Dr Wakefield: Will not make 23,000 feet. Very nervous, distinctly hysterical and thus not likely to properly conserve his power. Age very much against him, more than it really should be.
Mr Mallory: Good for between 24,000 and 25,000 feet, perhaps a little more but not over 25,500 feet. I am inclined to look upon him as the strongest of all if he learns to go slow and not fluster himself.
Mr Somervell: Good for 24,000 feet. Rather heavy and likely therefore to become muscle bound. 23,000 feet in tank at Oxford finished him, and given time 21,000 would have done so judging from Dreyer’s records of diastolic and systolic blood pressure.
Major Morshead: Don’t know. Was fairly fit last year at 23,000 feet but is no born mountaineer.
Major Heron: Won’t make 23,000 feet to judge from reports from last year’s members.
Captain Finch: Would, I hope, hold my own with Mallory. But also I hope I won’t be called on to make an attempt without oxygen.
George also wrote to Bubbles from Darjeeling. The letter, the first he’d written since leaving England almost three weeks before, began ‘Beloved wife’ and then launched into a list of instructions for dealing with the hundreds of photographs he planned to send back – ‘films galore’, he said. He had already begun taking photos as he strolled around Darjeeling, resplendent in his sturdy tweed knickerbocker suit, tie and pith helmet and carrying two pocket cameras.
By the end of the expedition he expected there would be more than 1500 images, all of which should be carefully developed by Bubbles with amidol, a crystalline powder, before the images were marked on the back by number to match the negatives and then filed in numbered envelopes with paper sheets between each photograph. What George required was ‘thorough developing, fixing, washing, drying and handling after to avoid scratching, soiling or finger-marking any film’.
To anyone else, his demands might have seemed over the top, but Bubbles knew it was simply her husband’s perfectionism speaking. She had fallen in love with a man she believed was a genius, and he needed her support. It was a role she wanted to perform.
George also sent Bubbles pages from his diary, insisting that Percy Farrar be the only other person allowed to read them ‘until he has censored out what should not go further’. He wrote in wonderment at the scenery around Darjeeling and the exotic animals – buffalo, elephants, tigers, panthers, cheetahs, two types of bear and an Indian bison called a Gaur – that lurked in the jungles down by the Tista River.
He told her he had been busy, if not with his own equipment then helping to repair the equipment of others, and was excited at the chance to test the eiderdown jacket he’d designed, now packed in a trunk until he reached the Rongbuk Glacier. But the letter made no mention of the chance to conquer Everest; instead, its overwhelming sense was one of loneliness, George’s distance from his new wife a more powerful feeling than the excitement of the adventure ahead:
My darling, I am hoping anxiously that the first mail from you will arrive here before I go on trek … You don’t know how I long for you, how everything seems to be pulling me back to you – I feel so empty, so forlorn. I ought to tell you when reading my diary don’t think I’m down in the mouth or really worried because I’m not. You are really always with me, and everything that comes along is just being accepted & taken on without question on my part. I love you, my dear darling heart with just that one great love of which I had never had the faintest idea of its existence but which I have known since you came into my life bringing happiness untold.
His sense of isolation was exacerbated by the underlying disunity of the expedition team. He was an outsider, unwanted by the team leaders, and he knew it. Worst of all, George did not trust the two men he would most likely be climbing with – George Mallory and Howard Somervell:
It seems to me that [reconnaissance expedition leader Colonel Charles] Howard-Bury has left something of a legacy of gossip for me to live down. I like all the members of the party except Mallory & Somervell neither of whom are straight, especially not the latter of whom I can tell you something when I return. Young Bruce & Morshead I don’t know, having only seen them for a few moments: but I think they are all right, even though Mallory is very thick with Morshead.
