Into The Silence

by Wade Davis

  Frank Smythe, by contrast, overlooked by Somervell perhaps because of his youth, would go on to extraordinary acclaim. A member of the three British Everest expeditions of the 1930s, frightful attempts inspired directly by Mallory’s legacy, he would in June 1933 reach higher than any man before him, following the path of his mentors, the ghosts of 1924. After two nights in the death zone, emaciated after weeks at altitude, he would turn his back on the summit and upon his descent begin to hallucinate, convinced that someone was at his side, a companion who hovered above, pulsating like a spirit in the mist. Just days before, he had come upon an “inexpressibly desolate and pathetic scene”: Mallory’s last camp. “Where were they?” he desperately wanted to know. Would Everest yield its secret? As he gazed aloft from those dreadful heights, he felt only anguish. He cared less about whether Mallory had reached the top than he did about his own deliverance, the peace that comes over the climber who has failed but survived. In his journal he wrote of the “relief of not having to go on.” The last 1,000 feet of Everest, he said, “are not for mere flesh and blood.” In time Smythe would triumph, not on Everest but on scores of other Himalayan peaks, becoming one the finest climbers and arguably the greatest mountaineering writer of his century. Unfortunately, his spirit and sublime gifts as an alpinist were lost to the men of 1924.

  So Beetham was in and Frank Smythe out. It was a considerable blunder, but not by any means the gravest mistake made by the selection committee. Richard Graham, like Beetham a schoolmaster, was another child of the Lake District, a keen hill walker as a boy, an accomplished rock climber in his teens, and a veteran of all the great summits of Europe before his thirtieth birthday, in 1923. A graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford, he was at the top of everyone’s list for Everest, well known to the entire climbing fraternity as a cheerful and generous companion, a natural leader with a great eye for a route, and a fine strategist and tactician who was particularly strong on snow and ice. He was the obvious replacement for George Finch. On March 16, 1923, General Bruce put Graham’s name forward in a letter to Sydney Spencer at the Alpine Club, but an official announcement would not be made until November 6, at a general meeting of the club.

  Graham’s elation upon hearing the news was matched in its intensity only by his disappointment when, scarcely a month after the announcement, the offer from the Everest Committee was formally rescinded. Graham was a Quaker; his father was a leading member of the Society of Friends. Both were pacifists by religious conviction. Following his graduation from Oxford, in 1915, Richard had registered successfully as a conscientious objector, a status not casually granted by the military authorities. He’d served throughout the war as a schoolmaster at Bishop’s Stortford College, a contribution that satisfied the army but not, as it turned out, a shadowy member of the Everest endeavor who refused to participate in 1924 unless the “conchie” was tossed off the expedition. General Bruce and Younghusband, Hinks, Spencer, and Collie, in a gesture of rank cowardice, acquiesced. Graham, shaken by the rebuke, decided to offer his resignation rather than risk disrupting the harmony of the climbing party. His humiliation was complete when word of his dismissal appeared in the press.

  Graham sent a note of explanation to Mallory, who came immediately to his defense in a furious letter that reached General Bruce on December 17, 1923. If the man was good enough, Mallory fumed, to pass muster with the senior members of the selection committee, who surely knew of his war record, he must certainly be good enough for any member of the expedition. To force Graham to resign after his nomination had been approved and made public in the newspapers was “simply a thing which is not done.” The suggestion that the majority of the climbing party was “very strongly against him,” Mallory continued, was patently untrue. He warned Bruce in no uncertain terms that whoever was “agitating to turn down Graham” would feel his wrath and become his enemy. Mallory had no idea of the identity of the culprit, he said. But whoever it was, he declared, “I hereby agitate against him!” It was without doubt one of Mallory’s finest moments.

  And he was not alone. Upon learning of the scandal, Howard Somervell, who by this late date had returned to his medical mission at Neyyoor, in southern India, immediately wrote to Sydney Spencer, threatening to resign from the Alpine Club. The “caddish treatment” of Graham, “a dirty piece of work,” as he put it, was surely a deliberate attempt by someone who “being outside the expedition is hoping for a place therein. I personally served throughout the war and don’t hold with conscientious objectors; but if something connected with the Alpine Club [has brought this about] I feel I ought not remain a member of the club.”

