The Lost Explorer

by Anker, Conrad

DURING THOSE THREE MONTHS, Mallory gave some thirty lectures on Everest, and hurriedly wrote six chapters of the official expedition book. The mountain was never far from his mind, and as he penned the last chapter, called “The Route to the Summit,” offering a step-by-step logistical brief for success on Everest, the obsession reclaimed him. At only thirty-five, Mallory was beginning to worry that he was past his climbing prime. And that vision, of the relatively easy stages by which a climber might angle up the north face to the northeast shoulder, then along the ridge to the summit, haunted his domestic hours.

  By late winter, the Everest Committee had put together a team for the pre-monsoon season of 1922. Once more the pundits opted for leaders long in tooth and short on technical ability. General Charles Bruce, who had served much of his career in the army in India, was made leader, at the age of fifty-six. Colonel Edward Strutt, who was forty-eight, also an ex-soldier, was drafted as climbing leader. (In the 1930s, Strutt would become infamous as the curmudgeonly spokesman for a wholesale British retreat into climbing conservatism, as he deplored the bold technical breakthroughs being promulgated by Germans, Austrians, and Italians in the Alps, which culminated in the first ascent of the north face of the Eiger in 1938.)

  Also on board, and well past his salad days, was Tom Longstaff, who held the record for the highest summit yet attained, when he had topped out on 23,360-foot Trisul, in the Garhwal Himalaya, in 1907. (No higher peak would be climbed for the next twenty-one years.)

  In view of his brilliant performance the year before, it may seem odd that Mallory was not made climbing leader in 1922. Knowledge of the man’s absentmindedness seems to have dimmed his prospects for an official leadership position. As Longstaff mordantly wrote to a colleague after the expedition, “Mallory is a very good stout hearted baby, but quite unfit to be placed in charge of anything, including himself.”

  Among the younger team members were Teddy Norton and Howard Somervell, who would prove so staunch in 1924, and Geoffrey Bruce, the general’s game but inexperienced nephew. Rounding out the party was George Finch, a remarkable climber who would prove the equal of Mallory on this, his only shot at Everest. Finch had been rejected on spurious medical grounds in 1921, and he would later so alienate the Everest Committee as to preclude any chance of being invited in 1924. Chroniclers attribute much of Finch’s difficulties to a vague sense on the committee’s part that he had too heartily embraced the more ambitious European ideals of climbing in the Alps; in addition, Finch was not a member of the Alpine Club, and, having been educated in Switzerland, had thus by definition not attended the “right” schools.

  In the months leading up to the 1922 expedition, the great debate was over the use of bottled oxygen. Finch, a born tinkerer, was the most avid proponent of using gas; Mallory, with his distrust of all things mechanical, the most ardent opponent, deriding what he called the “damnable heresy” of certain physiologists who theorized that humans would never ascend Everest without supplementary oxygen.

  All in all, the 1922 party was many times stronger than the ragtag team of 1921. And at first, everything went like clockwork. Mallory and Bullock’s 1921 reconnaissance had been so thorough that it had left only one side of Everest unexplored—the southern approaches, ranging out of forbidden Nepal. Mallory’s analysis of the possible routes on the other three sides was so penetrating that the 1922 party needed to waste no further time in exploration.

  Moving loads and camps steadily up the East Rongbuk Glacier, with an entourage not only of Tibetan porters but of Sherpas from Nepal, the team reached the North Col by May 13. Only six days later, all the necessary supplies were stocked at Camp IV, ready for a pair of summit pushes. At least two weeks of good weather, and maybe three, loomed before the monsoon would close down the mountain.

  The plan called for Mallory, Somervell, H. T. Morshead, and Norton to make a first attempt without oxygen, to be followed, if they were unsuccessful, by Finch and Geoffrey Bruce breathing bottled gas. On May 20, the first quartet set out with porters from the North Col at 7:30 A.M. Every step they climbed probed ground where no one had ever been.