Not everyone was suspicious of him. John Morris immediately liked Finch and was disturbed by the behaviour of some of the others, particularly Colonel Strutt, which he witnessed one morning when the weekly parcel of English newspapers arrived. In one of them was a two-page feature written about George and his exploits in the Alps. It was the piece in the Illustrated London News that Hinks had chided George about five months before, slipped into the mailbag for no other reason than to create more friction and give the impression that George had broken the publicity embargo. Strutt seethed, as Morris would recall in a book he wrote later about the expedition:
Strutt’s objections were based upon Finch’s unusual background. He had been educated in Switzerland and had acquired a considerable reputation for the enterprise and skill of his numerous guideless ascents. Besides, he was by profession a research chemist and therefore doubly suspect, since in Strutt’s old-fashioned view the sciences were not a respectable occupation for anyone who regarded themselves as a gentleman. One of the photographs which particularly irritated him depicted Finch repairing his own boots. It confirmed Strutt’s belief that a scientist was a sort of a mechanic. I can still see his rigid expression as he looked at the picture: ‘I always knew the fellow was a shit,’ he said, and the sneer remained on his face while the rest of us sat in frozen silence.
The incident made Morris keenly aware of George’s demeanour during the few days they were all together in Darjeeling:
He seemed ill at ease at first, probably knowing that his presence was not particularly welcome. But it was at once clear that his whole approach to the problem with which during the next few months we should be confronted was different from that of the rest. His attitude was thoroughly professional, and although this was his first visit to the Himalayas, his scientific training had led him to consider a number of matters the importance of which was barely sensed by some of the others. It was his misfortune to be of the right age to attempt Everest in 1922. His ideas of how such expeditions should be conducted were in advance of his time. He would have been more at home in one of the highly planned expeditions of later years, especially if he had been the leader. Even so, his contribution was considerable. He was an advocate of climbing with the aid of oxygen, which at the time was considered by the old guard to be unsporting. Indeed, Strutt was firmly of the opinion that if we reached the summit of Everest only with the help of oxygen we could not claim to have climbed the mountain. His dislike of Finch continued throughout the expedition.
21.
THE ROAD TO KAMPA DZONG
Charles Bruce split the expedition into three travelling groups when they left Darjeeling. On March 27 he led the first group, which included Mallory, Longstaff, Morshead, Wakefield, Noel and his nephew Geoffrey, out of the city. The next day Strutt, Morris, Norton and Somervell boarded a train and headed to Kalimpong. That left George and Crawford to bring up the rear with the oxygen equipment, which had not yet arrived.
On the surface the idea seemed to have merit. Smaller teams meant quicker travel and increased the party’s chances of getting to the Rongbuk Glacier and establishing a base camp with enough time to prepare for an assault on the mountain before the monsoons arrived, as expected, in early July.
But there was also a downside, as George attempted to explain to General Bruce, as tactfully as possible given his tenuous relationship with the expedition leader – ‘I do not wish to appear to be an unruly nuisance.’ The first two groups were well equipped with medical support but George and Crawford would have none and were likely to be several days’ march, perhaps a week or more, behind the others.
It was the opposite issue with the oxygen equipment. George and Crawford would be carrying everything, with no chance to test the equipment or complete the t
raining for the other climbers unless they caught them along the 250-mile trek to Rongbuk Glacier. George estimated it would take a fortnight to train the others properly, but that was now going to be almost impossible because it was unlikely, based on travelling calculations, that he and Crawford would arrive at Rongbuk until May 20, giving them barely a month to prepare for and make a climb before the expected rains in early July.
The diplomatic approach failed. General Bruce stuck with his plan and made it clear that it was up to George and Crawford to catch up, if and when they could. He and Strutt had also made a major decision about the climbing strategy. The first attempt to climb Everest would be made by a team led by George Mallory and it would be without oxygen. If he was ready, George could follow later.
