by Michael Gill
In the Hillary archive is a memoir written by Percy Wyn-Harris (who was on Everest in 1933) that gives a flavour of the General:
Here’s a story about old General Bruce who led the 1922 expedition. In Calcutta I’d called to see him at his hotel. He was lying on his bed on a frightfully hot night looking like an overfed porpoise. He said ‘Let me give you a piece of advice you’ll find very useful. If ever you get into trouble with Sherpa porters there are two words that’ll pull the porters up short. They are ‘muji kas’ and that means ‘tighten your assholes.’ Well, in 1933 at Camp 5 I found a big perched rock just waiting to be pushed off down the mountainside and I did. The porters were appalled and then I remembered that they believe that evil spirits live under rocks and I’d just let loose a whole cloud of them. Something special was called for from me. Then I remembered ‘muji kas’ and it did the trick. They tightened their assholes and they stopped being frightened!12
In India Bruce joined some of the earliest Himalayan climbing expeditions, and in 1907 he made the first ascent of Trisul, 23,360ft, at that time the highest peak yet climbed. In his prime he was a man of great physical strength and a formidable wrestler. He was good-humoured, shrewd and a raconteur with a fund of bawdy stories. Through his personality and his fluency in Nepali he established a rapport with the porters and the herders of 300 yaks as they spent the month of April swaying across the windswept plains of Tibet. He sounds like the sort of Englishman on whom the British Empire was founded.
Mallory, of course, was again chosen by Hinks and his Everest Committee. He had arrived home in 1921 feeling tired, but the mountain had him in its grip. He had taken the lead in finding the route; he was Everest’s spokesperson, its lead climber. Already, it seemed, the mountain was his destiny.
Then there was Finch, and this time even Hinks could find no reason to exclude him. Scientists were warning that deaths might occur above 25,000ft. Oxygen might help, but what would happen to a climber who ran out of oxygen close to the summit or whose apparatus malfunctioned? The expedition needed a technical person who understood the valves, tubes and gauges, and Finch was their man. Hinks was at his acidic best when writing to General Bruce prior to their departure:
This afternoon we go to see a gas drill. They have contrived a most wonderful apparatus which will make you die of laughing. Pray, see that a picture of Finch in his patent climbing outfit with the gas apparatus is taken by the official photographer … I would gladly put a little money on Mallory to go to 25,000 feet without the assistance of four cylinders and a mask.13
Hinks’s money would have been safe up to 25,000ft, a height not much more than that already reached by the Duke of Abruzzi, but on Everest there was still 4000ft of increasingly thin air before Mallory or Finch could reach the summit at 29,000ft. Even Finch must have been aware that his apparatus had its shortcomings. A standard rack of four oxygen cylinders – which they simply called ‘gas’ – on a carrying frame weighed a hefty 32 pounds (14.5kg). They contained in total 960 litres of oxygen which at a flow rate of 2 litres per minute gave eight hours of assisted climbing. Was this really enough, and could their Sherpas carry such a weight of oxygen high on the mountain?
By the end of April the expedition had its Base Camp in the Rongbuk Valley. Three weeks later Camp 4 was pitched on the North Col. Two parties would make summit attempts, the first led by Mallory without oxygen, the second by Finch with oxygen. Mallory was already fit and well acclimatised; Henry Morshead, who had been a surveyor in 1921, had also acclimatised well. Howard Somervell was new to the Himalayas but had a strong background in the Alps. At age 25 he had joined the war effort as a surgeon, at first behind the lines, then in 1916 in a field hospital at the Somme. In the first 48 hours of the battle its surgical operating theatre was overwhelmed by 10,000 casualties, many of whom could only be left to die. Somervell emerged from the war as a pacifist, a Christian, and a surgeon who would devote his working life to medical work in South India. Of the fourth expedition member General Bruce wrote: ‘Major E.F. Norton is an experienced and very reliable and thorough mountaineer. He is an officer in the Artillery, and well known in India for his skill and interest in pig-sticking.’