  At once the cold assailed all four men. Modern climbers have long been dumbfounded on contemplating the primitive gear and clothing with which Mallory and his partners assaulted Everest in the 1920s. The sense of the inadequacy of that equipage was perhaps the single most powerful perception that struck the five climbers on May 1, 1999, when they beheld Mallory’s body at 26,700 feet. It is thus worth pausing to note the passage in The Assault on Mount Everest, 1922, in which Mallory narrates the break the four men took at 24,200 feet to put on spare clothes and try to get warm:

  For my part, I added a light shetland “woolly” and a thin silk shirt to what I was wearing before under my closely woven cotton coat. As this outer garment, with knickers to match, was practically windproof, and a silk shirt too is a further protection against wind, with these two extra layers I feared no cold we were likely to meet. Morshead, if I remember right, troubled himself no more at this time than to wrap a woollen scarf round his neck.

  In general, Mallory’s passages in the 1922 expedition book are full of details that, in light of what came to pass two years later, seem eerily to foreshadow the great drama of 1924. On the way up into the unknown that day in 1922, the four men came to a dicey slope where crampons would have been useful. (Modern climbers carry and usually wear crampons all the way to the summit.) Yet the men had left theirs at the North Col. Explains Mallory, “We sorely needed them now. And yet we had been right to leave them behind; for with their straps binding tightly around our boots we should not have had the smallest chance of preserving our toes from frostbite.” (The leather boots of Mallory’s day were soft and pliable. Modern climbers use plastic or nylon double boots so stiff that tightened straps pose no circulation problem.) The fact that, in 1924, Mallory and Irvine again left their crampons at the North Col bears crucially on their fate.

  Similarly, as he described the route to the summit he had scouted for months in 1921, Mallory worried aloud, in the expedition book, about “the possibility of turning or of climbing direct certain prominent obstacles” along the summit ridge. Most prominent of all such obstacles would prove to be the ninety-foot-tall Second Step, at 28,230 feet. Climbing higher on May 20, Mallory could see that step as an unmistakable bump on the skyline far above him.

  Not only the cold bothered the men; the thin air made them fuzzy-brained. In a clumsy moment, the rope dislodged Norton’s pack, which he had laid in his lap during a rest stop. In Mallory’s words:

  He was unprepared, made a desperate grab, and missed it. Slowly the round, soft thing gathered momentum from its rotation, the first little leaps down from one ledge to another grew to excited and magnificent bounds, and the precious burden vanished from sight.

  With the pack was lost critical extra clothing.

  At 2:00 P.M., around 25,000 feet, the tired men stopped to pitch camp. There was no level shelf, and the climbers wasted hours piling up stones to make tent platforms, only to abandon one site after another. Ever since 1922, climbers on the north side have had the greatest trouble establishing Camp V; even for Simonson’s party in 1999, this was the camp the climbers dreaded, knowing a night there meant a struggle to catch any sleep.

  At last the men got two tents droopily pitched, their floors so sloping that the upper climber in each tent rolled all night on top of the lower. Mallory took stock of his comrades. Worst off was Morshead, whose fingers and toes were in the first stages of serious frostbite. Though Morshead made no complaint, “He was obliged to lie down when we reached our camp and was evidently unwell.” Mallory himself had frost-nipped his fingers as he cut steps up the slope where the men could have easily walked in crampons, and Norton had a frostbitten ear.

  After a nearly sleepless night, the men set out at 8:00 A.M. on the twenty-first, still hopeful of reaching the summit. At once, the debilitated Morshead realized he could go no farther: he pleaded that his teammates continue,
while he rested through the day in camp. The cold was even worse than the day before; Mallory had to stop, take off one boot, and let Norton rub his foot back into feeling. The going, across downward-tilting plates of dark shale, was made more treacherous by four to eight inches of fresh snow.

  By midday, Mallory knew that he and his partners were going too slowly. At their very best, they were capable of gaining only 400 vertical feet an hour (in the Alps, Mallory was used to climbing 1,500 feet per hour without breaking a serious sweat). Their progress would only slow as the air got thinner. A simple “arithmetical calculation” made it plain that night would fall before the men could reach the summit.

  Resolving to turn around at 2:15 P.M., the men accepted the mountain’s victory. In the expedition narrative, Mallory seems gallantly resigned to defeat: “We were prepared to leave it to braver men to climb Mount Everest by night.”

  Again, how those words foreshadow! For in 1924, in all likelihood, Mallory and Irvine became those braver men.

