by Wade Davis
While Norton held back, enjoying the shelter from the wind and the wide sweep of the sun, Odell and Mallory pushed on, tracking a route through the maze of snow ridges and crevasses that separated the shelf from the surface of the col. For Mallory, who had done the lion’s share of the step cutting on the way up, the subsequent hour was, Norton recalled, “cruel work for a tired man.” Odell led the way, finding an ice bridge across the most perilous of crevasses, an arch that would hold and carry them to the higher camps for the duration of the expedition. At 3:45 p.m., having rendezvoused with Norton and Lhakpa at the new site of Camp IV, they hastened down the mountain to Camp III with the careless abandon of men exhausted beyond the reach of reason. “The less said about the descent,” Norton later quipped, “the better.”
In truth, they were lucky to survive. Against all caution, they had followed the line of 1922, the very route that had ended in disaster. Norton and Mallory were unroped; Lhakpa brought up the rear, tethered to Odell. None had crampons. Norton slipped and momentarily lost control, as did Lhakpa, who plunged dangerously down the slope before coming to a halt in a patch of soft snow. Inexplicably, Odell had allowed him to tie in with a simple reef knot, which had not held. At one point Mallory simply disappeared. He wrote, “The snow gave way and in I went with the snow tumbling all round me, down luckily only about ten feet before I fetched up half-blind and breathless to find myself most precariously supported only by my ice axe, somehow caught across the crevasse and still in my right hand—and below was a very unpleasant black hole. I had some nasty moments before I got comfortably wedged and began to yell for help up through the round hole I had come through, where the blue sky showed.” He shouted for help, but the others were down the slope, well out of earshot. Eventually he had to cut through the side of the crevasse, knowing that his every move risked dislodging his precarious hold and plunging him farther into the dark and unknown depths beneath him, almost certainly to his death.
It was a chastened party that finally reached Camp III that night, shortly after 6:30 p.m. There was no warm homecoming. The site was miserably cold; the dark stones that in 1922 had captured the sun and radiated heat in the chill of evening were now all covered in snow. The streams were ice, and with the elevation it was impossible to make a hot meal, let alone a proper cup of tea. Norton wrote of the “hatefulness of the evening meal, with the camp in cold shadow and one’s feet like stones.” The food tasted of kerosene, and with the cold air, the lining of the men’s throats became so raw as to make eating painful. Along with chronic headaches, they were all, to one degree or another, tormented by hacking coughs so violent as to render sleep impossible.
Despite his exhaustion, Mallory lay awake much of the night, “distressed,” he wrote to Ruth, “with bursts of coughing fit to tear one’s guts.” Norton, who shared a tent with Mallory, also failed to sleep, preoccupied with concerns about the coming monsoon and the imposing challenge of the ice chimney, most especially for porters laden with loads. At first light he scribbled some notes: “Indifferent night—head too full of the very apparent difficulties and dangers of the whole business; overcast and warm, light snow in early a.m. Don’t like the look of weather much. Pray Heaven it’s not the beginning of monsoon, as no power on earth can make parts of North Col route safe under monsoon conditions.”
The following morning, Wednesday, May 21, even as the snowfall grew more severe, Hazard, Irvine, and Somervell led a dozen porters up to the North Col to provision Camp IV. The conditions were terrible, Irvine recalled, the “going perfectly bloody.” Hazard and the porters “sweated blood,” Somervell wrote, to cut a trail through the heavy snow. For Hazard, it was literally true: the war wound on his right hip had opened, and beneath his kit he bled profusely for a good part of the day.
Somervell led up the ice chimney, followed by Irvine. Hazard, from below, tied on the loads, and over the course of two and a half hours, Irvine and Somervell hauled them up, one by one. “Young Irvine,” Norton reported, “was a perfect tower of strength, and his splendid physique never stood him in better stead.” Still, it was long and exhausting work, and in order to return, as planned, to Camp III before dark, Irvine and Somervell left Hazard and the porters just 150 feet below the shelf of the col, at the site of Camp IV. Mist and snow reduced the visibility to a hundred yards; Irvine had “one nasty slip on the way down.” Tired and parched, they reached Camp III just as dusk settled over the glacier.
