Dressed in his knee-length eiderdown coat for the first time, George took the lead. Accustomed to trekking through a snowstorm, he ploughed ahead and found a safe path down from the Jelep La, but his footprints were soon covered by the snowfall and he had to backtrack to find the porters and Crawford who had become lost as visibility was reduced to a few yards. It took them over six hours but eventually George led the descent into the village of Yatung at the entrance to the Chumbi Valley. They had reached Tibet.
The cold had also hit the two parties ahead, both of which had reached Phari by April 6 and had then huddled for two days, frozen and ‘coughing in the ever thickening murk’, as John Morris noted. Mallory in particular was unhappy, telling Ruth in a letter that he had been bored by ‘the repetition of aesthetic experiences’ of the trip and was longing to get to Everest. The men stayed the second night in Phari to celebrate Charles Bruce’s fifty-sixth birthday with a bottle of 120-year-old rum that he’d brought for the occasion: ‘If we had known what was in front of us, we should have put off the drinking of this peculiarly comforting fluid until the evening of the day after our first day’s march from Phari,’ he would later write, referring to the blizzard they would face.
They set off on April 8 on a three-day march to the fortress town of Kampa Dzong where, in 1903, Sir Francis Younghusband had attempted to negotiate a trade treaty with Chinese and Tibetan officials. He had taken five hundred troops and waited five months before giving up and going home. Now it was the gateway to the greatest adventure of all.
Charles Bruce again split the reunited expedition (save for the Finch–Crawford party) into two groups: he would lead the first, taking a higher and quicker route with fifty Chumbi mules carrying mostly luggage, while the second, under Colonel Strutt, would include a convoy of two hundred yaks loaded with stores and supplies, and would follow the lower, safer, but longer track.
General Bruce had likened the trek so far to a walk through the Highlands of Scotland, but that was to change dramatically. Soon after midday, the threatening weather broke and struck with a force they had not expected. No one was properly prepared; neither the Englishmen who were dressed in a motley selection of tweed suits and pullovers, nor the porters who still walked in sandals and light robes.
The bitter ‘half-hurricane’ winds pounded them for hours and made it almost impossible to marshal their animals. In the midst of the tempest three porters from the lower group were lost and presumed dead. The next morning they were found barely alive, having slept the night in the open, unable even to chip through the ice crust and start a fire.
When General Bruce’s mule party reached Kampa Dzong on the afternoon of the 11th, his first priority was to check the grave of Alexander Kellas. He added extra stones to the mound over it to ensure its security against wild animals. He then set up a camp site at the base of a 300-foot cliff on which the old fortress had been constructed. Strutt’s group was another two days behind with the yaks, and arrived during the morning of the 13th, just a few hours ahead of George Finch and Colin Crawford.
It had been a remarkable effort by Finch and Crawford to travel from Darjeeling in just ten days – a journey that had taken the others eighteen days – yet their effort to reunite the expedition was barely acknowledged by General Bruce other than to question the impact it would have on the porters and coolies, who, he worried, would arrive at the base camp exhausted and unable to ‘do the work’, while the oxygen equipment, he said, had been ‘badly knocked about’. The general had intended leaving Kampa Dzong the next day but begrudgingly agreed to a rest day.
Unlike the sour Mallory and Bruce, George was ecstatic: ‘Ye gods, I am fit!’ he declared after describing how he rushed up and down a hillside to get a photograph of a Tibetan antelope that reminded him of a European chamois. The last few days had been challenging but exhilarating, cheered by the scenery of the Chumbi Valley as they crossed into Tibet which, blanketed by snow, reminded George of a Swiss Alpine gorge but otherwise left him at a loss for words: ‘I wish I could describe more adequately our experiences and the beauty of the scenery we have been wandering through the last few days. But sometimes it seems quite beyond the powers of my pencil, and I must trust my photographs to make up some of the deficiency.’
