by Wade Davis
Mallory was not so sure, but as the summer turned to the fall, there was never really any doubt that if another effort were to be made, he would be leading the charge. The mountain had become him, and he the mountain, not only in the minds of the British public but within his own.
CHAPTER 12
The Thread of Life
TOM LONGSTAFF FELT considerable relief on the morning of July 15 as SS Macedonia approached the harbor of Marseille shortly after dawn. Since taking leave of General Bruce and the expedition at Rongbuk, he had brought Henry Morshead home safely to Darjeeling, a grueling journey of some four hundred miles completed without rest in a mere nineteen days. Morshead had remained stoic throughout the ordeal, and without complaint had walked across 18,000-foot passes inaccessible to mounted ponies, on feet raw and blistered from frostbite. But, as Longstaff later recalled, the man “suffered abominably” and might well have died; blood poisoning was a constant worry. Opium did little to quell the pain and, as Howard Somervell had noticed at base camp, there were moments at night when in agony the tough explorer would “get away by himself and cry like a child.” In the end, thanks in good measure to Longstaff, Morshead survived with only the loss of the top joints of three fingers on his right hand.
Having left the invalid in the care of his wife, Evie, and the medical authorities in Darjeeling, Longstaff, along with Colonel Strutt and George Finch, pushed on for Calcutta on June 29, arriving in time to take luncheon with Lord Lytton, the governor of Bengal, before boarding the night train for Bombay. A slow passage to Aden brought them to Suez on July 10, and from there the gentle sea carried them past Crete and through the Strait of Messina to the south of France. A problem with customs at Marseille delayed their disembarkation, and it was not until late in the afternoon that they reached the Gare Saint-Charles to catch the overnight train to Calais. Having been away from England for five months almost to the day, they landed at Dover at 8:00 p.m. on Sunday, July 16.
Longstaff’s wife, Dora, awaited him in London at the Imperial Hotel. Their reunion was marred by an urgent message from Arthur Hinks, ordering Longstaff, along with Strutt and Finch, to attend a special meeting of the Everest Committee scheduled for the very next morning. Word of the avalanche on Everest and the death of seven Sherpas had broken in the London papers even as the Macedonia docked in Marseille. Having left base camp before the disaster occurred, Longstaff, Finch, and Strutt were completely in the dark. Longstaff, in particular, was appalled by the news, for he had strongly opposed a third assault, going as far as to formalize his protest in writing in an official complaint to General Bruce. At Chöbuk, their first stop on the journey home, he had been much relieved to look back at the mountain and see it cloaked in fresh snow. “Everest a snowpack,” Longstaff noted in his diary on the evening of June 6, “will take 3–4 days sun to clear. Impossible now.” He had turned his thoughts to the slow climb to the Pang La and the road to Shegar, certain that conditions on the North Col would force Mallory to abort the ill-conceived attempt.
It infuriated him now to read Bruce’s front-page story in the Times, a delayed dispatch from Rongbuk written on June 11, four days after the accident, in which the general glossed over accountability with a turn of phrase: “Everest is a terrible enemy, and the chances against those attacking it very great.” In truth, as Longstaff recognized with regret, there had been a failure of leadership on the part of his old friend. General Bruce acknowledged in his dispatch that the monsoon had begun, and that even as he’d authorized Mallory to have a final go at the mountain, he had ordered, for reasons of safety, the evacuation of the upper camps on the East Rongbuk Glacier. The climbing party had left base camp on June 3 in “threatening weather.” How they had been permitted to proceed by Bruce, and why Mallory, at Camp III, had persisted when there was no conceivable chance of success and every possibility of disaster, was beyond Longstaff’s comprehension.