The plan was for Hazard and his porters to remain at Camp IV for a single night before returning to Camp III. While Somervell and Irvine, at Camp III, prepared for their first attempt at the summit, Odell and Geoffrey Bruce, with another twelve porters, would proceed to Camp IV on Thursday morning, spend the night, and then continue up the Northeast Shoulder to establish Camp V at 25,500 feet. But, fatefully, the snowfall that had practically blinded Somervell and Irvine on their descent from the col continued through the night and well into Thursday, confining everyone to camp. “Awful day,” Somervell wrote. “The party we hoped to bring up to the North Col to complete its equipment couldn’t even start. Camp 3 was hell. I think the 13 of them on the North Col are more comfortable than we are. But this snow is making the way up very dangerous. We hope to send another party up tomorrow, but it’s not too safe on the slopes of the Col.” That night the temperature dropped to minus twenty-four Fahrenheit, a record cold on Everest, according to Odell. “Snowed hard all day until 3 p.m.,” Norton wrote in the Camp III diary. “Impossible to do anything but lie in flea bags with feet like stones and worry about Hazard and his faithful 12.”
Friday, May 23, dawned clear and bright, with the air as “keen as a knife.” Bruce and Odell were off by 9:30 a.m. Their goal was Camp IV, but in the heavy snow their party soon bogged down. Odell required oxygen, as eventually did Bruce. By 3:00 p.m. they’d managed to reach only as far as the foot of the ice chimney. Forced to retreat, they were stunned to see, above them, Hazard and a small party of porters, struggling down the face. Though the sky was bright, the spindrift obscured their vision; the white winds absorbed every sound. They shouted but were not heard, and had little choice but to turn their backs on the mountain and lead their exhausted party back down to Camp III.
Hazard, meanwhile, made his way down, arriving at Camp III at 5:00 with a terrible story to tell. Having endured a dreadful night of cold, and assuming that Bruce and Odell and their party would reach Camp IV that day, Hazard had left the cook, old dependable Poo, alone at the North Col and led his twelve porters back to Camp III. But en route three lost their nerve, and in a panic returned to the shelter of their tents at Camp IV. In the chaos and exhaustion Hazard had apparently not noticed their departure. So he was now back at Camp III with only eight of his men, having left the other four stranded for a second night on the North Col. Their one bag of rations had dropped over a cliff, and all they had to eat was barley flour; the only other provisions at Camp IV were tinned goods for the sahibs, impossible for the Tibetans to open. The other British climbers at Camp III were dumbfounded by Hazard’s folly. “It is difficult to make out how it exactly happened,” Mallory wrote, “but evidently he didn’t shepherd his party properly at all, and in the end four stayed up, and one of these badly frost bitten.”
The situation presented the ultimate test of Norton as a leader. With the monsoon winds growing, conditions on the North Col could only worsen. If the porters were not rescued within a day, at most two, they would surely die. Yet his climbers were exhausted, and their ordeal, the quest that had drawn them halfway around the world, had scarcely begun. Mallory and Somervell had bronchitis and terrible coughs from the altitude and cold. Irvine was down with diarrhea. Odell had not slept in days, and Hazard, with his seeping wound, was a nonstarter. Saving the Tibetans would require the skills and endurance of the strongest of the climbers—Mallory, Somervell, Irvine, and Norton himself—putting at risk the very men who had the best chances of reaching the summit of Everest.
Norton did not waver for an
instant. “The only thing that mattered,” he wrote, “was to get the men down alive.” There would be no repeat of 1922 on his watch. It would, however, be a precarious operation. Movement up the col would be exceedingly slow and difficult. The danger of avalanche was acute, the snow conditions horrendous. Norton put the odds at two to one in favor of success. Mallory, in a letter home to Ruth, thought ten to one in failure’s favor a better bet. That night they gathered by candlelight in the mess tent and made plans for the morning. “It was a gloomy little conference; we could not but recognize that to turn our backs once more on the mountain at this date might well mean the abandonment of all hope of success for the year.”
Before going to bed they gathered, as was their habit, between their two tents, stomping feet on the flat stones for warmth. They called their tents Balmoral and Sandringham, after the estates of the royal family. Odell and Somervell slept in one; Norton and Mallory shared the other. Little was said. “As we lay in our tent that night and listened to the soft pattering of snow on its walls,” they knew their chances were slim, recalled Norton, “although at the time we kept such pessimistic views to ourselves. About midnight the snow stopped falling and the moon came out.”
