by Wade Davis
Amid great confusion, as Wakefield recalled, Mallory, Crawford, Somervell, and Noel, along with the porters, set out just after 8:00 a.m. They soon discovered that the sun had failed them. With each step they broke through the crust, sinking to the waist. Strung out on three ropes, trading off the lead at frequent intervals, they essentially plowed a track to the base of the North Col, taking two full hours simply to cross the snowfield to its base. Leaving the other men to rest, Somervell, Mallory, one of the Tibetans, and Crawford, roped in that order, began slowly to find a way up the ice slopes buried in wet snow. Any sign of their previous route had been obliterated. But to Mallory’s surprise, even on the steepest pitches, the snow remained firm on the ice below, adhering to the surface so well that he did not need to cut steps. He carefully tested several slopes, trenching the snow to provoke slippage, as would occur in the case of an avalanche. If the steepest of gradients held firm, they would surely have nothing to fear on the gentler slopes higher on the face. “The thought of avalanche was dismissed from our minds,” he reported.
The going was nevertheless brutal and excruciatingly slow. Somervell led on a long rope, replaced by Crawford, and finally by Mallory—a tedious rotation so exhausting that the men had to pause to gasp for air after every step. At 22,500 feet Noel turned back. The softness of the snow made it impossible with his heavy cameras. He would instead film the party from the base of the col with his long lens. The decision saved his life.
At about 1:30 p.m. the party halted. After nearly six hours they were still 600 feet beneath the col. The Tibetan porters, strung out on three ropes, clustered to the fore, bringing fifteen bodies close together in the snow. They were on a gentle flank, and had the hour not been late, they would have rested. Instead Somervell plunged ahead, advancing perhaps 100 feet up the slope. The air was still, with no wind, and there was no idle chatter among the exhausted men. The bright sun glared off the snow, and the only sound was that of human breath. Suddenly the quiet was broken by a noise that Mallory later compared to “an explosion of untamped gunpowder.” In an instant the entire slope gave way. At first Mallory was able to ride the surge, but then the rope around his waist tightened and a massive wave of snow buried him alive. He thrust out his arms, as if swimming, struggling in the chaos of the tumbling snow in the dark, until mercifully, within seconds, it was over. His arms were free, his legs near the surface. The pressure of the snow grew in intensity. A brief struggle brought him to the surface, the rope at his waist still taut. Miraculously, the porter tied into his rope clawed out of the snow, unhurt, as did Somervell and Crawford, who had endured experiences similar to Mallory’s.
Searching frantically about, they saw one group of four porters perhaps 150 feet farther down the slope. Of the other two ropes, one with four men and the other five, there was not a sign. The British began desperately to dig. When the Tibetans down below failed to join them, Mallory realized that their comrades had been carried even farther down the mountain. He rushed down the slope, only to find the Tibetans standing at the edge of an ice cliff 40 to 60 feet high, a formidable drop. The avalanche had filled the crevasse at its base with snow, even as it had cast the nine men into the void. Crawford and the four surviving Tibetans began to dig. Mallory and Somervell dropped over the edge of the crevasse. One man was quickly recovered, still breathing. The one beside him had been killed by the fall. Mallory traced a rope to a second corpse, but then found a man alive, barely breathing, trapped upside down with snow packed hard around his limbs. He had been carrying four oxygen cylinders on a steel frame, which had to be cut from his body before he could be dragged to the surface. Of the others on his rope, they found only one, who was dead.
At Camp III Noel and Wakefield had been watching—the filmmaker through his camera, the doctor through the same binoculars he had used on July 1, 1916, when his Newfoundland boys had gone over the top at Beaumont-Hamel. Wakefield saw everything, as he later wrote his wife: “I had been watching them through glasses winding their way up the steep wall. Then I glanced away for a moment. When I looked back the whole wall was white and there was no string of ascending climbers. At first I thought all had been wiped off by the avalanche. But as I kept looking, the fuzz of snow settled down, and I gradually made out most of the figures still on the slope. I hastily made up a relief party with first aid and hurried up.” Wakefield ordered Noel to heat water for tea and then, with four Tibetan porters, headed up with shovels, ropes, dressings, and brandy. At 3:30 p.m. he met Crawford, coming off the mountain to fetch help. “All whites are safe” were Crawford’s first words. Wakefield soon saw that he was not needed. Men had lived or they had died.
