Into The Silence

by Wade Davis

  For documents, reports, and correspondence concerning the challenge of oxygen, see TNA: PRO DSIR (Department of Scientific and Industrial Research) Records Bureau Files. For Kellas on Kamet, Haldane’s experiments at Oxford, Finch’s report regarding the performance of the 1922 oxygen apparatus, and correspondence among Bruce, Farrar, and Professors Unna, Dreyer, and Hill, see: TNA: PRO DSIR 36/394 and TNA: PRO DSIR 3/254. For minutes of the Oxygen Research Committee, 1918–21, see: TNA: PRO DSIR 3/248. For additional Kellas correspondence about oxygen, see: TNA: PRO FD 1/1208.

  As a key player in 1922 and expedition leader in 1924, Teddy Norton had an extensive correspondence with the Everest Committee. See RGS Box 11, File 2; Box 26, File 3; Box 31, File 5; and Box 36, File 7. Within twelve days of the British declaration of war on August 4, 1914, Lieutenant Norton arrived in France from Ireland with the 3rd Cavalry Brigade, Royal Horse Artillery. He was awarded the Mons Star (TNA: PRO WO 329/2509) and, serving in D Battery (TNA: PRO WO 95/1133), was promoted to captain in October. On January 22, 1915, Norton was transferred to the 6th Divisional Ammunition Column (TNA: PRO WO 95/1588). In February 1915 he was mentioned in despatches and awarded the Military Cross. He joined the 53rd Battery, 2nd Brigade RFA in March (TNA: PRO WO 95/1596). Three months later he was at Ypres, assigned to the 1st Canadian Artillery Division (TNA: PRO WO 95/3740, 95/3733), Canadian Corps (TNA: PRO WO 95/1059). Mentioned for a second time in despatches in June, he served with the Canadians at the Somme, was promoted to major in September, and returned to D Battery, RHA, in February 1917 (TNA: PRO WO 95/1133). In 1917 he saw action at Arras, Loos, and Cambrai. His brother, Lieutenant Richard C. Norton, E Battery, RHA, was killed on March 23, 1918, the same month Norton was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) for “conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty” during the retreat of the Fifth Army after the German Spring Offensive. Richard, thirteen years younger than Teddy, was just twenty when he died.

  For Somervell on Tibetan music, see: “Tibetan Culture,” chapter 14 of The Assault on Mount Everest, 1922, pp. 313–318. See also: “The Mount Everest Film: Examples of Tibetan Music,” Times, January 16, 1923.

  Dzatrul Rinpoche’s autobiography is replete with references to his spiritual life and practice. In the third month of the year, for example, he offered a fire puja, fervent prayers that cast him into a dream state. A single cymbal-like sound spun into being three circles of light, the clear bliss light of his teacher, Trulshig Rinpoche, whose radiant face emerged from the void, the embodiment of loving compassion and wisdom. In the fourth month, even as the British marched on the mountain, a messenger arrived from Lhasa with sacred treasures, the long-life offerings of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, and other blessings for Dzatrul Rinpoche. In the sixth month, as was tradition, the lama entered summer retreat, giving his life over to the recitation of the Kangyur, the great canon of the Buddhist dharma. These devotions and many others are described in detail in the namthar. Of the arrival of the British climbers in 1924, there appears scarcely a word.

  11: Finch’s Triumph

  For Finch’s ongoing tussle for respect, see a book of his first published in German in 1925: George W. Rodway, ed., George Ingle Finch’s The Struggle for Everest (Ross-on-Wye: Carreg, 2008). That Wakefield and Crawford were serious about making their own attempt is evident in Wakefield’s diary entry for Friday, May 26, 1922: “Finch and Bruce return and go down to 3. Crawford and I alone plan ascent tomorrow. Wind W, sun and mist.” For the announcement of Finch and Bruce’s record climb, see: “The Mount Everest Expedition, 1922,” Geographical Journal, vol. 60, no. 1 (July 1922), pp. 67–71. For the death of the Sherpas on the North Col, see: “The Mount Everest Expedition, 1922,” Geographical Journal, vol. 60, no. 2 (August 1922), pp. 141–44. For a summary of achievements and notice of Morshead’s injuries, see: “The Mount Everest Expedition, 1922,” Geographical Journal, vol. 60, no. 3 (September 1922), p. 218.

