They were also rivals, both with a point to prove – to themselves and their philosophies. The rivalry bared its teeth on April 20 when the expedition arrived at Gyankar Nangpa, ‘the usual collection of dirty squalid hovels’, as George described the scene. In contrast, above the camp site rose an elegant mountain known as Sangkar Ri, which reminded him of the majesty of the Matterhorn.
The trek that morning had been barely six miles of easy terrain and the pent-up energy of the men bubbled over into a desire to climb the 20,000-foot peak as a training run for the challenges ahead. There was also the promise of an uninterrupted view of Mount Everest, which lay on the other side of the peak. They would have to camp overnight on the mountain and then strike out for the summit in the early morning to give them time to descend by 1pm the following day in order to move on with the rest of the expedition. Mallory, Somervell and Wakefield, as well as George, were all eager to go, so, with General Bruce’s permission, the four men divided themselves into two teams – Mallory with Somervell and Finch with Wakefield.
Mallory would later write that the climb was his idea and that he and Somervell, having sought the permission of Bruce, were making their plans when ‘two others’ decided to join in, as if it was an intrusion. To make matters worse an argument then broke out between Mallory and Finch about the right way to tackle the mountain – ‘a battle royal’, as George would describe it – which was only settled by Bruce who, perhaps surprisingly, favoured the Finch proposal.
They set off at 4.15pm, the four men with six porters who would bring the equipment – tents and sleeping bags – back down the mountain the next morning while the climbers continued upwards: ‘Mallory, of course, started to race so, just to show there was no ill-feeling, I acted as his runner-up and beat him by just over three-quarters of an hour in the three and a half hours it took to get to the site of our projected camp. It was dark by the time we set in to pitch our tents. The cold was intense,’ wrote George.
George woke during the night feeling ill and admonished himself for not wearing his cholera belt, a piece of flannel designed to keep the abdomen warm and supposedly prevent the chills that were thought to lead to dysentery. The others couldn’t sleep either because of the cold but preferred to stay huddled in their tents and ridiculed George’s suggestion that they leave at 1am to ensure they had enough time to complete the ascent. The men finally emerged at 3.30am, ate and broke camp soon after 4am, but were slowed almost immediately when confronted by moraine, debris from an ancient glacier. It took them four hours to negotiate the unexpected obstacle and reach the steep slope that led to the base of a col they hoped would take them to the mountaintop.
By 9am the four men, still climbing in pairs, were only halfway up the passage and time was running out if they were going to be back at Gyankar Nangpa by the promised 1pm deadline. George was feeling ill again, vomiting several times. He decided to turn back with Wakefield while Mallory and Somervell went on. Mallory’s report of the climb was laced with the perception that his rival had quit too easily: ‘We had ascended not more than 1000 feet the next morning when one of the party decided he was too ill to go on; he exhibited the usual symptoms of mountain-illness.’
As it turned out, Mallory and Somervell were also forced to turn back only a few hundred yards from the peak, both suffering the effects of altitude sickness, although Mallory shrugged it off: ‘I had come near to exhaustion, considering the difficulties of the climb, and had suffered from a severe headache, but certainly felt no worse than I expected at this stage in our training.’ Finch and Wakefield had rejoined the main party and made their way to the next village, but Mallory and Somervell would only arrive late in the night after being helped across riverbeds – ‘quicksands of evil repute’ – by their porters.
The Sangkar Ri experience not only highlighted the increasing division between the two lead climbers but also the challenge they all faced to acclimatise to the altitude. The Tibetan Plateau has an average altitude of almost 15,000 feet, the equivalent to trekking across the top of the Matterhorn. The climbers were accustomed to the plateau’s altitude and Sangkar Ri had been a chance to test themselves at the next level. Although he felt fitter than at any time in his life, it was clear that George Finch (and Mallory, too) needed more time to acclimatise and that performing an exercise at altitude in the controlled environment of a steel tank in Oxford was vastly different to the experience in the wild environs of the Himalayas.