Of the nine Tibetans who had been swept into the crevasse, the two found still breathing by Mallory would live. Unhurt, they would walk down to Camp III, and within a day be fully recovered, by all appearances utterly free of the emotional fervor that had only begun to torment the British. When Mallory asked them whether an attempt should be made to retrieve the bodies for burial, the survivors replied that the men, their friends and brothers, ought to be left where they lay. The British saw this response as a sign of the universal spirit of mountaineers. For the Tibetans it was simply over. There was no need for explanations, and certainly no purpose to be found in imagining what might have been.
Mallory by contrast was haunted with regret, Somervell tormented by a sense of unfairness. “I well remember,” Somervell later wrote, “the thought gnawing at my brain. Only Sherpa and Bhotias killed—why, oh why could not one of us, Britishers, shared their fate? I would gladly at that moment have been lying there, dead in the snow. If only to give those fine chaps who had survived the feeling that we had shared their loss, as we had indeed shared the risk.” The bitterness, Mallory wrote, was “in the irony of fate.” He and Somervell had been critical of what they viewed as Finch’s cavalier treatment of the porters, allowing them, for example, to head up the mountain without escort and unprotected by ropes. They had been appalled to learn that the relief party of May 26 had returned from Finch’s high camp at night, obliged to cross the dangerous crevasses of the North Col in the dark, arriving back at Camp IV at 11:00 p.m. They openly condemned such practices, and felt “consciously virtuous” for doing so.
Morris recalled the return of the survivors to Camp III: “I had thought they looked tired when they passed through on their way up, but now they were not only shaken and completely exhausted, but seemed to have aged considerably. It was obvious that we could make no further attempts that year.” The question that haunted them all, most especially Mallory, was whether this third assault ought ever to have been contemplated, given the conditions.
General Bruce learned of the disaster within hours. A Sherpa runner dispatched by Morris raced the length of the East Rongbuk, arriving at base camp at 9:00 p.m. The general, who took particular pride in understanding what he saw as the Asian mind, presumed that the Sherpas would react fatalistically: “If it was written that they should die on Everest, they should die on Everest. If it was written they would not die on Everest, they would not, and that was all there was to be said in the matter.”
Bruce sent word to Morris to begin the evacuation of the high camps immediately, and then set out to notify the lama of Rongbuk by runner and to offer, in writing, compensation to the families of the deceased, as he would in the case of soldiers killed in battle. Each family, he determined, would receive 250 rupees, roughly £13, in quarterly installments beginning on August 15. The names of the dead were duly recorded: Thankay, Sangay, Temba, Lhakpa, Pasang Namgyn, Norbu, and Pema. Norbu and Pasang, who were fathers, were allotted an additional payment of 50 rupees per child. In the case of the death of an heir, the general specified that the recruiting officer for the Gurkhas in Ghoom would disperse the funds, in consultation with the deputy commissioner and the superintendent of police. In Bruce’s official account of the 1922 expedition, there would be no mention of the names of the Sherpa dead.
Among the victims were several
of the men who had risked their lives to bring hot drinks and support to Finch and Bruce in their moment of crisis, and two, Sangay and Temba, who had worked closely with Wakefield throughout the expedition. Norbu had been Somervell’s servant. The day after the accident, a devastated Mallory headed immediately to base camp to brief the general, while Wakefield remained at Camp III to build a memorial cairn for the fallen, stones that Somervell inscribed with verse and the names of the dead. In the afternoon they headed down to Camp I with Crawford, leaving Morris alone to close down the higher camp. It was a hot and clear day, not a cloud in the sky. The monsoon winds brought warmer air. By the time Morris abandoned Camp III, bringing with him what few supplies he could salvage, the valley had been transformed. The trough of black ice running up the center of the glacier was a raging torrent. The great pinnacles crumbled and toppled, with ice disintegrating until the entire landscape, he recalled, resembled “a vast ice cream that had been left out in the sun.” It was no longer safe to walk the valley, let alone climb mountain slopes cascading with avalanches.