Their differences aside, Longstaff deeply admired Bruce, and believed that the general had been unduly pressured for results by Hinks and Younghusband, a conviction that was only reinforced by the tone of the meeting with the Everest Committee that following morning, Monday, July 17. Younghusband held the chair. Hinks played the inquisitor, and all three climbers felt as if on trial. Longstaff responded aggressively, ridiculing Hinks’s assertion that he and the others had abandoned the expedition when they had, in fact, hastened across Tibet to save Henry Morshead’s life. Longstaff later expressed his outrage in a letter to Sandy Wollaston, veteran of 1921, a member of the Everest Committee and the sole voice of moderation during the morning’s heated discussions. The general, as expedition leader, had performed brilliantly, Longstaff noted, as had John Morris and Geoffrey Bruce as transport officers. Teddy Norton was a great success, as indeed was Finch, a brilliant climber, who had overcome any number of impediments to establish a new record on the mountain. “With any reasonable conditions he would have stood on the final ridge,” Longstaff noted. “With luck he would have got to the top.”
Longstaff reserved his wrath for the climbers who, as far as he was concerned, had led the innocent Sherpas to their deaths. “Mallory is a very good stout hearted baby,” he wrote Wollaston, “but quite unfit to be in charge of anything, including himself. Somervell is the most urbanely conceited youth I have ever struck—and quite the toughest … He was honestly prepared to chuck his life away on the most remote chance of success … Mallory cannot even observe the conditions in front of him. To attempt such a passage in the Himalaya after new snow is idiotic. What the hell did they think they could do on Everest in such conditions even if they did get up to the North Col? By their ignorance and unwillingness to take advice Mallory and Somervell have brought discredit on old Bruce—and that’s why we were so savage the other day.”
Longstaff had every reason to be angry. His authority as medical officer had been undermined at base camp on Rongbuk, his advice as a seasoned Himalayan mountaineer ignored with mortal consequences, his honor challenged by an insinuation of desertion, even his homecoming to his beloved wife compromised by what he viewed as Hinks’s hysteria. Still, the intensity of his response, his defensiveness, suggests a man trying a little too hard to set the record straight. Longstaff dismissed Arthur Wakefield as a man “who could not face the altitude at all, rather worse than I was and is ignorant of the arts of mountaineering.” This was both ungenerous and untrue, and it suggests an aging climber coming to terms with his own limitations, the shame of personal failure, and the “disgrace,” as Longstaff himself saw it, of having physically collapsed and been carried down the mountain by Tibetan porters. It was an embarrassing outcome for a man who in his prime had climbed 6,000 feet in a day to reach the summit of Trisul in 1907. In 1922 Trisul remained the highest mountain ever climbed, but at 23,360 feet its peak was nearly 4,000 feet lower than the highest point achieved by the Everest climbers, including Geoffrey Bruce, who had never before been on a mountain. For Longstaff, incapacitated at the lowest camp, their success must have been bittersweet.
A cloud nevertheless hung over Mallory and Somervell, both still in Tibet and unable to mount their own defense. On July 21, Hinks sent a note to Norman Collie, president of the Alpine Club and a member of the Everest Committee, saying, “All who have come back think Mallory’s judgment in purely alpine matters was bad and inferior to Norton of whom everyone speaks very highly.”
Privately, as his letters to his wife and close friends reveal, Mallory was deeply disturbed by the accident, as indeed was Somervell. “Do you know that sickening feeling that one can’t go back and have it undone and that nothing will make it good?” he wrote to Geoffrey Young. “I don’t much care what the world says, but I care very much what you and a few others think.” In a letter that reached Mallory within days of his return to England in August, his old mentor urged him to set aside any thought of being responsible for the tragedy: “You made all the allowance for the safety of the party that your experience suggested … You took your full share, a
leading share, in the risk. In the war we had to do worse: we had to order men into danger at times when we could not share it. And surely we learned then that to take on ourselves afterwards the responsibility for their deaths, to debate with ourselves the ‘might-have-beens,’ was the road to madness.”
