by Wade Davis
By midday on June 4, Mallory could no longer bear the uncertainty and tension. Hazard that morning had inexplicably abandoned his post and returned to Camp III, leaving Odell alone in support at Camp IV. Concerned about the plight of Norton and Somervell, and desperately keen to position himself for a third attempt, Mallory, with Irvine, set out shortly after lunch for the North Col. Climbing with oxygen, they reached Camp IV in less than three hours, arriving at 5:10 p.m. feeling, in Mallory’s words, “very surprisingly fresh.”
Odell, at Camp IV with two Sherpa companions, Nema and Dasno, had spent the afternoon glassing the upper slopes, watching to no avail for Norton and Somervell. “I hope they’ve got to the top,” Irvine wrote that evening, “but by God, I’d like to have a whack at it myself.” After dark Mallory and Odell moved up the col with electric torches, hoping to draw the attention of Norton and Somervell. Irvine remained behind, preparing food and tea. The second team finally stumbled into camp at 9:30 p.m., supported by Mallory and Odell.
That night Mallory and Norton shared a tent, and Mallory laid out the rationale for a third attempt. It was the first Norton had heard of the plan. “I entirely agreed with this decision,” he later wrote, “and was full of admiration for the indomitable spirit of the man, determined, in spite of his already excessive exertions, not to admit defeat while any chance remained, and I must admit—such was his will power and nervous energy—he still seemed entirely adequate for the task.” Noble words, to be sure, but composed long after the fact.
Norton, at the moment, was utterly spent. He questioned Mallory’s choice of Irvine, but it was a pointless query, for the die was cast. Mallory was not concerned about mountaineering experience; he needed someone with limitless strength who could manage the oxygen apparatus, upon which the entire venture depended. Norton was in no condition to argue. As he dozed off, his body aching with cold and fatigue, he was startled awake by a sharp agonizing pain in his eyes. He could not see. By morning, after a sleepless night, he was totally blind from the sun; he would not fully recover his sight for three days. At this most critical of junctures, the expedition had no leader. Mallory had taken over. “It was not time to think of altering existing arrangements,” Norton later acknowledged, “especially as Mallory was leader of the climbing party and organizing his own show, while I was a blind crock.”
On Thursday, June 5, the weather remained clear. Unbeknownst to the men at Camp IV, it was the onset of the ten days of fair skies that typically precede the monsoon. The previous day a telegram forwarded by runner had reached Geoffrey Bruce at Camp III: “Monsoon has appeared on Malabar Coast but extension into Bengal likely to be later than usual.” All of their concerns had been for naught. There had been no need to abandon their carefully crafted plans, no need for Norton’s mad dash at the mountain, no need to abandon oxygen as an option.
Somervell, exhausted and sleepless, headed down for Camp III. Norton was so severely snow-blinded that he could not be moved; they piled sleeping bags over his tent to keep out the light. Occasionally he poked his head out of his tent to say something to the porters; of the English at Camp IV, he alone could speak their language. But mostly he hid away in the dark, the long length of his narrow body curled up in pain. Irvine reported that the temperature in the sun that day soared to 120 degrees, though the air in the shadows remained below freezing. “My face a perfect agony,” read the last lines of his last journal entry. “Have prepared two oxygen apparatus for our start tomorrow morning.” With a prearranged signal—blankets placed out in the snow—Odell sent a message to Camp III that brought up Hazard to replace Irvine in reserve.
The morning of Friday, June 6, dawned clear. Hazard and Odell made the climbers a breakfast of fried sardines, biscuits, chocolate, and tea. Mallory did not overdress: cotton and silk underwear, a flannel shirt, a brown long-sleeved pullover, and a woolen waistcoat that had been a gift from his wife. For the wind he wore a gabardine Shackleton jacket. He had two pairs of goggles, a fur-lined helmet, woolen mittens, and a scarf. Crammed into the pockets of his jacket and in two pouches worn around his neck were several miscellaneous small items: nail scissors and a penknife, a box of Swan Vesta matches, extra laces and straps, a tube of petroleum jelly, and two handkerchiefs, one burgundy, green, and blue, the other red, blue, and yellow, each monogrammed GLM. He had a list of supplies, scratched out on a bit of paper, and three letters. One was from his brother, Trafford, in London, dated April 2. A second had come from Mary, his sister in Colombo, written on April 12. The third was from a woman he had met in New York, Stella Cobden-Sanderson. No scandal here: he had often mentioned her to his wife, and the contents of the letter were frivolous, innocent gossip, nothing romantic or significant. On the back of the envelope he had written information about the pressure levels of the oxygen cylinders, which is the only reason he carried her letter with him on the fateful day.
