tibet to become a film star. But he would become one, whether he realized it or not. “St. Noel of the Cameras,” as General Bruce affectionately called the filmmaker, who happened to be Catholic, would see to it. The two films Noel made, Climbing Mount Everest (1922) and The Epic of Everest (1924), transformed the challenge of the mountain into a national mission, a symbol of imperial redemption, even as they elevated Mallory, still a relatively unknown mountaineer, into the realm of the Titans. “If you had lived as they had lived,” Noel would ask at the end of The Epic of Everest, “and died in the heart of nature would you, yourself, wish for any better grave?”

  THE OTHER RADICAL innovation of the 1922 expedition was oxygen. Thanks in good measure to the research of Alexander Kellas both during and before the war, it was known that at the summit of Everest a climber breathing normally would absorb only a third of the oxygen available at sea level. Oxygen deprivation severely weakens the body and, more seriously, can lead to mountain sickness, a misleadingly gentle term for life-threatening cerebral edema. In compression chambers at Oxford, experiments had shown that the debilitating effects of high altitude could be readily mitigated with supplemental oxygen, and by the end of the war virtually every plane in the Royal Air Force was suitably equipped with an apparatus. The potential application on the mountain was obvious. All that would be required was a portable source: steel bottles of compressed gas, together with a secure regulator and a mask.

  The challenge was less technical than ethical and aesthetic. Traditionalists such as Arthur Hinks and General Bruce questioned whether the use of supplemental oxygen was sporting. Wakefield remained highly distrustful. Mallory referred to it as “a damnable heresy.” Hinks, who knew nothing of mountaineering, was the most vocal critic. “Only rotters would use oxygen,” he insisted in a letter to Bruce. Those more scientifically inclined—Howard Somervell and George Finch, in particular—followed the evidence and considered the use of oxygen to be no more artificial than the selection of a good custom-made pair of boots.

  The argument was actually more complex and substantial than either side acknowledged. On the one hand, there were dangerous uncertainties. Professor Georges Dreyer at Oxford, who had worked with Kellas, could guarantee nothing. “I do not think you will get up without oxygen,” he cautioned, “but if you do succeed you may not get down again.” No one knew what would happen at such heights, or what might occur should the apparatus fail and the flow of air suddenly cease. The very notion of using a gas mask was haunting. John Noel was the first to refer to the “dead world of Everest,” the death zone rising above the “region of life” where a climber could be “suffocated as if by some subtle, invisible, odourless gas.” To climb the mountain with one’s face covered in anonymity by an apparatus so powerfully evocative of the trenches seemed less than heroic.

  On the other hand, getting to the top was ultimately all that mattered. Professor J. B. S. Haldane, the world’s leading physiologist whose opinion swayed Somervell, believed that while the summit could conceivably be reached without oxygen, only the use of supplemental gas would ensure success. Longstaff, initially strongly opposed, in time came around to the same position. On February 10, three weeks before the expedition sailed on the Caledonia, Percy Farrar of the Alpine Club, Hinks’s rival for control of the Everest Committee, wrote to Younghusband: “I should like to state very explicitly that I would very willingly dispense with this oxygen. At the same time I am sure that Longstaff is right when he states we can only get to the top with oxygen.”

  The challenge was to invent an apparatus light enough to be carried to the summit, and then to identify a climber to take charge of the effort, someone technically capable of maintaining and repairing the equipment and training the other climbers in its use. The obvious candidate was George Finch, the finest ice climber in Britain and a scientist in his own right who had already worked closely on the oxygen problem at Oxford with Kellas and Haldane. Finch’s participation in the 1921 reconnaissance had been denied at the last moment by the Harley Street physicians, and a cloud of controversy still hung over his name, but his credentials could no longer be denied. Mallory certainly wanted him along, if only for the challenge of the North Col. Farrar had never lost confidence in the man. “Finch was, so Strutt says, a gas expert in Salonika,” Farrar wrote to Younghusband. “He is entirely qualified.” When Younghusband made further inquiries, Strutt responded, “I personally, although my acquaintance with Finch is slight, have no objection to his inclusion. He served at the same time as I with the British Salonika Force, did good work and was popular with his unit. I think that Charles Bruce and I should be able to handle him. At the same time if the other members dislike him, which I fear is the case, it rather alters the situation. However in reply to your question I should like Finch to go. He is the one man I would back to reach the summit and we should always remember that!”