The ugliness of Phari, where they had arrived on April 10, had stood in sharp contrast, although it had offered a place to sleep and to post a letter and confirmation that they were within touch of the others. Foregoing the chance to rest for a day, Finch and Crawford and their party of a dozen porters and mule drivers had chosen to face the ice-cold conditions and bitter, stinging wind to race along the higher track toward Kampa Dzong. On April 11 they had slept outdoors and on April 12 their accommodation had improved slightly when they’d been welcomed into a roofless monastery by a group of helpful if bedraggled nuns who spread George’s eiderdown sleeping bag across an altar just beneath the partly eaten and decaying carcass of a goat.
At more than 16,000 feet above sea level it was akin to sleeping on top of Mont Blanc, but George was not complaining. On the contrary, his diary glowed with the pleasure of the scenery as it changed again, the blue skies revealing three giants – Chomolhari, Pauhunri and Chomiomo – across the flat, stony plain. George was by now encased in his eiderdown coat, trousers, gloves, flying boots and helmet, and was impervious to the cold and the altitude, as he noted: ‘I need hardly say that the altitude has had no noticeable effect upon me. I feel and know by what I can do by way of muscular work that I am extremely fit, and in spite of regular shaving, my face is almost as dark as any Tibetan. Crawford and I get on splendidly together.’
In the five weeks since leaving London he had not once mentioned, in letters or his diary, the prize of Everest. It was as if reaching the summit mattered less than the experience and the desire to test scientifically his theories about oxygen. He worried constantly about the equipment he had helped devise and design and was frustrated at the apparent lack of interest by General Bruce. He wondered whether it would result in him missing an opportunity to use the oxygen high on the flanks of the mountain, above the so-called death zone. It was this scientific attitude and his determination to absorb as much as he could from the entire experience that set him apart from many of the other men. He did not believe he was superior to them, but realised he had a more complex purpose in joining the expedition.
George was a polymath, happy to apply his varied skills for the benefit of the team, unfazed by the strictures of class: he made himself useful around the camp in Kampa Dzong developing film for his colleagues, including Mallory, and repairing the cameras of Morris and Longstaff; he applied his engineering skills to adjust the Primus stoves and didn’t blink at helping to shoe the horses, readily involving himself in manual chores which would have been unthinkable for men such as Colonel Strutt.
But his first rest day since leaving Darjeeling began with him writing to Bubbles, his declarations of love even more desperate than usual:
My own dear beloved wife,
Crawford and I arrived here yesterday afternoon after three very long marches from Phari, during which the weather had been decidedly cold. We found all the rest of the party here. They were all glad to see us & were surprised at our speed.
Mallory alone was obviously fed up. You know he does not like me. Today we are having a so-called rest day, but really there is so much to do that there is little rest about it. I took about six rolls of photos since leaving Phari. Two I developed here this morning – but they go very dusty drying so I’m keeping the rest until I get to some better spot. Beloved, I don’t know how many times I have read your letter … Please keep well darling. I am taking all possible care here – for whenever I am inclined to be careless you seem to be talking to me and telling me to pull up my socks. Dear darling beloved, you know how I love you, and I am coming back just as soon as possible to you. September is not far away & if it can be made sooner so shall it be. Beloved, we are just sending out a post & it is now just closin
g. I did not know one was going. Beloved, God bless you. I love you, love you, love you, kiss you my beloved. Your husband Geof
22.
GODDESS MOTHER OF THE WORLD
The expedition was now travelling together and the lumbering great caravan of three hundred animals and their handlers moved off. The Europeans rode mules or ponies when they could, across the flat, desolate Tibetan Plateau, crossing a series of dunes and marshes where the Yaru and Arun rivers met and timing each march to arrive at a new village each afternoon. On April 16 they set up camp outside Tinki Dzong, a fortress built into a hillside with its imposing stone wall overlooking a shallow lake.
George decided to resume the oxygen drills that had been abandoned because of lack of interest before they had even reached Bombay. It was the first time the entire party had been together for any period of time and he hoped that being so much closer to their goal might change a few minds.
