by Wade Davis
The wind pounded the canvas; the flaps beat like gunfire. He waited an hour. Then, fearing that Mallory and Irvine might be unable to find their camp, Odell went back into the storm and climbed another 200 feet up toward the ridge. He cried out and yodeled, but the driving sleet swept away his voice. He took shelter behind a rock and waited. After another hour, he had no choice but to retreat. It was now late afternoon. Just as he reached the tent, the wind abated. The squall passed, and in the wake of the storm a golden light swept the entire upper face of Everest. He scanned the summit ridge, the dark face and the Yellow Band below. All he could see was freshly fallen snow evaporating before his eyes, a gossamer veil rising off the body of the mountain.
Odell faced an agonizing decision. His every climber’s instinct urged him to stay, ready to help the men upon their return. If only he had carried with him a small tent; he readily could have managed the ten-pound weight. But now he had no option but to abandon their camp. There was no room in a small Meade for three men. The thought that Mallory and Irvine might not return was too terrible to contemplate; Odell did not even consider the possibility.
At 4:30 p.m., having placed Mallory’s compass conspicuously in a corner of the tent, he closed the flaps and made his way down the crest of the ridge. Frequently, upon his descent, he glanced back in bright sun without once seeing a hint of a man following behind. Reaching Camp V at 6:15 p.m., he could find no reason to linger. There was no food or fuel, no stove. He hurried off the mountain in a series of glissades that brought him in thirty minutes all the way to the North Col.
At Camp IV Hazard waited with tea and hot soup. Odell, famished and parched, shared only good news. The weather had come and gone, and there had been delays, but he was convinced that Mallory and Irvine had made the top and would soon be seen coming down triumphantly to Camp VI. He and Hazard stayed up throughout the night, keeping watch, straining their eyes for a sign—the light of a torch, a candle, one of the magnesium flares that each climber normally carried. “The feeble glow that after sunset pervaded the great dark mountain face above us was later lost in filtered moonlight reflected from the high summits of the West Rongbuk,” Odell wrote. Perhaps, he thought, the moonlight would help them, if by chance some unforeseen event had occurred.
ON THE MORNING of June 8, the day of Mallory and Irvine’s last ascent, John Noel sat on a promontory just above Camp III, his long telephoto lens focused on the summit pyramid three miles away, as Mallory’s note had instructed. Eight o’clock came and went without a sign. By 10:00 a.m. clouds and mist had rolled over the mountain, enshrouding the Northeast Ridge and obscuring all but a faint luminous shadow of the summit itself. By noon it was hopeless. Noel, stiff with cold, crawled out of his eagle’s nest, as he called his favorite perch, and made his way back to Camp III. In the mess tent he found Norton dictating a dispatch for the Times to Geoffrey Bruce. At Norton’s request Somervell later added a personal note: “We now await news of Mallory and Irvine who today are making another attempt hoping that they may reinforce the feeble summit air by artificially provided oxygen, and by that means be enabled to conquer the chief difficulty of reaching the summit. May the Genie of the Steel Bottle aid them! All of us are hoping that he may, for nobody deserves the summit more than Mallory, the only one of our number who has been at it for three years.”
These were generous words, and hardly the sentiments of one concerned for the plight of a close friend. Outwardly, the men at Camp III remained sanguine; few dared contemplate disaster. “Eyes glued to the mountain,” Hingston wrote. “There is just a chance of Mallory and Irvine getting to the summit. But the clouds today have been very thick. Only on occasions and for momentary intervals do we happen to see the final pyramid through the mist. We have, therefore, seen nothing of the climb and can only hope for the best. There is no sign of their having returned as yet to Camp IV. Whatever happens this must be the last attempt and in a few days we shall be leaving these high camps.”