Sandy Irvine wore similar gear, but with breeches and puttees beneath his Shackleton jacket. He had a felt hat, which he pulled down low over his face for protection from the sun. They had eight porters, each carrying twenty-five-pound loads: sleeping bags, meta fuel to melt snow, and several spare gas cylinders. For food they packed lightly, high-energy snacks mostly: chocolate, ginger nuts, macaroni, sliced ham and tongue, Kendal mint cakes, and tea. Mallory and Irvine each carried an apparatus, but because of a shortage of gas cylinders, they planned not to use oxygen until they reached Camp VI, which meant they would climb for two days encumbered by twenty-five pounds of deadweight on their backs.
Norton, still in pain and unable to see, waved them off from the flap of his tent. He recalled the time as 7:30 a.m. Odell wrote in his diary that they set out more than an hour later, at 8:40 a.m. “The party moved off in silence,” Odell recalled, “as we bid them adieu and they were soon lost to view.” Norton felt decidedly uneasy.
Hingston arrived an hour later, up from Camp III with two porters, Nema Tundrup and Chutin. He “bathed Norton’s eyes” and with the help of Hazard, at least as far as the ice chimney, escorted the blind invalid away from the white glare of the shelf and down the face of the North Col. Norton could walk, but he could not see a single footstep. Hingston, by reputation no mountaineer, stayed by his side the entire descent, 1,500 feet of ice and snow, guiding his companion’s feet to every rung of Irvine’s rope ladder, placing each of his crampons one at a time into steps cut into the snow. At the base of the col, six porters met them with a one-man carrier. The going was rough, “boulders, ice and frozen scree,” and it took them until 5:00 p.m. to sling the expedition leader down the moraine to the safety of Camp III, where John Noel and Geoffrey Bruce waited anxiously. Norton shared with them his hopes for Mallory and Irvine; however desperate the attempt, there was not a man among them who anticipated disaster.
“We said good-bye to Mallory and Irvine,” Norton later wrote. “My last impression of my friends was a handshake and a word of blessing, for it was only in my imagination that I could see the little party winding its way amid the snow humps and ice crevasses leading to the Col.”
The following morning, Norton’s sight began to improve, though he would remain in pain for another two days. He elected to stay with Bruce, Hingston, and Noel at Camp III while awaiting the outcome of the final climb. “During the next four days,” he wrote, “we were to pass through every successive stage of suspense and anxiety from high hope to hopelessness, and the memory of them is such that Camp III must remain to all of us the most hateful place in the world.”
. . .
MALLORY AND IRVINE evidently made good progress on the first day of their climb; at 5:00 p.m. that evening, four of their eight porters returned from Camp V to the North Col with a note for Odell: “There is no wind here, and things look hopeful.” The following day, Friday, June 7, was the calm before the storm. In the absence of further news, Hingston enjoyed a quiet day at Camp III, content that their ordeal on Everest would soon be over. “Personally I have not much hope of their success,” he wrot
e, “unless the oxygen is of greater value than we expect. This will be the last of the attempts. Already arrangements are on hand for the evacuation of the camps. The monsoon will be on us any time. The party is exhausted by fatigue and exposure. Within a week we should all be off the mountain. And no one will regret it. All have had a grueling this year and need a rest at lower elevations.”
John Noel carried his cameras to the North Col, along with instructions from Norton as to the blanket signals to use to communicate success or failure on the mountain. He returned that afternoon at 5:30 to Camp III. Odell, meanwhile, with Sherpa Nema, one of two fit porters at hand, left the col and climbed up the Northeast Shoulder to Camp V, again in support for Mallory and Irvine, who that day had pressed on to Camp VI. Odell and Nema reached Camp V, soon to be joined by the last four of Mallory’s porters heading back down to the North Col. They lingered only long enough to give Odell two additional notes from Mallory, one addressed to him and a second to John Noel.
