by Wade Davis
As Finch cast a harsh eye over India and everything in his experience, his fellow climbers did not escape notice. In his journal entry of March 21, having known some of the men less than a day, he displayed the analytical rectitude—many would say arrogance—that drove his colleagues to distraction: “With a view to seeing later how far future events will confirm, or otherwise, my present opinion of each individual in this group I am putting against each individual’s name the opinion I now hold of his chances of going far.” General Bruce, Tom Longstaff, and John Noel he listed as nonstarters. Captain Bruce: “good for 23,000 ft. too young (lack of stamina) lung capacity not very pronounced (he is slightly narrow in chest from back to front) Not a climber.” Captain Morris: “good for 23,000 ft. wears glasses. Not a climber. Rather clumsy. Body long, legs short.” Captain Crawford: “good for 22,000. Nervous disposition, tending faintly to hysteria … To judge from appearances is now even suffering from mild insomnia.”
One by one Finch worked through the list. Colonel Strutt might go as high as 24,000 feet were it not for his fundamental lack of confidence, certain to stop him at 23,000. Wakefield, like Crawford, appeared nervous, “distinctly hysterical and thus not likely to conserve his powers. Age very much against him.” Major Morshead had possibilities but “is no born mountaineer.” Howard Somervell would be good for 24,000 feet, though he was “rather heavy and likely therefore to become muscle bound. 23,000 ft in tank at Oxford finished him.” Mallory alone was solid, a sure thing: “Good for from 24,000 to 25,000, perhaps a little more but not over 25,500 ft. I am inclined to look upon him as the strongest of all if he learns to go slow and not fluster himself.” As for his own prospects: “Capt Finch would, I hope, hold his own with Mallory. But I also hope that I shall not be called upon to make an attempt without oxygen … Mt Everest will not, I am convinced be climbed without oxygen.” Referring to the existing height record, set by the Duke of Abruzzi in the Karakoram, he added that anyone who tried to go higher than 24,600 feet without supplemental air would surely be incapable of another attempt, even should oxygen be available. There would be no second chances on Everest.
ONE FINAL MEMBER of the climbing party impressed even Finch: a new man for 1922, Major Edward Felix “Teddy” Norton, who had come up from Bengal only that day. For a week he had been convalescing in a Calcutta hospital, having suffered a severe case of piles after reaching the finals of the Kadir Cup. An operation had not been necessary, but his condition was serious. The pain of thrombotic hemorrhoids, a common affliction in the Himalaya, is intense and debilitating in the extreme. Mallory questioned whether Norton would be fit in time to join them. Finch saw only great promise: “Good for 23,000, trunk long, legs short in relation. Stamina good. He may do 24,000.”
Teddy Norton, thirty-eight, was in fact the great discovery of the 1922 expedition, a man of extraordinary qualities of leadership, integrity, and grit. Commissioned as a graduate of the Royal Military Academy Woolwich in 1902, he had been a soldier since boyhood. Posted to the Royal Horse Artillery at Meerut at twenty-three, he had served throughout India, eventually becoming aide-de-camp to the viceroy before sailing with his regiment to France in the late summer of 1914. That he survived the war was a statistical miracle, for he fought in virtually every campaign, from the very first British attacks at Aisne and the Marne, through Ypres, Loos, and the Somme, and Arras and the German Spring Offensive of 1918. Mentioned in despatches three times, he was awarded the Military Cross, appointed DSO, and honored with every medal for gallantry and combat, save the Victoria Cross.
Norton was present at Bapaume on March 21, 1918, when the Germans unleashed the greatest bombardment of the war. Nine battalions were annihilated as a blanket of poison gas and shell fire ripped open the entire front of the Fourth and Fifth Armies, allowing forty-five German divisions to pour through. Norton’s brother, also an artillery officer, was killed in action and Norton’s own battery was overrun, his men torn apart by machine gun fire. Norton retired his guns in order, only to return to the fight. Six months later he was at Cambrai when the tide turned for good. Allied artillery, thousands of guns massed wheel to wheel in two enfilades that seemed to stretch the length of the world, flashed as a perfect sheet of flame, with unprecedented accuracy that allowed tanks and troops to roll forward in the massive final offensive that would end the war. It was the antidote to the Somme, though still a bitter fight. One German soldier singlehandedly knocked out five British tanks. Norton saw the man captured and bayoneted in cold blood. It was not a memory he would carry with him, any more than he would dwell on the certain knowledge that his brother had been killed by errant French fire. He had seen too much of death not to embrace the good fortune of his deliverance.
