George might well have cast his mind back to Salonika in 1916 when he had been confronted with the problem of an armoury made useless by leaking fuses and had managed to co-ordinate the repair of thousands of shells in a matter of weeks. By comparison, re-soldering and re-sealing ten oxygen units, while frustrating, was achievable. Even on the side of a mountain. The ground outside the tents resembled a mechanic’s shop as George set to work repairing the oxygen units with his makeshift toolkit and dodging a storm that suddenly swept through the valley, sending him scurrying into his tent to survive temperatures so cold – at times plunging to minus 56 degrees Celsius – that it was impossible to touch tools with his bare hands. Within twenty-four hours, however, he had four functioning sets, more than enough for himself, Geoffrey Bruce and Tejbir.
But there was a more serious issue – the breathing masks. He had packed two designs, the first one dubbed the economiser because it was configured to allow exhaled air to mix with the tank oxygen and therefore would use less of the precious mixture. By comparison, the second mask fitted across the bottom half of the face and fed a continuous stream of pure oxygen to the climber, whose exhaled air collected in a separate reservoir. Both masks had worked in the controlled surroundings of an Oxford laboratory but in the extreme environs of the Himalayas, the resistance caused by the complicated valve system of both designs meant the effort to breathe was simply too much for a climber already straining physically.
Without a working mask, the oxygen system was useless. Finch’s dream was on the verge of collapse, had it not been for his technical genius. A month before, as he waited in Darjeeling, George had struck on an idea for a simple, back-up mask in case the others either did not last the sea trip or became unusable at high altitude. The concept was simple (at least in George’s mind) and relied on the use of the toy football bladders he had bought at a local bazaar together with a small length of rubber tubing and a glass T-tube. The rubber tube was fitted between the oxygen valve and one end of the T-tube, the opposite end of which was placed in the climber’s mouth. The football bladder would enclose the third end of the T-tube.
When the climber inhaled, the oxygen flowed directly from the tank through the T-tube into his mouth. On exhaling, he clamped the tube shut with his teeth, forcing the air into the football bladder which inflated. He then unclenched his teeth as he inhaled, allowing the mixture of oxygen and exhaled air back into his lungs, and so on. And by halting the flow, the oxygen from the tanks was not wasted.
No doubt Colonel Strutt would add George’s mechanical tinkering to the growing list of his unattractive attributes, but the man himself was happy: ‘The correct closing and opening of the rubber tube by alternately biting and releasing the pressure of the teeth upon it became, after a few minutes’ practice, a perfectly automatic, subconscious response. The success of this simple mask pleased me greatly; without it, no really effective use could have been made of our oxygen supplies.’
Just after midday on May 20 George Finch and Geoffrey Bruce set out to test the repaired equipment by climbing to Rapiu La. It was the first time George had climbed using oxygen and he delighted in outstripping Strutt and Wakefield who trudged ever further behind Finch and Bruce as they made their way up the slope: ‘The effect of the O2 was remarkable. Though the apparatus weighed some thirty pounds we two went ahead like a house on fire.’
The view from Rapiu La warned them there was foul weather ahead – ‘the valleys in the south filled with dark and heavy cloud banks, piled high upon each other like giant feather beds’ – and they scurried back to camp just as a wild snowstorm struck. The blizzard continued for most of the next day, confining them to their tents. They wondered when it would lift and how badly it might be affecting the four men on the mountain. As sundown approached, they ventured out to scan the North Col for any signs of their comrades. At first they could see nothing against the white canvas, but eventually they spotted four black dots on the broad slopes of the lower ridge. They were descending, if slowly, clearly exhausted but alive. How far had they made it up the mountain?
The next morning George took Bruce and Tejbir with a group of porters to restock Camp IV in preparation for their own attempt. Strutt and Wakefield joined them to assist Mallory’s group back to the camp. It was difficult to know what condition the men might be in, but they had appeared weary and hesitant in their movements the previous evening.
