by Wade Davis
Geoffrey Bruce organized the transport, with the goal of conserving the strength of those destined for the highest camps. The locations of the first three camps would be as in 1922, at elevations of roughly 17,800, 19,800, and 21,000 feet. Establishing Camps I and II would be supervised not by the climbers, as had been the case in 1922, but by the Gurkha NCOs Hurke Gurung and Tejbir Bura, both veterans of that earlier expedition. To spare the elite Sherpas, those expected to establish Camps V, VI, and VII, Bruce recruited 150 locals to carry as far as the North Col. Each earned twelve annas a day, less than a rupee at a time when a woodcutter made ten rupees a week. It was not a wage certain to hold the loyalty of men and women being asked to heft eighty-pound loads across ice fields that were the domain of demons.
On Wednesday, April 30, with the sky clear and the ground blanketed by fresh snow, Bruce dispatched 151 loads to Camp I. Half the porters would stay overnight, ready to move up to Camp II in the morning. The others were expected to return the same day to base, which they did, but fifty-two deserted the expedition altogether. This forced Bruce reluctantly to use his high-altitude Sherpas, a setback that would prove significant. On May 1, with Shebbeare and Norton, he pushed another seventy-five loads to Camp I, and by the end of the following day, Camps I and II were fully established. Bruce then dismissed all of the local porters as undependable and provisioned Camp III with fifty-two Sherpas—two assault groups of twenty, as he put it, with a reserve of twelve.
Mallory, still at base camp, was enthralled by the military discipline of Norton and Geoffrey Bruce. “I can’t tell you how full of hope I am this year,” he wrote to his sister Mary on May 2. “It is all so different from ’22 when one was always subconsciously dissatisfied because we had no proper plan of climbing the mountain … On May 17th the four of us should join up somewhere about the base of the final pyramid; and, whether we get up or not, it will be my job to get the party off the mountain in safety … No one, climber or porter, is going to get killed if I can help it. That would spoil all.”
With Mallory was Irvine, whose first days on the mountain were not his best. He had felt “pretty seedy” for some time. At Rongbuk, while the others visited the monks, he had remained in his tent, mending his sleeping bag and repairing Mallory’s saddle. That night he took four castor oil pills, which had “the reverse of the expected result.” The walk up the valley from the monastery had been exhausting, and he had found the setting of their base camp unexpectedly harsh and “very uninviting,” despite the wonderful birds, the scores of rock doves and ravens and alpine choughs. His first journal entry from there began: “Bloody morning, light driving snow, very cold and felt rather rotten.”
Weakened by illness and suffering from the altitude, Irvine nevertheless got right to work, struggling against time to ready the oxygen equipment. It was no easy task. Parts were missing or damaged. Drills, taps, and hacksaw blades snapped in the cold. The conditions were so bleak that he had no choice but to seek shelter. Though often nauseated from the solder fumes, he managed to retrofit in two days six complete sets of the oxygen apparatus. He also found time to work on Beetham’s camera, even as he repaired the expedition’s forty-pound roarer cooker, which he then used as a forge to shorten the spikes on both of Mallory’s crampons by two inches. In doing so, he badly spiked one hand and scorched the other in two places. On top of everything, even as his thoughts on the first of the month turned wistfully to Oxford and the traditional celebrations of May morning, a highlight of the university year, he came down with a “tummy ache from eating Beetham’s birthday cake.”
Young Irvine’s mood improved dramatically when he learned the results of the hemoglobin tests conducted by Somervell on the morning of May 3. Of all the men, Irvine had by far the highest percentage of red blood cells, a strong indication of fitness and acclimatization. His mentor, Noel Odell, was a distant second. “Hope this is a really good sign,” Sandy wrote as he prepared his kit for a fortnight on the mountain. That afternoon, shortly after lunch, he and Mallory, with Odell and Hazard, headed up for Camp I, overtaking en route the twenty porters dispatched earlier that morning. The porters were not a happy lot, and several complained about the weight of their loads, which included several sets of the oxygen apparatus. Irvine later confessed in his diary, “I’m glad that I didn’t have to carry any of their loads 100 yards,” let alone several miles up the East Rongbuk Glacier. Camp I, protected from the wind and in the sun for long hours was, as Odell wrote that evening, “an awfully comfy camp.” With a good meal, the porters found their balance, and all troubles and complaints were for the moment forgotten.