Major Norton emerged from the war with a certain quality of being, a serenity, confidence, and uncanny presence that caused men almost reflexively to follow his lead. “Norton is one of the best,” Mallory exclaimed to Ruth in his first reference to the new man, “extraordinarily keen and active and full of interest and gentle and charming withal. He is to be my stable companion I understand and I don’t doubt that I shall like him in that capacity as well as anyone.” Two years later, when leadership on Everest in 1924 devolved to Norton, as fate inevitably would have it, one of the climbers marveled at how Norton, as commander, would make up his mind about a decision, then call in the entire expedition to confer, and “invariably they would after discussion come to his view.”
In retrospect it was remarkable that Norton was even available to join the Everest effort. He had just passed through Staff College and was destined for great things in the army. Arthur Hinks had gone to the very top, Sir Henry Wilson, chief of the Imperial General Staff, to secure for Norton eight months of leave, which Wilson granted in a letter of January 23, 1922. One senses the hand of Younghusband, who perfectly distilled Norton’s character and charisma in a brief biographical sketch written long after the expedition:
Major E. F. Norton, D.S.O., was well known in the Alpine Club and well versed in the lore of mountaineering. He had the additional advantage of having served in India and been on shooting expeditions in the Himalaya. He could speak Hindustani and knew how to handle Indian peoples. Compact and collected, erect and direct, and with a habit of command, he inspired confidence at once. And there was a kindliness and suavity about him, which increased the trust placed in him. He was indeed a combination of many qualities. As an officer of the Royal Horse Artillery he was noted for the smartness of his battery; he had served with distinction in the War; for seven years he had run the Kadir Cup Meeting—the great pig-sticking event in India; he was a keen observer of birds; and he was an amateur painter of more than average ability. In everything he was methodical … In his punctuality he took great pride: he would be neither too early nor too late. It was not much more than a minute before the train left Victoria that he arrived at the station on his way to India and he was leisurely saying good-bye to his friends and the train was well on the move as he quietly stepped into it continuing his conversation. With him there would be no flurry in emergency.
THE RECONNAISSANCE of 1921 had left Darjeeling in mid-May and crossed Tibet in the early days of summer only to run up against the full force of the monsoon, which broke over the Himalaya in the second week of July. The challenge in the spring of 1922 was to advance into the mountains as late as possible, with the hope of avoiding the worst of the winter, but still in time to reach Everest and complete the assault before the arrival of the rains. This narrow window demanded all haste.
General Bruce, arriving with his nephew Geoffrey in Darjeeling on March 1, had sprung into action, immediately seeing to the stores and supplies, even as he vetted 150 porters, selecting fifty of the best, including thirteen who had served on Mallory’s climbing party the previous year. The general elected to give Gyalzen, the sirdar who had caused such trouble for Howard-Bury, a second chance, and he took on as interpreter Karma Paul, a brilliant scholar and schoolmaster, a Tibetan born in Lhasa b
ut living in Darjeeling. For cooks, Bruce insisted on the very best, and tested a number of men in the field before finally selecting four. Food, both quantity and quality, most especially for the porters, had been a major point of contention in 1921. General Bruce, a man of prodigious appetites himself, would not make such a mistake. The supplies for 1922, packed and shipped from the Army and Navy Stores in London, filled some nine hundred light plywood boxes. In addition to the standard rations—cheeses and ham, bully beef, biscuits, oatmeal, and dried soups—the expedition larder included such delicacies as gingered lemons and tinned quail in aspic, not to mention a case of the finest French champagne and several bottles of 120-year-old rum, with which the general intended to toast his own birthday on April 7. “Our messing and transport are lavish,” Morshead remarked with delight in a letter to his wife, especially when “compared with Bury’s frugal methods of last year’s trip.”