  12: The Thread of Life

  For the first extensive set of images from the 1922 expedition, see: “Photographs from the Mount Everest Expedition,” Geographical Journal, vol. 60, no. 4 (October 1922), pp. 228–91. For the papers read at the October 16, 1922, joint meeting of the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society, see: C. G. Bruce, “The Mount Everest Expedition of 1922: I. Darjeeling to the Rongbuk Base Camp,” Geographical Journal, vol. 60, no. 6 (December 1922), pp. 385–424; George Leigh Mallory, “The Second Mt. Everest Expedition,” Alpine Journal, vol. 34, no. 225 (November 1922), pp. 425–39; and George Finch, “The Second Attempt on Mt. Everest,” Alpine Journal, vol. 34, no. 225 (November 1922), pp. 439–50. For Noel’s first film, see: “The Mount Everest Kinematograph Film,” Geographical Journal, vol. 61, no. 1 (January 1923), pp. 48–50. Throughout the fall of 1922 Finch remained committed to the Everest project, and loyal to the Everest Committee. On November 20 he addressed the technical challenges in a paper read before an afternoon meeting of the RGS. See: George I. Finch, “Equipment for High Altitude Mountaineering, with Special Reference to Climbing Mount Everest,” Geographical Journal, vol. 61, no. 3 (March 1923), pp. 194–206. Finch also made a significant contribution to the official expedition account. See: “The Attempt with Oxygen,” in C. G. Bruce, The Assault on Everest 1922 (New York: Longmans, Green, 1923), pp. 227–72. Correspondence tracking the conflict that led to his being denied a place on the 1924 expedition is found in the archives of both the Alpine Club and the RGS. For the formal announcement of the members of the 1924 expedition, see: “The Mount Everest Expedition of 1924,” Geographical Journal, vol. 63, no. 4 (April 1924), pp. 340–42. The failure in 1922 prompted a number of reassessments by leading figures in British mountaineering. See: Tom Longstaff, “Some Aspects of the Everest Problem,” Alpine Journal, vol. 35, no. 226 (May 1923), pp. 57–74, and Douglas Freshfield, “The Conquest of Everest,” Geographical Journal, vol. 63, no. 3 (March 1924), pp. 229–37. Somervell recalled that the snow at Camp III had been of a thick consistency “not previously seen in the Himalaya.” Plowing through “snow of an unpleasant texture,” it took them two hours merely to reach the base of the North Col from the upper camp. Longstaff was quite right in suggesting that the attempt ought never to have been made.

  For the adventures of William McGovern, see: To Lhasa in Disguise (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1924). Among those at Cambridge less than welcoming to Ruth Mallory was Arthur Benson. In his diary he described her as “beautiful, self-conscious, brusque and extremely inattentive. She believes herself to be a suggestive and humourous talker, but she is a thin and truculent performer.” Benson, of course, neurotic and obsessive, destined to be dead within two years, wrote unpleasant things about everyone and could be readily ignored.

  Bentley Beetham went to Barnard Castle School as a boy and remained for forty years, living out his life as a schoolmaster, with a special interest in ornithology and climbing. His books include: Among Our Banished Birds (London: Edward Arnold, 1927), The Home-Life of the Spoonbill (London: Witherby, 1910), and Photography for Bird Lovers (London: Witherby, 1911). His main contribution to the 1924 expedition was as a still photographer. He secured by far the finest images during the expedition, thus allowing Noel to concentrate on his film. For samples of his work, see: Bentley Beetham, “An Everest Portfolio,” FRCC Journal, vol. 7, no. 1 (1925), p. 69. For Beetham’s correspondence with the Everest Committee, see: RGS Box 24, File 4.

  John de Vars Hazard served with the 212th Field Company, Royal Engineers (TNA: PRO WO 95/2414), which was attached to the 33rd Division (TNA: PRO WO 95/2411). Hazard was wounded twice, most severely on May 15, 1916, on the Somme front, and again in 1918 while serving in Italy with 529th Field Company, Royal Engineers (TNA: PRO WO 95/4221). For his correspondence with the Everest Committee, see RGS Box Hazard 27, File 2. Hazard was largely responsible for the debacle that stranded porters on the North Col, leading to the rescue effort that may well have fatally weakened Mallory Somervell, and Norton on the eve of their summit attempts. But it was not completely Hazard’s fau
lt. He had been left alone in dire conditions on the North Col with porters who shivered with fear, as Geoffrey Bruce discerned, certain that the sounds they heard by night were the fierce howls and barks of watchdogs guarding the goddess’s abode. That Hazard could perform in any capacity at 23,000 feet was remarkable. As he explained in a letter to Eric Shipton, “On my part a severe war wound of the right hip had opened up for the second time since reaching the mountain, causing worry which, added to the stress at the loss of Mallory and Irvine would not have found me at my best.” Clearly a man in Hazard’s condition ought not to have been on the expedition from its inception.

