THE CONQUEST OF EVEREST?
George Mallory and Sandy Irvine (1924)
Ever since 1852, when the Survey of India had recognized Everest as the highest mountain in the world, the British had been wondering what to do about it. First they gave it a number – Peak XV – then in 1865 they gave it a name, and then, inevitably, in the 1890S they decided to climb it. The decision was purely academic, for Nepal and Tibet, on whose borders the mountain lay, still resisted British incursions. Even after the 1904 Treaty of Tibet, Everest remained practicably inaccessible. In part this was because of the ruggedness of its surrounding terrain; but predominantly it was because travellers were required to obtain permission from Lhasa, Peking (which claimed suzerainty over Tibet and maintained garrisons in the country) and the India Office, all of whom guarded their interests jealously. By 1913 the nearest a foreigner had come to the mountain was 40 miles, and the most anyone had seen of it was the top 1,000 feet or so. Following World War I, however, the political situation had eased, and an attempt on Everest was at last possible. Naturally, it would be a British attempt. To the members of the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club, who joined forces to plan the first ascent, Everest had to be climbed not, as one mountaineer would explain, because it was there, but because it was theirs.
Sir Francis Younghusband, soldier, imperial administrator and regional expert, justified the action in typically British terms. The conquest of Everest would produce no tangible benefit at all, he warned his audience at a Royal Geographical Society lecture. But it would be of inestimable value to one’s character: ‘The accomplishment of such a feat will elevate the human spirit and will give man, especially us geographers, a feeling that we really are getting the upper hand on the earth, and that we are acquiring a true mastery of our surroundings. As long as we impotently creep about at the foot of these mighty mountains without attempting to ascend them, we entertain towards them a too excessive feeling of awe ... if man stands on earth’s highest summit, he will have an increased pride and confidence in himself in the struggle for ascendancy over matter. This is the incalculable good which the ascent of Mount Everest will confer.’ Younghusband’s was the sort of archaic speech that might have gone down well before the war but it did not fit with the present mood. As the Daily News remarked sarcastically, it would be a proud moment indeed for the man who stood on top of the world, ‘but he will have the painful thought that he has queered the pitch for posterity’. Nonetheless, few serious mountaineers could resist Younghusband’s call to arms.
The necessary permissions were obtained and a two-year programme was outlined. In 1921 a party of climbers would conduct a reconnaissance of the area. Then, in 1922, a proper assault would be made by a second team. This approach was necessary for three reasons, the first of which was logistical. From Darjeeling, in British India, the only way to reach Everest was by foot and on pony, a journey that would take at least a month. Along the way it would be necessary to hire numerous mules and donkeys, plus porters who were willing (and more importantly, able) to tackle snow and extreme height. Any number of problems might arise, from malaria, dysentery, altitude sickness and food poisoning in the men to recalcitrance, illness and death among the pack animals. Also, a chain of procedure had to be established, for this was not the standard, lightweight, scramble of alpine mountaineering, but a siege that required reinforcements at every stage, up to and including Everest itself. Secondly, the mountain had to be scouted, and its perils calculated at first hand. One could not contemplate it from the safety of a village as one could, say, with the Matterhorn. It was so distant, so tall – at more than 29,000 feet it was six miles higher than Mont Blanc – that a survey was needed simply to establish where it was, let alone how best to find a way through its cliffs and snow slopes. Thirdly, it was important to show that Everest’s conquest was not just an example of nationalistic peak-bagging. A full geographical survey was to be conducted and, although opportunities could be seized, members should bear in mind that ‘attempts on a particular route must not be prolonged to hinder the completion of the reconnaissance’.
The 1921 expedition yielded mixed results. The chain of command and the forwarding of supplies worked reasonably well. However, of the two most senior and experienced Himalayan hands one died from exhaustion and another was broken by illness. The approach was mapped and the area surveyed in a rudimentary fashion, and by climbing the surrounding peaks they spied a potential route to the summit. It was not an easy one. At the bottom of the North Face one member wrote despairingly: ‘The long imagined snow slopes of this Northern Face of Everest with their gentle and inviting angle turn out to be the most appalling precipice, nearly 10,000 feet high ... The prospect of ascent in any direction is about nil and our present job is to rub our noses against the impossible in such a way as to persuade mankind that some noble heroism has failed once again.’ On the other hand, if they could skirt the precipices and reach a saddle that they named the North Col, it would be possible to attain the North-East Ridge and from there the way looked clear to the top. A party did climb successfully to the North Col from where they reported that: ‘No obstacle appeared, or none so formidable that a competent party would not easily surmount it or go around it. If one harboured a doubt about this way before, it was impossible to keep it any longer.’ They had neither the time nor the supplies to cover the final distance. Nor did they have the weather. A gale came from the north-west, so strong that they had to lean forward in order to remain upright. Peering through their goggles, they saw that ‘the powdery fresh snow on the great face of Everest was being swept along in unbroken spindrift and the very ridge where our route lay was marked out to receive its unmitigated fury. We could see the blown snow deflected upwards for a moment where the wind met the ridge, only to rush violently down in a frightful blizzard on the leeward side.’ They turned back, satisfied at having reached a height of 23,000 feet and in the knowledge that they had opened the way for the summit expedition of 1922.
