by Wade Davis
TWO DAYS after Irvine received his formal invitation from the Everest Committee, a brief note appeared in the Times officially announcing that a third expedition, under the command of General Bruce, would be going out to Everest in 1924. There was no list of names, but it was assumed by all that George Mallory would be leading the alpine assault. Indeed, perhaps the only person in Britain who had any doubts was Mallory himself. Formally offered a place on the expedition as early as May 1923, he had yet to tender a reply. When, on October 16, at a meeting of the selection committee, he was asked to draw up a final list of candidates, he scratched down his name but added beside it a question mark. He did much the same in a letter to his old friend and mentor Geoffrey Young.
In truth he was deeply conflicted, torn between his family and his fellow climbers, haunted by the specter of a mountain that laid claim to his every thought, even as it summoned him back, he feared, to his doom. Indecision tormented him through the fall of 1923, shaking even the tranquillity of his marriage to Ruth. His closest friends became deeply concerned. Geoffrey Young’s brother Hilton had married Kathleen Scott, the widow of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, whose quest for the South Pole had ended in agony and death. At Mallory’s request, he and Geoffrey, along with Young’s wife, Len, paid a visit to Kathleen. When they left in a taxi, according to Len, Mallory “confessed to us that he did not want to return to Everest again.” Geoffrey Keynes came away from a meeting with his old friend with very much the same impression. Keynes recalled, “He said to me that what he would have to face would be more like war than adventure, and that he did not believe he would return alive. He knew that no one would criticize him if he refused to go, but he felt it a compulsion. The situation has its literary counterpart in Melville’s Captain Ahab and his pursuit of the White Whale, Moby Dick.”
Young and Mallory’s sister Mary both urged him not to go. His wife, Ruth, had premonitions of disaster. Mallory himself hoped that circumstances would resolve his dilemma. He had scarcely begun his teaching obligations at Cambridge. Surely, he hoped, Reverend David Cranage would refuse to allow him to abandon his post. Cranage, of course, came under intense pressure from Hinks and the Everest Committee to do precisely the opposite, and in the end granted him six months’ leave at half pay, a generous offer that placed the burden of decision directly back on Mallory. Hinks and Younghusband lobbied hard, appealing to his patriotism, but their rhetoric meant little to him. Mallory wrote to his father, seeking his advice. “It is an awful tug,” he noted, “to contemplate going away from here instead of settling down to make a new life here with Ruth … [But] I have to look at it from the point of view of loyalty to the expedition and of carrying through a task begun.”
On December 15 the front page of the Times led with a big story, “Mount Everest Third Expedition Next Spring.” Three and a half weeks later, on January 10, 1924, a follow-up article listed by name the members of the expedition. Prominent among them was Mallory, though in truth even then he remained undecided. In the end, however, Everest fever proved too powerful to resist. At the world’s first Winter Olympics, which opened in Chamonix on January 25, Colonel Strutt accepted fifteen silver medals on behalf of the 1922 expedition, described in the citation as “the greatest feat of alpinism in the preceding four years.” Not to be outdone, the Vatican sent a letter through its secretary of state, Cardinal Gasparri, indicating that Pope Pius XI, a keen climber in his youth, would also be awarding a gold medal to the expedition. Throughout Britain, every manufacturer and commercial enterprise hit up by Hinks for free services now reaped their rewards; images of Everest and heroic climbers helped sell everything from playing cards and cigarettes to newspapers, Kodak film, mint candies, gabardine jackets, work boots, jams and jellies, butter, and bully beef. When the British Empire Exhibition, a two-year extravaganza, opened at Wembley in the spring of 1924, the key attraction of the India pavilion was a large-scale model of Everest. Some twenty-seven million visitors took in the celebration, the largest event of its kind ever staged.