The mood at base camp over the next days was grim. The medical evacuees were long gone; Longstaff, Finch, and Strutt would not even learn of the accident until they docked in Dover in mid-July. Norton and Geoffrey Bruce had accompanied them for two days and then, on the morning of the fateful climb, headed south over the Doya La to recuperate at Kharta. They would learn of the disaster ten days after the fact. Mallory, sharing the camp on the night of June 8 with the general, blamed himself for the loss. He was haunted by the thought that children the same age as his own had been left without fathers. “The consequences of my mistake,” he wrote to Ruth, “are so terrible; it seems almost impossible to believe that this has happened and that I can do nothing to make it good. There is no obligation I have so much wanted to honour as that of taking care of those men.” Writing to Francis Younghusband, he took full responsibility, acknowledging that if he had known more about the snow conditions, the accident would not have occurred. To his old friend and mentor Geoffrey Young, he confided, in a tone both sincere and paternalistic, “I’m quite knocked out by this accident. Seven of these brave men killed, and they were ignorant of mountain dangers, like children in our care. And I’m to blame.”
On Saturday, June 10, three days after the tragedy, Mallory, Wakefield, Somervell, and Noel visited the Rongbuk Monastery. They had all initially been uncertain about how the monks would respond. After their second attempt, Dzatrul Rinpoche had sent word congratulating the porters for their selfless devotion to Finch and Bruce, but he had also specifically warned the expedition to leave the mountain. He had foreseen an accident in a vision. When told that men had died, he had responded with sympathy and kindness. He asked only that the climbers attend a prayer service, as Morris recalled, to “honour the spirits of those we left behind.”
As the climbers approached the monastery that day, they were astonished to see scores of pilgrims gathering for what turned out to be a most extraordinary pageant. Mallory likened it to Shakespeare, theater in the round. Noel called it a “devil dance.” It was in fact the Mani Rimdu, a ritual of intense devotion that over the course of nearly three weeks recalls and celebrates the original dissemination of Buddhism to Tibet. The climbers happened to arrive on the climactic day, when masked dancers in great dramatic flourishes give form to all the forces of light and darkness, every demon and deity. The British stayed only until early afternoon, but before they left each was given a small red pill, a sacred offering that, if swallowed, literally allows one to eat the power of the Buddhist dharma.
FOUR DAYS LATER, the 1922 Everest expedition set out for home. They stopped at the monastery for a final audience with the lama, whom they now described in their journals as “the holiest man in Tibet.” Butter tea was served. Noel astonished all by actually drinking some, the first of the English to do so. Dzatrul Rinpoche gave the general an image of the Green Tara for protection, and then blessed the dead, their families, and all who had survived. The Gurkhas were overwhelmed to be in the presence of the lama; they scarcely dared approach to receive his blessings. Several wept as the rinpoche draped ceremonial scarves around their necks.
The warmth and beauty of Kharta and the lower Kama Valley held General Bruce and the remnants of his force for nearly three weeks. They celebrated Mallory’s thirty-sixth birthday in the shadow of a monastery at Teng, and the following day they all lunched at the mouth of the Arun Gorge, where Norton had found an enchanting glen. Noel and Morris took off on an exploration of the lower reaches of the Kama Chu, while the others botanized or loafed in the alpine meadows, where the flowers were at a peak. It was a welcome respite from the agonies of the ice. They gathered together at last on July 1. Mallory, still under a cloud, set off alone two days later.
