by Wade Davis
The following day, Mallory and Irvine scrambled to arrange their kits. Each man was allotted two mules, each capable of carrying 160 pounds. A Whymper tent weighed 60, leaving Irvine 260 pounds to divide among three suitcases, one large valise, one ice ax case with four axes, each wrapped in maps of the mountain, and one small case for cameras and delicate equipment such as binoculars. None of them traveled light. Taking a break to play a last-minute game of tennis with Lady Lytton, Irvine did not have his gear finally packed until the early hours of March 24. They would leave the following day, the entire expedition coming together in Kalimpong, where Norton and Shebbeare, as well as Noel, had been based for some days.
THE MARCH to Tibet began in earnest on March 26, with the men once again dividing into two parties so as not to overwhelm the capacity of the dak bungalows. General Bruce, Somervell, Hazard, Beetham, Noel, and Geoffrey Bruce headed out first, followed by Norton, Hingston, Mallory, Odell, Irvine, and Shebbeare. Between them they drove ten mules laden only with money. The previous year, the Tibetan authorities had recalled all of the silver in the country, forcing the expedition to rely on copper currency, seventy-five thousand coins altogether.
The most interesting impressions came from those making the journey for the first time. Hingston was much taken by the Buddhist prayer flags, “tall and narrow, fixed to high poles,” inscribed with “mystic words” and incessantly in motion. “At every quiver,” he wrote after the initial day’s march to Ghoom, “a thousand prayers were given to the mountain breeze.” Six days later, as he struggled up the heights of the Jelep La, exhaustion turned his tone to contempt: “The summit of the pass was decked with flags. Our porters added their contribution to the streamers, piled a few more stones on the existing heap, and uttered their monotonous prayer Om mani padme hum. But how feeble did this religious ceremony seem amidst such a world of snowy mountains. Round about them was the monument of universal power, while they worshipped a mere cluster of flags.”
Sandy Irvine, when not admiring butterflies, taking pictures, sampling new foods, or pestering Shebbeare about the curious habits of the local people, flung himself into his role as mobile repair shop, fixing Odell’s tripod and tinkering with his own wristwatch. At Kalimpong he first attacked the oxygen stores, repacking the frames and the cylinders for the long journey ahead. To his horror, he discovered that Siebe Gorman had utterly ignored his instructions. In a letter written to a friend from Pedong on March 28, he complained, “They haven’t taken my design, but what they have sent is hopeless, breaks if you touch it, leaks, is ridiculously clumsy and heavy.” Out of ninety cylinders, he found that fifteen were empty and twenty-four had leaked badly even before getting to Calcutta. “Ye Gods!” he exclaimed. “I broke one today taking it out of its packing case.” Three days later he reported to the general that all but one of the oxygen frames had been damaged in shipping.
With limited tools at hand, Irvine set out to salvage what could be recycled into a new design, which in the end would prove to be both lighter and far more functional than the dubious product of the Siebe Gorman lab. Indeed, in a month Irvine accomplished more than the company engineers had achieved in two years. That he was able to do so while marching across Tibet, fighting off the bitter winds of early spring, was remarkable. That the task was even necessary was a disturbing sign of just how much George Finch’s presence would be missed in 1924.
Irvine’s submission to Siebe Gorman had been disregarded chiefly because at twenty-one he lacked gravitas and authority. The Everest Committee, following the break with Finch, largely ignored the oxygen problem. Not one of the new climbers chosen for the 1924 expedition had any experience with the apparatus. Six months passed before the Everest Committee even assigned responsibility for oxygen to Noel Odell, who had no interest in the challenge, being personally opposed to the entire idea of using supplemental gas. Had it not been for Sandy Irvine—both his last-minute selection and his unique mechanical gifts—the expedition would have been without the one experimental innovation that had made all the difference in 1922. Given what had been learned, such casual disregard on the part of the committee was almost criminal. Douglas Freshfield compared the stubborn resistance to oxygen to Scott’s rejection of dogs for polar exploration: “So long as the summit of Everest is reached who cares whether it is with or without oxygen. One might as well claim merit for going up the Matterhorn without a rope or ice axe, in dress shoes or in shirtsleeves. A more tragic parallel could be found in the unfortunate prejudice against the use of sledge dogs in the Antarctic.” Captain Scott’s folly famously had resulted in the death of his entire party.