  All protests aside, the decision stood. Both Spencer and Younghusband explained away the controversy with the claim that Graham had proactively tendered his resignation for personal reasons that were beyond the discretion of the Everest Committee to reveal. In a letter to General Bruce on February 22, 1924, Hinks went as far as to say that Graham’s wartime status had played no role whatsoever in the committee’s deliberations. This was a blatant falsehood. As it turned out, the man who had assaulted Graham’s reputation and destroyed his dream of Everest was none other than Bentley Beetham, the one member of the 1924 Everest party, aside from Sandy Irvine (who was too young for the call-up), who had not actually served in the war. Like Graham, Beetham had escaped the front, spending all those terrible years as a schoolmaster, motivated, no doubt, by a raw emotion other than religious conviction.

  Having rejected George Finch, Frank Smythe, and now Richard Graham, three of the finest climbers of their era, not to mention two other future Everest climbers, Hugh Ruttledge and George Wood-Johnson, the Everest Committee inexplicably turned to John de Vars Hazard, a dour thirty-six-year-old engineer who had spent much of his professional life in West Africa building bridges, pontoon wharfs, jetties, and seawalls. Born in Nigeria, raised in France, educated in Geneva, he had hovered around the mountaineering scene for some time, nursing a plan to escape postwar London for India, where he hoped to live for several years. As early as December 4, 1919, he had written to Hinks, expressing a keen interest in going to Everest. Though never a member of the Alpine Club, he was an acquaintance of Noel Odell’s, and in 1920 had been invited to join Kellas’s expedition to Kamet. His closest friend among the Everest men was Henry Morshead, who had been his commanding officer in the Royal Engineers during the war, where together they had endured some of the worst of the fighting. Hazard, awarded the Military Cross for gallantry in action, had been wounded twice. Shrapnel had torn open his back, machine gun fire his thigh and hips. This left him with a slight problem that the Everest Committee either by choice or by negligence overlooked: Hazard’s wounds had never healed. In the midst of the greatest crisis of the 1924 expedition, he would find himself helplessly debilitated. Ridiculed later as a misfit, Hazard would quite unjustly become the scapegoat of 1924. In truth, if there was fault to assign, it lay with the Everest Committee, which had banished Richard Graham, a highly accomplished and proven climber known for his great stamina, and chosen in his stead a man intrepid and brave but half crippled by the war.

  THE LOSS of George Finch, with his scientific mind and technical acumen, left a gaping hole that the Everest Committee attempted to fill with one of its own: Noel Odell, like Mallory an official member of the selection committee. Hinks, woefully ignorant and openly disdainful of science, assumed that Odell, a geologist with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, would be a natural candidate to take on all the duties associated with oxygen and the redesign of the apparatus. He wasn’t, and indeed had little interest in the challenge, but he would nevertheless prove an invaluable addition to the expedition. For once, and almost in spite of itself, the Everest Committee got it right. Two years previously Odell, already committed to an exploration of Spitsbergen, had been obliged to turn down an invitation to join the 1921 reconnaissance. In 1924, on Everest, he would secure his place in mountaineering history.

  Born the son of a vicar on Christmas Day 1890 on the
Isle of Wight, Odell first made his mark as a climber in the Lake District at the age of thirteen. Three years later, already a member of the Alpine Club, he moved on to northern Wales, honing his craft on the smooth slabs of Cwm Idwal before heading to the Mont Blanc massif, where he climbed Aiguille du Tour at eighteen. Having discovered a love of ice and snow, he spent twelve seasons in the Alps, developing skills that would allow him, in 1936, to become the first to reach the Himalayan summit of Nanda Devi (25,645 feet), for fourteen years the highest peak ever climbed. Two years later, in 1938, he would be back on Everest, climbing to within 1,500 feet of the summit before being turned back by deep powder snow impossible to negotiate. A spare figure, with a kind and genial nature, Odell strode through life possessed of infinite reserves of energy, a seemingly limitless well of stamina that would have him attempting serious peaks at the age of eighty-seven and traversing glaciers at ninety-three. In time, mountain features on three continents would bear his name, as would a distant star in the constellation Lyra. In a climbing career that spanned three-quarters of a century, he inspired generations of young British climbers. In old age he was known to them as Noah, a nickname he adored.

