Into The Silence

by Wade Davis

  Mallory found his agent, Lee Keedick, a pleasant man, but he was surprised to learn that his first lecture was not scheduled for ten days. He used the time well, writing two long chapters for the official expedition account, a total of thirty thousand words, before leaving New York on January 25 for Washington, D.C. His debut the following afternoon was less than successful. Not a laugh, nor a clap—altogether the most unresponsive audience he had ever encountered as a speaker. The evening performance, fortunately, was seamless; Mallory felt he had never done better. The day grossed $1,000, a considerable sum in 1923. Philadelphia came next: two different halls, each sold out, a total audience of some 3000. Everything boded well for the most important date on the tour, the Broadhurst Theatre in New York on February 4. A decent audience filled half of the 1,100 seats, but unfortunately the critics did not appear. The lecture series went largely unnoticed in the press and actually lost money.

  Swallowing his pride, Mallory headed for Canada, only to discover that the Toronto event had been canceled. Montreal grossed a mere $48. He did better in Detroit, had a raucous reception at Harvard, in Cambridge, and then set off for a brief swing through the Midwest that took him to Toledo and Iowa City, before he returned east to Rochester and finally Hanover, New Hampshire. It was not exactly the A-list of American cultural centers. Keedick dropped the minimum fee to $250 and still failed to secure additional dates. After a month in the country, they had only three firm bookings ahead of them. “Mallory is a fine fellow and gives a good lecture,” Keedick confessed in a letter to the Everest Committee. But “the American people don’t seem to be interested in the subject.”

  Mallory returned to New York in a restless mood, anxious to get home. A failed attempt to climb a mountain evidently could not capture an American imagination fired by more splendid news, such as the discovery in Egypt of the treasure of King Tutankhamen, a story that broke in the New York papers on February 17, or the Tibetan adventures of William Montgomery McGovern, a Buddhist scholar who sneaked into Lhasa disguised as a monk, his skin and hair blackened with dye, only to be imprisoned and forced to make a harrowing escape. The only thing about Everest that seemed of interest to the American press was the fact that Mallory had taken a swig of brandy at 27,000 feet. Booze was a local hook. Prohibition was just beginning to convulse the country.

  Oddly enough, the most memorable note to turn up in the American papers was a casual remark Mallory made at the end of one of his lectures. Asked why he wanted to climb Everest, no doubt for the umpteenth time, Mallory reportedly replied, “Because it’s there.” This simple retort hit a nerve, and took on an almost metaphysical resonance, as if Mallory had somehow in his wisdom distilled the perfect notion of emptiness and pure purpose. It was first quoted in the Sunday New York Times on March 18, in the opening paragraph of a half-page feature, “Climbing Mount Everest Is Work for Supermen.” In time, it would be inscribed on memorials, quoted in sermons, cited by princes and presidents. But those who knew Mallory best, including two of his biographers, his close friend David Pye and his son-in-law David Robertson, interpreted the comment rather more casually. To them it was simply a flippant response by an exhausted and frustrated man who famously did not suffer fools. Or as Arnold Lunn remarked, Mallory, no stranger to New York speakeasies, just said it to get rid of “a bore who stood between him and a much needed drink.”

  Whatever its genesis, the phrase caught on because it did in fact capture something essential. “Everest is the highest mountain in the world,” Mallory later wrote, “and no man has reached its summit. Its existence is a challenge. The answer is instinctive, a part, I suppose of man’s desire to conquer the universe.” Elsewhere he added, “I suppose we go to Mount Everest, granted the opportunity, because—in a word—we can’t help it. Or to state the matter rather differently, because we are mountaineers.”