  On December 3, 1921, Younghusband sent Finch a letter inquiring as to his availability in 1922. Hinks again ordered a medical examination, but went out of his way to inform Finch that passing the physical would not imply a place on the expedition. The radioactive Finch had to wait until December 15 for a formal invitation, and only after he’d signed a confidentiality agreeme
nt and endured a rebuke from Hinks concerning photographs that had appeared, without authorization of the RGS, in the press in 1921, was his place on the climbing party secured.

  Finch, who had never been to the Himalaya, attacked the challenge of Everest with methodical rigor. Anticipating the cold, he contacted S. W. Silver & Co., a firm specializing in military uniforms and expedition gear, and ordered custom-made garments of his own invention: a knee-length coat, trousers, and gauntlets lined with eiderdown. These arrived for Younghusband’s inspection on February 13, 1922. Compared to the cut of a Norfolk tweed jacket, the world’s first down coat appeared inelegant in the extreme. But on the mountain, its worth would be proved.

  Meanwhile, Finch worked on the oxygen apparatus with another innovative English company, Siebe Gorman, which had pioneered deepwater diving technologies based on pressurized helmets, sophisticated regulators, rubber tubes, and suits that insulated the diver from the dangers of the depths. The result was a relatively simple invention, a Bergen backpack holding four bottles of Swedish steel, each weighing 5.75 pounds fully charged, for a total weight of 32 pounds. The regulator was designed to deliver air as if at an elevation of 15,000 feet, at a rate of flow that provided a total of seven hours of supplemental oxygen. Anticipating that some might find a breathing mask claustrophobic, Finch designed a second delivery system, a simple mouthpiece of piped glass. He tested the prototype in the laboratory at Oxford and, having made a number of modifications, ordered eleven complete sets to be manufactured for the expedition. Ten of these were dispatched to India on SS Chilka. One set Finch kept aside to take with him on the Caledonia, where the entire climbing party, all the men, would be expected to participate in oxygen drills in order to familiarize themselves with the equipment.

  Even this remarkable scientific and technical contribution did not earn Finch any respect. Indeed, if anything, it only further antagonized Hinks, who famously mocked the oxygen effort in a letter to General Bruce: “This afternoon we go to see a gas drill. They have contrived a most wonderful apparatus, which will make you die laughing. Pray see that a picture of Finch in his patent climbing outfit with the gas apparatus is taken by the official photographer. I would gladly put a little money on Mallory to go to 25,000 ft without assistance of four cylinders and a mask.”

  Bruce was no more charitable. In the same report in which he acknowledged Finch as being without doubt the best man on snow and ice on the expedition, as well as “extraordinarily handy in all kinds of ways outside his scientific accomplishments,” the general added a personal note: “Cleans his teeth on February 1st and has a bath on the same day if the water is very hot, otherwise puts it off until the next year. Six months course as a Lama novice in a monastery would enable me to occupy a Whymper tent with him.” It is difficult to know or imagine what provoked such contempt. By the time Bruce wrote these scathing remarks, Finch, at thirty-four a relatively young climber, had performed heroically on the mountain, establishing against all odds a new height record, even as he gave up a chance for the summit to save the life of the general’s own nephew, his climbing partner, Geoffrey Bruce.

  John Morris recalled an incident soon after the arrival of the climbing party in Darjeeling. A weekly parcel of English papers had arrived by post, among them an edition of the Illustrated London News with two middle pages devoted to photographs of Finch. One image showed him intently repairing his own boots. That Finch had not attended the proper schools was one thing for General Bruce and Colonel Strutt to endure; that he had chosen a career in the sciences, a profession unworthy of a gentleman, was quite another; but that he would cobble his own boots was beneath contempt. Strutt, in particular, was outraged. “I can still see his rigid expression as he looked at the picture,” Morris wrote. “ ‘I always knew that fellow was a shit,’ he said, and the sneer remained on his face while the rest of us sat in frozen silence.”

  As it turned out, Hinks had included the copy of the Illustrated London News in the postal dispatch as a deliberate taunt and provocation. The story was weeks old. The photographs in question had been taken long before Finch had been formally invited to join the 1922 expedition. The suggestion that Finch had violated his confidentiality agreement with the Everest Committee was absurd. The Illustrated London News printed the photographs only because of Younghusband’s official announcement, which ran through all the papers, that the two-man climbing team chosen for the ultimate assault on the mountain would be George Mallory and George Finch. Bruce’s slurs aside, Finch, a man in fact fastidious in his personal hygiene, would have his moment on the mountain.

