by Wade Davis
In Phari, where the expedition gathered on April 6, even Strutt had good reason to complain. Morris described it as the “most dreary place in the world.” Rather than pitching tents, they crowded into a smoky dak bungalow vile with soot, its courtyard heaped with garbage and frozen filth, the narrow alleys infested with pigs and vermin. The air was viciously cold, the winter winds swirling with grit, dust, and powdered yak dung. “They huddled at the dining table,” Morris recalled, “coughing in the ever thickening murk.” On the second night it was the general’s fifty-sixth birthday, but even a taste of 120-year-old rum did not elevate the mood.
No one the year before, and none of the men of 1922, had experienced the full wrath of a Tibetan winter. Their clothing was hopelessly inadequate. As in 1921, each climber had been responsible for his own kit, and the result was a motley assemblage, with each man layered in unique combinations of woolen underwear, flannel shirts, cotton outer garments padded with eiderdown, waistcoats and lambskin jackets, plus fours and cashmere puttees, stockings, knickerbocker suits, and Shetland pullovers. The only standard issue was a pair of thigh-length sheepskin RAF flying boots, which reduced all movement to “a clumsy waddle.” Morris wore a suit of shoddy cashmere tweed. “It looked all right,” he wrote, “but afforded little protection from the howling Tibetan gales.”
In clothing suitable for a modest winter outing in the Welsh mountains, the expedition made plans for a three-week march across the frozen uplands of the highest plateau on earth. No one, Morris recalled, felt like talking. They were headed for Kampa Dzong, where Kellas was buried, and would travel in two groups. The climbers, with porters and fifty mules, would make haste over the shorter route, crossing the Tang La and the Donkar La, thus saving two days, though it implied desperate marches. The yaks and the bulk of the supplies, General Bruce indicated, would follow the road to Lhasa and head west to Kampa Dzong, crossing the Dug La some distance northwest of Bam Tso lake. At Kampa Dzong they would await the arrival of Finch and Crawford and the oxygen detail. As the men contemplated the journey, it could not have helped morale that Morshead, only a week before, had received word from London that old Harold Raeburn, the climbing leader in 1921, had gone “off his head” and been diagnosed as clinically mad, obsessed and tormented by the delusion that he had somehow murdered Kellas in cold blood in the wastelands of Tibet.
The three-day direct march to Kampa Dzong lived up to expectations: a bleak and arid landscape, blinding blizzards, and “poisonous” winds from the south driving snow and sand into the eyes and obliterating all signs of a track. The first day, with men and animals strung out across several miles, each leaning into the storm, five porters strayed from the rest and for several anxious hours were presumed lost and quite possibly dead. They had yet to be issued clothing for the heights, and that night they slept in the open without bedding or shelter. The temperature dropped to eight degrees Fahrenheit and the wind blew into the dawn. There was no water save what could be melted from ice, and with a crust of snow covering the ground they were unable to kindle a yak-dung fire. Geoffrey Bruce found them barely alive the following morning at a nunnery at Tatsang, where they had sought warmth at first light. As General Bruce remarked, “It made for a disheartening start.”
By the time the expedition reached Kampa Dzong, on April 11, Somervell and Morris were both done in by the “diabolical” cold, and the general had also suffered severely. Within days Longstaff, too, would succumb, overtaken by a violent attack of vomiting and diarrhea, the first sign of the chronic health problems that would continue to afflict him for the rest of the expedition. Beginning on April 18, Wakefield, by now known to the men as the Archdeacon, would effectively take over the position of medical officer.
They made camp in a stone enclosure in the lee of the great fort, beneath the buttress ridge where swallows swept and spun across the rock face. The tireless Norton went birding. Enchanted by the falling light in the west, Somervell did a sketch of the fort, silhouetted by amber waves of color, the brown earth beneath a cerulean sky. Longstaff and Bruce paid a call on the dzongpen, and on the morning of April 13 they all visited Kellas’s grave, adding stones to the memorial. John Noel captured the moment on film, but several of the men urged him not to allow the footage to be shown. Dignity and discretion, Longstaff insisted, most especially for the dead.
