Into The Silence

by Wade Davis

  At Camp IV, Monday, June 2, was another day of absolute perfection. Irvine was out of his tent by 5:00 a.m., and Norton and Somervell, with six porters, got off by 6:45. They had one light Meade tent, two sleeping bags, and food and fuel for three nights. Each had a rucksack, with a compass, an electric torch, a change of socks, and some extra woolen clothes. Norton described in some detail what he looked like that morning, dressed against the wind:

  Personally I wore thick woolen vest and drawers, a thick flannel shirt and two sweaters under a lightish knickerbocker suit of windproof gaberdine the knickers of which were lined with light flannel, a pair of soft elastic Kashmir putties and a pair of boots of felt bound and soled with leather and lightly nailed with the usual Alpine nails. Over all I wore a very light pajama suit of Messrs Burberry’s “Shackleton” windproof gabardine. On my hands I wore a pair of long fingerless woolen mits inside a similar pair made of gaberdine … On my head I wore a fur-lined motor-cycling helmet, and my eyes and nose were protected by a pair of goggles of Crooke’s glass, which were sewn into a leather mask that came well over the nose and covered any part of my face which was not naturally protected by my beard. A huge woolen muffler completed my costume.

  Somervell was similarly dressed, as were the porters, all in layers of wool, leather, canvas, and gabardine. They were all bundled like “gollywogs,” Norton admitted, absurd in appearance but at least ready for the wind. Or so they thought. The instant they crested the height of the col, the full wrath of Everest made a mockery of their preparations. “The wind even at this early hour,” Norton later wrote, “took our breath away like a plunge into the icy waters of a mountain lake, and in a minute or two our well protected hands lost all sensation as they grasped the frozen rocks to steady us.” When Somervell tried to take a photograph, he could expose his bare fingers for only a second or two before they became too cold and numb even to press the shutter.

  As had Mallory and Bruce the day before, they leaned into the gusts, making their way from the wind-ravaged funnel of the col to the base of the Northeast Shoulder. There the sun offered some relief from the cold, and Norton led the way up the rocks, along the same direct route they had followed in 1922. At midmorning they reached a familiar spot, and Norton smiled to recall knocking over his pack in ’22, and watching as all his warm clothes tumbled off the mountain. As they continued up the ridge, they were startled to see Dorjee Pasang, Mallory and Bruce’s lead porter, coming down the mountain. The man was wasted, and simply handed Norton Mallory’s note indicating the failure of the first attempt. A few minutes later, roughly halfway to Camp V, they crossed paths with Mallory and Bruce coming down. Scarcely a word was exchanged. Mallory merely cautioned Norton to watch for small strips of cloth, indicating where they should abandon the ridge and make a short ascending traverse to reach Camp V. They wished one another good luck and shuffled on, one party going up, expectant and hopeful, the other down in muted disappointment.

  Mallory lingered at Camp IV, on the col, just long enough to confide in Odell that only oxygen would allow the summit to go. Leaving Odell and Hazard in support of the men up the mountain, Norton and Somervell, he continued directly down to Camp III with Bruce, conscripting Irvine on the way, who without orders from Norton followed them down. They arrived at 4:30 p.m. Mallory immediately instructed Bruce to find a cadre of fit porters, should it be possible. Of Irvine he demanded an inspection of the oxygen apparatus, until the two most dependable sets had been identified. Irvine did as he was told, though he was in considerable pain, his face, as he wrote in his diary, “badly cut by the sun and wind on the Col,” his lips so “cracked to bits” that he found it agonizing to eat. Mallory, though exhausted, was content. There would be a third attempt by him with oxygen, as originally planned. With him—again, as originally intended—would be Irvine. He had no more confidence in Odell than he did in Hazard or Beetham. “None of these three,” he had confided in his last letter to Ruth, “has any real guts.” This was both unfair and untrue, but it certainly indicates that Mallory never wavered in his choice of Irvine for his last climb.

  NORTON AND SOMERVELL, meanwhile, had continued up the mountain, reaching Camp V just after 1:00 p.m. In six and a half hours they had gained 2,500 feet. If such a rate could be maintained and all obstacles overcome, they could conceivably reach the summit in another ten to twelve hours of steady climbing. With the weather at last on their side, as it seemed to be, there was every hope, and one might have expected a certain elation, given all that they had endured.