On 20 May, Mallory, Norton, Somervell and Morshead set off on the first serious attempt to climb Mt Everest. Stepping up on to the exposed crest of the col, they were immediately assailed by the great enemy, the west wind blowing at gale force. They had not yet understood how debilitating the wind was, penetrating windproofs that were adequate in the Alps but not at 23,000ft. During a stop, Norton’s rucksack containing his spare warm clothes was flicked by the rope and disappeared down to the glacier 4000ft below. It was only after several hours of climbing that Morshead realised he ought to be wearing his outer windproof. They had not brought crampons so were slowed down by having to cut steps.
At a height of 25,000ft, higher than anyone had climbed before, they built two rock platforms for Camp 5 and retired for the night. Somervell described ‘sleep in snatches of the most fitful and unresting variety’. Next morning they had gone only a hundred yards when Morshead announced that he was too weak to go on. They had no Sherpas carrying a higher camp; now there were just the three of them, taking the lead by turns, hoping they might climb the last 4000ft with enough daylight left for the return. When by 2.30 they had reached only 26,800ft, it was clear they had neither the time nor the strength to get even close to the summit before dark. Any future summit attempt would have to start from a camp at 27,000ft, not 25,000ft. ‘We discussed whether we should go further … we chose retreat with the minimum of regret …’14
Down at Camp 5, a frostbitten, staggering Morshead was tied into their rope. They were crossing the head of a long, steep snow couloir when one climber slipped, dragging off the second, then a third until Mallory halted them with an ice-axe sunk into the snow. Morshead, Somervell thought, was not far from death. At the tents on the North Col there were no Sherpas, no climbers and no stove to melt snow. Slaking their thirst after 36 hours without fluid would have to await their descent to Camp 3 the following day. They could feel proud of the great height they had reached, but more than anything these two days had shown the magnitude of the difficulties high on this mountain.
Oxygen helps Finch on the second assault
The second assault on Everest would test Finch’s belief in oxygen, though he’d be using an apparatus which had been assembled in England at short notice. On a first trial in Tibet, he had found the stiffness of the valves made the face masks suffocating, so had improvised a system using a rubber football bladder as a reservoir. Oxygen flowed from its cylinder into the bladder, whose outlet was a rubber tube held in the climber’s mouth. The climber inhaled from a full bladder, then allowed it to refill with oxygen during exhalation by clamping the tube shut with his teeth. As a piece of technology it was crude, but it remained in use for the next 16 years.
Finch’s party of three consisted of himself, Geoffrey Bruce (cousin of General Bruce) and the Gurkha Tejbir. Geoffrey Bruce had come as a transport officer, a role in which he excelled, but he had never done any climbing. The North Col was not the best place to start. Tejbir, a tough Nepali, was also a climbing novice and untrained in the use of oxygen.
Finch began using oxygen on the climb to the North Col and noted that it made climbing easier even below 23,000ft. On 25 May the three climbers with 12 porters left the North Col using oxygen and following the route made by Mallory. Arriving at Camp 5 they had time to move the tents 500ft higher. No problems so far, but Finch described a terrible night during which a storm came in from the west and ‘rose to a veritable hurricane.’
Terrific gusts tore at the tent …The wild flapping of the canvas made a noise like that of machine-gun fire … and we had to take it in turns to go outside and tighten guy-ropes … a great hole was cut in the windward panel of the tent by a stone, and the flaps of the tent were stripped of their fastenings.15
All next day and into the night they were tent-bound and in
creasingly cold until Finch had an idea:
Like a heaven-spent inspiration came the idea of trying the effect of oxygen … almost at once I felt the painful, prickling, tingling sensation, due to the returning circulation of the blood, as the lost warmth slowly came back to my limbs. We connected up the apparatus so that all could breathe a small quantity throughout the night. There is no doubt that oxygen saved our lives; without it in our well-nigh exhausted and famished condition, we would have succumbed to the cold.16
The 27th was, in theory at least, their summit day. At 26,000ft Tejbir, carrying a load of oxygen cylinders, decided he’d reached his limit, and the wind was rising again. At a height of 27,300ft Bruce’s oxygen developed a fault, and Finch knew they had no hope of getting near the summit. Leaving four oxygen cylinders on the rocks, they turned and descended into thickening mist. So easy was the ground that the 1800ft descent to Camp 5 took only half an hour. They woke Tejbir from a warm sleep and continued downwards. On the Col, hot tea and a tin of spaghetti gave them strength to descend to Camp 3 in less than an hour.