There was another moment of importance the next morning soon after they struck camp and mobilised the caravan. The climbers were walking ahead, following the banks of the Yaru River, when they rounded a sharp bend. George caught sight of it first as a reflection in the calm waters, an enormous white pyramid that seemed to grow as they turned the corner. Everest.
The men stopped, transfixed. John Noel hurriedly set up his camera to capture the moment on film. Two of them – Mallory and Morshead – had seen the mountain before, but even they had not seen the Goddess Mother of the World from this perspective: the full south face blanketed in snow, filling the horizon of the mountain pass they walked in, as if she had been lying in wait and now wanted to show her might. The bare red and brown mountains that had bordered their path for the past week seemed to melt away, puny now – ‘a crumpled Egyptian desert’, mused Charles Bruce.
George Finch had a strange, mixed response: ‘A great and stirring sight,’ he wrote. ‘One which renewed the enthusiasm of all, perhaps a little dulled by our lengthy trek.’
Perhaps it was an anticlimax; after all, he had been imagining this moment for at least fourteen years, ever since Easter in 1908 when he and Max had sailed to Corsica to prepare themselves for the challenges of Everest in all her isolation.
George’s response to Everest also revealed that while the mountain was overwhelming in mass, it was not quite the thing of beauty he’d imagined. He wrote to Bubbles a few days later: ‘I have had several close-up views of Everest by now – it is not nearly such a fine-looking mountain as Mont Blanc.’
23.
THE FOOT OF EVEREST
Occasionally, George Finch reminisced about Australia. They were momentary flashbacks mainly; a sight or smell might take him home to the bush around Orange, where he had spent so much time as a boy, and in his later years he liked to tell tales of snakes and wallabies and swimming in Sydney Harbour.
On the road to Shekar Dzong, one of the last plains settlements before they began the climb to the base of Everest, he noticed clumps of a hardy shrub growing on the banks of the Arun River, its thorny, silver-green leaf and golden berries sparking a memory. He knew the plant well enough to name it – the sea buckthorn, or hippophae, which also grew in abundance high in the European Alps above the tree line where it could survive in dry air and with very little water. But this sight sparked a different and more distant memory of a morning on top of Mount Canobolas and a golden tree that symbolised his homeland: ‘A wattle … a great sight in an otherwise treeless country,’ he noted in his diary that night, as if reflecting on that twenty-year journey that was now so close to reality.
They were within a week of their first destination, the Rongbuk Glacier, where base camp would be established, and the weather was a confusing mix: warm and sometimes even hot under clear skies during the day then freezing cold after the sun set, with frequent whipping winds and frost. George had taken to wearing layers that could be added or discarded as the day progressed and conditions changed. By day he wore a sun-proof shirt and sweater, a cardigan waistcoat, long stockings, brogues and his plus-four suit as well as a soft felt hat. At sunset the hat, coat and brogues were replaced with his flying helmet and boots, his lambskin gloves and his now beloved eiderdown coat, ‘frankly admired and desired by all!’.
Though his testy relationship with Mallory bothered George, there were further signs of his acceptance by others in the expedition. The morning after the climb up Sangkar Ri he had played the fool by riding a yak and a cow, as if to disarm his coll
eagues and distance himself from the serious lecturer he normally appeared to be. It was a deliberate effort to earn a ‘sobriquet’, as he admitted in his diary on April 22, and he was immediately dubbed ‘Buffalo Bill’, adding to the growing list of nicknames that had been assigned as the trek proceeded and the men relaxed into each other’s company:
We are all settling down well and I am glad to feel now that most of the legacy of hate that Howard-Bury left behind for me has not only vanished but would appear even to be recoiling upon its author. Nicknames have started. Mallory, on account of his appearance and peculiar mentality, is known as Peter Pan. Morris, who affects native head dress in the evening and has shorn his head of all except one lock, after the manner of the Hindu, answers to Babu Chatterjee, or the latter for short. Wakefield is usually referred to as the Archdeacon … and General Bruce, of course, is the General. We could not have a better or more able leader.