  Mallory did not regret his time in America. He had been warmly received, most especially by a great cadre of new friends in the American Alpine Club, and in his quiet hours even managed to slip away to the Morgan Library to study some of Boswell’s letters. At the University Club, which made him an honorary member, he took tea and read the Guardian Weekly, catching up on news from London. Mostly he wandered the streets of the city, enjoying all the fresh, new sounds of America: jazz and unfettered classless laughter, the shouts of newspaper boys, all the strange accents and immigrant gestures, along with the screech and cacophony of snarled traffic, still a novelty for an Englishman in 1923. When finally, on March 31, he boarded the Saxonia for the journey home, he had only one serious concern. Financially, the tour had been a failure, and his earnings were hardly sufficient to warrant the time abroad. He returned to his family just as he had left, unemployed and with no immediate prospects, as insolvent, in fact, as the Everest Committee to which he had hinged his fate.

  Mallory’s fortunes happily turned within days of his reaching his spring garden at the Holt, the old stone house near the river Wey purchased for Ruth by her father as a wedding gift. While Mallory had been in America, Arthur Hinks had run into an old friend, Reverend David Cranage, who told him of a teaching position being advertised by the Board of Extra-Mural Studies at Cambridge. It was all rather unorthodox, Cranage explained to Hinks. They were looking for a historian who could design a curriculum suitable for workingmen and -women, and who was willing to travel from village to village in the greater Cambridge area, reaching out to those who had never had an opportunity to attend proper and decent schools. The lectures would run in collaboration with the Workers’ Educational Association.

  It was not exactly Charterhouse, which was precisely why it appealed to Mallory. It played to his strengths as a lecturer, his passion for new forms of learning, and his progressive values, first embraced at Cambridge, where he had flirted with Fabian socialism. Mallory submitted his application on April 20, scarcely a week after returning to the country. There were twenty-five other candidates for the post, many with far more extensive teaching experience, but he made up for it with a flood of reference letters. Arthur Benson wrote from Cambridge, Younghusband and George Trevelyan from London. Strong support came from the headmasters of both Winchester and Charterhouse. Mallory made the short list of five, and then sealed the deal with a brilliant interview on May 8. Ten days later the job was his. It came with an annual salary of £350, which, augmented by lecture fees, would give him a very respectable income of at least £500, a sum certain to please his father-in-law, who continued to provide Ruth with a yearly allowance.

  There was, unfortunately, a downside. In the short term, it implied yet another extended separation from his family. He had to be in Cambridge by the end of June. Ruth would stay behind in Surrey until they managed to sell the Holt. Even once she and the children joined him in October, his schedule of meetings and night classes precluded a normal family life. He left home each day at 4:00 p.m. and rarely returned before midnight. They had all the challenges typical of young married couples. Renovations to Herschel House, their new home in Cambridge, proved more costly than anticipated, and they frequently overdrew their accounts at the bank. Mallory’s old friends at Cambridge were delighted to have him back, but some were not especially pleased that he had come with a wife. For all the difficulties, in the fall of 1923 George and Ruth, for the first time in their marriage, faced a stable and secure future. Their three young children, Clare, Beridge, and John, delighted in the presence of their father, at last a constant in their midst.

  Into this domestic calm inevitably roared the winds of Everest. John Noel’s first film, Climbing Mount Everest, had a disappointing premiere, and only modest success when it toured the country. Although it ultimately grossed £10,000 at the box office, net profits for the Everest Committee were but £500. This setback did not for a moment deter the filmmaker. In June 1923, even as Mallory was settling into his new job, Noel made an unexpected and unprecedented offer to the Everest Committee. In exchange for all photographic and film rights to the upcoming 1924 expediti
on, he pledged to raise £8,000, an extraordinary sum in 1923. The terms of the deal were very specific. He would pay £1,000 upon signature, an additional £5,000 by December 31, the end of the year, and a final installment of £2,000 by March 31, 1924. The Everest Committee, for its part, would guarantee diplomatic access to Tibet, facilitate his work in the field provided it was not in conflict with the goals and safety of the expedition, and provide equipment: three tents at Camp III, two on the North Col, as well as one oxygen apparatus and five thousand liters of oxygen. The Everest Committee would have access to the photographs for promotional purposes and various publications, including the anticipated expedition account. But ownership would rest with Explorer Films, the company established by Noel to make all of this possible. Among Noel’s private investors were the Aga Khan and Sir Francis Younghusband, who also served as chairman of the board of the new enterprise.