As happened the previous day, the positive effect of the oxygen was immediately obvious as the three men, George, Bruce and Tejbir, outpaced the porters who were carrying less weight, not to mention Wakefield and Strutt. In his excitement, George flippantly described the climb as akin to ‘a brief Alpine ascent’ as he cut steps easily into the ice to climb from the glacier onto the shoulder of the col. It was here that they met Mallory and the others: ‘Most of them appeared to be at the end of their strength and were barely capable of speaking coherently. Only Norton, his skin a blackish brown from the cutting winds, his face showing the incredible strain he had been under, could give us a brief report of their adventure.’
They had not reached the summit, but had climbed higher than anyone before them.
George watched the weary men continue their descent, ensuring they were safely onto the glacier before he and his group continued upwards. It took three hours to reach Camp IV, well ahead of the porters who could not believe the speed of the men carrying tanks on their backs: ‘We explained to the coolies that our phenomenal speed was due to our freely imbibing “bottled English air”,’ George later wrote. To prove the point, he released a spray of pure oxygen at the cigarette he was smoking, the end glowing a fiery red in response.
By casually smoking a cigarette at 23,000 feet he had inadvertently solved another question mark hanging over the equipment. What would happen if they suddenly stopped using oxygen? Would they be affected, perhaps even die if the equipment stopped working? The answer was an emphatic no: ‘We were able on the Col to suddenly switch on or off our oxygen supply without experiencing the slightest inconvenience.’
The men stayed for less than an hour, ensuring the tents were solidly pitched and the supplies salted away before heading back to Camp III. The descent took just fifty minutes, including pausing for photographs, and their arrival was greeted with disbelief by the others who were sitting around a makeshift table, clasping mugs of hot tea against tortured fingers and warily eyeing a plateful of tinned ham that appeared as appetising as a serving of dog food. George captured an image of the blackened, weary faces as he sat down to listen to their story.
George Mallory had penned a letter to his wife the day before the four men had begun their climb to destiny. He was not optimistic: ‘We shan’t get to the top. If we reach the shoulder at 27,400 feet it will be better than anyone here expects.’ The letter would not reach Ruth until well after she knew that he had been right.
Mallory was referring to the shoulder of the North Col, a ridge at which the climbers would turn right and face a ramp-like slope that appeared to offer a comparatively easy climb to the summit. But it depended on so many factors, the effects of altitude and the weather being the most obvious. They had now made three trips from Camp III to the foot of the col and, each time, Mallory had felt the leaden weight of oxygen-deprived fatigue. The climb seemed to get slightly easier but the improvement was marginal, and if they felt lethargic at 23,000 feet, then how would they be able to climb the 6000 feet of snow, ice and rock above them to reach the summit?
Still, he had been hopeful the first evening, pitching five dark green tents at Camp IV for the climbers and the nine porters who would accompany them for the first part of the climb and then lying in his sleeping sack, the tent flaps open to suck in the thin offering of oxygen, content that the skies were clear enough to see the outline of the mountain.
‘I remember how my mind kept wandering over the various details of our preparations without anxiety, rather like God after the Creation seeing that it was good,’ he would later refl
ect. ‘It was good. And the best of it was what we expected to be doing these next two days.’
But the morning brought the first set of problems: the porters feeling the nauseating effects of the increased altitude and the breakfast cans of spaghetti frozen solid after being left outside the tents overnight. Only four of the nine porters would be fit enough to follow the climbers up the mountain, severely limiting the equipment they could carry and ruling out any chance of establishing any more camp sites between Camp IV and the summit.
They eventually broke camp at 7.30am, more than two hours late, which put more pressure on their hopes of climbing to the planned bivouac at 26,000 feet, just beneath the north shoulder, before sundown. Progress was steady at first, the lower slopes of the col firm and safe and the remaining porters able to carry between them two tents and double sleeping sacks, cooking gear and provisions for one and a half days.