John Noel stood back from the rest to capture the scene with his camera: George with his head down, eagerly pointing out the features of his creation to those gathered around him, their limited interest clear as they stand with their hands shoved into the pockets of their tweed jodhpurs. A group of porters looks on, bemused. Behind them white tents stand in neat rows, surrounded by stacks of wooden crates and ragged yaks that have somehow found small patches of alpine grass to eat on an otherwise brown landscape.
As indicated by the photo, the response was not what George had been hoping, and the resumption of the drill sparked a heated debate that night during dinner, with Mallory and Longstaff the most vocal opponents.
George had been right about Mallory, at least to some extent: ‘I’m bound to say I find Finch rather tiresome,’ Mallory told Ruth. ‘He is perpetually talking about science as practised in his laboratory or about photography. In fact it is becoming a little difficult not to acquire a Finch complex. I hope we shall manage to get on.’
Still, the anti-Finch sentiment was beginning to thaw. John Morris had already declared his liking for George and Crawford had become friendlier as the pair trekked across northern India and Tibet. Henry Morshead was another who was beginning to doubt what he had been told about George and indicated that others felt the same way, as he wrote in his diary on April 16 after the fractious dinner: ‘Finch has been giving us a lecture on the use of the oxygen apparatus; we are to practise it every day from now onwards. Finch is a good fellow and I don’t know how all those yarns about him originated last year. We all like him, and I personally consider him far more of a sahib than our local representative of the ICS [Indian Civil Service].’
George’s struggle to be accepted was only heightened by his dress. The men had all been issued with thigh-high flying boots but nothing else was standard issue. John Morris had hurriedly bought a knickerbocker suit before leaving Darjeeling, made of ‘shoddy Kashmir tweed’. He, like the others, wore woollen underclothing beneath his suit as well as several Shetland pullovers, which restricted their movements to a ‘clumsy waddle’.
George could sense a change in the attitudes of the others toward his attire: ‘Today has been bitterly cold with a gale of a wind to liven things up,’ he wrote on April 18. ‘Everybody now envies me my eiderdown coat and it is no longer laughed at. May it do its job well on Everest!’
Although he meant it innocently, envy was not an emotion he needed to foster. It is significant that Charles Bruce, in his memoir, wrote of his own ‘very efficient mackintosh’, but made no mention of Finch’s clothing. His silence was loud, as he agreed that the clothing of most of the men was useless against the wind that ‘simply blew through wool’. George Mallory, who had been complaining of the cold, took a different view, describing the men as ‘snugly wrapped in their woollen waistcoats and Jaeger pants, their armour of wind-proof materials, their splendid overcoats, the fur-lined finneskoes or felt-sided boots or fleece-lined moccasins devised to keep warm their feet’. His comment was ludicrous: at best heroic and at worst disingenuous, serving only to highlight his jealousy of George Finch.
John Noel, however, looked at George in wonderment: ‘Finch, who had a scientific brain, invented a wonderful green quilted eiderdown suit of aeroplane fabric. Not a single particle of wind could get through. Underneath he used to wear a suit of silk underclothes, then one of wool, then another, then a fourth of thicker wool, then a fifth of the thickest fabric he could find.’
Noel’s growing admiration for George Finch also extended to his photography. Despite Mallory’s carping (which was hypocritical, given that he had happily accepted George’s offer to develop his film), Noel recognised George’s skill and asked him to help with some of the photographic work. The panoramic shots were time-consuming: setting up the equipment and waiting for the right light, not to mention avoiding bad weather. And Noel was busy filming as well, in order to satisfy Arthur Hinks’s desire to have a commercially viable movie of the expedition to help recoup some of the costs and perhaps even turn a profit.
Not only was George Finch capable of developing film but he was also a decent photographer, so Noel set him the task of capturing the ‘topical’ shots that Hinks also expected – photographs of people, both members of the expedition and the people of Tibet, as well as photos that would capture the essence of how the party travelled and lived as they moved ever closer to Everest.