The immediate goal was to get Mallory and Irvine to Camp III, where they might test the oxygen equipment and acclimatize in preparation for the main assault. Odell and Hazard, meanwhile, would scout the route up the North Col and make Camp IV ready. John Noel would be there to film. Thus, on the morning of May 4, even as the Gurkha NCO Umar Gurung escorted the second group of twenty porters up from base camp, Mallory and the men made their move to Camp II, arriving shortly after noon. It was the first time Sandy Irvine witnessed Mallory’s storming of a mountain. “A devil must have got into Mallory,” he later wrote, “for he ran down all the little bits of downhill and paced all out up the moraine. It was as bad as a boat race trying to keep up with him.” They set up two Whymper tents, and then, while Mallory and Odell searched for a new and better route up to Camp III, Irvine supervised the building of a two-room shelter, low stone walls that could be covered with a tent fly. He worked for nearly three hours, moving heavy boulders, “trying to set an example to the coolies,” until blood began to flow freely from his nose. That evening the temperature dropped to zero Fahrenheit, and the weather turned.
They awoke to the sound of a Tibetan bellows blowing over the coals of a yak-dung fire. The cook was up, but the porters remained in their shelter, immobilized by the cold. One was apparently seriously ill. Tensions rose as Mallory shook them out of their lassitude; he threatened one with a fist to the face. They were not off until nearly noon, with Irvine on one rope with six, Hazard leading a long line of eleven, and Odell on a third rope with another six. Mallory walked alone, breaking trail. At one point Irvine grew so frustrated with one porter’s pace that he offered to carry his load. Mallory intervened and stopped him. Irvine then let the man off the rope, cursing him with the threat of ice devils and demons. From that moment things began to deteriorate badly.
They reached Camp III at 6:00 p.m. in bitter cold. “My boots were frozen hard on my feet,” Mallory wrote, “and I knew we could do nothing now to make a comfortable camp.” They quickly erected two Meade tents, and Kami the cook somehow managed to produce a hot meal, mutton and vegetable stew washed down by cool coffee, their first food since morning. There was no soup to be found, and the cheese and jam were frozen solid. Thirsty and still hungry, Irvine turned in at 8:30 p.m., but had trouble sleeping on the stony ground. “The sleeping bag,” he wrote, “seemed to shrink to half its normal size … and I kept turning over into patches of frozen breath.”
Mallory lay awake, haunted by other thoughts. He noted, “It was a queer sensation reviving memories of that scene, with the dud oxygen cylinders piled against the cairn which was built to commemorate the seven porters killed two years ago. The whole place had changed less than I could have believed possible.” His more immediate concern was the impossible cold. In packing the loads for Camp III, they had made the oxygen apparatus a priority, and inexplicably had failed to bring sufficient bedding for the porters. The high-altitude sleeping bags, intended strictly for the highest camps, were at Camp II, but he had specifically ordered that they not be brought up to Camp III the following day with the second wave of porters. Clearly, in this cold they would be needed. His only option was to get down to Camp II the following morning early enough to stop the men and reconfigure the loads. He assumed that, given the conditions, the convoy would not set off from the lower camp until at least 9:00 a.m.
On Tuesday,
May 6, Mallory rose early, eager to set off down the valley. “Energetic beggar,” Irvine noted. “I feebly asked if I could be of any help, without the slightest intention of moving from my warm sleeping bag. He gallantly refused my offer.” While Irvine slept, rising only at 9:00 a.m. for a meager breakfast of tinned milk and a sausage, Mallory embarked on what would be one of the more fateful days of the entire expedition. As it turned out, the porters at Camp II had left early, and by the time Mallory reached them they were well advanced, moving up the snow of the glacier in the face of what by early afternoon would be a full-out blizzard. All bore heavy packs. One struggled with the cooker, itself a forty-pound load. Some had brought blankets, fully expecting to sleep at Camp III, which was the last thing Mallory desired. He had no choice but to escort them up the valley, with the hope of reaching Camp III in time to dispatch them all back down the mountain to Camp II. In the snow and howling wind it proved impossible, and they had to dump their loads on the glacier in a cache well below Camp III. As it was, they barely made it back to Camp II before the storm obliterated every feature in the valley.