But things began to go wrong again mid morning when they stopped for a rest and Mallory accidentally knocked Norton’s knapsack containing the extra clothing he intended to wear as it got colder. It tumbled out of reach, back down the mountainside. It was already apparent that the men were woefully underdressed for the climb, their tweed suits, woollen pullovers, silk shirts and scarves little help against the bitter wind that blew across them from the right and seemed to grow with every passing minute – ‘an old wind in the old anger’ – although Mallory shrugged it off, insisting that his layers were enough to ward off the worst that could be thrown at him.
Their progress slowed as the wind grew and they were forced to lean forward into the gale to stay on their feet. The sun was now hidden behind clouds and frostbite was already a very real threat as fingertips, toes and ears began to throb. Mallory changed direction, slanting across the slope to find shelter from the wind. The ground was harder here and the blue ice difficult to cut, but he had no choice; they had left their crampons behind to save on weight and now had to cut their way up a 300-foot rise.
By midday, Mallory, Norton and Somervell had reached a height of 25,000 feet (measured by an aneroid barometer) and they stopped behind a wall of rocks to shelter and wait for Morshead who was struggling behind with the porters, badly affected by frostbite and altitude sickness. It had taken four hours to climb 2000 feet and the three men estimated that it would take another three hours to climb the remaining 1000 feet to their bivouac target.
They could go no further as the weather continued to close in, if only because the porters needed time to get back down the mountain to Camp IV before dark. It would take another two hours to find vaguely level places to pitch the two tents and they would spend a sleepless night, exhausted and in pain. They were not demoralised, Mallory recalled, ‘but we had come through an ordeal’. Mallory nursed three frostbitten fingers in a tent with Norton who could only lie on his left side because his right ear was swollen to three times its normal size. In the other tent, Morshead was nauseous, frostbitten, and could not stop shaking. He would pull out after a few steps the next morning, opting to remain in the tent while the others pushed for the summit, still 4000 feet away.
Progress was slow as they moved almost methodically, ‘evenly with balanced movements, saving effort, to keep our form, as oarsmen say at the end of the race, remembering to step neatly and transfer the weight from one leg to the other by swinging the body rhythmically upwards’. They climbed in thirty-minute spells, then stopped for five minutes to catch their breath. It was an effort of will to keep going, particularly when Mallory had to stop to remove his four layers of socks so Norton could rub his toes warm.
There was fresh snow to contend with, half a metre deep in places, and it became clear as the hours ticked by that they were not moving fast enough to reach the peak in daylight: ‘We were prepared to leave it to braver men to climb Mount Everest by night,’ Mallory concluded.
Besides, in the rarefied atmosphere everything was happening slowly, mentally and physically. The men ‘tacitly accepted defeat’ but agreed to keep moving upwards until 2.30pm when they would head back down with enough time to reach Morshead and then descend safely to Camp IV. None of them wanted a second night on the mountainside.
Mallory called a halt at 2.15pm after climbing a short, steep section. The ridge they hoped would lead to the summit was just above their heads, but it seemed out of reach to men whose tongues hung out of their mouths trying to catch a breath. They shared the small amount of food they carried in their pockets – chocolate, mint cake, acid drops, raisins and prunes and a nip of brandy – and lay back against the jumble of rocks, luxuriating for a few moments and gazing around and down at peaks that had previously looked gargantuan but were now ‘contemptible fellows beneath our feet’.
George Mallory, Howard Somervell and Teddy Norton had reached a height of 26,984 feet, almost 2500 feet higher than anyone had ever climbed. At that moment, though, none of them had a sense of triumph: ‘It is impossible to say how much further we might have gone,’ Mallory wrote after returning. ‘In light of subsequent events it would seem that the margin of strength to deal with an emergency was already small enough. I have little doubt that we could have struggled up perhaps two hours more to the north-east shoulder, now little more than 400 feet above us. Whether we should then have been fit to conduct our descent in safety is another matter.’ How right he was.
It took barely ninety minutes for the three men to descend to the tents where they had left Morshead, a quarter of the time it had taken to climb. Mallory felt it was quick and they had been moving freely, but realised later that his perceptions had been warped by altitude. Morshead insisted he was well enough to make it back to Camp IV where they would spend the night before returning to the relative comfort of Camp III where the other team members waited.
