Nonetheless, Mallory rallied his waning optimism, fixing May 28 as his new summit date, and wrote Ruth with dogged hope, “It is an effort to pull oneself together and do what is required high up, but it is the power to keep the show going when you don’t feel energetic that will enable us to win through if anything does.”
At last, on May 20, Mallory, Norton, Odell, and one Sherpa gained the North Col. Mallory took the lead up a steep ice chimney that formed a difficult but safe alternative to the slope that had avalanched in 1922. Norton left a vivid description of that 200-foot lead: “You could positively see his nerves tighten up like fiddle strings. Metaphorically he girt up his loins…. Up the wall and chimney he led here, climbing carefully, neatly, and in that beautiful style that was all his own.”
The ascent, wrote Mallory, was “a triumph of the old gang.” Yet on this expedition where nothing seemed to go right, a further catastrophe struck the four men as they descended.
It began as Mallory decided to head down by the ill-starred 1922 route. Early on, the men hit slopes where they needed the crampons they had left at Camp III. Mallory chopped occasional steps, but following unroped, first Norton slipped, then the Sherpa—both fortunately stopping after short slides. Leading downward, Mallory suddenly plunged ten feet into a hidden crevasse. As during his fall on the Nesthorn in 1909, when, belayed by Geoffrey Winthrop Young, Mallory never let go of his axe, now he showed remarkable self-possession even in midplunge. As he wrote Ruth, “I fetched up half-blind and breathless to find myself most precariously supported only by my ice-axe, somehow caught across the crevasse and still held in my right hand—and below was a very unpleasant black hole.”
Mallory shouted for help, but his teammates, caught up in their own perils, neither heard him nor knew what had happened. Eventually he “got tired of shouting” and managed to excavate a delicate sideways passage out of the crevasse—only to find himself on the wrong side of it. “I had to cut across a nasty slope of very hard ice and, further down, some mixed unpleasant snow before I was out of the wood.” The four men regained Camp III thoroughly exhausted.
Even so, they had finally reached the North Col, the platform from which all summit attempts must be launched, and the weather showed signs of ameliorating. The ice chimney Mallory had so deftly led presented a logistical obstacle to porters getting loads to the col, but fixed ropes eased the passage, and eventually Irvine wove a rope ladder and hung it on the chimney, turning the pitch into a reasonable scramble for laden men.
Then, just as hope glimmered in Mallory’s breast, yet another dire predicament thwarted the team’s progress. On May 21, Somervell, Irvine, and Hazard led twelve porters up to the North Col. While Somervell and Irvine descended, Hazard and the porters remained at Camp IV, awaiting the arrival of Bruce and Odell, who planned to use the porters to push on to establish Camp V. But a snowstorm began that evening and continued through the next day, while the temperature again dropped to −22º F. Odell and Bruce never left Camp III. The next day, Hazard decided to descend with the porters.
Among the expedition members, Hazard was distinctly the odd duck. A loner, he was not well liked by his teammates. As Somervell later wrote, Hazard “built a psychological wall round himself, inside which he lives. Occasionally, he bursts out of this with a ‘By Gad, this is fine!’ … Then the shell closes, to let nothing in.”
Now, as he led the porters down the slope made treacherous with new snow, Hazard failed to notice that four of them balked and returned to their tents at Camp IV. When Hazard showed up at III with only eight porters, Mallory was furious. “It is difficult to make out how exactly it happened,” he wrote; “but evidently he didn’t shepherd his party properly at all.”
This was perhaps too harsh a judgment, as the demand that one man be responsible for twelve porters in marginal conditions was a well-nigh impossible one. What the fiasco meant, however, was that four porters, no doubt terrified and possibly suffering frostbite, were stranded above all the sahibs on the mountain.
On May 24, Somervell, Norton, and Mallory headed up to rescue the porters. Norton judged the situation so desperate that, as he later wrote, “I would have taken a bet of two to one against a successful issue to our undertaking.” Norton and Somervell were off form, but “Mallory, who on these occasions lived on his nervous energy, kept urging us on.” Above the ice chimney, the snow slopes were loaded, ready to avalanche. With the other two belaying from the last safe stance, Somervell led a diagonal traverse, using every bit of the 200 feet of rope the men had carried. He ran out of line some ten yards short of the crest of the col. The porters, having heard the men approach, peered nervously over the edge. It was 4:00P.M.—dangerously late.
