by Wade Davis
HOVERING OVER the expedition from the very start was the ghost of 1922. That year they had marched on the mountain brimming with confidence; now they approached with even higher expectations, yet greater uncertainty. On Everest, they had learned, little could be predicted save the inevitability of the unexpected. General Bruce’s final dispatch of 1922, written at Shegar Dzong on July 24, ended, as he put it, with a “little aphorism … There is only one motto for the Himalaya: When in doubt, don’t.”
For more than a year each of the key players—Mallory and Norton, certainly Somervell and Geoffrey Bruce—had looked back on what had gone wrong, even as they’d anticipated what needed to be done for things to go right. Each returned to the field intent and focused on success, with strong opinions that had to be reconciled into a single strategy. As early as Christmas 1923 Norton had circulated a proposal, prompting a critique and counterproposal from Mallory, with no final decision reached even as the men sailed for India. The discussions continued at Darjeeling and Phari, with pressure growing to resolve any differences before the expedition left Kampa Dzong. A deadline loomed for the British press: the makeup of the climbing teams would have to be announced, at the very least, by the time the expedition reached Rongbuk. And for their morale, the men needed clarity.
From the start, it was assumed that attempts would be made with and without oxygen, and it was fully understood by all that the climbers at the highest camps would require a complex scaffolding of support, both of men and of equipment. The logistics of supplying and maintaining the highest camps demanded precision. Mallory’s fundamental disagreement with Norton concerned the number of camps required above the North Col. Norton’s initial scheme called for two men without oxygen to try for the summit from a Camp V at 26,500 feet. Mallory rightly suggested that a second and perhaps a third camp above the col would be necessary, most especially for a party without gas. Mallory, in truth, had concluded that any attempt without oxygen was quixotic. Irvine, a witness to the deliberations, noted on the evening of April 14, “We all had a long discussion about the method to adopt to climb the mountain. Norton suggests non-oxygen followed by oxygen attempt one day apart. Mallory wants two oxygen attempts one day apart, and both agree to have third attempt some days later.”
The solution came to Mallory on the road from Kampa Dzong to Tinki, a flash of insight he eagerly shared with his wife. “I’ve had a brain-wave,” he wrote on the evening of April 17, a Thursday. “No other word will describe the process by which I have arrived at another plan for climbing the mountain.”
His idea called for two simultaneous attacks on the summit, one with oxygen starting from a Camp VI, and one without gas from a Camp VII, situated an appropriate distance higher on the mountain. The goal would be a rendezvous on the summit. Norton immediately saw the wisdom of the plan and signed off. In his first formal report since assuming command of the expedition, written on April 19 in Chiblung, en route for Shegar Dzong, he laid out the details.
On day one, leaving Camp IV, at 23,000 feet on the North Col, two climbers with fifteen porters would establish Camp V at 25,500 feet and partially stock it with oxygen before returning to the col. The next day, the party climbing without gas would head up to Camp V, again with fifteen porters, to complete its cache of supplies and oxygen. Sending seven porters down, keeping eight, they would spend the night. The following morning, day three, they would climb to 27,300 feet and establish Camp VII. Sending their porters down to Camp V—or, should conditions permit, all the way to the North Col—the two climbers would sleep alone at VII. On that same day three, the oxygen party with unburdened porters would head up from Camp IV to V, and then transport that camp with its equipment and oxygen supplies to 26,500 feet to establish a Camp VI, before again sending its porters back to the col.
Thus by the night of the third day, four climbers would be perched high on the mountain: the oxygen party at Camp VI, and those climbing without gas at Camp VII, some 800 feet higher but within visual sight of the lower camp. The following morning, day four, the two parties would set out separately, each ready to support the other should something go wrong, but with the ultimate goal of meeting on the summit of the world. Should the first attempt fail, the other four climbers waiting in reserve would be standing by at Camp III or IV, ready for a second attack, with the flow of men, oxygen, and equipment already determined by the original plan and readily replicated.
