The Lost Explorer (12 page)

As it was, Wheeler came close to serious frostbite, with his circulation restored in camp only by Mallory’s rubbing his feet
for hours; and Bullock lagged behind on the descent, stumbling into camp two hours after his friends, completely played out.

Thus ended the reconnaissance of 1921. As the party meandered back toward Darjeeling, Mallory was filled with a sense of failure. “We came back without accident, not even a frostbitten toe,” he reported to Geoffrey Winthrop Young, trying to look on the bright side; but in the next breath, “It was a pitiful party at the last, not fit to be on a mountainside anywhere.” Young wrote back, telling his protégé that “this end of the world is only using the word
success
,” and putting Mallory’s extraordinary achievement in the perspective that posterity has since granted it: “I can assure you that the colossal effort of lifting an entirely unsuitable party, at the first attempt, on a single pair of shoulders, not only onto the right line but well up it, against hopeless conditions, forms an episode by itself in the history of mountain exploration, and will only be the more appreciated the more time goes on.”

On the voyage back to England, Mallory was burnt out and homesick. “I’m tired of travelling and travellers,” he wrote David Pye. “What I want to see is faces I know, and my own sweet home; afterwards, the solemn facades in Pall Mall, and perhaps Bloomsbury in a fog; and then an English river, cattle grazing in western meadows.”

There was already talk of another expedition in the spring of 1922. The long summer reconnaissance had convinced Mallory that the only time to go to Everest was in April and May, before the monsoon. He also judged that “it’s barely worth while trying again … without eight first-rate climbers.”

Of a 1922 assault, however, at the moment he wanted no part. “I wouldn’t go again next year…,” he wrote his sister Avie, “for all the gold in Arabia.”

As it was, George Mallory would spend only three months at home before setting out on the second Everest expedition.

D
URING THOSE THREE MONTHS
, Mallory gave some thirty lectures on Everest, and hurriedly wrote six chapters of the official expedition book. The mountain was never far from his mind, and as he penned the last chapter, called “The Route to the Summit,” offering a step-by-step logistical brief for success on Everest, the obsession reclaimed him. At only thirty-five, Mallory was beginning
to worry that he was past his climbing prime. And that vision, of the relatively easy stages by which a climber might angle up the north face to the northeast shoulder, then along the ridge to the summit, haunted his domestic hours.

By late winter, the Everest Committee had put together a team for the pre-monsoon season of 1922. Once more the pundits opted for leaders long in tooth and short on technical ability. General Charles Bruce, who had served much of his career in the army in India, was made leader, at the age of fifty-six. Colonel Edward Strutt, who was forty-eight, also an ex-soldier, was drafted as climbing leader. (In the 1930s, Strutt would become infamous as the curmudgeonly spokesman for a wholesale British retreat into climbing conservatism, as he deplored the bold technical breakthroughs being promulgated by Germans, Austrians, and Italians in the Alps, which culminated in the first ascent of the north face of the Eiger in 1938.)

Also on board, and well past his salad days, was Tom Longstaff, who held the record for the highest summit yet attained, when he had topped out on 23,360-foot Trisul, in the Garhwal Himalaya, in 1907. (No higher peak would be climbed for the next twenty-one years.)

In view of his brilliant performance the year before, it may seem odd that Mallory was not made climbing leader in 1922. Knowledge of the man’s absentmindedness seems to have dimmed his prospects for an official leadership position. As Longstaff mordantly wrote to a colleague after the expedition, “Mallory is a very good stout hearted baby, but quite unfit to be placed in charge of anything, including himself.”

Among the younger team members were Teddy Norton and Howard Somervell, who would prove so staunch in 1924, and Geoffrey Bruce, the general’s game but inexperienced nephew. Rounding out the party was George Finch, a remarkable climber who would prove the equal of Mallory on this, his only shot at Everest. Finch had been rejected on spurious medical grounds in 1921, and he would later so alienate the Everest Committee as to preclude any chance of being invited in 1924. Chroniclers attribute much of Finch’s difficulties to a vague sense on the committee’s part that he had too heartily embraced the more ambitious European ideals of climbing in the Alps; in addition, Finch was not a member of the Alpine Club, and, having
been educated in Switzerland, had thus by definition not attended the “right” schools.