Norton, who spoke Tibetan, coaxed the porters into trying the ten-yard descent to Somervell on their own. Two men made it safely, but the other two fell, slid and tumbled, then came to rest in precarious spots a short distance from Somervell. With no other option, he drove his axe into the slope, untied, fed the rope over the axe shaft, and, simply holding the end of the rope in his hand, sidled toward the trembling porters. With hardly an inch to spare, he grabbed each by the scruff of the neck and hoisted them back to the anchored axe. The worn-out men regained Camp III long after dark.
This debacle demoralized the porters utterly. After May 24, only fifteen of the fifty-five porters were of any use at all. The team dubbed these stalwarts “Tigers,” a hortatory epithet that has been current on Everest ever since. In the meantime, however, the party was in such disarray that Norton had no other choice than to order once more a wholesale retreat. By May 25, the team had limped all the way down to Camp I, at 17,900 feet.
“It has been a bad time altogether,” wrote Mallory to Ruth on May 27, in the last letter she would ever receive from him. “I look back on tremendous effort and exhaustion and dismal looking out of a tent door into a world of snow and vanishing hopes.”
AT HIS MOST PESSIMISTIC, Mallory had never foreseen a rout as complete as the one Everest had dealt his team during the preceding month. Less plucky men might have packed up and gone home at this juncture, with less than a week of May remaining. Instead, the 1924 expedition held what they called a “council of war.”
Neither food nor oxygen had yet been carried to Camp IV; only tents and sleeping bags were stocked there. Norton’s revised plan was to forget altogether about oxygen, in hopes that two light, fast parties of two men each, supported by porters, could make leaps on three successive days to Camps V and VI and then to the summit. The plan, of course, was pie in the sky, for as yet no climber had taken a single footstep above the North Col.
Both Somervell and Mallory had developed racking coughs. Mallory described his to Ruth: “In the high camp it has been the devil. Even after the day’s exercise… I couldn’t sleep, but was distressed with bursts of coughing fit to tear one’s guts—and a headache and misery altogether.”
Yet Norton offered Mallory a place in the first pair, arguing that “though he had so far borne the brunt of the hardest work, yet the energy and fire of the man were reflected in his every gesture.” His partner would be Geoffrey Bruce, who at the moment, Mallory wrote, was “the only plumb fit man” in the party.
At last the weather relented, granting the team several “cloudlessly fine and hot” days in a row. Despite their ailments, the climbers moved efficiently up the mountain. Mallory had no illusions about the team’s thin chances of summitting: “It is fifty to one against us, but we’ll have a whack yet and do ourselves proud,” he wrote Ruth. Yet he closed his last letter with a jaunty vow: “Six days to the top from this camp!”
On June 1, for the first time, climbers set off upward from the North Col, as Mallory, Bruce, and eight porters intended to establish Camp V at 25,300 feet. The day was again sunny, but above the col a bitter wind out of the northwest swept the face. Some 300 feet short of their goal, the porters flagged. Four of them had to drop their loads and head down, while the other four stumbled up to the stony slope
where Mallory had already begun to build makeshift tent platforms. In a heroic effort, Bruce and Sherpa Lobsang ferried the other four loads up to camp. In doing so, however, Bruce exhausted himself; it was later determined that he had “strained his heart,” and after June 1, he was of little use on the mountain.
That night the two sahibs and three porters slept at V. In the morning, Mallory was ready to push on, but Bruce was too weak to climb, and the porters had, in Norton’s phrase, “shot their bolt.” There was no choice but to head back down to Camp IV.
There Odell and Irvine were installed in a supporting role, cooking meals for the summit pair and carrying oxygen up to them as they descended. Irvine chafed at his role, writing in his diary, “I wish I was in the first party instead of a bloody reserve.” But during the previous week, he too had been unwell: he had had a three-day bout of diarrhea, and on May 24 he recorded, “felt very seedy.” The sunburn that had afflicted his fair complexion for more than a month had gotten worse. The men had brought various ointments, including zinc oxide, to smear their faces with, but these remedies apparently did Irvine little good. As early as April 11, he had written, “My face is very sore from wind and sun … and my nose is peeling badly.”