As for the team members, it was agreed that Mallory and Somervell would take the two lead roles. Somervell’s remarkable performance in 1922 made him the obvious choice to head the party climbing without oxygen. Should it fail, he would recover quickly and, if the previous expedition was any indication, be ready for another attempt with gas. Climbing with Somervell would be Norton. Mallory, convinced that only oxygen could carry a man above 26,000 feet, eagerly accepted the lead of the oxygen party. As his second he chose Sandy Irvine, again for quite logical reasons. Beetham was down, Hazard of questionable strength, and Geoffrey Bruce, scarcely more experienced than Irvine, lacked Sandy’s knowledge of the oxygen apparatus. Noel Odell, the only other serious possibility, though a far more experienced climber, had not performed well on the march across Tibet. His lassitude in the mornings had driven his companions to distraction, particularly Shebbeare, who, as the transport officer, was responsible for breaking camp. All that concerned Mallory was success. Committed to oxygen, responsible for the safety of both climbing parties on their descent from the summit, he was not about to leave behind Irvine, the physically strongest member of the expedition and the only one who knew enough about the oxygen apparatus to improvise in a crisis.
So it was decided. Geoffrey Bruce and Noel Odell would establish Camp V. Somervell and Norton, climbing without oxygen, would head for the summit from Camp VII; Mallory and Irvine would strike out on the same day from Camp VI, 800 feet lower but with the advantage of “English air.” A second wave, if necessary, would consist of Odell and Geoffrey Bruce with oxygen, Hazard and Beetham, if fit, without it. Norton dispatched the official announcement on April 21 from Shiling; on that same day Mallory and Irvine climbed above their encampment and young Sandy had his first view of Everest. Though thrilled to climb with Mallory, he was quietly disappointed to have been chosen for the oxygen party.
Mallory felt only relief that the key decisions had been made. Everything was falling into place. Karma Paul, rejoining the main party at Chiblung, had brought the post, with a number of letters from General Bruce, confirming that he was safe and well in India. A kind and generous letter from Ruth, written just days after Mallory’s departure from Liverpool, swept away any lingering worries about their love, freeing Mallory, with her blessing, to focus solely on the challenge at hand. As he wrote to the Everest Committee, he had total confidence in Norton, an inspired leader, knowledgeable about every detail, a tremendous adventurer “dead keen to have a dash with the non-oxygen party,” yet humble enough to yield any decision-making authority concerning his own involvement to Mallory and Somervell. “Isn’t that the right spirit to bring to Mount Everest?” Mallory asked. Somervell, too, was a wonder, whether transcribing music, extracting a decayed wisdom tooth from a Tibetan porter with an improvised pair of pincers, or discussing modern art, as he did with Mallory over the course of a six-mile march to Kyishong on the morning of April 22.
Mallory’s confidence grew with each passing day, as they came nearer to their goal. Even the prospect of an early monsoon, predicted yet again and with greater certitude in another note from his sister in Colombo, could not faze him. Writing to Tom Longstaff, he dismissed the dire forecast of the “meteorological people” with a flash of bravado: “But what does it all mean? We’re going to sail to the top this time, and God with us, or stamp to the top with our teeth in the wind.”
“The conquest of the mountain is the great thing,” he wrote to Ruth on April 24 from Shegar Dzong, “and the whole plan is mine and my part will be a sufficiently interesting one and will give me, perhaps, th
e best chance of all of getting to the top. It is almost unthinkable with this plan that I shan’t get to the top; I can’t see myself coming down defeated. And I have very good hopes that the gasless party will get up; I want all four of us to get there, and I believe it can be done.”
Shegar Dzong, as always, held them for three days, as Norton paid respects to the various authorities and Bruce and Shebbeare arranged for new transport to carry them across the Pang La to Rongbuk and the mountain. Irvine spent his days at a bench set up outside his tent, tinkering with the oxygen equipment. He had managed to salvage several sets, reducing their weight by five pounds. Mallory tested the new model against the original, climbing high to the fortress summit of the dzong. He returned, favorably impressed, though the device (with two cylinders) still weighed thirty pounds—a “manageable load” provided one carried no more than two cylinders for the final summit assault. That this might imply insufficient oxygen supplies at the most critical moment of need was for the moment overlooked as Irvine, to the delight of all, played a trick on the onlookers. As he told it, “I chased a crowd of Tibetans with a loudly hissing cylinder of oxygen. I’ve never seen men run so fast—they must have thought it a devil coming out.”
