by Wade Davis
Given that Buddhists have no notion of heaven, Bruce’s own explanation seems on the face of it more authentic: “I was fortunately inspired to say that we regarded the whole expedition, and especially our attempt to reach the summit of Everest, as a pilgrimage. I am afraid … I rather enlarged on the importance of the vows taken by all members of the Expedition. At any rate these gentle white lies were very well received, and even my own less excusable one, which I uttered to save myself from the dreadful imposition of having to drink Tibetan tea was also sufficiently well received. I told the Lama that I had sworn never to touch butter until [we] arrived at the summit of Everest.”
Neither recollection, however, is consistent with what Dzatrul Rinpoche recalled in his spiritual autobiography. According to the namthar, the beginning of 1922 found the lama in his fifty-sixth year, gravely ill. After a slow recovery, the rinpoche, though still weak, returned to his labors as abbot of Rongbuk in the second month of the year, for the monastery was in a frenzy of construction and expansion. The monks had only just begun the murals of the sanctuary, and the painters had yet to color the pillars of the prayer hall, when the district authorities from Shegar arrived along with the thirteen sahibs and several hundred beasts and porters. They insisted that he give an audience to the leader of the English. Initially the rinpoche refused, citing his poor health. Relenting under pressure, he agreed to make himself available the following morning. He received three sahibs and their leader, to whom he gave “a picture of the 13th Dalai Lama and a piece of silk. I gave them tea, yoghurt and rice, and then asked them where they were going. They said, ‘if we can climb the world’s highest mountain, the English government will give money and high position.’”
With no mention of pilgrimage or heaven, the lama told them that the heights were extremely cold, with nothing useful to be done save the practice of the dharma. He then warned them of dangerous forces, wrathful protectors of the land. The British asked for his protection, sought permission to gather firewood, and vowed not to kill any creatures. “After they had gone,” he recalled, “I sent a trunk of meat, four bricks of tea and one bowl of flour according to our local tradition of hospitality. They camped at the bottom of the mountain, then, I heard they camped for seven times for each level they reach, with great effort they use magical skills with iron nails, iron chains and iron claws, with great agony, hands and feet frozen … [Some] left early to have limbs cut off, the others stubbornly continue to climb … I felt great compassion for them to suffer so much for such meaningless work.”
Of all the British, Morris was most affected by the encounter with the rinpoche. “I suppose the world would have called him illiterate,” he wrote,
but he was a man who radiated a sort of positive goodness, a true man of God, and it was impossible to conceive of his having an evil thought. He told us that great harm would come if we killed any of the animals or birds, which wandered tamely in the lower reaches of the Rongbuk. Everest, itself, the lama said, was the home of demons, but he did not fear that our activities would disturb them; they were sufficiently powerful to look after themselves. For his part he would intercede with them not to harm us. He smiled benevolently as he said this and asked us to approach him one by one. To each of us he gave a ceremonial scarf and then blessed us by lightly touching our heads with what looked like an ornate silver pepper pot … For our porters it was one of the great occasions of their lives. As they entered the presence each man prostrated himself and wormed his way forward to receive the blessing. None raised his head.
It is not good, one of the men later told Morris, “for mortal man to look upon God.”
As the expedition moved up the Rongbuk on the morning of May 1, with the wind in their faces and twenty-three degrees of frost, the thoughts of both General Bruce and Morris turned to the hermit cells along the flanks of the valley. “How it is possible for human beings to stand what they stand, even for a year,” Bruce pondered, “without either dying or going mad, passes comprehension.” Even Morris was bewildered and offended by the austerity of the practice. “Tibetans regard these ascetic monks with the utmost veneration, but their vacuous faces, looking as though they had lost the power of thought, gave me nothing but a feeling of disgust. It seemed horrible thus deliberately to deny the purpose of life.” The lama’s talk of wrathful deities and wild creatures, yetis inhabiting the upper glaciers of the mountain, inspired confidence in no one.