At 2:30 that afternoon, Finch and Crawford turned up, having reached Kampa Dzong in just ten days. Finch, his face blackened by the sun, was uncharacteristically cheerful. He was wearing a flying helmet, quilted trousers, flying boots, lambskin gloves, and his notorious knee-length down coat. Not once on the journey had he been bothered by the cold. “Everybody now envies me my eiderdown coat,” he gloated in his diary, “and it is no longer laughed at.” Finch was not one to wear success well. He was a skilled photographer, second in talent only to Noel, but no one in camp wanted to hear about all the images he had taken, the first of more than two thousand photographs he would expose in Tibet. His arrival implied a return to the dreaded oxygen drills, which most of the men loathed. “I’m bound to say I find Finch rather tiresome,” wrote Mallory. “He is perpetually talking about science as practiced in his laboratory or about photography. In fact it is becoming a little difficult not to acquire a Finch complex. I hope we shall manage to get on.”
Not everyone crossed swords with Finch. Around camp he was exceedingly helpful, fiddling with cameras and lenses, adjusting the stoves, even on one occasion shoeing Noel’s horse. Finch joined Norton for bird-watching and often compared notes with Noel on photography. He was a keen observer with a trenchant sense of humor. “If one ever wishes to talk with a Tibetan,” he wrote acidly,
it is advisable to stand on his windward side. A noble Tibetan informed me with great pride that he had had two baths, one on the day of his birth and the other on the day of his wedding … In this matter of physical cleanliness the Tibetan priests are even worse offenders than the laity; doubtless because they do not marry. As two-fifths of the able bodied population of the country follow a religious calling, it will be readily understood that the odour of sanctity is all pervading. Only once did I see a Tibetan having a bath. It was at Shegar Dzong … Disporting himself in the waters of a pool, quite close to the village, was a Tibetan boy, stark naked. On closer examination it transpired that the boy was the village idiot.
Henry Morshead in particular quite admired Finch. “He is a good fellow,” he wrote his wife, “and I don’t know where all these yarns about him originated last year. We all like him and I personally consider him far more of a Sahib than our local representative of the ICS [Indian Civil Service] … We are a very happy party, absolutely no jarring elements, and my only complaint is the extreme cold compared with last year.”
Small tensions did, in fact, erupt just four days before the expedition reached Shegar. In order to test the fitness of the men and their acclimatization, General Bruce authorized a short diversion, allowing two teams—Mallory and Somervell, Finch and Wakefield—to have a go at Sangkar Ri, an elegant peak that rose 7,000 feet above their camp at Gyangkar Nangpa. They would travel light, one Whymper and two Mummery tents, with six porters to carry provisions and gear. Before setting out, as Finch later wrote, he and Mallory “had a battle royal on the right way of approach to the mountain—settled by the General’s casting vote in favor of my plan.” Having assured General Bruce that they would be back down in the valley by 1:00 p.m. the following day, ready to rejoin the march to Shegar, the four climbers set out at 4:15 p.m. on April 20, a Thursday. “Mallory, of course, started to race,” Finch recalled, “so, just to show there was no ill feeling, I acted as his runner-up and beat him by just over ¾ hr in the 3¼ hours it took to get to the site of our projected camp.”
With both Finch and Somervell sick that night, the men did not get off the next morning until just after 4:00, having first dispatched the porters with tents and equipment back to the expedition. The climbers, now on their own, faced a four-hour slog simply to r
each the base of a steep col on the northern side of the peak. “I was going strong being fit in wind,” Finch scratched in his journal, “but was very sore in my tummy and vomited several times.” Lagging behind Mallory and Somervell and only halfway up the col by 9:00 a.m., Finch and Wakefield decided to turn back to keep their promise to the general.
Mallory naturally went on, encouraging Somervell to join him. They struggled to within 500 feet of the summit. “We were neither of us well acclimatized at the time,” Somervell later wrote, “moreover I had had a severe attack of dysentery, and frequent halts and slow progress were necessary for me. Mallory could, I think, have got to the top without me, but instead he chose the safety of a party of two. In his place I should continually have said to my companion ‘Come along now, don’t be slow,’ and so on, but Mallory was absolutely patient and while one could see his eagerness to get on, one could see far more clearly his infinite considerations for his slower companion.” This casual comment offers an important insight into Mallory’s character as a mountaineer, particularly in regard to the fateful events of June 8, 1924, the day he and Sandy Irvine were last seen alive on Everest. However powerful the allure of a summit, nothing, according to Howard Somervell, would induce Mallory to abandon a weaker climber on a mountain.