On January 28 a lead editorial in the Times heralded the upcoming expedition as not just an inspiration to the nation but as the very embodiment of British values and spirit, the essence of the race. “Whether the result be victory or defeat,” the piece noted, “the third attempt to conquer Everest will mean like the two before it an inspiring display of the resolution and endurance and indifference to discomfort and danger that all through the ages and to the uttermost ends of the earth, have made the people of these islands, above all a race of pioneers. When General Bruce says that the great adventure of Everest has now become almost a pilgrimage, he touches upon a profound truth.”
After all he had endured and invested in the quest, it was inconceivable that Mallory would not be there at the end. On February 13, just two weeks before he was scheduled to sail to India, he finally signed the official contract, committing himself to the expedition. Seldom had a more ambivalent man set out on a more perilous mission.
IN 1924, the climbers converged on Darjeeling from all corners of the empire. Noel Odell traveled east from the oil fields of Persia. Howard Somervell came north by train from his mission in Travancore, crossing the length of India. The new medical officer, Major Richard Hingston, took leave from his post at the RAF hospital in Baghdad and sailed from Basra on February 15.
From England, Norton and General Bruce went out first, arriving by mail steamer in Bombay on February 16. They traveled immediately to Delhi to meet with Lord Rawlinson, the commander in chief of the Indian Army, who had personally intervened on Bruce’s behalf to secure Hingston’s respite from the air force. The thirty-six-year-old Irish doctor was a veteran of the 5th Gurkha Regiment and well known to the general. Hingston had fought throughout the war; like Somervell and Wakefield, he had dealt with wounds never before imagined by surgeons and had borne witness to the death of hundreds, even while saving the lives of countless more. Serving in Mesopotamia in 1916, he won the Military Cross for the rescue under close and constant enemy fire of a wounded sepoy, an act of heroism that inspired enlisted men throughout the Gurkha regiments. It was no wonder that eight years later General Bruce was prepared to go right to the top to secure Hingston leave to join the Everest expedition. One could not find a better man, or one more certain to stand firm in a crisis. For Hingston, the general’s intervention was a godsend. After years of heat, cholera, and sandstorms, he longed for the mountains of India. “What we all hunger for,” read the last lines of his war diary, “are hills and valleys, the green fields and shady woods, the rivers, the torrents, the glaciers and the snows. I see visions of the Himalaya and all its wondrous beauty.”
General Bruce, having paid his respects to the high command in Delhi and thanked Lord Rawlinson for help in the Hingston affair, ordered Norton on to Calcutta and then headed for the North-West Frontier to rendezvous with his nephew Geoffrey and three of the Gurkha NCOs seconded to the expedition: Umar Gurung, Hurke Gurung, and Tejbir Bura, all of the 2nd Battalion, 6th Gurkha Rifles. He had an ulterior motive as well: to drop by a favorite shop in Abbottabad and purchase a supply of a particularly esteemed brand of fine woolen puttees from Kashmir, which he considered an essential article of clothing for mountain travel. Bruce had notoriously strong opinions on such matters. When, as a young officer, he had found his Frontier Scouts struggling on steep terrain in their regulation trousers, he’d ordered them to cut their pants at the knee, thus introducing shorts to the British Army. In time, the garment became standard issue for service in the tropics.
In Calcutta, meanwhile, Norton arranged for the bulk of the expedition supplies and equipment—close to a thousand cases, according to the logs of the Army and Navy Stores—to be dispatched by rail directly to Kalimpong. The personal kits of the expedition members went through Siliguri to Darjeeling, where John Morris’s replacement, Edward Oswald Shebbeare of the Indian Forest Service, another most remarkable character, would take charge.
The son of a Yorkshire vicar, educated at C
harterhouse, Shebbeare had fled England at the age of twenty and, since arriving in India in 1906, had devoted his life to the study of elephants, both tame and wild—preferably the latter. He was also the recognized authority on the birds and fishes of North Bengal. Fluent in Hindustani, Bengali, and a number of regional dialects, he was, at thirty-nine, a rough-and-tumble naturalist who most assuredly did not stand on ceremony. Detailed late in life to accompany the governor of Bengal on a tiger hunt, he famously turned up in a bush shirt and tattered shorts, his bare feet thrust into boots commandeered from a Japanese guard in the prison camp that had held him for three years after his capture at Singapore in 1941. On the day of the shoot, he wore the same ragged outfit but had added a pair of socks. “Well, you know,” he explained to a companion, “on these occasions you have to cut a bit of dash.” His one published book was an elephant’s life story, told from the point of view of the animal. Everything about Shebbeare was conceived to endear him to Bruce. “He was, is, and ever will be,” the general wrote, “a glutton for work, and with him discomforts count not.”