SATURDAY, MAY 24, Empire Day, dawned bright, even as shadows hung over the expedition and the marooned porters on the North Col. Sandy Irvine, scheduled to participate in the rescue attempt, woke with such a severe headache and stomach troubles that he had to return down the mountain with Geoffrey Bruce and Hazard, who had been ordered by Norton to evacuate Camp III. Their goal was Camp I, but Irvine was so weak he had to be left in Shebbeare’s care at Camp II, while Hazard pushed on for base camp. Beetham, in defiance of Hingston’s orders, had struggled up to Camp II, but he remained too feeble to assist in any meaningful way. Hingston, at base camp, had just learned of his father’s death, which had occurred three months before, even as he nursed the ailing cobbler Manbahadur, who had contracted pneumonia and lay in critical condition. “Hingston daren’t leave the base,” Irvine noted in his journal, “as the frostbite waller may die any day. Good night, but face very sore.” Irvine’s fair skin, blistered by the sun, wind, and cold, was so raw that every time he touched his face, burnt bits came off in his hands.
At Camp III, Mallory, Somervell, and Norton set out at 7:30 a.m., trudging waist-deep through fresh snow that blanketed the ground to and beyond the base of the North Col. Mallory led as far as he could before yielding to Somervell, who struggled to the snow gulley where Bruce and Odell had abandoned their loads the previous day. Norton then took over; he alone wore crampons. He climbed until he could do no more, and passed the lead back to Mallory. And so it went; each man climbed to the point of exhaustion. At no time during the seven-hour ascent to the North Col did they not have to plow through snow to the knee; often it reached their thighs or higher. When finally, utterly spent, they approached the ledge of Camp IV, the four porters appeared, stumbling and leaning each upon another. Norton shouted, demanding to know whether they could walk. “Up or down?” came the reply from the stalwart Sherpas, even though two of them, Namgya and Uchung, were severely frostbitten. “Down, you fool!” Norton cried, stunned to realize that the men had no idea of the danger they were in.
Separating the four from the rescue party was a steep and severely exposed slope, a precarious traverse across deep snow in what were clearly avalanche conditions. Belayed by Norton and Mallory, Somervell, with 200 feet of rope, slowly made his way toward the men. He got to within 30 feet before reaching the end of his tether. It was already 4:00 p.m. There was no time to go down for another rope. The men would have to come to him. The first reached Somervell safely, and was quickly passed along to Norton’s anchor. The second did equally well, but as he was just within reach of Mallory, the other two rashly decided to come down together. Somervell screamed at them to halt, but it was too late. Their combined weight cut loose a great sheet of snow, and they plunged down the slope, seemingly to their doom.
The slide suddenly stopped, the snow compacting not ten yards from the edge of ice cliffs that fell away 200 feet. The two men stood, quivering in fear, too frightened to move. Somervell ordered them to sit. He then untied his belay, drove his ice ax into the snow as an anchor, and passed the rope around it. He glanced back at Norton and Mallory, saw that they were secure, and then slowly lowered himself, with one hand on the rope and the other free to grasp the victims. It was as unnerving as swimming up to a drowning man at sea: in their panic they might do anything. He had barely enough slack to grab each by the scruff of the neck, and with numbing authority lead them, one at a time, to safety.
It was now 4:30, and they still had to make their way down the North Col with four trembling wards, two suffering from severe frostbite, all weak with hunger and fear. Mallory led, trailing one of the porters on a rope. Somervell followed, shepherding two others. Norton brought up the rear, leading Namgya, whose useless hands were swollen grotesquely from the frost. They negotiated the ice chimney and stumbled on in the fading light, reaching the glacier at the base of the col at dusk. There Namgya broke down completely. Norton took him by the shoulder, like a wounded soldier at the front. At 7:30 p.m., as they finally reached the moraine that ran for a mile above Camp III, two shadowy figures approached out of the dark. It was Odell and John Noel with food and a thermos flask of hot soup. Noel, who had been filming the rescue all afternoon, later described the moment they encountered the returning men:
We had toiled through the darkness for about one and a half hours when, in reply to our frequent call, we heard answering shouts. When we met, the whole lot of them sank down in the snow. They were absolutely done. The porters were like drunken men, not knowing what was happening. Norton, Somervell and Mallory hardly spoke. We got out our hot food to give them. One of the porters vomited as quickly as he took the stuff into his mouth and the other we had to prop up with our knees. They were not fit for another stroke of work for the rest of the expedition. In fact, during the next few days there was a general exodus from Snowfield Camp [Camp III] of everybody who was not up to the mark.