The following morning, Irvine spent three hours at the monastery, enchanted by everything he saw. He gave two half-filled oxygen cylinders to the lama to be used as gongs, explaining that within each was a devil whose breath would kindle a spark. He demonstrated on a glowing bit of incense. At one point John Noel observed Irvine intently examining a massive prayer wheel. “What’s he doing?” Noel asked. “I expect,” replied Somervell, “he is trying to work out how to mechanize it for them.”
On April 24, the eve of their departure from Shegar and the day King George V opened the British Empire Exhibition in London, Mallory hastily finished a letter to Ruth: “Only four marches, starting tomorrow morning, to the Rongbuk monastery! We’re getting very near now. On May 3rd four of us will leave the Base Camp and begin the upward trek, and on May 17th or thereabouts we should reach the summit … The telegram announcing our success, if we succeed, will precede this letter, I suppose; but it will mention no names. How you will hope that I was one of the conquerors! And I don’t think you will be disappointed.”
CHAPTER 13
The Price of Life Is Death
THE EXPEDITION CROSSED the Pang La on Saturday, April 26, and reached Chöbuk, the last village on their way to Everest, the following evening. At the pass, huddled close to the ground, they hesitated for some time, glassing with binoculars and a telescope the upper slopes of Everest, some thirty-five miles distant, searching in vain for anything resembling level ground between 25,000 and 28,000 feet where high camps might be established. Coming down out of the Pang La, they leaned into winds so fierce that small stones caught up in the gusts lacerated their skin. The land, Sandy Irvine noted, “looked for all the world like the moon, with hardly a sign of vegetation.” A garden of willows at Chöbuk offered relief for the night, but the following day, as they trekked up the valley of the Rongbuk Chu, they returned to country so spartan it evoked for Norton memories of the Western Front. “The stage from Chöbuk to Rongbuk,” he wrote, “bears to the wide plains behind and the big glaciers ahead somewhat the same relation as, in an approach march of the Great War, the ruined areas bore to the fertile fields of France behind and the stricken battlefield ahead. For it is a cheerless, desolate valley suggestive at every turn of the greater desolation to which it leads.”
Their small army, some three hundred pack animals and 150 native porters, along with the ten sahibs and their ponies, arrived at Rongbuk just after 3:00 p.m. on Monday, April 28, and made camp for the night on a stony shelf just before the monastery. Colonel Norton learned to his regret that the abbot, Dzatrul Rinpoche, was ill and could not “carry out the ceremony of blessing the whole expedition, on which, on behalf of our porters, we set considerable store.” A small delegation nevertheless visited the monks, delivering a number of gifts for the lama, including a yakload of portland cement needed to repair the monastery’s dominant chorten. While Hazard, a sapper in the Royal Engineers during the war, showed the monks how to mix the cement with gravel and sand, the rest of the men toured the temples and prayer halls.
John Noel was the first to notice an unsettling mural evidently painted since the 1922 expedition. As he later recounted, “An old man with a gnarled face and only two teeth in his head, shuffled over the courtyard wrapped in his maroon gown, and led me to the temple entrance, where on an inner wall, so dark that I could not at first distinguish it, he showed me a freshly executed painting.” The mural, a most “curious picture,” Noel wrote, depicted cloven-hoofed devils armed with pitchforks casting a party of climbers into a vortex that spun ever deeper into a cold abyss, a hell zone that for Tibetans is not a place of fire but a realm of ice, snow, and murderous winds. Ferocious dogs guarded the flanks of Everest, while at its base lay prostrate a single white body, speared and ravaged by horned demons.
Noel took a tracing and photographed the image; his wife later added a commentary, allegedly a quotation from Dzatrul Rinpoche: “Chomolungma, the awful and mighty Goddess Mother, will never allow any white man to climb her sacred heights. The demons of the snow will destroy you utterly.” It is doubtful that the lama spoke these words. For Tibetans, Everest was the domain of Miyolangsangma, one of the Five Sisters of Long Life. These minor mountain deities were long ago subdued by Guru Rinpoche and transformed into acolytes of the Buddha, generous benefactors who showered the dharma community with wealth and good fortune. The benevolent reputation of Miyolangsangma was, in fact, one reason the local porters were prepared to work for the British, despite the physical and spiritual dangers associated with the mountain.