The first away that morning were Somervell, Wakefield, Crawford, and Finch, detailed by the general to find a route through the massive moraines that dominated the valley, a track suitable for laden yaks and porters. The goal was to establish the expedition base camp well up the eastern side of the glacier, close to the mouth of the East Rongbuk. The burden fell largely on Finch. “I had to lose the others before anything good in this line could be accomplished,” he wrote. “None of them have the slightest idea of route finding. It all involved three wearisome double journeys for me, but I had the satisfaction of getting the whole transport through onto the level plain stretching towards the foot of the Rongbuk glacier.” Then a curious thing happened: the Tibetans simply stopped and refused to continue. “No argument or inducements by way of backsheesh,” a bewildered Finch recalled, “was of the slightest avail. Fear of devils and lack of grazing for the animals were insuperable obstacles.”
Finch had no choice but to order a retreat to Mallory and Bullock’s old camp from 1921, a mile below the snout of the Rongbuk Glacier, where he furiously instructed the Tibetans to dump their loads. The result was chaos, scores of restless and hungry yaks snorting across the barren flat, ponies on the loose, hundreds of small heaps of saddles, boxes, tents, and equipment scattered in all directions. Aside from sixty porters brought on from Darjeeling, the expedition had picked up a hundred or more local “transport workers,” men, women, and no few children. Shaken at the prospect of disturbing the demons of the ice, fearful of the wrath of the mountain, the Tibetans demanded to be paid immediately that they might abandon the valley in all haste. Tempers flared. Longstaff only just managed to “stave off a stoning match between Tibetans and our people.” A few choice words from the general quelled the unrest. After several hours, all the yak herders had been dutifully compensated and dismissed, and the expedition, thirteen British and a small corps of Sherpa porters, was “left alone in its glory.”
The site was not ideal. There was little forage, and with the ground still frozen, the only source of drinking water was the glacial surge of the Rongbuk Chu, fast and hazardous. The cold was intense, as was the wind, and there was little fuel to be had. The men struggled to erect mess and sleeping tents in the lee of great stacks of stores. John Noel pitched his developing facility close to the stream, using boulders and rope to secure the stays. That evening, “on a night cold beyond imaginings,” Morris recalled, he broke open the champagne and each man had a mouthful as they toasted the general for safely leading them through Tibet. As night fell, the clouds cleared to reveal a magnificent view of the North Face of Everest. Though dwarfed by the mountain, their base at 16,500 feet was still nearly a thousand feet higher than the summit of Mont Blanc.
HAUNTED BY the specter of the monsoon, General Bruce did not waste a day. Wheeler’s map of 1921 left little doubt that with the base established well below the mouth of the East Rongbuk, they would require three advanced camps running up to the flank of the North Col, not the two initially planned. Porters burdened by heavy loads could not be expected to carry for more than three hours. On that first morning, Tuesday, May 2, the general dispatched Strutt, Norton, and Finch up the East Rongbuk to select a site for Camp I. Wakefield and Longstaff took sick parade and then saw to the medical support, breaking open the boxes to assemble individual kits with all the necessary supplies, one for each of the upper camps. John Noel, meanwhile, worked alone, taking some satisfaction as he set up the world’s highest photographic laboratory. Inside the darkened tent, he put together the lined plywood boxes in which he would pro
cess several thousand stills along with some seventeen thousand feet of film stock, and he positioned the stove, which, fueled with yak dung, would allow him to dry the negatives. He would work exclusively at night, in temperatures well below freezing. All the processing had to be finished by dawn, when the winds returned to whip up clouds of sand and dust, certain to ruin the emulsion.
The general spent the early afternoon filing one of the periodic reports for Hinks and the Times, an obligation he loathed. He paced in the mess while Morris did the typing. “It is a weakness of Bruce’s,” Mallory noted, “that he hates writing; if only he could realize how deplorable is the result of his dictating he would perhaps bring himself to the effort.” General Bruce had more pressing concerns. He desperately needed men. Local supplies of barley flour, dried meat and grain for the porters, and dung to fuel the cooking fires had to be sourced some forty miles away. These loads could be brought up to the heights by yak, provided herdsmen could be found. But the upper camps on the East Rongbuk would need to be resupplied by relays of porters. The bulk of the stores and equipment, including oxygen tanks and apparatus, ropes, snow stakes, crampons, climbing gear, tents, and high-altitude boots and clothing, would have to be moved up the mountain to the foot of the North Col. That depot, Camp III, would anchor a supply line leading to the crest of the col. Camp IV, pitched on the col at an elevation higher than any human had ever slept, would in turn support a light camp somewhere high on the Northeast Shoulder, the jumping-off point for the summit.