Within a fortnight of his return, Mallory had a chance to present his side of the story in a September 4 lead article on the front page of the Times, “Mount Everest Risks: Why the Last Climb Was Attempted.” It was not a spirited defense as much as a muted statement of the obvious. Climbers in the moment make choices, and they take calculated risks. The weather was visibly breaking, and the general was of the opinion that a “succession of fine days would follow the first snow.” After all they had endured, retreat from a “mountain so nearly conquered” was too bitter a prospect to accept. They had proceeded carefully, testing the snow. Despite all precautions, the accident had happened. Good men had died, and the survivors had lived on to bury the grievous loss in memory.
That was the end of it. Within the Everest Committee, Younghusband rallied to Mallory’s support, as did Hinks, who was not about to allow the death of seven porters to tarnish the reputation of the man who had become the public face of the entire enterprise. While formally bemoaning the tragic loss of life, Hinks recognized an opportunity when he saw one. As Strutt cynically reminded Mallory in a letter of August 2, the “British Public, the middle classes, shop-keepers, gillies, etc., who alone show a real interest in the expedition, these rather welcome the accident (dead bodies always appeal to them), and think us real heroes in consequence.”
Hinks, with the ongoing support of John Buchan, continued to use the press to build interest in Everest. The Times alone published some sixty articles between April and September 1922, with many making the front page. These, in turn, were echoed by the other London dailies and picked up by scores of local papers throughout Britain. Given the competition for headlines, it was no mean achievement. In Russia, Soviet policies since the revolution had provoked famine. Throughout the country, the Times reported, people were reduced to eating grass and acorns; five million perished in 1921 alone. In Italy, Mussolini came to power even as Italian troops ravaged Libya. Egypt secured its independence from Britain; Morocco rose up against Spain; while in Ireland the assassination of Michael Collins sparked civil war. In Germany all was chaos, with hyperinflation forcing housewives to use wheelbarrows to carry money for the purchase of a single loaf of bread. In London T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land. In Paris Ulysses appeared and James Joyce famously dined with Pablo Picasso, Marcel Proust, and Igor Stravinsky at the Majestic Hotel, their first and only encounter. King George V visited, for the first time, the trenches of the Western Front, which had become one of France’s most popular tourist attractions. In a speech to his constituents on November 11, Winston Churchill distilled the somber mood of the nation: “What a disappointment the twentieth century has been. How terrible and melancholy is the long series of disastrous events, which have darkened its first twenty years. We have seen in every country a dissolution, a weakening of bonds, a challenge to those principles, a decay of faith, an abridgement of hope, on which the structure and ultimate existence of civilized society depends.”
Hinks and Buchan worked to position the Everest story as an antidote and distraction for the nation. Above all they sought to build a momentum that could not be denied. Within two days of Mallory’s article in the Times, the September issue of the Geographical Journal announced that planning had begun for a third Everest expedition. At the end of the month, Hinks sent a reporter to meet General Bruce as his ship, the Malva, docked in Marseille. “Nature still has secrets which she cannot be forced to reveal,” General Bruce told the man from the Times who boarded his northbound train on October 1. “When one seeks to penetrate the mysteries of the world, their guardian rises in one form or another to forbid our approach. Here it is the ice, there the heat. On Everest it was the wind, a capricious wind. Sometimes it blew in icy squalls. Sometimes in warm gusts that melted the ice and caused unlooked for catastrophes. Nothing could be foreseen. I have never encountered a worse enemy.”
Asked whether the effort to conquer the mountain would be renewed, the general replied, “Yes, perhaps in two years.” The journalist made a remark about British tenacity. General Bruce replied with a laugh and a single word: “Shackleton.”
The interview ran the following morning, October 2, in the same edition that carried a dispatch from John Noel in Gyantse. The photographer had lingered in Tibet to document what the article’s title called the “gruesome customs of the lamas,” local color for his Everest film. Along with “devil dances” featuring lamas wearing aprons of human bones, playing drums made from skulls and trumpets from thighbones, Noel had witnessed a sky burial. He wrote, “After a lama has said prayers and incantations over the naked corpse the professional butchers sliced the body up with knives, cutting off separately the legs and arms and lastly the head. They hack and smash each member into pulp on a rock with hatchets, and throw it to the vultures who stand waiting only 5 feet away. The birds consume every particle of flesh and the crushed bone … Although I had my cinematograph with me when I saw this burial I refrained from photographing the custom. The thing was simply too awful and soul stirring to photograph.”