The others started the following morning, and with various diversions and delays would reach Darjeeling in the first days of August. It was for the most part an uneventful journey, though Morris, as transport officer, had to struggle at times to maintain discipline among the porters, especially when it came to drink. “We decided that a man was not drunk,” he reported, “so long as he could lie on the ground without actually holding on. It was, we felt, a generous interpretation, but there was one porter who was consistently unable to comply even with this simple test.” As a lesson they loaded the man with a one-hundred-pound sack and made him carry it to Phari, across three 18,000-foot passes. With great enthusiasm, the Tibetan stormed up the first pass, sweating out his drunkenness.
On this, one of their last marches before dropping into the Chumbi Valley, they came upon an arresting sight, a pilgrim traveling from Lhasa to Kathmandu in ritual prostration. It recalled Howard-Bury’s similar encounter during his approach to Tingri in 1921. The young man, though dressed in rags, appeared strong and well fed. He hailed from Urga, in northern Mongolia. His journey had already consumed a year of his life. “It seemed to me not only a futile waste of time,” Morris later wrote, “but a terrible denial of life, but when I came to consider it later I could not think it any more repugnant than the austerities practiced by some Christian orders.”
JOHN MORRIS came back from Everest no longer able to endure the boredom of military life. In the end he managed to secure a long overdue leave, and returned to London for the first time in years. “There was nobody I particularly wanted to see,” he wrote. “In any case mine was the generation that had suffered most in the war, and the few friends I had acquired during the course of it were dead. There were times when I wished that I, too, had been killed, for there seemed in those days to be an unbridgeable gulf between those who had been actively involved in the war and those who had not. I envied the ones who could take the easy way, but I disliked the taste and still more the effects of alcohol; and no love affair came my way.” After eight months, he would pull himself out of a severe depression and once again turn his thoughts to Asia. Eventually he moved to Japan and became fluent in the language; he taught literature in Tokyo until, in the wake of Pearl Harbor in 1941, he had to escape.
Teddy Norton, who brought back from Tibet a collection of some 400 botanical specimens and 120 butterflies and moths, could not wait to get back to soldiering. Invited by Hinks to lecture on behalf of the Everest Committee, he scoffed at the thought. In September he rejoined his regiment and was immediately posted to Turkey, where he spent the winter in Constantinople and Chanak, as Britain and the Soviets edged ever closer to war.
Morshead endured several operations and was finally able to continue his survey duties in Dehra Dun. Finch reached England something of a hero; even Hinks had to acknowledge his record achievement, which he did grudgingly in a letter of June 22. Wakefield did not even bother to stop in London; he made a beeline for his wife and medical practice in Kendal, in the Lake District. Tom Longstaff, broken in health, wanted nothing more to do with Everest. “For Heaven’s sake,” he wrote, “climb the wretched thing and let’s get back to real mountaineering.”
Somervell remained
in India after the expedition and, with £60 in his pocket, set off for several months to wander about the country. In time he would join the staff of the Neyyoor mission hospital in Travancore, in southern India, forgoing a prestigious post he had been offered at University College Hospital in London. But for the moment he was just a pilgrim, a spiritual traveler.
While still in India, Somervell began work on the score for Noel’s first film, Climbing Mount Everest. The film initially was a disappointment, but gradually word of mouth carried the day. By the end of its ten-week run at the Philharmonic Hall, every performance was sold out.
Mallory, having resigned his teaching post at Charterhouse, found himself back in Britain without work and with a young family to support. His only income came from lecturing, fees he managed to squeeze out of Hinks and the Everest Committee. In a very practical sense, his fate was tied to the mountain. Noel ended his film with a melodramatic flourish certain to please the British press: “Though defeated this time, still our climbers will not accept defeat. They will make another expedition soon to complete the conquest of the mountain. They will return to this terrific battle with Nature and, despite the dangers, the storms and the cold, they will win through. They will conquer and they will stand on the summit of Everest—the very topmost pinnacle of the world.”