  Instead the mood was dour, muted by exhaustion. Mallory’s two tents still stood, pitched on crude stone platforms piled up in the lee of the ridge. Norton sent his two weakest men back to Camp IV, leaving him four to cram into a single tent. Norbu Yishé he compared to an old soldier: undependable in daily life but a rock in a crisis, when things mattered. Llakpa Chédé was outwardly a small man, quiet and diffident, whose discretion veiled a fierce inner strength. He was, Norton wrote, “a brilliant man on a mountain.” Semchumbi was a rogue, a cadger around the officers’ mess, dismissed by Bruce but recognized by Norton as a force to be reckoned with in battle. Lobsang Tashi was a “simple good natured giant from the eastern borders of Tibet,” which actually meant he was Khampa, a people who to this day fight fiercely for their freedom and independence.

  They stood about in the late afternoon light, shuffling and stamping in the cold, not yet ready to surrender to their tents, where there would be neither warmth nor sleep. Norton and Somervell struggled to prepare dinner. The “most hateful part of the process,” Norton later wrote, “is that some of the resultant mess must be eaten, and this is only achieved by will power; there is but little desire to eat—sometimes indeed a sense of nausea at the bare idea—though of drink one cannot have enough.” In the end they went to bed with only pemmican, bully beef, coffee, and biscuits in their bellies.

  Norton and Somervell lay in the upper tent, cold and damp, unable to sleep. The Sherpas squeezed together down below. As the early midnight hours waned, the wind suddenly revealed its power. Nothing else could account for the stones that rained down, slashing the canvas, slicing open Semchumbi’s knee, cracking Lobsang’s skull, leaving pools of blood that by dawn froze all along the bottom of their tent. Unaware of their suffering, Norton stumbled out into the morning cold and took measure of his men. He found them, he recalled, “packed like sardines” in their tent. Then he saw the blood, and immediately knew that Lobsang was finished. Semchumbi was half lame. He tried to rally the other two, Norbu and Llakpa, with promises that if the summit was achieved, their names would be inscribed for all time in a book of gold.

  This meant nothing to them, but honor did. Three, including the wounded Semchumbi, were ready to continue. Each was given a twenty-pound pack. The five men left Camp V at 9:00 a.m. and walked until 1:30 p.m., reaching 26,800 feet. Somervell stayed by the wounded Semchumbi the entire day, coaxing him aloft, just as he had lifted the lives of so many in the war. Shortly after midday they passed the highest point they had reached with Mallory in 1922. At 2:30 p.m. the porters went down, all of them, including Semchumbi; they had 4,000 feet to descend to the North Col before dark.

  As the sun fell on the evening of Tuesday, June 3, Somervell and Norton were alone at what they grandly called Camp VI. Far below they could see their old camp from 1922, and they wondered how they had managed to reach so much higher. They gazed as if from another dimension at a sunset that, Somervell later wrote, was seen “all over the world, with all the mountains black against a red sky.” They would sleep that night at an elevation where no man had reached without oxygen. Only Finch and Bruce in 1922 had managed to climb as high. They went to their tents content and optimistic. “With a clear day ahead of us,” Norton wrote, “and given favourable conditions, what might we not achieve!”

  Norton rested well, failing to waken even as the cork of one of his two thermos flasks popped off, soaking his bedding with the hot tea he had intended to carry with him o
n their summit bid. This caused a delay in the morning, as they waited to melt snow for drinking water. The sky was bright, the air bitterly cold. They were off at 6:40 a.m., just two men, moving light, as Norton wrote: “cardigans, a thermos flask of coffee and a vest-pocket Kodak; nothing else save ice axes and a short rope.”

  The day was fine and nearly without wind, a “perfect day for our task,” Norton observed. Rather than continue directly up the shoulder to its junction with Northeast Ridge, Norton and Somervell stayed well below the skyline, climbing on the diagonal toward the Yellow Band, which they reached in an hour. Their pace was dreadfully slow: twenty steps followed by a pause, as if moving across the bottom of a sea with all the weight of the ocean on their back. Five minutes of agony, then a minute or two of rest. Norton shook so violently from the cold he thought he was suffering from an attack of malaria. He took his pulse and found it to be 64, 20 beats above his norm. He stumbled dangerously as he moved across the sandstone slabs and broad ledges, all bare of snow. His goggles impeded his sight. He removed them, a critical mistake.