On May 24, he noted, “face very sore indeed.” By June 2, the sunburn was in danger of incapacitating the staunch young man. That night he wrote, “My face was badly cut by the sun and wind on the Col, and my lips are cracked to bits, which makes eating very unpleasant.”
A day behind Mallory and Bruce, Norton and Somervell formed the second summit party. Rather than appoint himself to this team, which would seize the apparent last chance for the summit, Norton had asked Mallory and Somervell to determine who Somervell’s partner should be. From among Odell, Irvine, Hazard, and Norton, they had nominated Norton. It would prove a wise choice.
Norton and Somervell left the North Col with six carefully selected Tigers on June 2. Still the weather held. They carried their own tent and sleeping bags, for if the plan had worked, Mallory and Bruce would at the moment be pushing on to establish Camp VI, and all four Englishmen would need tents and bags at both V and VI.
In The Fight for Everest, Norton gives a detailed description of the clothing he wore that day—a state-of-the-art wardrobe for 1924. It makes for a startling contrast with the down suits and plastic boots of today’s Everest climber:
Personally I wore thick woollen vest and drawers, a thick flannel shirt and two sweaters under a lightish knickerbocker suit of windproof gaberdine the knickers of which were lined with light flannel, a pair of soft elastic Kashmir putties [ankle wraps, the predecessors of modern gaiters] and a pair of boots of felt bound and soled with leather and lightly nailed with the usual Alpine nails. Over all I wore a very light pyjama suit of Messrs. Burberry’s “Shackleton” windproof gaberdine. On my hands I wore a pair of long fingerless woollen mits inside a similar pair made of gaberdine; though when step-cutting necessitated a sensitive hold on the axe-haft, I sometimes substituted a pair of silk mits for the inner woollen pair. On my head I wore a fur-lined leather motor-cycling helmet, and my eyes and nose were protected by a pair of goggles of Crookes’s glass, which were sewn into a leather mask that came well over the nose and covered any part of my face which was not naturally protected by my beard. A huge woollen muffler completed my costume.
Neither man wore crampons, for despite Irvine’s tinkering, no one had yet figured out a way to strap these invaluable spikes to one’s boots without cutting off circulation to the feet.
On the way up, Norton and Somervell were dismayed to meet one of Mallory’s Sherpas descending. From him, they learned of the first party’s turnaround, then crossed paths with their friends as they despondently clumped down to the North Col. Continuing with only four porters, Somervell and Norton reached Camp V at 1:00P.M., where they settled in to cook and get warm.
Lower on the mountain, the men had cooked on Primus stoves using liquid fuel; above the North Col, however, they preferred Unna cookers that burned a solid cake of Meta fuel made in France. The chore of making dinner was one all the men detested. As Norton put it, “I know nothing—not even the exertion of steep climbing at these heights—which is so utterly exhausting or which calls for more determination than this hateful duty of high-altitude cooking.”
Scooping pots full of snow to melt, heating the water to its tepid boiling point at altitude, filling Thermos flasks with hot water or tea for the morrow, washing up the greasy pots—and then, “Perhaps the most hateful part of the process is that some of the resultant mess must be eaten, and this itself is only achieved by will power: there is but little desire to eat—sometimes indeed a sense of nausea at the bare idea—though of drink one cannot have enough.”
In the morning, the men did not get off until 9:00A.M., so difficult was it for Norton to persuade three of the four porters to continue. “I remember saying, ‘If you put us up a camp at 27,000 feet and we reach the top, your names shall appear in letters of gold in the book that will be written to describe the achievement.’”
Despite the late start, the climb on June 3 went smoothly enough; the weather was still fine, with even less wind than the day before. Somervell’s cough gave him so much trouble he had to stop now and then. Even so, the two Englishmen passed their own 1922 high point of 26,000 feet just after noon, and later they exceeded Finch and Geoffrey Bruce’s mark of 26,500 feet. Sending the three porters back, Somervell and Norton pitched Camp VI at 26,800 feet, once again shoring up a tent platform by piling loose stones. They were higher than human beings had ever been on earth.