  At their high point, the three men ate a small lunch of chocolate, mint cake, raisins, and prunes; one of them (whose identity Mallory coyly camouflages in The Assault on Mount Everest) produced a pocket flask of brandy, from which each of them took a restorative nip. Then they started down.

  With a barometer reading adjusted by a theodolite observation, Mallory fixed his high point at 26,985 feet. In First on Everest: The Mystery of Mallory & Irvine, Audrey Salkeld and Tom Holzel argue cogently that the true altitude the three men reached on June 21 was only about 26,000 feet. No matter: it was the highest anyone had yet been on earth.

  The prudence of their turnaround would emerge late that afternoon. By 4:00 P.M., Norton, Somervell, and Mallory had regained Camp V. There Morshead declared he was feeling well. The four men roped together, then headed down the 2,000 feet toward Camp IV on the North Col. Mallory took the lead, for, as the strongest of the four men, he readily assumed the tiring task of cutting steps for his partners (a much more awkward task going down than ascending).

  Suddenly Morshead, coming third on the rope, slipped on a steep slope. His fall pulled an unprepared Norton, last on the rope, out of his steps, and the two of them pulled Somervell loose. The three plunged helpless toward the void 3,500 feet above the East Rongbuk Glacier.

  On the verge of cutting a step, Mallory had time only to drive the pick of his axe into the snow and pass the rope over its head, and time to anticipate one of two outcomes. As he put it in the expedition book, “In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred either the belay will give or the rope will break.” Miraculously, neither happened now. The pull came not in one tremendous jerk, but accordion-fashion, as each falling climber absorbed the pull of the one below. Mallory belayed with grim resolve: the rope “gripped the metal like a hawser on a bollard,” but the pick held.

  Almost never in mountaineering history has one man held three falling companions with nothing more solid than an ice axe belay. The rare instances have become legendary deeds. Mallory’s astounding belay has not—in part because he was excruciatingly modest about the accident. In The Assault onMount Everest, he not only avoided identifying the man who slipped, he disguised his own identity as the miracle belayer. The four climbers were tagged only as “the third man,” “the leader,” etc. Only in a letter to Ruth did Mallory make clear who played which role. Even then, he blamed himself as much as his teammates: “I hadn’t realised then how shaky Morshead was and had cut rather poor steps.”

  Though no one was hurt in the all-but-fatal fall, as they staggered in to Camp IV, at 11:30 P.M., Morshead was ravaged with exhaustion. He had been taking ten-minute rests after feeble two-minute bursts of clumping downward, until Norton and Mallory had to take turns propping him up with a shoulder for his arm and a hand around his waist, all but doing his walking for him.

  By the time the four men made it back to Camp III the next day, Morshead’s fingers had swollen and turned black with frostbite. The men had also become severely dehydrated. Somervell confessed to downing seventeen mugsful of tea; Mallory guessed the man had drunk even more.

  TWO DAYS LATER, on May 24, George Finch set out on a second attempt, using oxygen. Because of the physical conditions of all the other team members, he had only one choice for partner—the plucky Geoffrey Bruce, who had climbed no real mountains before Everest.

  Nonetheless, the two men set out full of optimism, telling each other, “Of course, we shall get to the top.” Finch believed oxygen would make all the difference.

  In the end, the pair’s struggle up the north face turned into a fight for their lives. At Camp V, they held on to their tent all night while a gale tried to tear them from the mountainside. They waited out the next day, as the storm dispersed, then, with little food or water left, stretched their sortie into a third day as they headed up. Starting at 6:30 A.M., they passed the high point of Mallory, Norton, and Somervell and added 500 feet to the world altitude record. Oxygen had made the difference, for, thanks to the storm, Finch and Bruce were far more worn out as they launched their summit attempt than their four teammates had been on their own thrust on May 20.

  The choice to turn around was agonizing for Finch, but it was as canny a decision as Mallory’s had been. As Finch wrote in the expedition book, “I knew that if we were to persist in climbing on, even if only for another 500 feet, we should not both get back alive.” In the end, Bruce’s feet were so badly frostbitten that he had to be sledged part of the way down from the North Col.