Recruiting porters had been much more difficult than anticipated. It was the plowing season, and Tibetan men were needed in the fields. Unbeknownst to the British, the traditional rituals performed at the Rongbuk Monastery in the first days of May were believed by Buddhists to be especially irritating to the demons of the mountain, making it a highly inauspicious time to go anywhere near Chomolungma. As a result the expedition never knew, as the general complained, if “three or four or thirty” contracted coolies would report for duty. Bruce had hoped to reserve the Darjeeling Sherpas for the high camps, but in the circumstances he was obliged to put all officers and men to work. This labor shortage, ultimately resolved as word reached Nepal and enterprising Sherpa men and women from Solu Khumbu crossed the 19,050-foot Nangpa La, had two immediate and serious consequences: it placed added physical strain on the climbers even as it delayed, by several critical days, the arrival of the oxygen apparatus at Camp III. Both factors would prove highly significant to the outcome of the expedition.
Shortly after 4:00 p.m. the scouting party returned, having found, as Finch recalled, a “splendid” site for Camp I, near a stream about a quarter mile west of the snout of the East Rongbuk Glacier on the north bank. At an elevation of 17,800 feet, it was roughly three and a half hours, or three miles, from their base. The going was “poisonously monotonous” but without serious challenge, though at one point Finch had to cut a few steps. To his surprise, the first blow with his new and “beautiful Schenk ice-axe” bent the blade almost parallel to the shaft. It was his first experience of Himalayan ice.
The following morning, Wednesday, May 3, with Finch detailed to put in order the high-altitude kits, General Bruce sent Somervell, Crawford, and his nephew Geoffrey back to Camp I, along with forty-three porters laden with some twelve hundred pounds of yak dung for fuel. The day was cold but clear, with stunning views of Everest. They lingered long enough to build four roofless stone huts, which would later be covered with tarps and canvas, tents being in somewhat short supply. At noon the weather turned, as it did each day, with clouds covering the sun and the usual “pestilential wind” arising from the west. Meanwhile, at base camp, Mallory was restless. He had received no letters from home in nearly two months. Word that Finch intended to deliver a lecture to the entire expedition sent him literally running for the hills. He and Somervell persuaded the general that further acclimatization demanded an excursion.
On Thursday morning, even as Finch assembled his props—Primus stoves and various fuels: kerosene, petrol, and absolute alcohol—Somervell and Mallory set off early to climb a 21,850-foot peak high above the west bank of the Rongbuk. The scramble almost ended in disaster. On the ascent the nails of Mallory’s boots slipped on a granite slab; in falling, he badly skinned the back of his right hand. Then, higher on the mountain, as he worked his way along a broken ridge, he dislodged a large stone, which fell heavily on his foot, badly bruising his big toe. He had just the strength to heave the boulder down the slope. Fortunately no bones were broken, but the pain was severe and Mallory was grateful to have a little whiskey in his tea when finally they returned to camp.
Finch, too, had a bad day. His cooking and stove demonstration went well enough. The Tibetans and “high-going coolies” had been impressed by the pyrotechnics, though the British climbers perhaps less so. But a second experiment ended poorly. In addition to cylinders of gas, regulators, and masks, Finch had devised a backup method for oxygen resuscitation. This involved a chemical reaction of sodium peroxide in what was known as an oxylithe bag. The idea was simple: at rest, the exhausted climber would lean face-first into a sack, add cold water, and absorb a blast of oxygen released by the reaction. For just this purpose Finch had brought across Tibet solid blocks of sodium peroxide weighing altogether no less than 125 pounds. Noel, working the previous night in his sealed and darkened tent, had found that the air quickly became deoxygenated, making it difficult to breathe. He complained to Finch, who gave him a tin of oxylithe just after the morning lecture. The filmmaker did as directed, but less than ten minutes after he added water the entire works exploded with a great flash of flame, leaving the interior of the tent thick with a caustic mist of soda.