  Noel Odell, the last to see Mallory and Irvine alive, is a pivotal figure in the Everest story For his correspondence with the Everest Committee, see RGS Box 30, Files 1 and 2. Additional papers, publications, and correspondence may be found at the Alpine Club Archives. See especially the Geoffrey Winthrop Young Collection, as well as Ref: C138, B74, B75 Misc. Papers, F13/1, F13/2, F13/3. Ref: D98 contains a partial copy of Odell’s 1924 Everest diary, May 25 to June 21. The complete diary begins in earnest on March 9, with his arrival in Darjeeling, and runs through September 6, the day his ship docked at Dover on his return to England.

  During the war Odell served in the 59th Field Company, Royal Engineers (TNA: PRO WO 95/1535). The Medal Card Index indicates that he first entered a theater of war in July 1916, the summer of the Somme; the unit diary records that he reached Mametz on July 27. On April 14, 1917, he was wounded at Allouagne in an accident, as his pick struck buried ordnance. Following his accident, according to Odell’s personal war diary, spanning 1915–18, he did not return to France until January 18, 1918, when he was dispatched on a training assignment. For three weeks he gave and endured lectures well behind the lines, until he returned to England on Friday, February 8, where he remained for the duration of the war.

  Odell began his military service as a subaltern. During the entire war he received but a single promotion, to first lieutenant, a rank that, given his class and education, was virtually a birthright in the British wartime army. His name does not appear among the Medal Lists, nor was he ever mentioned in despatches. He was, of course, exposed to the suffering; he lost his brother Eric, of the 8th Black Watch, who died of wounds inflicted at Arras on December 18, 1918. And he no doubt shared his sister-in-law’s agony as she wrote letter after letter to Eric’s commanding officer, a Captain Williamson, seeking details of his death, anything that might give meaning to the sacrifice (TNA: PRO WO 339/27163). Nevertheless, every indication suggests that Noel Odell himself had a relatively easy war, and an exhaustive search of the archival records found evidence of only the one minor injury while on active duty. Exaggerating one’s war record was no crime and not uncommon, especially among those who had not faced the worst of the fighting. Men had any number of reasons for doing so, and there is nothing in this small mystery that would challenge Odell’s character, integrity, or honor. He was by all accounts an exemplary and beloved individual. Still, his insistence that he had been wounded three times during the war, if indeed untrue, does suggest something about his sense of personal narrative, which in this instance would be important, given that the entire mystery of Mallory and Irvine hinges on his eyewitness account of their disappearance.

  For Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, there is no better source than the biography written by his grandniece Julie Summers, Fearless on Everest. For his correspondence with the Everest Committee, see: RGS Box 28, File 1. For Irvine’s 1924 Everest journal, see: Herbert Carr, ed., The Irvine Diaries: Andrew Irvine and the Enigma of Everest 1924 (Reading: Gastons-West Col, 1979). Edward Shebbeare’s most significant contribution to the Everest legacy is a very fine diary from the 1924 expedition, the only one of his notebooks to survive his imprisonment during the Japanese occupation of Malaya. It is on deposit at the Alpine Club Archives, D101. For Shebbeare’s correspondence with the Everest Committee, see: RGS Box 33, File 11.

  Though Richard Hingston came late to the Everest adventure, he was without doubt one of the most compelling characters. An old Asia hand, he had been a member of the 1913 Russian Pamir triangulation expedition and served with distinction for many years in the Indian Army, where he met Charles Bruce. Hingston’s papers are on deposit at Trinity College Dublin, which has both a forty-nine-page Everest notebook (TCD MS 10473 Everest 1924) and his complete Everest diary (TCD MS 10474); the diary begins on March 7 in Darjeeling and ends on August 1, again in Darjeeling, with a local band playing, the town bedecked in flags, and Lady Lytton waiting at the crossroads for the returning heroes. Also at Trinity and of great interest are Hingston’s personal war diaries. The first begins on September 16, 1914, at Abbottabad and runs for 128 pages through February 22, 1915 (TCD MS 10514 Diary East Africa 1914). The second starts on January 22, 1916, again in Abbottabad, and ends on May 19, 1918, in Bombay after the long campaign in Mesopotamia. The last lines read: “What we all hunger for are hills and valleys, the green fields and shady woods, the rivers, the torrents, the glaciers and the snows. I see visions of the Himalaya and all its wondrous beauty.” See also: TCD MS 10472 “Notes on Baghdad.”