  ON BOARD the Caledonia the oxygen debate played out with its own small drama. Wakefield was on one side, highly doubtful, and Finch on the other, dogmatic and irritatingly competent. “I must say that in this company I’m amused by Finch and rather enjoy him,” Mallory wrote to Ruth. “I’m much intrigued by the size of his head which seems to go out on the sides where it might go up. He’s a fanatical character and doesn’t laugh easily. He greatly enjoys his oxygen classes.” Somervell lightened the mood with a series of sketches of climbers descending the mountain, sucking oxygen straight from the bottle. Finch was not amused. He was certain that only with supplemental gas would they reach the summit. It was an experiment that had never been tried, however, and there were considerable risks. The side of the mountain in a gale at 28,000 feet was not the place to learn how to use the apparatus. He believed it essential that each man practice until the tanks seemed but an extension of his own lungs. Few of the others shared his conviction that the benefit of supplemental oxygen would offset the burden of climbing with more than thirty pounds of steel on one’s back.

  Mallory, however, came away from Finch’s lectures quite hopeful, convinced that the oxygen “will serve us well enough without physiological dangers from a camp at 25,000 feet.” He was open to anything that would get them to the summit. But the idea of holding a rubber tube in his mouth he found disgusting. “I sicken with the thought of the saliva dribbling down,” he wrote. And like the others, he thought he had mastered the contraption after a single try, and privately shared everyone’s relief when Colonel Strutt called off the drills on the morning the Caledonia steamed out of the Red Sea and into the Indian Ocean.

  They arrived in Bombay on Friday, March 17, and had but five hours before their train departed for Calcutta. Word of the arrest of Gandhi had reached them in Aden, as had news of the general strike and the shutdown of the railways. Longstaff, heading for Darjeeling on March 12, had been caught in the chaos. But within days the intervention of the army had cleared the lines, and the men from the Caledonia experienced no delays. With Wakefield sharing a berth with Mallory, they crossed India in less than two days, pulling into Calcutta’s Howrah Station just before noon on Sunday. After a lunch at Spence’s Hotel and a quick visit to the native market and the infamous Black Hole, they made their way to North Station to board the 4:50 p.m. Darjeeling Express for the overnight run to Siliguri. The following morning General Bruce came out by car and rode with them the last few miles into Darjeeling, where they arrived not long after noon on Monday, March 20.

  Mallory immediately slipped away to stay at Chevremont with the Morsheads, Henry and his wife, Evie, who had spent the winter in Darjeeling after the birth of their second son. After some diplomatic haggling, Morshead had finally secured permission to join the new effort, not as a surveyor but as a member of the climbing party. The Tibetan authorities wanted nothing more of maps, and Charles Bell saw to it that the Survey of India had no formal role on the second expedition. Mallory cared nothing for cartography, but he was deeply relieved to know that Morshead, the old workhorse of 1921, would be with him on the mountain. They walked into town that night to a dinner hosted by General Bruce at the Mount Everest Hotel, where the rest of the party was billeted, along with Morris, Longstaff, Geoffrey Bruce, and the general. It was the first time the expedition had been together in the same place; hence the formality and awkwardness that drew Morris�
�s notice.

  To be sure, the men watched their words, even as they watched one another. No one fell under greater scrutiny than Finch, and no one was more judgmental than Finch himself, as his diary entries attest. In his journal, he began with a brutal assessment of India and its people, a place to which he had never previously traveled and of which he knew nothing. His only experience was the train trip, and the few moments in Bombay and Calcutta. “The country is wonderfully rich and very magnificent,” he wrote. “The dweller in the plains is bodily poor and mentally most abased, little better than animals. I can see no hope for them except in the most autocratic government. These hills men up here are totally different. They are fine, well set-up self-reliant men. They despise the plainsmen, and I must confess I believe they have every right to.”

  Not an impressive or charitable judgment for one so new to India, but indicative of conventional British opinion, which was precisely why the Raj was falling apart. Mahatma Gandhi had indeed been arrested during the fortnight the Everest expedition had been at sea, accused of fomenting sedition and disaffection in the Indian Army, a charge to which he enthusiastically pleaded guilty. On trial he defended himself, reviewing his history with discrimination in South Africa, his service in the Boer War, the false promises from the Crown that the millions of Indians who had served in Gallipoli and on the Western Front would be rewarded for their loyalty, a dream betrayed by the Rowlatt Acts and crushed in blood at Amritsar. Britain, Gandhi said, had broken its word even as it shattered India’s pride. “In my humble opinion,” he had told the court, “non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is co-operation with good.” He then asked the judge to impose the harshest penalty the law would permit. Two days after Finch and the men reached Darjeeling, Gandhi was sentenced to serve six years in the Yerawada jail. In Darjeeling the British enclave rejoiced.