  In 1923, all of this, of course, lay in the distant future. The war had been Odell’s seminal experience, as it had been for most of his generation. Attached to the 59th Field Company of the Royal Engineers, he first reached France in July 1916. His baptism of fire was the Battle of the Somme. His younger brother Eric, just twenty-two and a lieutenant in the 8th Black Watch, served in the same theater and was killed near Arras, just before Christmas. In his war diary, Noel scarcely mentions his brother’s death. The entire entry for Monday, December 18, 1916, reads: “Stayed in hut till tea time, when went across to mess until bedtime. Tonsillitis better. Eric wounded by trench mortar bomb. Died 20th.”

  It is impossible to know what this cryptic note implies, if indeed anything. Odell’s journal entries both during the war and on Everest were notoriously curt. But there is one curious uncertainty. Noel Odell went to his death convinced that he had been wounded three times; the fact is noted prominently in several obituaries, as well as in his official profile in the Dictionary of National Biography. The War Office records, however, indicate but a single incident, an accident behind the lines at Allouagne on April 14, 1917, when Odell inadvertently struck a buried bomb with a pickax. The concussion from the detonation reputedly blinded him for two days, but according to the medical board his injuries were minor: one small fragment of steel was removed from his left temple; a second minute bit of metal remained lodged subcutaneously in his nose. It was the type of wound men at the front dreamed of getting, a ticket out of the war. After a lengthy recuperation, which included time for climbing and trekking in the Scottish Highlands, Odell entered the Home Service in a training capacity, which even allowed him to be close to his wife and infant son. Like Wakefield, he lost track of his Christian faith. Both his father and his father-in-law were clergymen, and there were vitriolic family arguments when, in the last year of the war, Odell and his wife, Gwladys Mona, showed little interest in christening their only son.

  Odell’s response to the horror, which he certainly experienced during his months at the front, was to float above conflict, cultivating an air of detachment—an attribute that served him exceedingly well on Everest. One of his companions in 1924, E. O. Shebbeare, hired in Darjeeling as transport officer by General Bruce, would write, “Odell, a wonder on the mountain, is quite useless in the ordinary affairs of life.” But his great quality, Shebbeare continued, was his refusal to worry about anything: “In an emergency, and we had plenty of emergencies on our trip, he never offered fatuous advice. Instead he would sit placidly on a rock and read the Times Literary Supplement, a copy of which, by that time many months old, he always carried in his rucksack, and so he would wait for the situation to clear. It made you ashamed to worry and at the same time heartened you to get something done to justify such implicit confidence.”

  Noel Odell brought to Everest one other remarkable asset, in the form of a second-year engineering student from Merton College at Oxford, twenty-one-year-old Andrew Comyn Irvine. Known as Sandy to his friends, he was an extremely good-looking lad, with a bright smile and a great shock of blond hair. A superb athlete, he rowed for the Oxford Eight, gaining his blue letter even as a freshman, and there is little doubt that his place at the university was secured in good measure by his physical prowess. Intellectually, he lagged. He wrote poorly, was a dreadful speller, and today might well be diagnosed with some learning disability, quite possibly dyslexia. In truth, he had the brilliant mind of an inventor, precise, analytical, and methodical. At the age of fifteen he independently devised from scratch an interrupter gear that would allow a machine gun to fire through a propeller, thus offering a solution to a strategically vital technical challenge of the war effort. When he submitted his unsolicited sketches to the War Office, along with a second invention, a design for a gyroscopic stabilizer for airplanes, the response was stunned disbelief. More than a tinkerer, he was a mechanical savant. There was nothing engineered by man that he could not take apart and put back together. His most prized possession was a 1914 Clyno 750CC motorcycle and sidecar, the same V-Twin model the army mounted with Vickers machine guns at the front. At sixteen, while holidaying in the Welsh mountains of Snowdonia, he went off-road in the Carneddau range and just kept driving. Approaching the 3,205-foot summit of Foel Grach, he ran into none other than Noel Odell, and casually asked the astonished climber for directions.