Norton was the exception. Throughout the day, as John Noel recalled, the expedition leader “paced backwards and forwards in front of his tent, speaking little, visibly affected and I think already resigned to the worst.” At midday Norton ordered Hingston to ready all medical supplies and be prepared to launch a relief effort to the col. He dictated a furious reprimand for Hazard, still at Camp IV. “I am writing this for Norton,” Bruce wrote, “whose eyes are still bad. He cannot understand why you sent down all except one man yesterday evening, as it is hard to see what good you can be with one man if there is trouble up the mountain. You are to keep these two men and the one you already have with you until the last Sahib is off the mountain; as in the case of snowblindness, frostbite, broken leg etc. it takes at least 3 men to get a casualty off the N. Col. Re: Evacuation. Not one single stitch of anything need be brought down from Camp IV. The whole thing is to get away safe and quick.”
By the morning of Monday, June 9, there had been no sign of either Mallory or Irvine since Odell’s fleeting glimpse at 12:50 p.m. the previous day. The only hope was that somehow they had slipped back unseen to Camp VI; the chances of surviving a bivouac higher on the mountain were slim to nil. At 11:00 a.m. Norton dispatched a second note to the North Col, addressed to Odell, saying, “The absence of a signal from you spells disaster I fear.” He instructed Odell to keep watch on the mountain, most especially the Northeast Ridge up to Camp VI, throughout the day, posting a sentry for two hours after dark. No one, he stressed, should climb toward the rescue unless fully capable of returning to Camp IV the same day. Odell was to remain in support until 4:00 p.m. the following day. “I send you this principally to give you a definite time limit,” he wrote, “and for you to clearly understand that the guiding principle must be not to risk a single other life English or Tibetan on the remote chance of retrieving the inevitable. You are the man on the spot and within these limits must use your own discretion. Your position is a most trying one old boy and I fully sympathize with you. Excuse writing as my thumb is frostbitten.”
Noel, meanwhile, had erected his telescope in the middle of camp, with men posted in shifts to scan the upper slopes during every daylight moment. No sooner had the porter carrying Norton’s second note reached the base of the North Col than three figures were spotted above Camp IV, heading up the mountain.
Odell and Hazard had been up since before first light, glassing the summit approaches with Irvine’s binoculars. They’d begun to fear the worst. They’d improvised a series of signals: a code of flashes if by night, a spread of sleeping bags by day. Without awaiting instructions from Norton, Odell and two porters, Nima Tundrup and Mingma, had headed up for Camp V at 12:10 p.m., arriving at 3:25 p.m., an extraordinary rate of climb of 600 feet an hour. The camp was precisely as Odell had left it. Everything now depended on what would come with the dawn. “Nothing further of Mallory and Irvine,” Odell scratched in his diary. “One’s sole hopes rested,” he later wrote, “on Camp VI though in the absence of any signal from here earlier in the day, the prospects could not but be black.”
Hingston described the tension that night at Camp III: “A most anxious day. Not a sign of Mallory and Irvine. At the latest they should have been at Camp IV this morning, but there is no trace of them as yet. The condition of the mountain has changed for the worse. For most of the day it has been in cloud with every indication of a bitter wind. Everything points to a fatality, which would be a disastrous ending to the affair. Norton is of the same opinion. He has sent instructions to Odell on the North Col to do what is possible in the way of a search. But he is loath to involve more people in the mountain especially as there is indication of the approach of the monsoon.”
Norton, Bruce, Hingston, and Noel huddled near the Whymper tent that served as their mess. Noel wrote, “Now and then we called over to the watchers on the telescope, ‘Kutch Dekta?’ Do you see anything? The men turned and shook their heads each time: Kutch Nahin, Sahib. Nothing at all, Sir. Two whole days and nights had now gone, with hope fad
ing at every hour.” That afternoon Shebbeare arrived from Camp II with a team of Sherpas, ready to begin the evacuation of the mountain.
At Camp V the weather closed in. “The cold was intense,” Odell recalled, “aggravated by high wind.” Though inside a tent, fully dressed, dry, and covered in two sleeping bags, he shivered through a miserable night, too chilled to sleep. He shuddered to think of men alone, exposed to the elements. By morning, Nima and Mingma were useless; he sent them down to Camp IV with a note for Hazard, indicating that he would proceed up to Camp VI, returning to the North Col by dark. He reached the higher camp shortly after 11:00 a.m. and, to his despair, found it precisely as he had left it: strewn with a small assortment of provisions, bits and pieces of the oxygen apparatus, a single cylinder, and, in the corner, Mallory’s compass, just where he had placed it. Some part of him knew his companions were gone, but he pushed farther up the mountain and waited for two hours, his shouts echoing off the stones.