George’s glowing praise of Bruce was surprising, given their earlier clashes, but the fact that the general had backed him over Mallory in how to tackle Sangkar Ri had caused George to rethink his opinion of the team leader. Perhaps in hope more than anything else, he appeared oblivious to Bruce’s obvious dislike of him and chose to blame Howard-Bury for spreading the poison that had actually been fed and fostered by Arthur Hinks, aided by Francis Younghusband, and had now been picked up by Colonel Strutt. George’s new-found admiration for authority would not last long.
Shekar Dzong, with several thousand inhabitants, was the biggest settlement they’d seen since crossing the border into Tibet. White-walled stone houses wound their way up the side of a steep hill, reflecting the sunlight, true to the village’s name (meaning shining glass), toward the fort set high above the plains. The expedition would stop here for three days, waiting for new transport.
George was happy enough with the delay because it gave him time to develop some film, a slow process given the brackish water he had to first distil and the continual dust devils that swept through the camp and threatened to ruin his work. He was also developing film for the others, including John Noel, with whose work he could not resist comparing his own, as he confessed in his diary: ‘On the whole my photographs are very good and have improved ever so much since leaving Kampa Dzong. Noel’s photos are, to my mind, not as good and they are far less numerous.’
He wrote to Bubbles for the first time in a fortnight, two letters in as many days, which he sent as they were leaving on April 27 and in which he enclosed some jewellery he’d bought at the local market, including two bracelets of brass and quartz, a bead and stone necklace, turquoise earrings and a small silver charm box. He was pleased with himself, ‘awfully fit’, and had finally had some time to relax and read from the ‘little library’ he’d brought, particularly the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the sonnets of Robert Burns.
And as much as he looked forward to the challenge of Everest, it was home that was consuming his thoughts:
How I long for the time when we turn our backs on Everest & we’re homeward bound towards you. Gen Bruce has definitely settled that we all leave when the monsoons break – so set your mind at rest on that. Don’t be anxious then, for you are always with me & I know that for your sake I must not only always be careful but that I must, come what may, come back to you in September.
Until now the expedition had been following the path forged by the Howard-Bury reconnaissance the previous year, but that was about to change. Worried by the approach of the inevitable monsoonal deluge, Charles Bruce decided to cut a shorter path to Rongbuk across a mountain pass known as Pang La, long used by travellers and merchants moving between China and Tibet but never before by Europeans. The trek would take four days and should have them at the mouth of the glacier by May 1.
They left Shekar Dzong on April 27 and headed south before beginning the ascent to the pass. The next morning, George Finch, Geoffrey Bruce and Thomas Longstaff went ahead of the main party, eager to clamber to the top of the pass where they sat for two hours, transfixed by the jagged white line that stretched across the horizon beyond the folds and shadows of the brown hills:
Everest was in clouds, but the great ridge of the Cho Oyu and Gyachung Kang was perfectly clear and stood up to great advantage. Later on, Everest itself shook off its fleecy mantle, at least in part, and to our astonishment we saw that its great northern flank east of the north ridge and the north peak was almost bare rock. One thing cheered us all up, and that was the thought that from Tashidzom onwards every step we took bore us up nearer to the summit of Everest; at an end were the ups and downs of the last month’s trek.
The old man had an enormous face, seemingly twice the size of Charles Bruce’s, and the general for once was showing humility. George watched, impressed by Bruce’s diplomatic skills, as he fiddled with his camera to adjust the light settings, keen to take a photo of the ‘impressive old humbug’. The two men were standing in the darkened monastery, the most sacred of temples in Rongbuk, the ‘land of precipices and deep ravines’. Outside, the great slab of rock they had come to conquer loomed ominously, but here it was the fat-faced man who first needed to be conquered. The lama of Rongbuk, Dzatrul Rinpoche, was a living Buddha and the reincarnation of the mythical teacher Padmasambhava who’d brought Buddhism to Tibet.