Mallory returned to Camp III, where all was lethargy and collapse. The porters had endured a dreadful night, with little food and no proper bedding. Of the twenty-three, only four were fit for duty. Most were already incapacitated with mountain sickness. In the late afternoon Odell and Irvine, with the able porters, returned a mile down the glacier to bring up six loads from Mallory’s cache. Irvine hoisted a sixty-pound Whymper tent on his back and set a fast pace that got them back to Camp III just before dark. Unfortunately, what they most needed was not shelter but bedding and supplies. The temperature that night dropped to minus twenty-one degrees Fahrenheit, fifty-three degrees of frost, and none of the porters had any protection save the clothes on their backs and a blanket apiece. For food, they had nothing but uncooked barley, no more than a handful for each man. At any rate, most were too sick to eat and by morning were comatose. Those still capable of movement were vomiting. “One of them,” Mallory noted, “who was absolutely without a spark of life to help himself, had swollen feet, and we had to pull on his boots without socks. He was almost incapable of walking; I supported him with my arm for some distances and then told a porter to do that.”
With Odell “distinctly unfit” and Irvine suffering from a severe headache, Mallory, on the morning of Wednesday, May 7, ordered Hazard down to the glacier cache to meet ten porters expected around noon from Camp II. Not one of the porters at Camp III was capable of carrying a load. Most could barely walk and required support as they hobbled off the mountain. Mallory escorted them halfway down to Camp II, then returned to join Hazard at the cache. When Irvine arrived with hot food and drink, he found a desolate scene: a forlorn Hazard, three exhausted porters from Camp II, and a thoroughly bedraggled Mallory. With Sandy hoisting a bundle of eight high-altitude sleeping bags, they managed to get seven loads up the glacier, and mercifully, on the night of May 7, those few porters still at Camp III slept in warmth and reasonable comfort. On the following morning, even as Odell and Hazard set out to scout a route up the North Col, Mallory dropped down to Camp II to confer with Norton and Geoffrey Bruce.
QUITE UNAWARE of the crisis at Camp III, Norton, Somervell, and a reinvigorated Bentley Beetham had headed up the East Rongbuk on the morning of Tuesday, May 6, leaving Shebbeare in charge at base camp. The following day, while Shebbeare was off tracking three bharal near a hermit’s cave just above their camp, Geoffrey Bruce set out with twelve porters, their last reserves. The full extent of the debacle did not become clear until Norton and Somervell reached Camp II that afternoon. By then many of the debilitated Sherpas had stumbled into camp, overwhelming its capacity and forcing the British to break open supply boxes carefully packed and intended only for the final assault on the summit.
The situation deteriorated further the following day, when Bruce, expecting to find Camp II empty, arrived with yet another twelve men to feed and shelter. By then, as John Noel recalled, the entire transport and supply system lay in ruins. In but two days, Mallory wrote to Ruth, “the morale of the porters had gone to blazes.” As Norton and Somervell watched the last of the wasted porters come down the ice, Norton was reminded of his worst moment in the war as a British soldier. He wrote in his May 13 dispatch to the Times that the men coming off the mountain looked “all the world like the stragglers of the British army I once saw blocking the roads south of Le Cateau on August 27, 1914 … As at St Quentin, Chauny and Noyen in 1914, there is now no time to count the cost nor look far ahead.”
The crisis, in other words, called not for reflection or recriminations but for action. Norton immediately ordered Somervell to head up with every available fit porter to complete the supply of Camp III. With Camp II effectively becoming the base of the expedition, he needed men fluent in the native languages. Hazard therefore was recalled from Camp III and sent to base camp to relieve Shebbeare, who was brought forward and posted to Camp II with orders to remedy the supply situation. Shebbeare was dumbfounded to learn that Mallory had given priority to the oxygen equipment, leaving behind the sleeping bags, and had from the very start expected his porters to stay at least one night at Camp III, with only blankets for warmth.