Finch could reflect that although oxygen had taken them higher than anyone had been before, they had not really been close to the summit. Their oxygen apparatus was crude, and the logistical problem of carrying a large number of oxygen cylinders high on the mountain was daunting. Climbing Everest had been harder than they’d thought it would be.
Down at Base Camp at the end of May, expedition members saw the first snowfall of the monsoon cover the mountain. They could with good reason abandon Everest, yet Mallory and Somervell had recovered from their ordeal of 10 days earlier. The line of camps was established and stocked with food, and four cylinders of oxygen awaited them at 27,300ft. It was worth one last try. When 6 June broke fine, Mallory and Somervell, with 14 porters, set off on a third attempt. They dug Camp 3 out of its new snow, which Somervell noted ‘was of a thick consistency that we had not previously seen in the Himalayas’. Next day, with the weather still fine and mercifully free of wind, they set off on the climb to the North Col, ‘ploughing through snow of a most unpleasant texture’.17 They recognised the avalanche risk but judged it to be acceptable.
At 1.30 p.m. Somervell, who was breaking trail, described hearing ‘a subdued report ominous in the softness of its violence’, and a crack opened in the snow above him. Then the whole body of snow began sliding downwards, carrying 17 people with it. The avalanche slowed to a halt but not before nine porters had been carried over a 70ft ice cliff. One survived unscathed, another was dug out alive, but seven Sherpas were killed. It was a tragic end to an attempt on a brutal mountain of unpredictable difficulty.
Recollecting their experience when writing the book of the expedition in 1923, Bruce, Finch and Mallory all agreed that Everest was climbable, though they placed varying emphases on how oxygen should be used and when. One chance observation that would be largely forgotten over the next seven expeditions was that ‘sleeping oxygen’ restores appetite, gives sleep, and reverses the process of high-altitude deterioration. Even Finch failed to mention it when he summarised what was needed on Everest: ‘The climbing equipment of the mountaineer in this zone should include, firstly, a supply of oxygen; secondly, warm and windproof clothing and footgear; thirdly plenty of food and drink.’18 It sounded straightforward, but there were many problems involving technology, ‘ethics’ and leadership to be resolved before this simple recipe would be put into effect.
– CHAPTER 10 –
Mallory and Irvine, 1924
The Everest expedition of 1924 included Mallory but not Finch, who had easily been picked off by Hinks after he found that Finch was making money from lectures about the 1922 expedition. The lectures took place in Switzerland and were given in German, which made them no great threat to the commercial arm of the RGS, but permission had not been sought from Hinks. Finch gave his opinions freely on such matters as the selection of personnel and use of oxygen, but what made him especially intolerable, apart from being an Australian, was that he was usually right.
Bearing in mind Hinks’s distaste for publicity, it was surprising that he included Captain J.B.L. Noel on the 1924 expedition. It was all about money. In 1921 King George V had donated £100 and the Viceroy of India all of 750 rupees, but Hinks was in need of £10,000. To his astonishment, Noel, who had been photographer in 1922, came up with the extraordinary offer of £8000 for the 1924 film rights. He was an unlikely pick for Hinks – he would have been at home in a late twentieth-century advertising agency – but £8000 was a very useful sum and would solve the expedition’s funding problems at a stroke.
Noel’s faith that he would profit from his investment reflected the confidence of the whole expedition. Sir Francis Younghusband, in his Introduction to The Fight for Everest 1924, wrote, ‘The members of the expedition, marching across Tibet, took it as a certainty that they would reach the summit.’ The better part of two years had been available for planning under the leadership of General Bruce, and in London it was easy to look at a photograph of Everest on a fine day and be confident of success.