George was excited by Noel’s invitation, although he was wary of Hinks and the Everest Committee as he instructed Bubbles to get two mountaineering pals, Raymond Peto and Bentley Beetham, to make prints of the best shots, bind them in a paper book and arrange for Percy Farrar to offer them to the committee for publication:
But do not let them have the film on any account, for I have suffered so much by way of stained, fingermarked, torn & even lost negatives through lending them to office people that I do not trust any more. If they demur about this, inform them that the negatives are made throughout with my own materials. And if they should get still nastier, don’t let them have any at all, but keep them till I return. I hope, however, they are reasonable for I should very much like some of my photos to be published soon.
Back in London, Arthur Hinks had not let up in his campaign against George Finch and his oxygen, and was unapologetic in his attempt to influence Charles Bruce, even en route to Everest. On April 12 he wrote to Bruce complaining about an article Percy Farrar had prepared for the Alpine Journal in which he supported Professor Georges Dreyer’s view about the use of oxygen. He planned to counter the article with one of his own in the Royal Geographical Society magazine:
Dreyer seems to maintain that oxygen must be taken into use at 23,000 feet. The president [Francis Younghusband] and I believe that it is nonsense. Abruzzi went to 24,800 feet without it. Kellas and Morshead at 23,500 feet on Kamet felt quite fit to go a long way, and our opinion is that this year the expedition ought certainly with its far greater resources [be able] to beat Abruzzi’s record without oxygen, though it might very well be that oxygen be taken up to the top. I write of this just to tell you what is in our minds, and to let you know that although we cordially agree with equipping the party with oxygen we think that a great deal can, and should be done, without it. I would gladly put a little money on Mallory to go to 25,000 feet without the assistance of four cylinders and a mask.
Two weeks later he tried again, revealing that things had got personal between himself and Farrar, who had accused him of making fun of the oxygen outfit. Hinks denied the accusation even though it was true: ‘It is not intended to make fun of the oxygen outfit at all, as Farrar had first supposed, but some of us do feel that the oxygen people have relied too much on Dreyer … we shall be very disappointed if some of the party do not get to 25,000 feet or 26,000 feet without such artificial aid, and I hope they will bear that in mind.’
When the Royal Geographical Society article appeared it got immediate publicity in the wider media, with The Times reporting:
The writer entertains doubts as to whether or not oxygen should be taken a
t all times above 23,000 feet and adds that ‘it seems quite as important to discover how high a man can climb without oxygen as to get to a specified point, even the highest summit in the world, in conditions so artificial that they can never become legitimate mountaineering’.
It demonstrated yet again that Arthur Hinks, who had declared before the men left that ‘anyone who climbs to 26,000 feet with oxygen is a rotter’, was determined to find a way to sabotage George Finch. His acceptance of oxygen as a legitimate experiment was disingenuous and his machinations were potentially damaging to the expedition and the lives of the thirteen men who had been sent to seek glory on behalf of the Empire. His stance was even more damning considering that he was neither an expert nor had he ever experienced the effects of altitude on a climber’s mind and body – and that he was trampling on the decision of a committee largely made up of men who had.
Mallory and Finch wanted to find reasons to like each other – after all they were kindred souls on a mountain – but their differences at ground level were becoming more and more entrenched as the expedition progressed. Not only were the two men divided on the question of artificial oxygen – one because of his own dogmatic character and the other because he was easily swayed by the arguments of others – but the manner and even the skills of each man were annoying to the other.
Mallory was a sublime natural athlete who moved instinctively and often without thought for the consequences. George moved quickly enough and with authority, but only after careful thought. Mallory was a creative spirit, who wrote like a dream and thought nothing of peeling off his clothes if the weather was too warm and trekking naked. He habitually left his belongings scattered around the camp site. George was a man of logic who preferred his camera to words. He was far from a prude, happy to bathe in a mountain stream. However, his preference was for order: he preferred hot water, hated the feeling of stubble on his chin and was perennially frustrated by the necessities of quick teeth, face, hands and arm washing after wading across rivers on long treks.
The Brilliant Outsider Page 20