After a month of demoralizing setbacks, of ignominious defeat staring them in the face, the two men dared believe that the summit might be within their grasp. Norton slept well, Somervell tolerably. “Truly it is not easy to make an early start on Mount Everest!” Norton would write. Yet on June 4, the men were moving by 6:40 A.M.
After an hour, the pair reached the foot of the broken cliffs that would come to be known as the Yellow Band. They had topped 27,000 feet, with the summit about 2,000 feet above them. Moving diagonally up and right, Norton and Somervell found easy going on ledges that led one to the next.
It was here that Norton purposely diverged from the ridge route that had always been favored by Mallory. To his eye, a long, gradually ascending traverse toward what would come to be called the Great Couloir afforded the best line on the upper north face. The day remained perfect, though the men climbed in bitter cold.
Yet now, with the top tantalizingly close, the men began to succumb to the awful ravages of altitude. Somervell’s cough had grown alarming, necessitating frequent stops. Norton had made the mistake of taking off his goggles when he was on rock: at 27,500 feet, he started seeing double. Without oxygen, the men were slowed to a crawl. “Our pace was wretched,” Norton later wrote. He set himself the goal of taking twenty steps without a rest, but never made more than thirteen: “we must have looked a very sorry couple.”
By noon, however, the two men were approaching the top of the Yellow Band. They were some 500 or 600 feet below the crest of the summit ridge, well to the west of the First Step. All at once, Somervell announced that he could go no farther, but he encouraged his partner to continue alone. With weary, careful steps, Norton pushed on, traversing farther right along the top of the Yellow Band. He turned two corners, the second directly below the skyline feature the team had named the Second Step—“which looked so formidable an obstacle where it crossed the ridge,” Norton presciently wrote, “that we had chosen the lower route rather than try and surmount it.”
Beyond the second corner, the going abruptly got worse, as the slope steepened and the downsloping “tiles” underfoot grew treacherous. Twice Norton had to backtrack in his steps and try another approach. Still he pushed on, at last reaching the Great Couloir.
There, suddenly, he waded through knee- and even waist-deep unconsolidated snow. In a moment, the full terror of his predicament came home to him:
I fou
nd myself stepping from tile to tile, as it were, each tile sloping smoothly and steeply downwards; I began to feel that I was too much dependent on the mere friction of a boot nail on the slabs. It was not exactly difficult going, but it was a dangerous place for a single unroped climber, as one slip would have sent me in all probability to the bottom of the mountain. The strain of climbing so carefully was beginning to tell and I was getting exhausted. In addition my eye trouble was getting worse and was by now a severe handicap.
Norton turned around. He was only 300 yards west of Somervell, and 100 feet higher, but, as often happens when a climber acknowledges defeat, a kind of mental collapse now seized the man. As he approached his partner, facing a patch of snow thinly overlying sloping rocks—ground he had walked easily across perhaps half an hour before—he lost his nerve. Norton pleaded for Somervell to throw him a rope. Once tied in, he accomplished the crossing.
The expedition would later fix Norton’s high point as 28,126 feet—only 900 feet below the summit of the world, which stands 29,028 feet above sea level. Unless Mallory and Irvine reached a greater height four days later, Norton’s altitude record would stand for the next twenty-eight years. His oxygenless record would last twenty-six more, until Peter Habeler and Reinhold Messner summitted without gas in 1978.
Starting down at 2:00P.M., the men stayed roped together all the way back to Camp VI. Along the way, Somervell dropped his ice axe and watched as it bounded out of sight. At VI, he replaced it with a tent pole.
By sunset, the men, now unroped, had reached Camp V. Rather than spend a miserable night on one of its sloping, inadequate tent platforms, the duo pushed on down into the dusk, aiming for Camp IV. And here, Somervell nearly lost his life. Glissading ahead, Norton noticed that his partner had stopped above. All during the expedition, Somervell had painted skillful watercolors of the scenery (a number of the paintings were published in The Fight for Everest). His thinking addled by altitude, Norton now guessed that his friend had stopped to make a sketch or painting of the mountains bathed in their twilight glow. In fact, Somervell’s worst coughing fit so far had seemed to lodge some object in his throat that threatened to choke him. At last he coughed it loose in an explosion of blood and mucus. It was later determined that Somervell had coughed up the lining of his larynx.
The Lost Explorer Page 13