“The upper part of Everest,” he later reflected, “must be indeed the remotest and least hospitable place on earth, but at no time more emphatically and impressively so than when a darkened atmosphere hides its features and a gale races over its cruel face. And how and when more cruel could it ever seem than when balking one’s every step to find one’s friends. After struggling on for nearly two hours looking in vain for some indication or clue, I realized that the chances of finding the missing ones were indeed small on such a vast expanse of crags and broken slabs and that for any more extensive search toward the final pyramid a further party would have to be organized.”
Odell turned his back on the summit ridge and slowly walked back to Camp VI. “With a great effort,” he reported, “I dragged the two sleeping bags from the tent and up the precipitous rocks behind to a steep snow-patch plastered on a bluff of rocks above … It needed all my efforts to cut steps out over the steep snow slope and then fix the sleeping bags in position, so boisterous was the wind.” At 2:10 p.m., 4,000 feet below on the North Col, Hazard saw the signal, a dark T against the snow; this meant “No trace can be found, given up hope, awaiting orders.” Five minutes later Hazard relayed the message to Camp III, using six blankets in the form of a cross, placed on the surface of the snow; it was the message of death. Noel, at his telescope, spotted it first. Geoffrey Bruce asked him what he had seen. Noel could not bring himself to speak. They both looked again “and tried,” Noel recollected, “to make the signal different, but we couldn’t.” Finally they told Norton, who hesitated for ten empty and endless minutes before ordering three rows of blankets to be arranged in response: “Abandon search. Return as soon as possible.” Hazard acknowledged receipt of the order by removing the blankets he had laid in the snow. He then signaled Odell: “All right. Return.”
ODELL TOOK Mallory’s compass and the oxygen apparatus from Camp VI, proof that his young protégé Sandy Irvine had remained devoted to his mission until the last, and then closed the flaps of the tent. His final diary entry for the day reads: “No trace found. Left some provisions in tent, closed it up & came down ridge in violent wind & didn’t call at V.”
Odell later wrote of his long, mournful descent to the North Col: “I glanced up at the mighty summit above me, which ever and anon deigned to reveal its cloud-wreathed features. It seemed to look down with cold indifference on me, mere puny man, and howl derision in wind gusts at my petition to yield up its secret—this mystery of my friends. What right had we to venture thus far into the holy presence of the Supreme Goddess? If it were indeed the sacred ground of Chomolungma, had we violated it, was I now violating it?”
But then he sensed a shift:
And yet, as I gazed again another mood appeared to creep over her haunting features. There seemed to be something alluring in that towering presence. I was almost fascinated. I realized that no mere mountaineer alone could but be fascinated, that he who approaches close must ever be led on, and oblivious of all obstacles seek to reach that most sacred and highest place of all. It seemed that my friends must have been thus enchanted also; for why else should they tarry? In an effort to suppress my feelings, I turned my gaze downwards to the North Col far below, and I remembered that other of my companions would be anxiously awaiting my return eager to hear what tidings I carried. How then could I justify my wish, in face of such anxiety, to remain here the night, and prolong my search the next day? And what hope, if I did, of finding them alive? Alone and in meditation I slowly commenced my long descent.
Odell reached Camp IV safely just after 5:00 p.m., finding only Hazard and the Sherpas Nima and Mingma. The following morning, June 11, leaving behind tents and all equipment, they abandoned Camp IV, bringing down from the North Col only their exhausted selves and the personal effects of the two missing climbers. The temperature, Hazard remembered, in the sun was eighty-seven degrees Fahrenheit; the clouds were light, with high winds above, the mountain smoking all along the ridge.