  After six hours they approached their immediate goal: a broad couloir, a gully that cleft the entire face of the mountain, running from the Rongbuk Glacier far below all the way to the base of the summit pyramid. From the start Norton’s plan had been to avoid the Northeast Ridge, the skyline with its impossible winds and unknown obstacles. He had an uncanny eye for mountain approaches, intuitions honed by his very first outings with his grandfather in the Alps. A band of rock guarded the final pyramid of Everest, encircling its base. Where the cliff met the skyline of the Northeast Ridge, it formed a formidable escarpment, what Norton and the men of 1922 had identified as the First Step. Beyond this on the same ridge was another even more challenging barrier, dubbed by the men the Second Step. From a distance it was impossible to ascertain the severity of either pitch. Which is precisely why Norton, not by nature a ridge walker, had chosen to go along the side of the hill, aiming to hit the couloir, with the hope that it might be ascended. This would leave him and Somervell above the last of the obstacles of the Northeast Ridge, spat out at the foot of the final pyramid, which even from a distance was transparently a go.

  It was noon. They were but a thousand feet below and a quarter of a mile in distance from the summit of the world. In the Lake District these figures might have implied an hour of easy climbing. At 28,000 feet on Everest, such distances invoked infinity.

  Somervell’s body was the first to fail. During the rescue of the porters at Camp IV, he had strained every fiber of his being; his throat was burnt raw from the effort, seared by frost. Now he found it increasingly difficult to breathe. He sat down on a stone in shelter from the sun, and urged Norton to go on alone.

  With a nod Norton continued, following the upper edge of the Yellow Band until it met a pronounced buttress, geologically the same strip of rock that erupted on the Northeast Ridge as the Second Step. He dropped down until he found a cut that led through to the gully itself, the great couloir that in time would bear his name. This was the opening to the summit. The exposures were desperate. A simple slip like any one of the many they had endured would mean disaster, a violent glissade into the void of the glacier many thousands of feet below. The footing was terrible, the deep snow impossible. The Yellow Band had been manageable, a “whole face composed of slabs like tiles on a roof and all sloped at much the same angle as tiles,” he noted. But the couloir was ice lightning, with not a handhold or any chance of a reprieve, most especially for a blind man.

  And that was precisely what Norton was becoming with every step, each moment. He’d first sensed trouble as low as 27,500 feet, long before he reached the couloir; his eyes dripped fluid, which froze upon his cheeks. By 28,000 feet he was seeing double. Still he moved into the couloir, even as the going got steadily worse. The snow reached to his waist; it was too soft to cut steps. He stepped, he recalled, half blind from “tile to tile, as it were, each tile sloping smoothly and steeply downward; I began to feel that I was too much dependent on the mere friction of a boot nail on the slabs. It was not exactly difficult going, but it was a dangerous place for a single, unroped climber, as one slip would have sent me in all probability to the bottom of the mountain.”

  In another hour he gained but 100 feet in elevation, perhaps in distance 300 yards. “The strain of climbing so carefully was beginning to tell and I was getting exhausted,” he later wrote. “In addition my eye trouble was getting worse and was by now a severe handicap. I had perhaps 200 feet more of this nasty going to surmount before I emerged on the north face of the final pyramid and, I believe, safety and an easy route to the summit. It was now 1 p.m. and a brief calculation showed that I had no chance of climbing the remaining 800 or 900 feet if I was to return in safety.”

  Snow-blind, suffering from double vision, which was madly disorienting and excruciatingly painful, he went on until he could do no more, turning back finally at 28,126 feet, less than 1,000 feet from the summit. Then things became dangerous. His nerves cracked from exhaustion. In one moment he had been fearlessly pressing on, climbing in waist-deep snow up a chute that exposed him to death with every step. Then the instant he gave up the chase, a world of fear and intimidation closed in on him. Merely to turn about was a daunting challenge. He came to a patch of snow—a trivial impediment given what he had faced all day—but in the moment he froze and desperately called out to Somervell for help. Somervell rose quickly to the call, offering a rope and a belay. A moment later, with Norton once again at ease, Somervell accidentally dropped his ice ax, and they both watched in horror as it careened off the mountain, end over end, dropping several thousand feet into the void. Norton followed the clinging and clanging as the steel struck rock all the way down. He felt Somervell tie a rope to his waist.