‘I should mention at this stage that the attempt (or at all events the first real attempt) is to be made without oxygen,’ George wrote in a diary entry on March 22 as he sat in his room in the suitably named Everest Hotel:
I gathered this impression yesterday in conversation with General Bruce and it was confirmed today by Longstaff in the course of a conversation between him, Norton and myself. I can also mention that Longstaff thinks it is a great mistake to have oxygen at all. Oxygen is not popular and I doubt very much if anyone, excepting myself, places any reliance upon it as a help in reaching a high altitude.
After the others left Darjeeling, George became more and more despondent. He packed and repacked four times, including his supply of 1000 cigarettes, shot and developed dozens of photographs in a makeshift tank as an experiment, made waterproof maps of the area by pasting them to canvas and coating them with layers of a thin rubber compound, and even whittled himself a slingshot to use as protection against the jackals he could hear wailing at night outside the hotel.
He bought the bladders from toy footballs in case he needed a back-up breathing system for the oxygen tanks and rearranged the nail tread on his boots to improve their grip and then tested them by climbing to the top of Tiger Hill, a seven-mile trek from the town, where on a clear day it was possible to get a glimpse of the tip of Everest as it peeked through the wall of rock and ice immediately confronting the expedition.
George even began drawing, sketching and painting, as he explained to Bubbles in a series of letters: ‘I got up at 6am & went to Observation Hill armed with sketchbook and pastels. The result of my labours, especially after applying fixative, is very horrid, but in spite of my obviously absolute inability in this field I’m going to stick to it, chiefly because it affords a certain amount of amusement.’
He also referred to the financial problems at home, which highlighted the sacrifices he’d made to go on the six-month expedition. Most of the participants were independently wealthy men, like Charles Bruce, Strutt, Longstaff and Somervell. Others had been drafted in from the Indian Civil Service or the British Army and remained on full pay. George, by contrast, was on half pay and it was clear that Bubbles was already struggling, worried about meeting the £10 per month payment on a car, an open-top Humber that George had bought in his flush of excitement when they married:
I rang up before leaving to say that I was not going to resume payments until October. Sell the Humber when you like & for what you like, only keep back my tools! In any case, beloved wife, you may do anything you think fit and you need never be afraid that I shall criticise what you do – provided you look after yourself & don’t worry or fret. I know how awful this separation is. Almost ever since last writing to you I’ve been fighting off an almost insufferable attack of loneliness. Beloved heart. Like you I find my way to you and dreamland in the still dark hours, wondering at the strangeness that leaves me so often much alone. I love you, love you & wonder sometimes at my undeserved happiness in having the love of you.
On March 31 George received word that the oxygen tanks had finally arrived in Calcutta and would be railed almost 400 miles to reach Kalimpong by April 3. It meant he and Crawford would be eight days behind the others by the time they left. Perhaps all was not lost, after all, as he wrote to Bubbles:
My beloved wife,
The oxygen has turned up sooner than I had dared to hope so tomorrow sees the real commencement of our trek. Dear darling Bubbles, I love you as you know & I am so utterly proud of you. I am getting this letter off tonight because after today postal arrangements will not be so good! Somehow I have felt all the time that you are with me & partaking in all the things I see and experience. I feel I go forward now to achieving my best – whatever that may be. We have a longish trek tomorrow (to Pedong) and as it’s getting late I must begin to say goodnight. I long & long for the time when I can once more fall asleep in the happy shelter of your arms. Darling wife, be happy as is possible – I think of you and am so often with you. Do not worry, I will be careful & God will keep me well for your dear sake.
George faced a dilemma as he and Crawford set out from Kalimpong on the morning of April 4. They had to find a balance between haste, so they could catch up to the main parties that were both now approaching the Tibetan fortress town of Phari, 100 miles north and another 6500 feet above sea level, and care, to avoid damaging the precious tanks with their life-giving oxygen.
He could hear the hollow clank of metal on metal as the cylinders rubbed together, carried by porters on their shoulders along the rough track. George ordered a halt and using a penknife – the only tool Charles Bruce had bothered to leave him – prised open one of the boxes. It confirmed the worst, that the cylinders had already been damaged.