The general was not pleased when Mallory and Somervell turned up at Shiling several hours after dark, but he did admire their stamina. In a day they had walked from their high camp for four hours to reach the base of Sangkar Ri, climbed several thousand feet to within reach of its 20,490-foot summit, and then returned in five hours to Gyangkar, only to face a ten-mile ride through “quick sands of evil repute” to rejoin the expedition. By morning all was forgiven. At breakfast the general lightened the mood with an off-color joke. Finch that same morning disarmed everyone by making a fool of himself riding the back of a yak, thus acquiring the nickname Buffalo Bill. Morris, who wore flamboyant native dress to dinner and, “after the manner of a Hindu” had shaved all but a lock of his hair, soon answered to the name Babu Chatterjee. Mallory became, appropriately, Peter Pan. General Bruce naturally remained the general. “We could not have a better and more able leader than him,” Finch confessed. “His immense power over the coolies is worth the presence of a dozen good men.”
Morale soared later that morning when, not fifteen minutes out of Shiling, they rounded a rocky promontory and suddenly caught a clear view of Everest, some fifty-five miles away to the southwest. Reflected in the smooth water of the Yaru Chu, the summit seemed much closer. “It was a great and stirring sight,” Finch recalled, “one which renewed the enthusiasm of all.” Two days later, just before noon, the party reached the Shining Crystal Monastery of Shegar, where it remained for three days, as General Bruce met with the dzongpens, secured new transport and additional porters, and made all final arrangements for the mountain. Longstaff bought a rosary for his wife and several trinkets for his children, and with Strutt climbed to the very top of the fort, where juniper and incense offerings burned ceaselessly on a sacred platform surrounded by prayer flags. John Noel labored throughout the stay, securing extraordinary footage of ceremonial processions, monks in prayer, and the wildly theatrical rituals described by the British as devil dances.
Finch, too, set immediately to work, developing not only his own film but also that of Mallory and several of the men. Mallory’s images were dreadful, frantically composed and impulsively shot. Finch’s work was remarkably good, and his skill in the darkroom allowed him, in short order, to take portraits and deliver prints to the leading local authorities, something of a diplomatic coup for Bruce. “On the whole my photos have improved ever so much,” Finch noted in his diary on April 25. “Noel’s photos are to my mind not as good and they are far less numerous.” In style immodest, but in reasoning quite true; Finch arguably secured the best still images in 1922.
GENERAL BRUCE’S aim was to reach Everest, the sooner the better. Rather than continue west as far as Tingri, as the 1921 reconnaissance expedition had done, he intended to strike south from Shegar, crossing the Pang La, a high pass that offered a direct route to the Dzakar Chu, the river that drained the Rongbuk Glacier. It was country largely unknown to the British, but well trodden by local traders, pilgrims, and monks. Within four days, the general had been assured, they would reach the monastery, poised to move straight up the East Rongbuk to the North Col, a goal that in 1921 had taken Mallory and Wheeler more than four months to attain. The plan after that was simple. Establish a base as near as possible to the mouth of the East Rongbuk, and then fix two or, if necessary, three camps between it and the foot of the North Col. A fourth camp would perch on top of the col, sheltered in the lee of the ice cliff that Mallory had described in his report. From there, a light camp would be carried high onto the Northeast Shoulder to provide the jumping-off point for the thrust to the summit. They would have five weeks, the general anticipated, to reach the top before the onset of the monsoon obliterated all approaches to the mountain.
The expedition left Shegar on Thursday, April 27, and crested the Pang La at midmorning the following day. The light lifted on a quilt of brown mountain ridges running up against a stunning panorama of ice peaks clawing at the skyline, Makalu, Everest, and Cho Oyu. With the exception of Mallory and Bullock, and possibly Heron, they were the first Europeans to reach the heights of a pass traversed today by every climber who comes at Everest from the north. Finch was astonished to see through scattered clouds that the “great northern flank east of the north ridge and the North Peak were almost bare rock. The N ridge also showed up almost wholly as rock.” With Noel and Longstaff, he climbed a hillock rising 500 feet above the Pang La. In the few minutes it took them to reach the highest promontory, he noted, “Everest shook off its fleecy mantel [sic].”