  Finch and Bruce’s gutsy push not only set the new altitude record, to a certain extent it eclipsed the luster of Norton, Somervell, and Mallory’s brave attempt four days before. And it convinced Mallory for the first time that bottled oxygen, far from a “damnable heresy,” might be the key to climbing Everest.

  By June 1, the 1922 expedition had accomplished extraordinary things, reaching 26,500 feet and making known for the first time the secrets of the upper north face. The team had exercised such hubris at the cost of nothing worse than some cases of frostbite (Morshead, the worst afflicted, would lose one toe and six fingertips). Had the expedition now packed up and gone home, as most of its members were inclined to do, the venture would have been hailed in England as a grand success.

  But fate was not to let the 1922 party off so easily. As May turned to June, and still the monsoon delayed its arrival, Mallory’s obsession turned his thoughts upward once more. He talked his teammates into a third, last-ditch attempt.

  As it was, most of them were too worn down even to make another stab. Finch gamely set out, but, unrecovered from his ordeal of May 24-26, tossed in the towel at Camp I.

  On June 7, Mallory, Somervell, and teammate Colin Crawford led fourteen porters up toward the North Col. An abundance of new snow had blanketed the slope, but Mallory found the conditions ideal for step-kicking. As the party neared the crest, Somervell led up a gentle corridor. Wrote Mallory, “We were startled by an ominous sound, sharp, arresting, violent, and yet somehow soft like an explosion of untamped gunpowder. I had never before on a mountain-side heard such a sound; but all of us, I imagine, knew instinctively what it meant.”

  From a hundred feet above the party, an avalanche had broken loose. The three Englishmen, highest on the slope, and the porters nearest them were swept off their feet and knocked a short distance down the slope, but came to rest and dug themselves out. The porters lower on the slope were caught in the avalanche and hurled over a forty- to sixty-foot ice cliff. Their teammates scrambled down the slope and frantically dug in the avalanche debris below the cliff. Six porters were found dead, more likely from the impact of the fall than by smothering under the snow. The body of a seventh was never found.

  Overcome with sorrow, the ten survivors stumbled down to Camp III. Mallory was struck by the Sherpas’ forbearance in this tragedy:

  The surviving porters who had lost their friends or brothers behaved with dignity, making no noisy parade of the grief they felt. We asked them whether they wished to go up and b
ring down the bodies for orderly burial. They preferred to leave them where they were.

  As the team trudged out from the mountain, Howard Somervell agonized, “Why, oh, why could not one of us Britishers have shared their fate?” The blame for the accident was loaded onto Mallory’s shoulders, not only for pushing the late attempt, but because he had approached the North Col in dubious snow conditions. Tom Longstaff, who had already left Base Camp for home when the accident occurred, was unsparing. “To attempt such a passage in the Himalaya after new snow is idiotic,” he wrote a colleague two months later.

  In the expedition narrative, Mallory painfully retraced his party’s steps toward the disaster, wondering out loud whether he ought to have recognized the danger. “More experience, more knowledge might perhaps have warned us not to go there,” he wrote, bewildered. “One never can know enough about snow.”

  Mallory did nothing, however, to shirk his responsibility, writing Geoffrey Winthrop Young, “And I’m to blame…. Do you know that sickening feeling that one can’t go back and have it undone …?” For the rest of his shortened life, he harbored a black pool of guilt about the catastrophe. Clare Millikan believes that the chief reason Mallory went back to Everest in 1924 was the idea that success might somehow mitigate the tragedy he had brought upon the seven faithful porters.

  MALLORY’S ETERNAL FRIEND AND MENTOR, Geoffrey Winthrop Young, tried to gentle his return, insisting the blame for the accident could not be laid on any man, but on “that shadow of huge, dangerous ‘chance,’” and reminding him, “You took your full share, a leading share, in the risk. In the war we had to do worse: we had to order men into danger at times when we could not share it.”

  All this gave Mallory faint comfort. At home, he brooded about the expedition, even as he cast about looking for a new job. In the interim, he undertook a three-month tour of America, lecturing on Everest. The tour was a financial failure, Mallory disliked most of what he saw in the United States, and he was homesick for Ruth and his children. Clare was now seven, Beridge six, John only two. Since Clare had been born, thanks to the war and Everest, Mallory had been home less than half her days.