They had to be repacked, and it was a six-hour task to secure all of them using a makeshift padding of ropes and rags. Otherwise the tanks would not make it to the base of Everest, let alone the summit, as George wrote: ‘The inevitable explosion would not only cost us the cylinders’ precious contents and maybe endanger lives but it would have discredited oxygen completely, and many participants had a low opinion of and little love for oxygen as it was.’
The condition and route of the trail compounded the problem; it was a rough and rutted track alternately plunging through deep valleys of lush green jungle and wild blue and silver rivers before leading upwards so steeply they had to walk their ponies until they topped a ridge, often to find a village of roughly hewn houses with a tea house at its centre and surrounded by tiny plots of farmland.
George Finch had never seen country, weather or people like this although, typically, he had read about the region assiduously: ‘Get Farrar to lend you [Douglas] Freshfield’s book,’ he advised Bubbles in a letter. ‘It has lots to say about Darjeeling & is altogether a ripping book.’
He photographed everything, fascinated in particular by the faces of the local tribespeople, and spent hours under candlelight each night experimenting with makeshift methods of developing his film. His diary, until now filled with his frustration at the delays, recorded his wonderment as he and Crawford leapt into a mountain stream to wash off weeks of grime in the pristine waters:
The surrounds of the stream are beautiful beyond all my powers of description. Both banks support dense jungle growth – magnificent trees, many of which have their life support sapped away by the luxuriant burden of orchids, ferns, creepers and other parasitical plants which they nourish. Dense shrub and fern undergrowth completely hide the ground and the lowest part of the tree trunk. Bamboo grows everywhere with many beautiful palms.
He also wrote about the mule drivers, porters and cooks who accompanied them:
The twenty mules are rather small animals; they average little more than 14 hands but they are wonderfully fast goers, ever so sturdy and splendid weight carriers and are extremely well looked after by their two Tibetan drivers – cheerful, willing hard workers. The coolies are a mixed lot – one or two Nepalese and mostly Lepchas … they come along all right and don’t grouse. Our cook is a Sherpa. His name is Kang Cho. He is rather lame, the result of a horse’s kick. He is a very solemn figure with a lovely pigtail. He cooks well and is always usefully busy. His mate is a Lepcha, quite a boy
and satisfactory in every way.
The days and villages passed by – Pedong, Rangli, Rangpo, Lingtam, Sedongchen and Lingtu – as the trail inevitably led upwards, through the land known as Sikkim toward Kangchenjunga, the world’s third highest peak. The mountain’s name, an interpretation of Tibetan pronunciation by members of the Kellas expedition in 1920, meant ‘five treasures of the high snow’ and the expedition members would have to work their way around the base of the five peaks of the mountain to get to their destination.
The scenery was changing, the forests thinning. The vivid dark red hues of the giant rhododendrons and the white, lilac, blue and yellow gentians were increasingly replaced by bare stony ground. And the temperature was falling as they climbed higher, the hazy skies and humidity of the hills and valleys now turned misty and overcast.
It began to snow on the afternoon of April 7 as they approached the hilltop village of Gnatong; slight flutters at first but thickening to cast a grim pall as they stood for an hour in the local cemetery, reading the inscriptions on the headstones of British soldiers who had lost their lives during the bloody campaigns of the late nineteenth century. George was taken by the fact that only one man had been killed in action, the others dying from disease or exposure. It highlighted the isolation and peril of the bleak, barren country they were about to traverse.
It was still snowing the next morning, forcing a delay as they arranged stockings and boots for the porters before the next climb across the Jelep La, the mountain pass linking India with Tibet. George was frustrated that his skis had been taken ahead against his express wishes – yet another example of his warnings about conditions being ignored. The climb itself wasn’t difficult under calm skies, hence the name which meant ‘lovely level pass’, but by mid morning the snowfall had turned into a blizzard, the conditions now hazardous as the mercury plunged and the trail began to ice.
The Brilliant Outsider Page 19