General Bruce’s recollection of the lama was perhaps kinder than the observations of George Finch, describing him as dignified and wise and keen to understand why his men wanted to climb the mountain. Bruce settled on the word ‘pilgrimage’ and concocted a series of ‘gentle white lies’ about vows his men had taken. Finch listened to the exchange: ‘With perfect logic he explained that Everest’s summit, being the highest point on earth, was also the spot closest to the heavens; and was it not natural that, at least once during our brief journey through life, we would try to get as close to heaven as we possibly could?’
George thought the explanation had ‘satisfied the old gentleman’, who gave them his blessing and later sent them meat, tea and flour, according to the local tradition of hospitality. The lama later wrote his own version of the meeting which highlighted the cultural chasm between the climbers and the spiritual leader who admired their efforts and ‘magic skills with iron nails, iron chains and iron claws’ but was perplexed by their motives: ‘I felt great compassion for them to suffer so much for such meaningless work.’
The lama’s permission may have been a formality, but their progress up the glacier was more problematic. George was sent with Somervell, Wakefield and Crawford to try to thread a route through a minefield of moraines so the cavalcade could reach a level plain that stretched out at the foot of the glacier, ideal for setting up camp. Much to George’s frustration, his companions were useless – ‘none of them has the slightest idea of route finding’ – and he went off on his own to find a route, which he did, taking three trips to bring the entire caravan through the glacial debris. But that’s where the trek ended for many of the local workers: ‘Here the transport stopped and refused to budge another inch,’ he wrote that night in his diary. ‘No arguments or inducements by way of backsheesh were of the slightest use. Fear of devils and lack of grazing for the animals were insuperable obstacles. So back they went and here we are with all our kit and what now must become our home base.’
The base was almost exactly where the reconnaissance mission had pitched its tents the year before, although it had arrived a month later when the bare, rocky ground was cushioned by alpine grass and a wide running stream eased past, fed by thawing ice from above. Now there was no grass to be seen and the stream bed was virtually dry, save for some patches of snow. The men pitched their tents – eight in total – against the side of a steep rise in the hope it might act as a wind-break against the icy gusts that billowed from the glacier behind them.
Charles Bruce was sanguine: ‘I do not think such an enormous cavalcade could possibly have mounted the Rongbuk Glacier before. There were over three hundred baggage animals, about twenty ponies, fifty
or sixty men in our own employ and the best part of one hundred Tibetans. Finally, all were paid off and the expedition was left alone in its glory.’
They had arrived at the foot of Everest.
24.
THE RIGHT SPIRIT
May 10th
Mallory and Somervell start this afternoon upwards. They are to try to climb Everest without oxygen. In a few days time Norton and I start for the same thing with oxygen. Meanwhile, the great difficult problem is how to get our staff forward and keep all the advance camps replenished. Personally I am quite optimistic (that is, as far as the oxygen party is concerned) though I don’t give Mallory and Somervell a foot above 25,000 feet. I am completely recovered and my tummy is quite normal again. Now for the mail!
George Finch had been wrestling with a bout of dysentery for the past four days, confined to camp where he had made himself busy studying weather patterns, tweaking the Primus stoves and testing the oxygen equipment while the others trekked upwards to find sites for the three camps they would need between the base, at 16,500 feet, and the bottom of the North Col, from where the attempts to the summit would be launched.
A week earlier he, Colonel Strutt and Edward Norton had walked, scrambled and climbed for almost four hours across a lunarscape of broken rock and ice hard enough to bend his best axe to find a suitable site for Camp I (at 17,720 feet) on the eastern edge of the giant glacier. The men had begun under sunny, clear skies but by the time they headed back down in the afternoon it had clouded over and a ‘pestilential’ wind had whipped up. It was a pattern that would be repeated over and over again during their six weeks on the mountain, the expected summer weather refusing to arrive as if the mountain devils were set against their intrusion.
The Brilliant Outsider Page 21