  For his military service record, see: British Library Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections, India Office Records IOR L/MIL/9/425 f.535–43 and L/MIL/14/15501. Hingston began the war as medical officer to the 2nd Battalion of the 5 Gurkha Rifles and soon joined Indian General Hospital No. 6 in support of Expeditionary Force B, slated to make the ill-fated invasion of German East Africa. The armada sailed from Bombay in the third month of the war. The forces landed at a forgotten place called Tanga, where machine guns waited in the jungle and British officers watched as the army they had built over years crumbled to pieces within minutes. In desperation they beat their soldiers with swords and shot them dead with their revolvers, but nothing could rally troops bled white with fear.

  Hingston’s task was to dress the wounded in a rubber planter’s bungalow, on a veranda stained red with blood, overlooking fields where the “dying and dead strewed the ground in all directions.” The wounded groaned and cried through the night. Some walked about waving the stumps of amputated limbs, insisting in their delirium that they remained unharmed. “Bones shattered, fingers blown away; faces mangled out of recognition,” Hingston wrote, “formed a never to be forgotten sight. The most horrible wounds were those which entered the back of the head and travelled forward until the bullet blew away the palate and the jaws.”

  When the order to withdraw finally came, men panicked in their rush for the open boats, trampling and drowning those among the wounded who stumbled in the sand. On the skiff that carried him away, Hingston encountered a man whose arm he had removed the previous day, and another with a hole in his back the size of a fist. “Scarce a word was uttered,” he wrote. “Men looked as though they had aged as many years as they had spent days in that country.”

  Thus began four years of fighting that took Hingston from East Africa to the North-West Frontier and, ultimately, to Mesopotamia and the relief of Kut. On September 17, 1916, he was awarded the Military Cross for a heroic act that he later described almost as an afterthought. During a search-and-destroy mission near Nasiriyah on September 11, 1916, his troops were ambushed by an Arab force that soon grew to over 8,000. In the chaos Hingston and two orderlies, including his old friend Harkadhoy Rai, braved a hail of bullets to reach a soldier shot through the shoulder and chest. To evacuate him by stretcher across that “bullet-swept plain” was suicidal. The only option was for Hingston to lift the man onto his shoulder and make a run for it. As soon as they stood up, the air all around hissed with bullets. “One went crashing through Harkadhoy’s head, blowing a huge piece out of his skull. He uttered a faint, broken gasp, and fell dead, with the wounded man and myself, in the same heap.”

  Hingston’s journal entry for the day continues with a curious digression, almost as if in the midst of the battle he had stepped back to observe the moment with clinical precision, as if the words might somehow insulate
him from the terrible reality of his friend’s death: “A bullet passing through the skull makes a sharp smashing sound, extremely unpleasant to hear, resembling, as nearly as I can compare it, to the flat blade of an oar striking the surface of the water. This must be due to the instantaneous shattering of so much bone; certainly this man’s head was so blown to pieces that I could have put my fist into his brains.”

  Hingston gathered three riflemen and placed the wounded soldier on the stretcher. Then, crawling on hands and knees, with Arab fire coming from three sides, they wriggled back toward their lines, a foot at a time, hoisting the limp burden, pushing it forward a few inches, and then collapsing from exhaustion before having another go. Under constant fire they covered but ten yards in thirty minutes. The Arabs pressed their attack. As he lay prostrate in the sand, Hingston recalled, “I used to peep above the camel thorn from time to time to watch them rushing forward singly or in small groups. They were picturesque in their white flowing garments; on they came waving their rifles wildly over their heads, shrieking aloud in their enthusiasm, madly gesticulating, leaping like lunatics into the air; one almost expected to see them cutting themselves with knives like the howling fanatics at the Altar of Baal. But they were receiving lead in exchange for their fervour; our rearguard was hammering them at every rush.”

  Hingston’s deed did not go unnoticed, and he was awarded the Military Cross within six days, a remarkably short interval. The citation acknowledged his “gallantry and devotion to duty in treating the wounded continuously under heavy fire at close range regardless of his personal safety.”

  For Hingston’s correspondence with the Everest Committee, see: RGS Box 27, File 4. Like all medical officers on the Everest expeditions, in 1924 Hingston also served as naturalist, and he fulfilled these duties with a zeal matched only by that of Wollaston in 1921. He collected 500 distinct species of plants, and more than 10,000 additional specimens, including 211 bird skins, 387 spiders, 439 mollusks, and 8,554 insects. For a summary of this work, see his contribution to the official expedition account: “Natural History,” The Fight for Everest, 1924, pp. 261–88. See also: Richard Hingston, A Naturalist in Himalaya (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1920).