Seven dead on the slopes of the mountain, an ordeal of survival worthy of Shackleton, lurid rituals, macabre and mesmerizing, and the promise of a third expedition, a final gesture of heroic redemption—what more could the newspapers want? The challenge for the Everest Committee was to make it happen. Any number of impediments had to be overcome before another expedition could be launched. Younghusband’s wildly impractical proposal that an advance team be sent out immediately in the fall of 1922 to establish camps and ready the way for a climbing party in the spring of 1923 was mercifully allowed to die by Bruce when the general took over as chair of the Everest Committee, even as Percy Farrar, to the delight of Hinks, resigned his place at the table. Hinks and Bruce clearly had 1924 in mind.
Their first challenge was money. The 1921 reconnaissance had cost £4,241, but donations and the sale of various rights had yielded a net profit of £7,845, which had been placed in reserve for 1922. This considerable sum had only partially funded Bruce’s expedition, which, better supplied and indulged by the general’s extravagances, had cost a staggering £12,548. In time, revenues from lectures, photographs, publications, and ticket sales to Noel’s first film would also generate a surplus, but only of £2,474. In the fall of 1922, however, the Everest Committee faced a short-term deficit of several thousand pounds. Bruce insisted that a budget of £1,000 per Englishman was required, an arbitrary figure but one given authority by the general’s prestige and reputation, not to mention his place as chair of the Everest Committee and, as of early 1923, president of the Alpine Club.
Not only was the Everest Committee broke, it had serious liabilities and had suffered unanticipated reverses. Arthur Hinks had been promised £250 for his tireless efforts, a well-deserved yet costly bonus. A less legitimate charge was a bill for £360 sent by the India high commissioner for the useless government mules that had given Howard-Bury such trouble in 1921. More bad news came with the failure of the Alliance Bank of Simla, which took down another £700 of reserves. But the worst crisis came in the fall of 1922 when it emerged that a twenty-eight-year-old accounts clerk hired by Hinks at the Royal Geographical Society, Charles Eric Thompson, had embezzled over £700.
Married with two children, Thompson was arrested at Chelmsford, living with a woman who was not his wife, and ultimately sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment with hard labor. What made the case particularly embarrassing was the fact that Thompson, a profoundly disturbed young man, had written to Hinks, essentially admitting to the crime, and it was this confession alone that revealed the extent of the graft, which might not otherwise have come to light. Edward Somers-Cock, the treasurer of the Everest Committee, was so mortified that he persona
lly offered to repay £350, provided the matter be kept quiet. It was for a while, but eventually the scandal slipped into the Times, in a brief notice on February 7, 1923, that incorrectly doubled the size of the loss to £1,400. It was not the sort of news to encourage donations.
Aside from financial matters, there remained the question of personnel. The collapse of Longstaff and the failure of Wakefield as a climber, together with the loss of Raeburn and Kellas in 1921, had finally convinced even the most recalcitrant of the old guard that Everest was a young man’s game. But this, in turn, illuminated a growing divide between those who still considered climbing to be a sport of gentlemen and those of a new generation, who played in an altogether different league. The former used the language of war to describe their efforts and intentions on a mountain; the latter had lived through a war that allowed them to walk with grace and commitment at the very edge of death. These were climbers prepared to do almost anything to succeed. George Finch, as much as Mallory and Somervell, exemplified the new breed. In his contribution to the official account of the 1922 effort, Finch argued that the “margin of safety must be narrowed down, if necessary to the vanishing point.” A climber on Everest must drive himself beyond exhaustion, “even to destruction if need be.”