The Mount Everest Committee chose a strange assortment of men for the 1922 attempt. On the grounds that youthful enthusiasm should be tempered by wisdom, the party comprised old buffers and youthful daredevils. Among the buffers was General Charles Bruce, an Indian Army officer who had been discharged in 1919 on grounds of ‘cardiac debility with great enlargement’, but who was given overall control of the expedition despite his obviously weak health. (As he later joked, ‘Even my liver was found to be so large that it required two men and a boy to carry it’.) Several other members were past their prime, including the climbing leader Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Strutt, and at least one of them had been classified medically as ‘not a very good specimen’. Of the daredevils there was Howard Somervell, a Cambridge-educated surgeon, amateur musician and artist who was 32, and a climber of great ability. Major ‘Teddy’ Norton was another: the grandson of alpine pioneer Sir Alfred Wills, he had grown up in the Alps, had superb organizational and diplomatic skills, could speak several Indian dialects, and exuded quiet authority. Then there were George Finch and George Mallory, who would become the expedition’s leading figures.
On paper, the two Georges had much in common: they were both in their thirties, they were expert mountaineers and they had proved their ability over numerous seasons in the Alps. In personality and background, however, they were very different. Born in 1888, Finch had led an unusual life, moving from Australia to France and then to Switzerland before finding a job in Britain as a research chemist. He was a strong, fast climber, with a particular interest in the technical aspects of mountaineering – the various states of snow, ice and rock, the effects of cold and altitude on the human frame. But to the stuffier members of Britain’s mountaineering establishment he was uncouth, unconventional and not quite the right sort. His supporters had had some difficulty persuading the Mount Everest Committee to accept him. Mallory, on the other hand, was the Alpine Club’s darling. Two years older than Finch, he was the son of a vicar, had been educated at
Cambridge, had served as a gunner in World War I, and was a schoolteacher. He was well known in literary circles – the Bloomsbury Group adored him for his physical beauty and mental purity – and as a mountaineer was renowned for his elastic agility on rock. Mallory’s technique, however, was more spiritual than technical: he had an almost Victorian attitude to climbing, in that he did it for the thrill and the beauty alone. He was, however, notorious for his absentmindedness – he could forget even the most basic things, such as tying himself on to the rope – and in the eyes of some could be too impetuous for his own good.
Finch and Mallory differed in more than character. Finch was an advocate of oxygen, which he said was vital where they would be going. As he explained to the Mount Everest Committee, they could only guess at the conditions ahead and had no idea if humans could even survive at that altitude. Italy’s Duke of Abruzzi had matched his furthest north of 1900 with a furthest skyward in 1909, attaining 24,600 feet in the Karakorams, but this was the highest anybody had been. At the peak of Everest, nearly a mile above Abruzzi’s furthest, the air would be so thin and so cold that climbers would have a hard time staying alive, let alone moving with any strength. The debilitating effects of altitude had been well attested ever since the first person climbed Mont Blanc; there was every reason to suppose they would become intolerable on Everest. Mallory, the muscular Christian, rejected the idea of oxygen on aesthetic grounds: it was not possible to appreciate beauty or to climb effectively with artificial assistance. Besides, he was of the firm opinion that the thinness of the air could be overcome by a combination of acclimatization and proper breathing. In the end a typically British compromise was reached: the expedition would take oxygen but would not necessarily use it.
The expedition surmounted the lower slopes of Everest without difficulty, and on 14 May 1922 the first party, comprising Mallory, Norton and Somervell, plus a surveyor named Morshead, set out for the North Col. Four days later they had not only reached their goal but were at a height of 25,000 feet. Here, at Camp V, the cold was so intense that they had to send the porters back. The following morning, with Morshead suffering from a combination of frostbite and exhaustion, the other three left him in the tent and departed on their own for the summit. The terrain was not technically difficult, but it was awkward, and steep enough to mean death if they slipped. Their greatest difficulty, however, was the atmosphere. Determined to defeat the mountain the old-fashioned way, they had come without oxygen and were soon prey to a lethargy worse than anything they had encountered in their careers. ‘Our whole power seemed to depend on the lungs,’ Mallory wrote. ‘The air, such as it was, was inhaled through the mouth and expired again to some sort of tune in the unconscious mind, and the lungs beat time, as it were, for the feet. An effort of the will was required not so much to induce any movement of the limbs as to set the lungs to work and keep them working.’ By 2.00 p.m., at a new record of 26,800 feet, it became obvious that they were not going to reach the top. Also, it was important that they get Morshead to a more sheltered position before nightfall. In Mallory’s opinion, ‘the only wisdom was in retreat’. That evening they arrived safely at Camp IV, on the edge of the North Col, dehydrated and in a state of semi-stupefaction from lack of oxygen. Of his decision to turn back Mallory wrote: ‘Wonderful as such an experience would be, I had not even the desire to look over the North-East Ridge; I would have gladly got to the North-East Shoulder as being the sort of place one ought to reach, but I had no strong desire to get there, and none at all for the wonder of being there ... Our minds were not behaving as we would wish them to behave.’ The following day, as they made their way down the North Col to Camp III, they met Finch leading a party in the opposite direction.