The inspiration for the mural, as the porters of 1924 learned to their dismay, was not so much the death of the seven Sherpas by avalanche but, rather, a terrifying encounter that occurred after the departure of the 1922 expedition. In their retreat the British had abandoned at the higher camps large quantities of tsampa (roasted barley flour), rice, oil, and other goods. Naturally the local herders and villagers were keen to salvage the supplies; Dzatrul Rinpoche, knowing the mood of the deities, cautioned against it. Defying the lama, twenty youths from a low-lying hamlet slipped past the monastery in the darkness. They slowly made their way up the East Rongbuk Glacier, braving, over a matter of days, the impossible ice. When they finally reached the base of the North Col, one of them saw seven yetis spring from the snow. Fearing for their lives, the boys raced down the valley, hardly stopping until they gained the monastery, where they desperately sought the lama’s forgiveness and blessings. The apparition of demons, Dzatrul Rinpoche told them, was a certain sign that the “hidden land’s protectors are unhappy.” He then instructed the wayward youths to perform “Fulfillment and Purification practice” in homage to all the mountain deities, which they fervently did over the next many days.
In 1922, Dzatrul Rinpoche had received the British with compassion and curiosity, offering prayers that General Bruce, for example, might be reborn a “trainable being of the Buddha Dharma field.” In 1924, he reacted to their arrival with compassion tinged with bewilderment. Having endured such hardships, why had they returned for more? The Tibetans pitied the British for their folly, and Dzatrul Rinpoche, writing in the Water-Dog year, 1922, went to some lengths to account for their delusions. The return expedition of 1924, by contrast, occurring in the Wood-Bird year, the fifty-eighth year of the lama’s incarnation, did not warrant a single remark in his autobiography.
The motivations of the climbers remained a mystery for the Tibetans. They made offerings to the mountains, and every day, with their rituals, assuaged the wrath of the deities. But the idea of risking one’s life, this vital incarnation, in order to crawl over ice and rock into nothingness was for them the epitome of ignorance and delusion. On the Tibetan Plateau death was already near; it stalked every nomadic encampment, found a place in every hamlet.
To court annihilation deliberately in the frozen wastes of a mountain was inconceivable. In Tibetan, there is no word for a mountain summit; the very place the British so avidly sought, their highest goal, did not even exist in the language of their Sherpa porters. Among the “Tigers,” men hand-picked by Norton and Bruce for the most difficult work at the highest elevations, there were many who believed that the British were actually searching for treasure, a golden statue of a cow, perhaps a yak, rumored to reside at the highest point, which they would pillage and melt down into coins. In their mercantile zeal, inspired by generations of trans-Himalayan traders, their own forefathers, the Tibetans assumed that the British sought wealth, which in a certain sense was true. Fame and fortune most certainly awaited the first victors on Everest, rewards and ambitions that lure climbers to its flanks to this day.
ALL OF THIS, of course, was lost on the British climbers who left the monastery that first evening, content with gifts of tsampa and dried meat, and returned to their tents, even as night fell and a cold wind unlike any they had ever known swept from the glaciers to the base of the mountain. The following morning, Norton wasted no time pushing the expedition farther up the valley to base camp. “We walked over five rough miles of tumbled moraine and a frozen watercourse to the camp just under the snout of the Rongbuk glacier, in the teeth of a bitter wind,” he reported. His goals were precise, the timetable exacting. In 1922 the monsoon had broken on June 1. Norton wanted all camps as far as the base of the North Col fully established and provisioned by May 17, at which time the assault on the summit would begin in earnest. Each man had his duties. Mallory and Beetham were responsible for the alpine equipment and the provisioning of the high camps beyond the col. Shebbeare was in charge of all supplies and stores, save the oxygen apparatus, which was detailed to Odell and Irvine. Hazard would run the mess.