The first sign of misplaced confidence came in early April during their march through Tibet when the General succumbed to his recurring malaria and had to quit the expedition, leaving Norton as leader. Norton was a good replacement but Bruce was missed. He was liked and respected by the climbers, and above all had a rapport with the porters. Now Norton had to pick up the intricate details of a plan requiring that a thousand loads be carried up the East Rongbuk Glacier and built into a pyramid at whose apex would be a Union Jack on the summit of Mt Everest. On 14 April, Mallory wrote to his wife that Norton ‘has appointed me second-in-command and also leader of the climbers altogether. I’m bound to say I feel some little satisfaction in the latter position.’ Mallory drew up a plan in which Norton and Somervell, without oxygen, would be a first summit party, followed by himself and Irvine using ‘gas’, with which they were well supplied. He told his wife:
The gasless party has the better adventure and … it is naturally disappointing that I shall be with the other party. Still, the conquest of the mountain is the great thing, and the whole plan is mine and my part will be a sufficiently interesting one and will give me, perhaps, the best chance of all of getting to the top. It is almost unthinkable with this plan that I shan’t get to the top; I can’t see myself coming down defeated … The telegram announcing our success, if we succeed, will precede this letter, I suppose: but it will mention no names. How you will hope I was one of the conquerors! And I don’t think you will be disappointed.1
On 30 April, the arrival of the expedition at a Base Camp was celebrated with champagne and a five-course dinner. Summit day was scheduled for 17 May, but snow fell in the afternoons, strong winds blew, and the nights were thought to be unseasonably cold, though no one really knew what was ‘seasonable’ in this bleak place. Logistics were already disorganised when on 9 and 10 May the whole expedition was shaken by a full blizzard. It was hard to distinguish porters who were seriously ill with altitude sickness or hypothermia from those who were simply demoralised. One led to the other, anyway. Man Bahadur the cobbler, his feet frozen to the ankles, would have ended up with bilateral amputations if he had not died. Samsherpan became comatose and later died of a stroke. Tamding fell and broke his leg below the knee.
On 12 May Norton ordered a retreat to Base Camp, followed by a pilgrimage to Rongbuk Monastery for a blessing from the Head Lama who now filled the role of chaplain to the expedition’s bedraggled front-line troops. Fine weather, of a sort, returned intermittently, but as late as 27 May Mallory was writing: ‘It has been a bad time altogether. I look back on tremendous effort and exhaustion and dismal looking out of a tent door into a world of snow and vanishing hopes … The physique of the whole party has gone down sadly. The only chance now is to go for a simpler, quicker plan.’2
They agreed on three assaults mounted sequentially from a Camp 6 placed at 27,000ft. The first team was Mallory and Geoffrey Bruce; the second Norton
and Somervell; the third the two newcomers, Noel Odell and Andy Irvine. They had oxygen at Camp 3, but with only 15 of 52 porters still fit, there did not seem to be the capacity to carry it to higher camps for use in the assaults.
On 1 June in fine weather Mallory and Bruce, considered the strongest climbers at this stage, climbed the familiar snow and broken rock of the route to Camp 5 at 25,300ft. The plan was to establish Camp 6 at 27,000ft the next day, but in continued fine weather that morning the watchers were surprised to see the party returning. Their three porters had refused to continue, they said, leaving them no choice but to come down. What had happened to Geoffrey Bruce’s fluency in Nepali and his powers of persuasion? Mallory gave another explanation: ‘I do not think it is possible without oxygen.’
Meanwhile Norton and Somervell, still in the window of fine weather, had climbed easily to Camp 5, and a day later, at 26,800ft, had pitched the single tent that was Camp 6. The fourth of June was their summit day, fine and nearly windless. The climbing was still easy and after 500ft they had passed the high point reached by Finch and Bruce two years earlier. Everything was going to plan, except that they were going ever more slowly as they hit a wall of exhaustion.
At midday Somervell was too exhausted to continue. Norton continued angling slowly upwards into what would become known as the Norton Couloir. Here the climbing problems multiplied: the angle was steeper, the footholds smaller and more sloping, the snow patches powdery and uncompacted. By 1 p.m., at a height of 28,100ft, he knew that he lacked the resources to climb out of this cul-de-sac. The easier route on Everest did not lie up the Great Couloir. Was he also up against a physiological ceiling? No one knew. The descent was a nightmare. Norton was becoming snow blind and seeing double. Somervell dropped his ice-axe which bounced 8000ft down the North Face. At 9.30 p.m. they staggered into Camp 4. It was an extraordinary achievement to have climbed so high, yet it asked more questions than it answered. If there was a climbable route, where was it? Would oxygen have helped? Was it, in fact, essential?