  It was an odd fulcrum of mountaineering history. The quest for the highest summit slipped from imperial venture to commercial opportunity. The Everest Committee had no choice but to accept. The cash infusion transformed its bottom line. Noel’s offer implied not only an investment of £8,000 but also a savings of £2,000, as the committee would no longer be responsible for paying for film and photographic costs. In a single gesture Noel shouldered all financial risks, even as he liberated the committee to move ahead aggressively with plans for a third expedition to the mountain.

  THE CHOICE of General Bruce as expedition leader had been a foregone conclusion. The avalanche controversy notwithstanding, he remained universally admired, a figure larger than life. Mindful of his well-being, never venturing higher than base camp, he had returned from Everest in 1922 having shed a good part of his belly and some ten years in appearance. Of all the men on the expedition, he alone had not once been sick or ill disposed, a fact he shared with any doctor who would listen. His charismatic authority in the field and the uncanny ease with which he inspired and motivated the native porters made him the inevitable choice, despite lingering and, indeed, growing concerns about his true state of health.

  The same Harley Street physicians who had turned a blind eye in 1922 felt compelled to come clean when they examined him again in late 1923. Bruce’s bluster aside, his blood pressure was dangerously high, his heart dilated on the left side, and the mitral murmur had increased in severity. There were also indications of kidney disease. Anderson authorized him to go, provided he not climb higher than 15,000 feet, a condition that alone precluded his participation. Larkins, to his credit, did not gloss over problems in his diagnosis, reporting, “I passed him for the expedition [in 1922] because in spite of his defects I felt he was fit for the job, but this time I honestly do not feel comfortable about passing him.”

  Bruce’s response was to ignore the Harley Street experts and seek the advice of his personal physician, Dr. Claude Wilson. On November 9 Wilson, a general practitioner, wrote to Larkins from Tunbridge Wells: “I don’t want General Bruce to see a modern heart specialist. His electro-cardiogram would probably not be ideal, and they would, almost to a man, turn him down on this, or on his blood pressure. I don’t want him frightened and I don’t want him turned down. I am willing to take full responsibility.” Wilson, not surprisingly, authorized Bruce to go, with the minor caveat that he agree to undergo a further medical examination before setting off for Tibet from Darjeeling. Notified of the decision, Larkins and Anderson, convinced that the general’s life was at risk, “washed their hands of the entire affair.”

  The Everest Committee did not share their dire concerns, but it hedged its bets with the selection of Colonel Norton as second-in-command. Should the general falter, it would be essential to have a subordinate ready to take his place, one accustomed to command and capable of orchestrating the complex logistical and diplomatic arrangements of what was increasingly perceived as a military campaign, a battle with a mountain. Mallory, despite his prominent role in 1921 and 1922, was never a contender. He could scarcely keep track of his own kit, let alone manage an expedition, and he was most certainly not a professional soldier. The Everest expeditions, inspiring to the country, had touched a particular nerve in the army. When, in the late spring of 1923, Colonel Strutt, following an audience with the king and queen of Belgium, visited the Rhine Army of Occupation at Cologne, more than four thousand British officers attended his lecture. The following day, June 20, another three thousand officers and enlisted men crammed a zeppelin shed at Wahn to listen to the same talk. The conquest of Everest had transcended sport and become a national mission. That the final assault might be led by anyone other than a military officer was inconceivable.

  In 1922 Norton had proved exceptional in every way. Calm in a crisis, stoic in the face of adversity, he was a confident leader whose measured orders were embraced readily by those under his command. Norton’s mind—unlike that of so many senior officers they had known during the war—did not run on rails. He was open to discussion, tolerant of debate, and had a way of making each man feel a part of what were ultimately his decisions alone. As a personality and a mountaineer, he quite literally stood out from the pack. Mallory, Somervell, Geoffrey Bruce, and indeed most of the alpine climbers were of remarkably similar stature. Each was an inch shy of six feet and weighed roughly 160 pounds fully clothed. Norton, by contrast, was six foot four, exceedingly tall and thin, approximating, as he quipped, “Euclid’s definition of a straight line.” Heralded by all, and most especially by Mallory, Norton’s unofficial appointment in October 1922 took on particular significance when only a month later General Bruce, finally exhausted by the trials of the past six months, did indeed take seriously ill, leading even Hinks to question the wisdom of sending him back out to Everest in 1924.