Unfortunately, this meant everyone. With every day counting, and the rising monsoon winds constantly tormenting his thoughts, Norton, to his intense disappointment, had no choice but to order a second full retreat from the flank of the North Col. “Next morning,” he wrote, “we thankfully turned our backs on Camp III and escorting a miserable little convoy of the halt, the lame and the blind, reached Camp II in due course in the teeth of a northeast wind and with snow falling again.”
By Sunday evening, May 25, Norton, Somervell, Odell, and Shebbeare were at Camp II, with Norton and Somervell ready to head farther down the mountain the following day. Mallory had continued all the way to Camp I to join Irvine and Bruce. Hazard and Beetham were at base camp, where that morning the cobbler Manbahadur, in his agony, had finally succumbed. “Ill fortune besets the expedition,” Hingston wrote.
Manbahadur, whose feet were badly frostbitten, died this morning of pneumonia. It was better that he should do so, for both feet would have to be amputated later. But far worse than this is the change of weather. Today there was no fierce wind from Everest, but a strong wind from the opposite direction. Moreover it is a warm wind and accompanied by white of cloud. Can it be that the monsoon has come? This would be a very serious blow. It would mean that the mountain had become impossible; and none has yet been above the North Col. It really is unthinkable that the Expedition will fail. But we have met with weather conditions far more severe than anyone anticipated. Shebbeare sent me a note from Camp II. He said there is going to be a revision of plans. Norton has come down to Camp I. Probably some new scheme is under consideration. The Expedition can never return after having reached only the North Col.
The following day Norton summoned Hingston to Camp I for “a council of war.” The fate of the expedition clearly hung in the balance. The rescue of the four marooned Tibetans had been a very close call. When Tom Longstaff read of it in the Indian pap
ers, he famously exclaimed, “Talk about pulling the whiskers of death—these folk crawled in through the chinks between the closed teeth!” It was later acknowledged that Geoffrey Bruce had been excluded from the rescue party because Norton, convinced that there was a good chance that all three of them would die, did not want to expose Bruce to the risk, knowing that his knowledge and skills would be needed to lead the survivors home to India.
There is no indication in the official camp diaries, in the private journals of Shebbeare, Hingston, Odell, or Irvine, in the letters of Mallory or Beetham, or in any of the subsequent accounts and memoirs to suggest that any member of the expedition questioned Norton’s decision to risk all to save the lives of the stranded Tibetans. At the same time, everyone understood what the rescue effort implied. As Shebbeare, the transport officer, reflected, “This was the most daring and the most strenuous effort of the whole expedition and the resulting loss of condition by three of the strongest climbers may have cost us the mountain.”
THE EXPEDITION was in desperate straits. Norton and Mallory, and certainly Odell, Somervell, and Bruce, were acutely aware that the expectations of a nation—indeed, an empire—called for nothing but success, for victory, whatever that term had come to mean. On May 26, the very day that Norton was bringing together his war council at Camp I, the fellows of the Royal Geographical Society gathered in London for their anniversary meeting and dinner, a thousand men in black tie and tails, trading stories of Everest and the supreme announcement they so eagerly anticipated. Most knew nothing of the mountain and could not have imagined the fate that had befallen the men.
A month had passed since the climbers’ arrival at Rongbuk, and despite their refined plans, little had been accomplished. At Camp IV, on the col, they had only four tents in place, and sufficient sleeping bags for twelve porters and one climber. Food and supplies for the higher camps lay scattered the length of the East Rongbuk Glacier. Of the fifty-five Tigers, the Sherpa elite so dramatically elevated by General Bruce at the outset of the expedition in Darjeeling, only twelve (according to Shebbeare; as many as fifteen by Bruce’s estimate) remained fit and capable of returning to Camp III and the North Col. The oxygen equipment was the one thing ready to go, thanks to young Sandy Irvine. But with its weight and the complete breakdown of the supply train, it seemed in the moment less an asset than a liability. At Norton’s war council, Geoffrey Bruce pushed to eliminate oxygen altogether, in order to free the few fit porters to carry more essential goods: food, fuel, tents, and gear.