The men seemed safe, relieved almost, as they made their way down, Mallory in the lead, followed by Norton and Morshead with Somervell as the anchorman. Mallory was trying to follow the footsteps of the day before but fresh snowfall made it difficult. Their progress was slowed as it became necessary to clear the snow to ensure they were not stepping onto rocks that might cause a slippage. This was a danger period when fatigue made concentration difficult. And then it happened.
Morshead, the third man in line, slipped on a rock just as Somervell behind him was mid step. Both men fell and began hurtling down the slope that only stopped at the Rongbuk Glacier more than 3000 feet below. There was hardly time to call out as they slid past Norton who plunged his axe into the snow but could not hold their combined weight and was swept off his feet.
Mallory had heard ‘unusual sounds’ behind him and without looking wedged his axe into the snow and ice, managing to hitch his rope around the handle like a belay then brace himself against the slope before the others flew past: ‘In 99 cases out of a hundred either the belay will give or the rope will break,’ he later wrote. ‘In the still moment of suspense before the matter must be put to the test nothing further could be done to prevent a disaster one way or another.’ The axe gripped, the rope tightened but held. The men were safe but shaken.
Their relief was short-lived, however, as the descent slowed even more, because Morshead seemed almost unable to move. What had looked to be a relatively easy descent had now become a desperate race in slow motion to reach their tents at Camp IV before darkness. The way down had become perilous, their tracks from the previous day now obliterated under the new snow and their fears of a hidden crevasse forcing them to stretch the distance between them to ensure that only one would fall and could be saved by the others.
It was almost sundown when George Finch and the others at Camp III spied them on the lower slopes. They appeared exhausted and still some distance from the Camp IV tents, clearly unable to reach safety until after dark. It would be 11.30pm before they found the tents by candlelight, the last 600 feet taking an hour. Unable to swallow anything solid, they all desperately wanted water but the porters had taken the stove and there was no way to melt the snow. Norton tried to manu
facture an ice-cream of sorts from a tin of strawberry jam, frozen ideal milk and snow, but the concoction just made them retch.
The descent resumed at six o’clock the next morning, another four hours of hesitant and weary progress through the thigh-high snow that had gathered as the slopes flattened toward the bottom of the col. The discipline that had kept them together and alive finally broke down at the top of the last slope, such was their desperation for fluid. In the rush, Mallory, who had overcome a shaking fit the night before, slipped and slid 100 feet before his axe once again saved him. His relief turned to annoyance when he looked up to find that George Finch, carrying his oxygen equipment, had photographed his ‘ignominious glissade’.
Colonel Strutt, Geoffrey Bruce and Arthur Wakefield were with George and handed over two thermoses to the desperate men before Strutt and Wakefield guided them back to Camp III where they gulped down tea and told their story of triumph and survival. The next morning they would return to base camp to recover while George Finch, Geoffrey Bruce and Naik Tejbir Bura began their own attempt.
It would take more than a fortnight for news of Mallory’s triumph to reach London, announced exclusively in The Times as per their commercial agreement with the Royal Geographical Society. ‘Gallant explorers … in these tremendous altitudes more especially because they made no use of oxygen, that must be looked at as extremely good going,’ the newspaper declared, outlining the barest of details from a note scrawled by General Bruce and transported by foot from the base camp back across the Tibetan Plateau to Darjeeling where it was wired.
Arthur Hinks was delighted: ‘Nothing pleased us more than the exciting news which arrived on June 8 and was published the following day than the two words “without oxygen” reached 26,800,’ he wrote to the expedition leader. Later that day he penned a note to Ruth Mallory:
We send you hearty congratulations on the success of your husband reported in The Times this morning, and we are so very glad that he is able to break the record so completely without the use of oxygen. It does not seem impossible that at the second attempt they might get to the summit without it. I have always been willing to bet Captain Farrar that your husband would get higher without oxygen than Finch would with it. This is not because I fully believe it, but in order to rouse the oxygen experts.
The Brilliant Outsider Page 23