Norton had ordered the immediate evacuation of Camp III. He, Bruce, and Noel had left the previous afternoon, as soon as the fate of Mallory and Irvine was certain. No one would be tempted out of sentiment to search for the bodies or launch a quixotic and dangerous rescue effort. Somervell was already down at base camp, along with Beetham. Hingston alone awaited Odell and Hazard at Camp III. As medical officer he wanted them all off the mountain. “They all badly need a rest,” Hingston wrote, “and are no longer needed at Camp III. I shall not be sorry to leave this spot. If only we abandoned it under happier conditions. Everest is a most dangerous mountain. In three expeditions it has claimed twelve victims. It is just possible that Mallory and Irvine may have climbed it. Odell last saw them at about 800 feet from the summit and going strong for the top. We are all heartily sick of the business by now. No one is fit to stay here any longer, much less to make another attempt. Everyone has lost a great deal of weight. We must get down to lower altitudes and recuperate in some green spot.”
Even as Odell and Hazard were heading down from Camp IV, Shebbeare arrived at Camp III with twenty-eight porters and orders to destroy the camp. At 1:00 p.m., carrying only essentials, the convoy headed down the East Rongbuk Glacier. “It was a fine descent,” Hingston wrote, “through the fantastic iceberg scenery, which I have already described. The porters care little for the weight of their loads since they are now on the downhill path.”
Odell’s diary entry for Thursday, June 12, but two days removed from the final acknowledgment of their loss, reads in its entirety: “Lovely a.m. Left Camp II 9:30 with Hingston and Shebbeare, glorious walk down good moraine track; had tiffin at Camp I and continued to Base Camp via upper moraine and visited stone polygons with Hingston; lovely spring alpine flowers here and there from Camp I.”
Odell’s performance had been nothing less than heroic. Since May 31, when Norton had rallied the men for a third series of attacks on the summit, the final campaign, Odell had climbed from the base of the North Col to Camp IV, at 23,000 feet, three times. From Camp IV he had gone once to Camp V (25,300 feet) and from Camp IV to Camp VI (26,800 feet) twice over four consecutive days. In twelve days he had slept only one night below 23,000 feet. For nearly a fortnight he had thus lived at elevations higher than science had believed possible. His reward, as Norton would write in a final dispatch, was to have been the last to see their friends, “going strong for the top.” He was convinced, according to Hingston, that Mallory and Irvine had reached the summit, only to die from exposure upon their return. It was pure speculation, Hingston acknowledged, but it satisfied Odell, who never wavered in his conviction that they had achieved their highest goal. They were dead, and as he walked off the mountain, there was nothing more to say, think, or feel.
At base camp, Somervell found the news hard to accept, writing, “My friend and fellow-climber, Mallory, one in spirit with me, dead? I found it difficult to believe.” There were only two possibilities, he later added: “accident or benightedment. It is terrible. But there are few better deaths than to die in high endeavor,
and Everest is the finest cenotaph in the world.”
Odell was relieved to be back at base camp, as was Hingston. “It was a luxury,” the doctor wrote on June 12, “to have a chair to sit on and a camp bed on which to sleep at night.” The following morning, Norton asked Odell to sort through the personal effects of the dead, selecting what should be returned to family in England and what left to burn. Odell’s diary entry reads, again in its entirety: “Had lovely night in camp bed and first bath in a month. Lovely day. Sorted out Mallory and Irvine’s kit most of the day. Others prepared memorial for the casualties of the three expeditions. Noel took our photos as ever.”
As Somervell and Beetham worked on the memorial, a great cairn of stones with the names of all the dead chiseled with screwdrivers into the rock, Norton busied himself with dispatches. The most urgent went out in code, by runner for the distant telegraph lines at Phari: “Obterras London—Mallory Irvine Nove Remainder Alcedo—Norton Rongbuk.” It would be wired from Phari on June 19 at 4:50 p.m. By Saturday morning, June 21, all of London would know that George Mallory had died on June 8, ten days before his thirty-eighth birthday, along with his young companion, Andrew Irvine.
At base camp Norton ordered Hingston to examine all of the survivors. Their condition was as expected. “There was no question of any further resumption of hostilities on the mountain,” Norton later wrote. “At my request Hingston examined the whole party and reported that without exception all those who had been above Camp IV had their hearts distended … he warned us that further exertions at high altitudes would be liable to cause serious and permanent disability.”