AS THE EXPEDITION gathered at Yatung on April 2, there was a more immediate and pressing concern. Having promised the Everest Committee that he would undergo a medical examination before leaving Darjeeling, General Bruce finally made time on the tenth day of the journey. In his second progress report to London, dictated to John Noel, who had taken Morris’s place as expedition typist, the general was decidedly upbeat. “Subject to directions received, I duly submitted myself to the tender mercies of Hingston and his countless and innumerable instruments were applied to every square inch of my body. Hingston came to the conclusion that Larkins had treated me with extraordinary ferocity and that I might be allowed to proceed. All is well.”
Actually, it was not. Hingston, who had been with the second party, was in fact profoundly disturbed by Bruce’s condition at Yatung. “Unfortunately,” he reported, “I found the General not too fit. He had a chill in crossing the pass and will have to take it easy on the march across Tibet.” The same day Irvine wrote in his journal that Bruce was a “little seedy.” Somervell noted that the general clearly was “not feeling up to the mark; fever, and he doesn’t look fit.” Mallory, in a letter to Ruth, voiced concern that Hingston had described Bruce’s pulse as “irregular.”
A cloud hung over the expedition as it moved up the Chumbi Valley, arriving in Phari on April 6. Odell and Shebbeare were both ill; Beetham was weak from chronic diarrhea. The general put on a good face on the night of his fifty-eighth birthday, as he cracked open a bottle of his family’s prized 150-year-old rum. But the mood was grim, and not about to be lifted by the dreary streets of Phari. Shebbeare wrote of “gutters knee deep in filth, dark houses, smoky rabbit warrens, people black with grime.” Hingston, no stranger to urban hovels after months in Baghdad, was nevertheless appalled by what he saw: piles of manure scattered about, yak dung heaped against walls and on rooftops, great rotting piles of refuse, yak bones and carcasses. “Phari,” he wrote, “was little else than a place of indescribable filth. The ravens and the lammergeiers were its only scavengers and the people were in keeping with the place they lived.”
Even the ebullient Sandy Irvine was downcast; word reached him by telegraph on April 6 that the Cambridge Eight had crushed Oxford in the 1924 boat race. He was still trying to digest the news two days later. “I still can’t get over Oxford being beaten,” he confided in his diary, “by four and a half lengths!” He drowned his disappointment in work, fixing one of the pressure cookers, reducing the weight of his toolbox, repairing Mallory’s camp bed and ice ax.
Geoffrey Bruce and the ailing Shebbeare, meanwhile, saw to the transport, hiring some 250 yaks and 80 mules to carry them into Tibet as they headed west, abandoning the main trade route to Gyantse and Lhasa. When the general learned that prices had risen by 25 percent since 1922, he furiously and very publicly threatened to wire a protest to the prime minister of Tibet. After the local authorities yielded to his bluster, he dramatically tore up the telegram and tossed the fragments into the air. It was his last theatrical gesture of the campaign. Noel Odell, who shared a tent with Bruce, reported to Hingston that all through the night the general had been “wheezing and coughing and shaking like an earthquake.”
By morning the general was so weak that Hingston proposed that the expedition split: while the main party would head directly over the high passes for Kampa Dzong, as planned, he a
nd John Macdonald would escort the general on the longer route through Tuna, around Dochen Lake and Tatsang, a six-day journey as opposed to four. With clouds gathering, Hingston, Macdonald, and Bruce finally got away just after noon, with twenty-two miles to ride. Hingston, who stayed by Bruce the entire time, was surprised by the harshness of the land, the utter sterility and destitution: “Remove the stones that littered the surface, cut away the hills on either side, and the prospect before us might be the desert in Iraq.”
They made camp late, at 14,500 feet, in the frost and winds of Tuna. Hingston went birding at first light and returned to find the general “dressed, but shivering with a violent attack of ague. It was clear he could not proceed today. We got him in bed, covered him in blankets, made hot water bottles out of double soap-dishes and dosed him with Dovers powder, aspirin and quinine.” To make matters worse, John Macdonald was down with mountain sickness. A message was dispatched to the main party: “General seedy, Hingston broken all thermometers.”