“It strikes me that oxygen from oxylithe will want some watching,” Finch conceded in his diary. “Tomorrow I am going to give one of Leonard Hill’s bags a try-out, but I’m not going to take any chances!” Breathing the oxygen-enriched soda spray, he soon discovered, caused “violent coughing and produces … a vile slimy taste in the mouth which must be relieved by frequent expectoration.” This dramatic and very public failure could not have inspired confidence in those skeptics already resistant to the entire oxygen scheme, especially when Finch, despite the fiasco, nevertheless insisted on sending bags of sodium peroxide up to the highest camps. It was perhaps no wonder that he became ever more isolated in what the others viewed as an oxygen obsession.
Friday, May 5, was, according to Wakefield, the “finest day to date,” clear and sunny through the late afternoon, with only a slight breeze by evening. Strutt, Longstaff, Morshead, and Norton set off early on an extended reconnaissance, charged with the task of finding locations for Camps II and III and assessing the conditions of the ice and snow on the flank of the North Col. The year before, Wheeler had explored and mapped much of the East Rongbuk, and with Mallory and Bullock had traversed, from the Lhakpa La, the great cirque at the head of the glacier to climb the col. But to date no one had walked the entire length of the valley. Strutt, Morshead, and Norton would be the first to do so. Along with sixteen porters, they reached Camp I at 12:45 p.m. Longstaff arrived thirty minutes later, noticeably weak. While he rested, with Strutt staying at his side, Norton and Morshead pushed on.
General Bruce, meanwhile, secure as always at base camp, dispatched to Camp I a second party, a supply column of some fifty heavily laden porters escorted by Morris and Wakefield. It fell to Wakefield, bringing up the rear, to keep the small army moving. “It really was the funniest thing in creation,” he recalled, “to follow from behind, keeping the flock together, preventing straggling and seeing that everything went ok. We patiently shepherded them from behind, cheering up the stragglers. I felt like an old Westmoreland farmer, driving a flock of sheep to market. We had with us several Gurkha non-coms, helping us like sheep dogs doing the barking (and biting) when necessary.” The Tibetans, each carrying eighty-pound loads, were not amused. Just as they reached the head of the trough leading to Camp I, they struck for a second time,
refusing to continue. Only Morris’s skillful diplomacy, together with a promise from Longstaff to reduce the weight of the loads, defused a potentially disastrous situation. The expedition, already shorthanded, needed at least ninety porters; it could hardly afford to lose fifty that it had.
With Morris and Wakefield heading back to base camp, Strutt and his men pushed ahead on May 6, reaching Wheeler’s old 19,360-foot camp just before noon. Finding it inadequate for a large party, they continued, eventually placing Camp II at 19,800 feet on the west side of the valley just below the spur that terminates Everest’s North Ridge, some four hours beyond Camp I.
At this point, as if on cue, the strain of weeks of exposure and exhaustion caught up with several members of the expedition. Longstaff, severely depleted, could not continue and sent a note saying as much to General Bruce. At base camp Crawford was also down, as was Finch, who took ill on Saturday and remained, on medical orders, in bed through Tuesday, setting back the oxygen preparations by three days.
On Monday, May 8, leaving Longstaff to rest at Camp II, Strutt, Norton, and Morshead, with five porters, continued up the East Rongbuk. At first the ground was open, the way clear, but two miles out they ran into a maze of jagged ice pinnacles, which forced them onto the true left bank, the western side of the valley. Eventually they found a deep trough running through the seracs to the smooth surface of the glacier, ice so polished and hard they needed crampons, despite the easy angle of ascent. The distance from Camp II to Camp III, ultimately established at 21,000 feet on a broad snow plateau just below the steep slopes leading to the North Col, was only three and a half miles, but the route was not trivial. Broken by crevasses, swept by wind and snow, with towering ice distorting the senses, it demanded real mountaineering skills, something the porters would have to acquire.