  They stumbled down to Camp VI, pausing only long enough to anchor the tents with stones and salvage a tent pole for Somervell to use in place of his ice ax. He brought up the rear, knowing that Norton was slipping into the realm of the blind. At Camp V they foolishly unroped. The ground was easy; sunset was unfolding, and all seemed well with the world. Norton unexpectedly left Somervell behind, slipping off the ridge in a series of bold glissades. He was soon so far ahead that he assumed his companion had stopped deliberately, perhaps to sketch or take pictures, as was his habit. In fact, Somervell was fighting for his life. Somervell later wrote, “I sat in the snow to die whilst Norton walked on, little knowing that his companion was awaiting the end a few yards behind him.”

  All day and indeed for several days he had been troubled by a burning sensation in his throat, which made both eating and speaking impossibly painful. While Norton walked ahead, Somervell had suddenly collapsed, quite unable to breathe. A coughing fit on the way down the mountain, not unlike the many he had endured over the past week, had dislodged the mucous lining of his larynx. Frostbite had scorched all of his airways, leaving every surface raw. “I made one or two attempts to breathe but nothing happened. Finally I pressed my chest with both hands, gave one last almighty push and the obstruction came up. What a relief! Coughing up a little blood I once more breathed really freely—more freely than I had done in some days.” Though still suffering intense pain, Somervell was able to increase his pace and finally catch up with Norton.

  It was small relief, for darkness was coming on and they were nowhere near the safety of Camp IV. Odell and Mallory, who had returned to Camp IV, spotted torch lights on the mountain just after 8:00 p.m., but it was another hour and a half before Norton and Somervell reached the base of the Northeast Shoulder and the broad surface of the col. They shouted for help, but as Norton later recalled, “My own throat and voice were in none too good a case, and my feeble wail seemed to be swallowed up in the dim white expanse below glimmering in the starlight.” They might both have readily died. They had been exposed to the wind and the agony of the heights for more than fifteen hours, with nothing to eat and precious little to drink. Out of the darkness of the col emerged two shadow
y figures, Mallory and Odell, saviors save for one thing: they brought to the rescue not soup and hot tea but bottles of oxygen. Norton erupted in rage, the only time during the entire expedition when he lost his military discipline and composure. “We were parched and famished with thirst,” he later wrote, still furious in recollection. “I remember shouting again and again, ‘We don’t want the damn oxygen we want drink.’ ”

  ON JUNE 3, even as Norton and Somervell moved up with their porters to Camp VI, Hingston arrived at Camp III, astonished to find Mallory and Bruce there and not somewhere higher up the mountain. Odell and Hazard, in support at the North Col, that same day decided to climb to Camp V, both to resupply it and simply to pass the time. Hazard wanted to stretch his legs; Odell, to study the geology of the mountain. After feeble beginnings, both had acclimatized unexpectedly well, and with little effort they scrambled to heights that only two years before had been considered by science beyond reach of any human without supplemental oxygen. At Camp III, meanwhile, Mallory brooded, concerned about Irvine, who’d awoken that morning in agony. “A most unpleasant night,” he noted, “when everything on earth seemed to rub against my face … which made me nearly scream in pain.”

  The following morning, Wednesday, June 4, shortly after breakfast a porter arrived from the North Col, bringing word that Norton and Somervell had reached 27,000 feet the previous afternoon, poised for a summit attempt. From his perch above Camp III John Noel trained his telephoto lens on the summit. Everyone stirred, the entire camp expectant and hopeful. “This is great progress,” Hingston wrote, “and must have been a splendid achievement. If they are not completely exhausted, they may have a chance today of climbing the remaining 2,000 feet. But our field glasses and telescopes could detect nothing. Noel has had his camera trained all day on the peak. This, however, does not mean that they have been unsuccessful. It is extraordinarily difficult to pick up people at such a distance against a background of rock.”