It had originally been planned that Finch would make a second attempt with Norton. But Norton had gone with the first group – without telling him – leaving Finch with no experienced mountaineers fit enough for the ascent. Unfazed, Finch selected two of the strongest remaining men – a Gurkha named Tejbir and a novice climber named Geoffrey Bruce – and set off with a team of ten porters plus three oxygen sets. At 25,500 feet they pitched a new Camp V, sent the porters back, and settled down for a uncomfortable night of gales. Sleep was impossible, as they spent the hours holding down the groundsheet to stop the wind getting underneath. ‘We knew,’ Finch wrote, ‘that once the wind got a hold upon it, the tent would belly out like a sail, and nothing would save it from stripping away from its moorings and being blown, with us inside it, over the precipices.’ Before the storm died, on the afternoon of the next day, the tent was in tatters: three guy ropes had snapped, a wind-blown rock had knocked a hole in the canvas, and the door could no longer be fastened. Six porters climbed heroically to their rescue, bringing thermoses of tea and Bovril. They would have liked to escort them down the mountain to safety, but Finch waved the offer aside. After another night in their tent, taking gulps of oxygen – in Finch’s case interspersed with puffs on a cigarette – the three men continued upwards. After 500 feet Tejbir collapsed. In an act for which he would later be soundly criticized, Finch gave him a few bottles of oxygen and let him make his way home.
Forsaking the route that Mallory had taken, Finch and Bruce donned their masks and hacked across the North Face towards a couloir, or snow-filled gully, that seemed to offer an easy way to the ridge. Here was a remarkable situation: Bruce, a beginner who had to be taught as he went along, was helping pioneer a route up the world’s highest mountain, and doing so with a primitive, cumbersome and weighty apparatus that had never seen proper service and was little more than a prototype. Neither he nor Finch was afflicted by the hallucinatory dullness that had bedevilled Mallory’s group, and they were moving swiftly – at their best they averaged 900 feet per hour. It was almost too good to be true. Only three things could stop them: Bruce, the weather or the oxygen. Bruce was still going strong; the weather could have been better, but was reasonable; and the oxygen was working perfectly – so far.
In Britain, scientists had given solemn advice on the use of oxygen. When used properly it would help climbers reach the summit. But once it had been employed there was no going back. If they took the masks off at high altitude, or if the supply failed for any other reason, they would die. At about midday Bruce stumbled against a rock and broke one of the glass tubes leading from his canisters. Within a few steps he was gasping for air. ‘I saw him struggling ineffectually to climb up towards me,’ Finch recorded. ‘Quickly descending the few intervening feet, I was just in time to grasp his right shoulder with my left hand as he was on the point of falling backwards over the precipice. I dragged him face forwards against the rock, and, after a supreme effort on the part of both, we gained the ledge where I swung him round into a sitting position against the slope above.’ Perched on the North Face of Everest, clad in tweeds and woollen shirts, and wearing solar topees to protect them from the effects of high-altitude radiation, they took turns breathing from Finch’s oxygen tube. Finch contrived a T-piece so that they could both breathe from his own canisters while he mended Bruce’s equipment. Freshly aerated, they climbed on. But the shock, and the draining effect of the stop, had done for Bruce. Finch wrote: ‘Now I saw that [he], like Tejbir, had driven his body almost to the uttermost. A little more would spell breakdown. My emotions are eternally my own, and I will not put down on paper a cold-blooded, psychological analysis of the cataclysmic change they underwent, but will merely indicate the initial and final mental positions... Never for a moment did I think we would fail; progress was steady, the summit was there before us; a little longer and we should have been at the top. And then – suddenly, unexpectedly, the vision was gone.’
They had beaten Mallory to a new record of 27,300 feet. The difference was only 500 feet, but in percentage terms it was huge. Finch and Bruce had 1,600 feet to go, and could have covered it, theoretically, in three or four hours. They would then have had just enough time to descend to a camp before nightfall. In the lore of Everest it has been sugg
ested that had Finch been on his own he might have reached the summit. Like Mallory, however, he rightly took responsibility for the weakest member and led Bruce down the hill in a superb 6,000-foot descent that took them below the North Col to Camp III, where they arrived before the day was out, mildly frostbitten and, in Finch’s words, ‘dead, dead beat’. The expedition’s supplies were plundered to their most extravagant limit. ‘The brightest memory that remains with me of that night is dinner,’ Finch recalled. ‘Four quails truffled in pâté de foie gras, followed by nine sausages, only left me asking for more. With the remains of a tin of toffee tucked away in the crook of my elbow, I fell asleep in the depths of my warm sleeping bag.’
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