“Dear Odell,” began the first, “We’re awfully sorry to have left things in such a mess—our Unna cooker rolled down the slope at the last moment. Be sure of getting back to IV tomorrow in time to evacuate before dark, as I hope to. In the tent I must have left a compass—for the Lord’s sake rescue it: we are here without. To here on 90 atmospheres for the two days—so we’ll probably go on two cylinders—but it’s a bloody load for climbing. Perfect weather for the job! Yours ever, George Mallory.”
The note for Noel was far more significant. It read: “Dear Noel, We’ll probably start early tomorrow (8th) in order to have clear weather. It won’t be too early to start looking out for us either crossing the rock band under the pyramid or going up the skyline at 8.0 p.m. Yours G Mallory.” The reference to a start time of 8:00 p.m. was an obvious mistake; Odell knew to watch for them in the morning. The rock band was not the Yellow Band, which Norton and Somervell had traversed; it referred to a dark rim of rock at the very base of the summit pyramid. Mallory left no doubt that he intended to follow the Northeast Ridge, despite the impediments of the First and Second Steps. He was by nature a ridge walker, and a climber not easily intimidated by cliffs of rock, even at 28,000 feet. From the elevation and location of Camp VI, Odell surmised, it might well be possible to attain the skyline in two hours.
Odell sent the ailing Nema down the mountain with the others—they would descend 6,000 feet in a day—and settled in to spend the night at Camp V. As Mallory’s note had indicated, there was no stove at Camp V. Odell could neither heat food nor melt snow for water, and yet he was quite comfortable and utterly content. “Wonderful time alone at V,” he enthused in his diary. He ate a dinner of jam, macaroni, and tomatoes, and then lay back to enjoy the “most gorgeous cloud effects” of the night sky. The weather was hopeful, the view spectacular. “Westward,” he wrote, “there was a savage, wild jumble of peaks, culminating in Cho Uyo [sic] bathed in pinks and yellows of most exquisite tints. Right opposite were the gaunt cliffs of Everest, the north peak, intercepting a portion of the wide northern horizon, of a brilliant opalescence, which threw into prominence the outline of a mighty peak far away in Central Tibet. Eastward floating in the thin air, the snowy top of Kangchenjunga appeared and at last the beautifully varied outlying Gyangkar range. Sunset and after at that altitude were a transcendent experience never to be forgotten.”
Thus on the eve of the last climb, the men were spread the length of the high camps: Shebbeare was, as always, stationed in logistical support at Camp II; Norton, Bruce, John Noel, and Hingston were at Camp III; Hazard was alone on the North Col at Camp IV, Odell was up the Northeast Shoulder at Camp V; and Mallory and Irvine slept somewhere close to 27,000 feet at their Camp VI.
That night Irvine must have asked Mallory to do a final check on the pressure levels of their oxygen cylinders; Mallory sketched the notations on the back of the envelope of the letter from Stella Cobden-Sanderson. Four were up to 110, a fifth just at 100. They clearly aimed for an early departure on the following morning; Mallory’s note to Noel anticipated getting to the skyline or even reaching the rock band at the base of the summit pyramid by 8:00 a.m. This would imply breaking camp as early as 6:00 a.m., possible but unlikely at 27,000 feet. As always with Mallory, there would have been a certain amount of chaos. He had left behind his compass at Camp V. At Camp VI it would be his torch—an extraordinary oversight given his experience in 1922 when he, Norton, Morshead, and Somervell had very nearly perished stumbling down the mountain in the dark. Had it been anyone other than Mallory, such a blunder would have been highly worrisome, indicative perhaps of a loss of mental focus at elevation. But for him it was just typical behavior, suggestive only of his absentmindedness and impatience to get on the move.
Leaving camp, Mallory and Irvine would have donned masks and communicated in hand signals. The oxygen mask would have painfully irritated Sandy’s face. Their route would have carried them on a long diagonal ascent to just below the crest of the Northeast Ridge; at 27,760 feet they rested and dropped a gas cylinder. From this point they could have traversed to follow Norton’s route up the couloir or continued up to the ridge. Mallory naturally chose the skyline.