In the last days of February, General Bruce and Geoffrey joined Norton and Shebbeare in Darjeeling. Hingston arrived on March 7 and Noel Odell two days later. The general’s plan was to have the bulk of the stores organized and ready to go before the remainder of the party arrived in the third week of March. With this goal in mind, he ordered Norton and Shebbeare down to Kalimpong on March 13 to deal with the baggage and supplies that had been sent there, altogether three thousand pounds of food, tents, and equipment destined for the mountain. Among the supplies were sixty tins of quail in foie gras and forty-eight bottles of champagne, Montebello 1915, the general’s favorite vintage.
Noel Odell remained in Darjeeling, apparently to have fun. His diary chronicles a veritable social whirlwind: squash at the Gymkhana Club followed by tea at the Rendezvous, dinner and dancing for 150 at the Planters’ Club, lawn tennis with a young lady followed by billiards and then more dancing, evenings that rarely ended before two in the morning. On Thursday, March 20, the day Somervell finally reached Darjeeling, Odell spent the afternoon looking at stuffed birds at the Natural History Museum, the evening dancing at the Gymkhana Club.
While Odell frolicked, General Bruce and Hingston set out to recruit the porters, interviewing and inspecting some three hundred, of whom seventy would be chosen. Hingston, who had done scientific investigations of the physiological effects of oxygen deprivation at altitude, and who expected to continue the work begun with pilots by monitoring the Everest climbers, did his best to evaluate the porters objectively, using measurements and performance tests. General Bruce scoffed at the notion, hiring men on instinct and reputation. Karma Paul would go out again as translator, and Gyalzen as sirdar. Old Poo the cook signed on for his third expedition. The melancholy cobbler Moti brought along his brother. Hingston hired as his assistant a Lepcha naturalist by the name of Rhombu. Among the Sherpas hired for the high camps was Angtarkay, one of the two survivors of the avalanche in 1922. Bruce also made a last-minute attempt to draft both John Morris and Henry Morshead to the cause. Neither could secure leave, however, and Morris, Bruce informed Younghusband and Hinks in his first progress report, suffered, in addition, from some strain in his foot that would require surgery—“tennis elbow of the heel,” as it was described.
The photographer John Noel, General Bruce was pleased to note, had arrived in Darjeeling and was up to his old tricks. His latest scheme involved every schoolchild in the empire. With him at the Everest Hotel was his wife, Sybille, a folklorist with a keen interest in mythology, and their friend Francis Helps, an artist who had designed for Noel a commemorative postcard with a swastika, an ancient symbol of the Hindu faith, and a photograph of Mount Everest taken from base camp. For a slight fee children could write in with their return address and request that a card be mailed to them from the foot of the mountain. For the youth of Britain at the time, it was as exciting a prospect as receiving a letter postmarked on the Moon. Noel arranged for thousands of these cards to be carried across Tibet, and then dispatched home from Everest on the backs of porters through arrangements with the Indian postal service.
Noel had a number of more serious challenges to overcome during the few days available to him in Darjeeling. His attempt to develop and process film in the field in 1922 had proven to be extremely difficult. Dust and sand ruined the emulsions. Water and even chemical developers froze overnight. The air inside his lightproof tent became toxic to breathe. For 1924 he decided to concentrate all the work in Darjeeling. Using funds from his investors, he bought a piece of land and ordered the construction of a photographic laboratory, fully equipped with developing trays, chemical supplies, and an electric generator for power. To run the lab Noel hired a local photographer, Arthur Pereira, who with one assistant would work seven days a week for four months. The film itself would travel to Darjeeling in relays of porters and horsemen, carried in air- and watertight containers that had been custom-built in London. Altogether Noel had fourteen cameras, including one small pocket-sized model designed to carry but two minutes of film, for the men to take on the summit attempt.