In the months leading up to the 1922 expedition, the great debate was over the use of bottled oxygen. Finch, a born tinkerer, was the most avid proponent of using gas; Mallory, with his distrust of all things mechanical, the most ardent opponent, deriding what he called the “damnable heresy” of certain physiologists who theorized that humans would never ascend Everest without supplementary oxygen.

All in all, the 1922 party was many times stronger than the ragtag team of 1921. And at first, everything went like clockwork. Mallory and Bullock’s 1921 reconnaissance had been so thorough that it had left only one side of Everest unexplored—the southern approaches, ranging out of forbidden Nepal. Mallory’s analysis of the possible routes on the other three sides was so penetrating that the 1922 party needed to waste no further time in exploration.

Moving loads and camps steadily up the East Rongbuk Glacier, with an entourage not only of Tibetan porters but of Sherpas from Nepal, the team reached the North Col by May 13. Only six days later, all the necessary supplies were stocked at Camp IV, ready for a pair of summit pushes. At least two weeks of good weather, and maybe three, loomed before the monsoon would close down the mountain.

The plan called for Mallory, Somervell, H. T. Morshead, and Norton to make a first attempt without oxygen, to be followed, if they were unsuccessful, by Finch and Geoffrey Bruce breathing bottled gas. On May 20, the first quartet set out with porters from the North Col at 7:30
A.M.
Every step they climbed probed ground where no one had ever been.

At once the cold assailed all four men. Modern climbers have long been dumbfounded on contemplating the primitive gear and clothing with which Mallory and his partners assaulted Everest in the 1920s. The sense of the inadequacy of that equipage was perhaps the single most powerful perception that struck the five climbers on May 1, 1999, when they beheld Mallory’s body at 26,700 feet. It is thus worth pausing to note the passage in
The Assault on Mount Everest, 1922
, in which Mallory narrates the break the four men took at 24,200 feet to put on spare clothes and try to get warm:

For my part, I added a light shetland “woolly” and a thin silk shirt to what I was wearing before under my closely woven cotton coat. As this outer garment, with knickers to match, was practically windproof, and a silk shirt too is a further protection against wind, with these two extra layers I feared no cold we were likely to meet. Morshead, if I remember right, troubled himself no more at this time than to wrap a woollen scarf round his neck.

In general, Mallory’s passages in the 1922 expedition book are full of details that, in light of what came to pass two years later, seem eerily to foreshadow the great drama of 1924. On the way up into the unknown that day in 1922, the four men came to a dicey slope where crampons would have been useful. (Modern climbers carry and usually wear crampons all the way to the summit.) Yet the men had left theirs at the North Col. Explains Mallory, “We sorely needed them now. And yet we had been right to leave them behind; for with their straps binding tightly around our boots we should not have had the smallest chance of preserving our toes from frostbite.” (The leather boots of Mallory’s day were soft and pliable. Modern climbers use plastic or nylon double boots so stiff that tightened straps pose no circulation problem.) The fact that, in 1924, Mallory and Irvine again left their crampons at the North Col bears crucially on their fate.

Similarly, as he described the route to the summit he had scouted for months in 1921, Mallory worried aloud, in the expedition book, about “the possibility of turning or of climbing direct certain prominent obstacles” along the summit ridge. Most prominent of all such obstacles would prove to be the ninety-foot-tall Second Step, at 28,230 feet. Climbing higher on May 20, Mallory could see that step as an unmistakable bump on the skyline far above him.

Not only the cold bothered the men; the thin air made them fuzzy-brained. In a clumsy moment, the rope dislodged Norton’s pack, which he had laid in his lap during a rest stop. In Mallory’s words:

He was unprepared, made a desperate grab, and missed it. Slowly the round, soft thing gathered momentum
from its rotation, the first little leaps down from one ledge to another grew to excited and magnificent bounds, and the precious burden vanished from sight.

With the pack was lost critical extra clothing.

At 2:00
P.M.
, around 25,000 feet, the tired men stopped to pitch camp. There was no level shelf, and the climbers wasted hours piling up stones to make tent platforms, only to abandon one site after another. Ever since 1922, climbers on the north side have had the greatest trouble establishing Camp V; even for Simonson’s party in 1999, this was the camp the climbers dreaded, knowing a night there meant a struggle to catch any sleep.