By the following morning, April 9, a Wednesday, the diagnosis was certain. General Bruce had gone on a tiger hunt just before the start of the expedition. As Odell remarked, “He bagged his tiger, but also picked up malaria.” The only option was evacuation. Bruce’s spleen was dangerously enlarged, and his body so racked with fever that he would lose nearly thirty pounds in a week.
Hingston sent a runner to Phari, with a note to be dispatched by telegraph requesting that a stretcher be brought in all haste from Gyantse. It arrived on April 11, having been carried on horseback, night and day: six stages in less than twenty-four hours. More bad news came from the main party. Beetham had virtually collapsed with severe dysentery, and Mallory was down with what was feared to be appendicitis, a life-threatening ailment in 1924; Somervell was making plans for emergency surgery. There was nothing for Hingston to do save rally the porters for the difficult and immediate task ahead. He selected eighteen of the strongest men, and they set off for the safety of Yatung on the morning of April 12. “I had the General in his stretcher by 9 a.m. and away we marched across the plain to Phari. In a sense it was a mournful procession; the stretcher being hoisted on the shoulders of six men who changed with others when they became tired. But we moved along at a fair pace, and the Tibetan porters relieved the monotony with a lively rhythmical chant.”
The air trembled before Hingston’s eyes. Exhausted with tension, no doubt with thoughts of Kellas’s fate in mind, he rode as if into a mirage or hallucination, with the entire horizon constantly changing shape and color before his gaze. “On the ground,” he wrote, “the air seems to dance in a shimmering layer or spreads itself into a watery sheet. Imaginary lakes conceal the plateau or rest beneath a rounded hill. In these we see the reflections from the mountains and their draperies of ice and snow. When the fierce winds blow we see the haze in motion; the mirage seems then to sweep across the plateau in circling waves of foam. We observe the usual distortion of objects, the irregular outlines, the confused shapes, the fantasies of the trembling air.”
In a day they reached Phari, white beneath a blanket of fresh snow. As they traveled farther down the valley, their procession seemed to Hingston to become less mournful. Their spirits rose as they entered the gorges and moved into forests sheltered from the harsh winds of the plateau. The Tibetans continued to chant. “Though monotonous,” Hingston recalled, “it was a pleasing tune and seemed to blend with the rumble of the stream. The General’s health should now quickly improve.”
And it did, presenting Hingston with yet another dilemma once they had reached the comfort of Yatung on Easter Monday. He looked first to the men, rewarding them generously for their extraordinary feat; in two days they had carried Bruce, an enormous man, more than fifty miles down off the Tibetan Plateau, thereby no doubt saving his life. Hingston then turned to his new challenge: the general, despite the severity of the attack, insisted on returning to the expedition. Hingston dispatched a telegram to the Everest Committee: “Bruce returned Yatung malaria convalescent Norton commanding. Hingston.” Then he wrote a more severe note to be delivered by post: “General Bruce is anxious to rejoin the expedition. But this I consider to be most unwise. He is still very weak; his spleen is enlarged, the malarial infection still exists in his system and is liable to become active at anytime if he is exposed to the cold and wind of Tibet. Should this occur in some part of the plateau where he could not quickly be transferred to a lower altitude the most serious consequences might occur. I have, therefore, advised General Bruce that it would be most dangerous for him to rejoin the expedition, and that, if he does so, I cannot be responsible for the consequences that may occur.”
The pressure on Hingston was considerable. A letter from Norton delivered by postal runner urged him, as medical officer, to return to the main party with all haste. Beetham was so severely disabled that Norton was considering sending him back to the Swedish missionaries at Lachen. Mallory’s abdominal pain had worsened. Somervell was filling in as medical officer, but was desperately needed for the climbing party, especially if Mallory was forced to withdraw. Hingston’s plan was to accompany General Bruce as far as Gangtok, where he might recover at the residency of the British political officer, F. M. Bailey, Morshead’s old companion in exploration and a veteran of Rawling’s expedition of 1904. Hingston would then return posthaste across the Serpo La to rejoin the expedition at Rongbuk, perhaps by as early as May 15.