So, too, were the expenses. Within a fortnight of arriving in Darjeeling, General Bruce wrote the Royal Geographical Society demanding an additional £2,000, a wild request that sent the miserly Hinks into spasms of indignation. The general could not have cared less. His favorite party trick was to tear a pack of cards in half. For casual exercise he carried his adjutant on his back up and down whatever mountain was at hand. His body was a canvas of bullet wounds. In a struggle of wills, Hinks at his desk in London was but a flea on the body of a bear. If the Everest Committee expected Sherpa and Tibetan porters under Bruce’s command to transport the deadweight of Noel’s photographic gear and supplies, all the cameras, lenses, chemicals, developing tanks, specialized tents, tripods, and thousands of feet of film stock, as well as eleven ridiculous sets, as the general saw it, of oxygen racks and steel cylinders, weighing altogether some nine hundred pounds, his men would be well fed, whatever the costs.
It made for a dramatic convoy, ultimately more than three hundred yaks, fifty mules, riding ponies for the thirteen sahibs, Karma Paul, and the four Gurkha NCOs, along with cows, donkeys, oxen, and, at any moment, between fifty and a hundred Tibetan and Nepali porters. The initial route was that of the reconnaissance: down to Kalimpong and up the Teesta Valley, across the Jelep La to Yatung and then the long ascent of the Chumbi Valley to the Tibetan Plateau at Phari. As in 1921, the departure from Darjeeling was deliberately staggered. Longstaff and Morris left by rail for Kalimpong on March 22. General Bruce and Geoffrey, John Noel, Morshead, Mallory, and Wakefield joined them four days later. Strutt, Norton, and Somervell arrived on the evening of March 27. The geologist Heron, singled out by Tibetans for alleged transgressions in 1921, met up with the party in Kalimpong, still with the vague hope of being able to accompany the expedition. At dinner on March 27 General Bruce discreetly passed along the regrettable news that in deference to Charles Bell and the Tibetan authorities, permission had been denied at the last moment by the Foreign Office. Heron gracefully retreated to Darjeeling, where he and his wife were based. Morshead came close to suffering the same fate. Before setting out for Pedong on the morning of March 28, Bruce scratched a note to Hinks: “I must say I congratulate myself on having been able to smuggle Morshead in as not only can he talk Thibetan [sic] but he will be able to amplify his map.” Enlarging the survey, of course, was precisely what the Tibetans did not want to occur, but such diplomatic nuances did not register with the general.
Finch and Crawford, meanwhile, remained behind in Darjeeling, awaiting the oxygen equipment. SS Chilka, having docked in Colombo and several Indian cities, was not expected in Calcutta until the end of the month. The delay did not bother General Bruce, whose disdain for the oxygen experiment was well known. But it provoked in Finch considerable anxiety. Every evening he scanned the Statesman, Calcutta’s newspaper of record, for an announcement of the ship’s arrival. The port list included vessels not due until April 5, but as late as March 29 there was still no word of the Chilka. He would need a day to discharge the cylinders, and three more to get the equipment to Kalimpong. He and Crawford, assuming they could find transport, would then be obliged to do a forced march with no medical support to catch up with the expedition in Kampa Dzong. The climbers, to make matters worse, would have no opportunity for further training with the apparatus. English pluck, Finch was certain, would not get anyone to the summit. Oxygen would, and now he would have neither tools nor the time to make essential modifications to the ten sets still stuck in the hold of the Chilka.
With little to do but wait in Darjeeling, Finch tinkered for four days, testing his Kodak Vest Pocket camera, making alterations to his high-altitude boots, assembling a “corking good catapult with rubber tubing” for hunting birds, and waterproofing his maps with a Duraprene concoction of his own invention. Finally, on March 31, a wire arrived reporting that the ship was at anchor in Calcutta, with its cargo scheduled to reach Kalimpong in four days. Finch and Crawford got off on April 2, a full week behind the expedition vanguard. At the railhead they hired ten mules just to transport the gas cylinders, another ten to carry their kit and supplies, and, finally, nine porters to lug the oxygen apparatus—backpacks, regulators, and breathing tubes—some 350 miles across Tibet to the lower flanks of Everest.