At last the men got two tents droopily pitched, their floors so sloping that the upper climber in each tent rolled all night on top of the lower. Mallory took stock of his comrades. Worst off was Morshead, whose fingers and toes were in the first stages of serious frostbite. Though Morshead made no complaint, “He was obliged to lie down when we reached our camp and was evidently unwell.” Mallory himself had frost-nipped his fingers as he cut steps up the slope where the men could have easily walked in crampons, and Norton had a frostbitten ear.

After a nearly sleepless night, the men set out at 8:00
A.M.
on the twenty-first, still hopeful of reaching the summit. At once, the debilitated Morshead realized he could go no farther: he pleaded that his teammates continue, while he rested through the day in camp. The cold was even worse than the day before; Mallory had to stop, take off one boot, and let Norton rub his foot back into feeling. The going, across downward-tilting plates of dark shale, was made more treacherous by four to eight inches of fresh snow.

By midday, Mallory knew that he and his partners were going too slowly. At their very best, they were capable of gaining only 400 vertical feet an hour (in the Alps, Mallory was used to climbing 1,500 feet per hour without breaking a serious sweat). Their progress would only slow as the air got thinner. A simple “arithmetical calculation” made it plain that night would fall before the men could reach the summit.

Resolving to turn around at 2:15
P.M.
, the men accepted the mountain’s victory. In the expedition narrative, Mallory
seems gallantly resigned to defeat: “We were prepared to leave it to braver men to climb Mount Everest by night.”

Again, how those words foreshadow! For in 1924, in all likelihood, Mallory and Irvine became those braver men.

At their high point, the three men ate a small lunch of chocolate, mint cake, raisins, and prunes; one of them (whose identity Mallory coyly camouflages in
The Assault on Mount Everest
) produced a pocket flask of brandy, from which each of them took a restorative nip. Then they started down.

With a barometer reading adjusted by a theodolite observation, Mallory fixed his high point at 26,985 feet. In
First on Everest: The Mystery of Mallory & Irvine
, Audrey Salkeld and Tom Holzel argue cogently that the true altitude the three men reached on June 21 was only about 26,000 feet. No matter: it was the highest anyone had yet been on earth.

The prudence of their turnaround would emerge late that afternoon. By 4:00
P.M.
, Norton, Somervell, and Mallory had regained Camp V. There Morshead declared he was feeling well. The four men roped together, then headed down the 2,000 feet toward Camp IV on the North Col. Mallory took the lead, for, as the strongest of the four men, he readily assumed the tiring task of cutting steps for his partners (a much more awkward task going down than ascending).

Suddenly Morshead, coming third on the rope, slipped on a steep slope. His fall pulled an unprepared Norton, last on the rope, out of his steps, and the two of them pulled Somervell loose. The three plunged helpless toward the void 3,500 feet above the East Rongbuk Glacier.

On the verge of cutting a step, Mallory had time only to drive the pick of his axe into the snow and pass the rope over its head, and time to anticipate one of two outcomes. As he put it in the expedition book, “In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred either the belay will give or the rope will break.” Miraculously, neither happened now. The pull came not in one tremendous jerk, but accordion-fashion, as each falling climber absorbed the pull of the one below. Mallory belayed with grim resolve: the rope “gripped the metal like a hawser on a bollard,” but the pick held.

Almost never in mountaineering history has one man held three falling companions with nothing more solid than an ice
axe belay. The rare instances have become legendary deeds. Mallory’s astounding belay has not—in part because he was excruciatingly modest about the accident. In
The Assault onMount Everest
, he not only avoided identifying the man who slipped, he disguised his own identity as the miracle belayer. The four climbers were tagged only as “the third man,” “the leader,” etc. Only in a letter to Ruth did Mallory make clear who played which role. Even then, he blamed himself as much as his teammates: “I hadn’t realised then how shaky Morshead was and had cut rather poor steps.”

Though no one was hurt in the all-but-fatal fall, as they staggered in to Camp IV, at 11:30
P.M.
, Morshead was ravaged with exhaustion. He had been taking ten-minute rests after feeble two-minute bursts of clumping downward, until Norton and Mallory had to take turns propping him up with a shoulder for his arm and a hand around his waist, all but doing his walking for him.