Unhelpfully, Hinks sent a telegram suggesting that the final decision on the course of action be left to Bruce. By their third night at Yatung, the general was decidedly restless. He diagnosed the attack as a recurrence of the Banna fever he and his wife had contracted in 1916, which had not flared up since May 1919, save a brief episode in 1921. His heart, he boasted to Hingston, had never been better. His weight loss could only be for the good.
For all his bravado, however, the general knew he was through. As early as April 12, at the height of the crisis, he had ordered John Macdonald to forward a particular shipment from Yatung to the men at Kampa Dzong: his most valued asset, twelve bottles of his family’s vintage whiskey. That was his moment of surrender. The final blow came on April 22, as Hingston made his plans for his return journey to Tibet. He had hired nine mules, two Tibetan muleteers, a cook by the name of Tenchadder, a pony wrangler named Dabla, a pony, and a Tibetan dog. He was ready to set out for a monthlong journey through lands he had never seen. “My partnership with the General is over,” he wrote. “This morning I walked with him and Bailey as far as the Rajah’s palace. At the entrance I bade him farewell. The General, I think felt the severance; it must have seemed to him the cutting of the last link with the party.”
NEWS OF the general’s collapse reached Kampa Dzong on April 13, with the arrival of John Macdonald. The gift of whiskey was most welcome; most of the champagne had frozen, shattering the bottles. The main party had experienced such cold coming up from Phari that ink froze and Somervell had abandoned an attempt to sketch Chomolhari; even his paints were rock hard with cold. Though Finch’s eiderdown designs had not caught on, most of the men at least wore windproof clothing rather than tweed, felt hats instead of topees. Each also had a Whymper tent, a welcome bit of privacy. Norton had designed a large and comfortable mess tent. Sent well ahead of the party on a pair of mules dubbed Jack and Jill, it was a welcome sight at the end of long and bitter marches. Still, with the temperatures hovering around four degrees Fahrenheit, the passage remained most difficult, especially for Beetham, who had foolishly drunk from every stream during the long march from the lowlands.
Even as Norton took over as expedition leader, he had to decide whether to allow Beetham to continue. Seven days of dysentery had taken a dreadful toll, and there was no end in sight. Odell and Irvine were also not well. Mallory’s brush with appendicitis had turned out to be a false alarm, but he was still weak. During the four days they spent at Kampa Dzong awaiting new transport and word of the general, Mallory passed much of the time in bed, reading the letters of
Keats and passages from The Spirit of Man. A letter from his sister Mary, in Colombo, suggesting that the monsoon might break a fortnight earlier than usual, only added to a general unease in the camp.
In Hingston’s absence, Somervell had taken over sick parade, and it was his word alone that caused Norton to allow Beetham to continue, a decision not made until the morning of their departure from Kampa Dzong. “Beetham came on with us,” Mallory wrote to Ruth. “At present [he] looks years older, in much the same way that Raeburn did in ’21, only at a younger stage and has quite lost all kick, and there was no one more energetic earlier.” Beetham would never fully recover. His shameful treatment of Graham notwithstanding, he was a highly accomplished and experienced climber, and his collapse left a void in a team that was already far weaker than it might have been.
The loss of General Bruce, as it turned out, was far less problematic. As Mallory said in a letter to Younghusband, the general would be missed “a good deal in the mess, and we shall miss his moral force behind the porters later on and the absence of his genial chaff.” But his departure would be of little consequence once the men were on the mountain. Shebbeare and Geoffrey Bruce, both fluent in the local languages, were perfectly capable of handling the transport and porters. John Macdonald was also available as a translator. Not one of the men regretted the appointment of Norton, who was in any number of ways a more serious, methodical, and dependable leader. His promotion freed Mallory to take on the official role as head of the climbing party, a position he cherished and fully deserved. Despite the setbacks and loss of personnel, the expedition that left Kampa Dzong on April 15 was arguably stronger and more focused than the one that had left Darjeeling but three weeks before. By the evening of the following day, as they reached Tinki Dzong and celebrated Somervell’s thirty-fourth birthday with a dessert of plum pudding washed down by absolute alcohol, they had resolved any number of conflicting ideas and at last settled on a plan for the conquest of the mountain.