To reach the Northeast Ridge from Camp VI, Mallory and Irvine would have moved up and through angled sandstone slabs on a slow ascending traverse that would have brought them to the top of the Yellow Band and left them on the ridge at the foot of a distinctive face of darker rock, which itself was the base of a higher strata of black stone, much steeper than the Yellow Band, that ran across the North Face. Beyond this tower, the First Step, the Northeast Ridge continues upward until challenged by the Second Step, an even more formidable barrier, a vertical cliff 100 feet high. Once these hazards are overcome, the way to the summit is free and open, with no serious obstacles, save exhaustion, elevation, and exposure.
ODELL HAD SLEPT WELL at Camp V. He woke at 6:00 a.m. and was off two hours later up the mountain, carrying a light pack—mostly food and drink for Mallory and Irvine, but no oxygen. The dawn had been clear, but as he rose up the Northeast Shoulder, mist rolled in from the west. The sky beyond was luminous, leaving him hopeful that the summit remained free of clouds. He assumed that Mallory and Irvine were well on their way, perhaps even climbing the final pyramid. If so, it implied they had found a way up or around the two daunting impediments that had intimidated Norton and kept him and Somervell away from the skyline.
Supremely confident in Irvine’s strength and endurance and Mallory’s ability as a rock climber, Odell lingered in support, in no particular hurry to go anywhere. Feeling wonderfully fit despite his many days at altitude, he left the Northeast Shoulder and drifted across the North Face, examining the geology of the mountain, the great “variety of gneisses,” as he reported, “highly altered limestones and igneous intrusions of light granitoid rocks.” At nearly 26,000 feet he came upon a small crag perhaps a hundred feet high, easily avoided but nevertheless tempting—a chance, he thought, to test his conditioning. Just as he reached the top, the sky lifted, the mist dissipated, and he had an unexpected glimpse of the Northeast Ridge. What he saw, or claimed to see, would be challenged for the rest of his life, to a point of such madness that he himself in time would equivocate, qualify, and reimagine the vision that unfolded before his eyes.
In his diary, there is no indication of doubt: “At 12:50 saw M & I on ridge nearing base of final pyramid.” Writing only days later in a formal dispatch from the mountain, again with the clarity of immediate and unimpeded memory, Odell reported, “There was a sudden clearing of the atmosphere, and the entire summit ridge and final peak of Everest were unveiled. My eyes became fixed on one tiny black spot silhouetted on a small snow crest beneath a rock step in the ridge; the black spot moved. Another black spot became apparent and moved up the snow to join the other on the crest. The first then approached the great rock step and shortly emerged on top; the second did likewise. Then the whole fascinating vision vanished, enveloped in cloud once more.
“There
was but one explanation.” Odell continued. “It was Mallory and his companion moving, as I could see even at that great distance, with considerable alacrity, realizing doubtless that they had none too many hours of daylight to reach the summit from their present position and return to Camp VI by nightfall. The place on the ridge referred to is the prominent rock step at a very short distance from the base of the final pyramid, and it is remarkable that they were so late in reaching this place. According to Mallory’s schedule, they should have reached it several hours earlier if they had started from the high camp as anticipated.”
Odell dropped off his isolated rocky crag, elated yet still confused. Clearly, according to his ocular testimony, what he saw and believed in the moment was that Mallory and Irvine had reached the top of the Second Step and were still moving upward on the mountain. They were unexpectedly, even dangerously, behind schedule. What might have held them back was anyone’s guess. But if they were indeed beyond the Second Step, as Odell reported, though the hour was late, they would still have had time to reach the summit, assuming they could gain roughly 650 feet in elevation in the remaining hours of daylight.
Coming down would be another matter, and that was the immediate concern that propelled Odell farther up the mountain. The weather had closed in with a vengeance, a drop of pressure so sudden as to squeeze the breath out of stones. Odell climbed into the teeth of a squall that became ever more violent the higher he went. After an hour he managed to find Mallory and Irvine’s highest camp, Camp VI, even as the visibility dropped to nil. He entered their tent, searching for a sign, a note or clue that might indicate Mallory’s intentions or suggest why they had been so slow getting off in the morning. He found only some food and an oxygen cylinder. Perhaps, he thought, they had used gas to sleep; otherwise the equipment would have been left outside the tent. Discarded parts of a regulator scattered haphazardly about the floor suggested a repair; possibly Irvine had brought the apparatus into the tent to make adjustments, again delaying their advance.