Conditions at Camp III worsened dramatically over the next forty-eight hours. Friday, May 9, was a “perfectly bloody day,” Irvine wrote; “nothing else will describe it.” Hunkered down in their tents were Odell, who with Hazard had been unable to reach the North Col, and Somervell, who had arrived the previous day. Three Sherpas remained at the camp, and the cook. There was no hot food or drink. The wind blew so fiercely that even Irvine, risking frostbite, could not get the stoves to ignite.
That morning Norton and Geoffrey Bruce, along with Mallory and twenty-six Sherpas, set out from Camp II to relieve the higher camp. They met Hazard on his way down, but in the wind exchanged hardly a word. The storm grew with such furious intensity that Norton was forced to let most of the porters dump their loads on the glacier and return to Camp II. With eight of the strongest, the rest of the party struggled on, reaching Camp III just after 1:00 p.m. It was a desolate scene, as Geoffrey Bruce recalled: “No one moved about the camp; it seemed utterly lifeless. The porters there were wretched, and this terrible blizzard, coming immediately on top of their hardships of a few days ago, completely dampened their spirits and energy … The fierceness of the wind made movement outside a tent almost impossible.”
Mallory crawled into a Whymper shared by Odell, Somervell, and Irvine. To Somervell’s bemusement, he removed his boots and knickers, put on his favorite footless stockings knitted by Ruth, and then pulled from his pack a set of playing cards and his well-worn copy of The Spirit of Man. Irvine alone was unfamiliar with the book. “I began reading one thing or another,” Mallory later wrote to Ruth. “Howard reminded me that I was reproducing on the same spot a scene which occurred two years ago when he and I lay in a tent together. We all agreed that ‘Kubla Khan’ was a good sort of poem. Irvine was rather poetry shy but seemed impressed by the Epitaph to Gray’s ‘Elegy.’ Odell was much inclined to be interested and like the last lines of ‘Prometheus Unbound.’ Somervell, who knows quite a lot of English literature, had never read a poem of Emily Bronte’s and was happily introduced.”
As they passed the afternoon reading aloud from the anthology of verse first compiled as a propaganda tool during the bleakest days of the war, the storm outside, as Geoffrey Bruce wrote, “continued with unabating violence.” Mercifully, they had hot soup; Irvine had managed to start the Haddock cooker. But as Mallory recalled in a letter to Ruth on May 10, “tremendous gusts” tormented them through a sleepless night. “I don’t know how the tent stood it,” he added. Through the long hours of darkness the snow “drifted into our tents covering everything to a depth of an inch or two. The discomfort in the night was acute. Morning came, and the snow stopped falling, but fallen snow was being driven along the surface of the glacier, producing the same effect as a blizzard.”
By Saturday morning they were running out of food. Mallory and Irvine, both showing signs of strain, were ordered down the mountain to Camp II. Norton and Somervell, with seventeen of the porters, accompanied them as far as the supply dump on the glacier, where they managed to retrieve nineteen loads, though the effort completely shattered the Sherpas. When they reached Camp III, Bruce recalled, they “simply flopped into their tents and lay there. We forced them to eat and drink, took off their boots, and saw them safely tucked into their sleeping sacks. I do not think that I have ever seen men so tired, and it was not to be wondered at, for the majority of them had carried loads through wind and snow on five successive days.”
That night the temperature dropped to minus thirty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. The wind, as Norton wrote in his dispatch, “appeared to be shot high in the air over the North Col, Rapiu and Lhakpa La, the three passes surrounding us and, from some point high in the zenith descended on the camp like a terrier on a rat-pit, and shook our little tents like rats … Sleep was an impossibility with the noise of the wind and the wild flapping of the tents.” By morning, snow had drifted into every shelter. The porters “huddled in their tents, not caring whether they lived or died,” Norton related. The North Col was out of the question, and as Bruce and Norton determined, “there was nothing for it but retreat.”