Noel’s technical innovations were startling. Obliged to use black-and-white film, he recorded the colors of every still photograph by reference to a standard chart, such that once converted to glass negatives, the images could be accurately tinted by hand. His film cameras had special features that mitigated the effect of static electricity, and electric motors that allowed both time-lapse and slow-motion exposures, both novelties at the time. Clipped to his camera was a six-power telescope, which was synchronized with the optimal axis of the lens such that the image in the telescope was also in the aperture of the lens. With a twenty-inch Cooke telephoto lens he would capture still images at three thousand yards, a greater distance than had ever been achieved in the history of photography. From a perch above Camp III, at an altitude of about 22,000 feet, he would be able to film the ascents from a distance of three miles with almost perfect clarity. To transport his cameras, he bought mules, and had saddles specially designed. With the aid of two trained porters, he found that with practice he could have his camera out of its box and mounted on a tripod in thirty seconds or less. The footage that eventually found its way back to Pathé News and to theaters all over Britain would be of a quality rarely before seen in newsreels.
. . .
MALLORY SAILED from Liverpool on February 29 on SS California, a new ship out of Glasgow of ten thousand tons, bristling with tourists. Many recognized him by sight and pestered him for photographs and stories of Everest. He hid away in his stateroom, reading Maurois’s Ariel and practicing his Hindustani, even as he worked through every detail of supply and organization for the upcoming climb, the high camps where his word would carry such weight. There would be no height records for their own sake this year. All that mattered was the summit. He shared his cabin with Hazard but took most of his meals with young Irvine, whom he described to Ruth as “sensible and not at all highly strung,” adding that “he’ll be one to depend on for everything perhaps except conversation.” Beetham was also on board, bunking with Irvine. They passed the time working out in the gym, tossing about a medicine ball, and running laps of the deck—whatever they could manage to do to stay fit.
Mallory was haunted by memories of the previous months: the tensions and difficulties at home, the foolishness of it all. He had been on the road lecturing as late as February 27, two days before his departure. “I fear I don’t make you very happy,” he wrote to Ruth on March 8, the day before the California reached Port Said. The day of his departure a powerful westerly wind had pressed the ship against the quay where Ruth stood waving farewell. It took the tugboats so long to drag the vessel out to sea that she gave up and simply went home. His last image of her was of her back as she slowly walked away.
The California reached Bombay on March 17. When a journalist asked Sandy Irvine about the prospects of the climb, he replied, “It is the du
ty of the Alpine Club to climb as near as it can to heaven!” Mallory felt far less ebullient in the torrid heat. During the five-day rail journey across India, the thermometer did not once drop below one hundred degrees until the tracks finally rose from Siliguri into the mists of Darjeeling. They arrived at the Everest Hotel on March 22, just three days before the expedition was scheduled to depart for Tibet.
Mallory’s spirits lifted the moment he met the other members of the expedition. He deeply admired Norton, felt a strong bond with Somervell, took an immediate liking to Hingston, and in Odell recognized “one of the best.” He always got a great kick out of John Noel, whom he found “more than ever” up to his old schemes. From their long sea journey together, he knew both Beetham and Hazard to be unselfish and personable. Irvine was a delight, not only a mechanical wizard but also a very fine and enthusiastic photographer. The last-minute recruitment of John Macdonald to supervise the mails promised great improvements. And perhaps the most uplifting news of all came from the medical officer. “The General,” Hingston reported rather hastily, for he had yet to examine Bruce, “is in exuberant spirits and looks the picture of health.” At the welcoming dinner hosted that night by Lady Lytton, wife of the governor of Bengal, toasts were many and heartfelt. “We couldn’t be a nicer party,” Mallory wrote to Ruth. Norton was especially confident: “I don’t believe a stronger party will ever be got together for Everest.”