Longstaff sat down to steady his breathing and the scope in his hands. It was quite wrong, he could see with the glass, to consider any part of the ascent of Everest to be easy, as many had inferred. The strata on the upper slopes of the North Face slanted down like tiles on a roof, the Northeast Ridge was far more serrated than he had anticipated, with great buttresses at several points, and even against the dark rock he could see spindrift sweeping across the face at tremendous velocity, evidence of the ferocity of the winds. The exposures would be formidable.
John Noel, the nonclimber, dwelt only on the aesthetic as he steadied his camera on its tripod. “For weeks,” he later reflected, “we had toiled through the desolation of mountain and plateau. At last we sighted our goal and gazed spell bound at the sheer cliffs of rock draped in ice which seemed to form part of the very heavens above us.”
Noel and others on the expedition, certainly Mallory and, in their own way, Somervell and Norton, like so many European climbers, projected onto mountains a sense of the spiritual, as if the alpine heights and icy crags were animate, responsive, infused with redemptive power. “I try to compose my pictures,” Noel wrote, “as if to interpret, if possible, the soul meaning of these mountains. For me, they really lived.” Perhaps not surprisingly, Noel did not extend the possibility of such inspiration or connection to the people of Tibet, who in his mind lived both literally and metaphorically in the bottomlands, in the squalor and filth of their hamlets and towns, “sunk in the most fantastic superstitions,” their religion but a “solemn fantasy.” Quaint and photogenic as their customs and manners might be, their rituals fundamentally provoked in him only “disgust.” Morris thought otherwise. He found the constant complaints about hygiene and sanitation a tedious refrain. But Morris was exceptional, a refugee from his own culture living by choice in remotest India, his sensibilities already informed by scholarly intuitions that in time would make him a fine ethnographer and a world authority on the Lepcha people of Nepal.
The expedition reached the Rongbuk Monastery on April 30. Plans to move immediately farther up the valley, closer to the confluence of the East Rongbuk, were stymied by the cold and the late arrival of the stragglers. Longstaff, weak with gastri
tis, did not stumble in until well after 4:00 p.m., accompanied by Geoffrey Bruce. The general decided to camp at the monastery and dispatched Finch to retrieve the vanguard. The following morning General Bruce, Karma Paul, and a number of the men went to pay a call on the lama of Rongbuk, Dzatrul Rinpoche, who the previous year had been in spiritual retreat and unavailable to meet with Howard-Bury.
The lama had never seen an Englishman. The British had never been in the presence of a living Buddha. Dzatrul Rinpoche was the incarnation of Padma Sambhava, Guru Rinpoche. Bruce acknowledged his host as the embodiment of a god, one “depicted with 9 heads.” The general had no idea what this actually meant, but he did take notice of the cleanliness of the monastery and the reverence shown to the rinpoche by all Tibetans. Karma Paul, Western educated and clothed, precisely the sort of native Bruce most admired, positively “groveled” at the lama’s feet. They were clearly, Bruce later wrote, in the presence of a remarkable individual. “He was a large, well-made man of about sixty, full of dignity, with a most intelligent and wise face and an extraordinarily attractive smile. We were received with full ceremony, and after compliments had been exchanged, the Lama began to ask questions with regard to the object of the expedition.”
Bruce’s response has become part of the folklore of Everest. According to Finch, who was there, the lama, “an impressive bit of humbug, with a huge face, almost twice as large as yours or mine,” asked why we would “spend so much money, endure hardships, and face the dangers he was sure had to be faced, merely for the sake of standing on top of this loftiest of great peaks … General Bruce, as usual, rose to the occasion,” explaining with irrefutable logic that as the summit was the highest point on earth, it was the location closest to heaven, a worthy goal for any man. According to Finch, this explanation, “which contains more than a germ of the truth, satisfied the revered old gentleman completely.”