The rest of the expedition had crossed the Jelep La on the third day in April and slowly made its way up the Chumbi Valley to the planned rendezvous at Phari. They were on the whole a “cheerful and happy” mob. Morshead and Wakefield celebrated their escape from civilization by having their heads shaved at Pedong by Morshead’s servant, Munir Khan, already a great favorite of the men. A few days later Norton and Longstaff were similarly scalped, as was Mallory, who reported in a note to Ruth, “I look rather like a Hun with my close crop and unshaven chin.” Morris and Somervell discovered that they had both served at the Somme in the 46th Division, but they spoke little of the war. Somervell wanted to learn Nepali, and with Morris’s help he did. Meanwhile General Bruce made “heroic exertions to get rid of his tummy,” refusing his mount as he stormed ahead on foot, climbing as much as 5,500 feet in a day. “You know his figure,” Mallory exclaimed in undaunted admiration, “and you may imagine how he watered the path, but what energy!” George, by contrast, lacking a ready change of shirt, chose to ride. He had fine sensibilities and a strong and perhaps unexpected aversion to the clammy sensation of perspiration next to his skin.
Norton and Longstaff, riding on their own, took great delight in the beauty of the Chumbi Valley, the primulas and blue poppies at the edge of winter snows on the flanks of the Jelep La, the “lovely glades and alpine forests,” the unknown birds. Norton the soldier would collect more than four hundred botanical specimens during his time in Tibet, along with 120 varieties of butterflies and moths. Longstaff was enchanted by the “dream crag of Shegar, hung with forts and monasteries like martins’ nests on a cliff” and the massive monastery walls of Tinki Dzong, “reflected in the mirror of the lake, the haunt of bar-headed geese, never hunted in this sacred spot.” To experience these wonders on the approaches to Everest, he wrote, made up for the “penalty of being condemned to try to climb the monster; for monster it is, this relic of primordial chaos, murderous and threatening, the home of devils, not of gods.”
Somervell embraced the new country through sound. At Sedongchen, at the end of a hot and dusty trek, he and Morshead came upon four Buddhist monks chanting prayers to avert a hailstorm, accompanied by drums, cymbals, rattles, and a trumpet made from a human thighbone. Morshead was astonished to see Somervell decipher the cacophony into precise musical notations. Somervell marveled that the very first tune he heard in Tibet, “whistled by a lad at work in the fields,” differed by only one note from the “little air played at the beginning” of Stravinksy’s Rite of Spring. He later wrote, “Men working in the fields sing pentatonic tunes and this must be considered as the national mode. I have heard Tibetans whistling arpeggios of common chords and strangely enough of diminished sevenths; but never a semitone, which they do not seem to appreciate as an interval. They may strike E and E flat in this way, bu
t never in succession.”
Not all the men displayed such sensitivity or scholarly discipline. Mallory was frankly bored by the return journey. “The repetition of aesthetic experiences is not very stimulating,” he wrote to Ruth from Tinki Dzong. “The march in the sun and the wind in camp have a somnolent effect; and one is apt to feel too much of an animal.” Mallory’s mind and spirit, his entire being, focused exclusively on the mountain. His personal deportment remained fastidious in the extreme, but his kit was always a shambles. Mallory moved with effortless grace, Morris recalled fondly, his body perfectly proportioned, “leaving trails of untidiness wherever he went.” After a few days the other men decided to take turns cleaning up Mallory’s scattered gear to ensure that nothing essential get left behind or pinched by the scores of young Tibetans who crowded around their every camp.
Privacy was never an option. The men were constantly on display, as Morris wrote, “like animals in an exhibition.” Morris, always insightful, took note of how they coped with their basic needs, such as defecating in the morning. “The attitude of different members of the party was very revealing; the extraverts squatted down behind the nearest rock and paid no heed to the audience, while the others would saunter on until their pursuers lost interest.” Among the priggish was most certainly Colonel Strutt, whose dislike of Tibetans grew with each passing day. “A usual and by now welcome sound in each new place,” Mallory wrote, “is Strutt’s voice, cursing Tibet—this march for being more dreary and repulsive even than the last one before, and this village for being more filthy than any other. Not that Strutt is particularly a grouser; but he likes to ease his feelings with maledictions and I hope feels better for it.”