  Recruiting the rest of the 1924 expedition would ultimately consume the better part of a year. Various names were bantered about as early as the autumn of 1922, but it was only with Noel’s funding in place in late June 1923 that serious attention turned to the makeup of the climbing party that seemed destined to place a man on the top of the world. By then, of course, Finch was out. Kellas was dead. Raeburn had lost his mind, and would be gone within three years. Longstaff, Wakefield, Crawford, and Strutt were nonstarters, even had they been interested, which they were not. Sandy Wollaston, Howard-Bury’s confidant in 1921, volunteered to serve as naturalist and medical officer but was disqualified due to age. Guy Bullock, ensconced as consul at Le Havre, was not about to forfeit his diplomatic career. Howard-Bury had turned his passions and considerable wealth to Tory politics, gaining election to Parliament in 1922. In the summer of 1923 his thoughts were on Ireland and India and the troublesome agitations of Gandhi, whose cause he strongly condemned in a bitter parliamentary debate in late July. Oliver Wheeler, back in India after an extended leave in Canada, reluctantly sent General Bruce his regrets; the Survey of India was unable to spare a single officer for the 1924 expedition. Colonel Ryder offered instead to dispatch an accomplished Indian topographer, one Hari Singh Thapa, No. 2304, a naik, or corporal, in the 2nd Battalion, 5th Gurkha Regiment. Ryder’s order excluded not only Wheeler but also the indefatigable Henry Morshead, who was keen to have another go despite the severity of his injuries. John Morris, granted eight months’ leave in the spring of 1923, spent much of the summer scrambling around Switzerland with General Bruce. He, too, was eager to return to Everest, and the general wanted to have him. Unfortunately, his regimental commander deemed it inconvenient. Thus, aside from General Bruce, Colonel Norton, and the photographer John Noel, of the twenty veterans of the first two expeditions, only Geoffrey Bruce, Howard Somervell, and George Mallory remained viable candidates for the third campaign.

  Somervell, after three months in India, had returned to London in mid-November 1922 and immediately flung himself into the daunting task of completing, in a matter of weeks, the score for Noel’s film. It was a considerable challenge. To save money Hinks insisted that the orchestra be small, no more than nine players. Undeterred, Somervell forged ahea
d, driven in part by his growing conviction that all of the world’s music had been born in Tibet. Modern jazz, only just reaching the West End clubs of London, he interpreted as but a wild return to the root sounds and arrangements of the primordial musical impulse of the Himalaya. General Bruce dismissed Somervell’s musical theories as poppycock, but he admired his energy, just as he had admired his strength, courage, and commitment on Everest.

  In the summer of 1923 the general encouraged Somervell to travel to the Dolomites and assess two prospective candidates for the third expedition. One was Frank Smythe, a promising but as yet untested climber of just twenty-four. The other was Bentley Beetham, whose name had been floated by the general for several months. Age thirty-eight, Beetham had a passion for birds and had traveled once to the Arctic, in 1911. In six weeks Somervell led thirty-two successful climbs. He was struck by lightning, nearly killed by a massive boulder, and, after fracturing his fibula, climbed through the pain until the bone healed. His record on the mountains was remarkable, but his final report to the general was an astonishing miscalculation. He scored Beetham well, securing for his old friend a journey to Everest, where the man would break down completely and offer in the end nothing. Beetham, for forty years a teacher at the same institution he had attended as a boy, the Barnard Castle School in county Durham, would end his climbing career at Raven Crag in the Lake District, with a fall that would crack his skull in six places. On Everest in 1924 he would walk with the gait of the lame, and never reach higher than Camp III.