  Their paths crossed again in the spring of 1923 at Putney on the Thames, where Irvine and his crew were training for the annual Oxford-Cambridge boat race. Sandy’s close friend George Binney, then in the process of putting together a second Oxford exploratory expedition to Spitsbergen for the summer of 1923, had recruited to the effort Odell as geologist and Tom Longstaff as doctor. Sandy had signed on for the adventure formally known as the Merton College Arctic Expedition. By then Odell was committed to Everest for 1924, and very much on the lookout for young talent. From their first training climbs in Wales, at Great Gully on Craig yr Ysfa, Irvine stood out from the rest. He was invariably in high spirits, remarkably resourceful, ferociously strong, and exceedingly personable. Odell took him under his wing. During one outing on Spitsbergen, he and Irvine alone traversed the Lomme Bay Glacier to reach a series of formidable peaks that soared out of the ice. Sandy had no experience as a climber, but he fearlessly followed Odell up 3,000 feet of hard metamorphic rock, reaching the southeast ridge of a summit in the Stubendorff Mountains that Odell would later name Mount Irvine. On that day a mountaineer was born.

  Odell was more than impressed. If Geoffrey Bruce, a soldier who had never been on a mountain, could climb with Finch and establish a height record, surely Irvine was fit for Everest. They needed youth, and Sandy’s mechanical skills would be a godsend. Odell, assigned oxygen duties, dreaded the prospect, and was thrilled to be able to pass along the responsibility to one far more suited to the task. Upon their return to London in September 1923, Odell immediately floated Irvine’s name. A month later, on October 24, the formal invitation came, along with a letter from Merton College granting the undergraduate two semesters of leave. As Mallory explained in a note to Geoffrey Winthrop Young, “Irvine represents our attempt to get one superman, though lack of experience is against him.” Soon after, Sandy got hold of a sample oxygen apparatus from 1922, which he took home to his workshop to strip down into parts. Within the week, and without bothering to seek authorization from the Everest Committee, he sent the manufacturer, Siebe Gorman, a list of improvements for what amounted to a total redesign of the equipment.

  The inclusion of young Irvine in 1924, given the tragic destiny that awaited him on the mountain, has always provoked controversy. But in the circumstances he was a logical and, indeed, ideal choice. The criticism that he had never been on a mountain is unfounded. Odell tested him in Wales and on Spitsbergen and had been astonished by his natural
abilities. His raw strength and physical agility alone made him easily the match of any number of more experienced mountaineers, especially on Everest, where endurance counted far more than technical skills with a rope. The prurient notion that Mallory had designs on the young man—a theory put forth seriously by some Everest historians—suggests a complete misunderstanding of both Mallory’s sexuality and Irvine’s libido. Mallory’s emotional bonds to men, even his physical attractions, were a reflection of his times and the experimental culture of Cambridge before the war; they had little to do with homosexuality as we know it today. At thirty-seven, he was a devoted father and husband. Sandy Irvine, by all accounts, was wildly and devilishly heterosexual.

  If these older men—Mallory and Odell and, in due course, Norton and Somervell—appear to have been especially keen on Irvine, and not merely for the skills he brought to the expedition, the explanation may lie in another realm of unspoken emotion. Sandy, born in 1902, never served in the army, the war having mercifully ended before, at sixteen, he would have been eligible for the fight. But he was not untouched by the conflict. His cousin Edward was killed in France. And his brother Hugh, nearby when a German shell landed in a gas dump, was splattered all over with mustard gas, which etched burns deep into his neck and back. The open wounds would never heal; they would have to be dressed twice a day every day until he died, in 1965. Odell and Norton had both lost brothers at the front. Somervell had struggled through acres of dying boys at the Somme. Mallory and all of them had borne witness to the carnage, in many cases for years. If they were all powerfully drawn to young Irvine, it was perhaps because in some small way he embodied, with his vitality, innocence, and limitless possibilities, the reason they had all fought and the future for which so many of their friends had died.