The Lost Explorer (17 page)

One can imagine Irvine trying to explain these arcane matters to a puzzled Mallory. Indeed, a kind of unintentional humor emerges from the diary, as Irvine tends to the gear woes of (in Longstaff’s pithy characterization from 1922) the “stout hearted baby” who was “quite unfit to be placed in charge of anything, including himself.” A sample:

A
PRIL
11
^th
…. I mended Mallory’s bed, Beetham’s camera, Odell’s camera tripod and sealed up a full tin of parrafin….

A
PRIL
12
^th
. Spent day in camp, did some photography, sorting biscuit boxes and doing a job of work on Mallory’s camera, which spun out and took all afternoon.

A
PRIL
19
^th
…. I spent this afternoon mending one of Mallory’s ice axes (broken by a coolie)….

A
PRIL
27
^th
…. After about an hour Mallory came in with a box of crampons, and I spent till dinner time fitting crampons to Mallory’s and my boots, and trying to fix them without having a strap across the toes, which is likely to stop the circulation.

A
PRIL
28
^th
…. Spent most of the afternoon with Beetham’s camera, also mending my sleeping bag and Mallory’s saddle.

All this compulsive puttering, of course, was of immense practical value to the expedition. Irvine might be “poetry-shy,” but he
would be irreplaceable high on the mountain when gear malfunctioned.

As the expedition progressed, the bond between Mallory and Irvine grew. After May 7, in Irvine’s diary, Mallory is called “George”; the others remain Norton, Somervell, Hazard, and so on. The friendly competitiveness that had dictated a pony race extended onto Everest, where, however, Irvine could never keep up with his older friend, that wizard of motion in the mountains. “When we moved on,” Irvine wrote on May 4, “a devil must have got into Mallory, for he ran down all the little bits of downhill and paced all out up the moraine. It was as bad as a boat race trying to keep up with him.”

T
HE PARTY REACHED
B
ASE
C
AMP
beneath the terminus of the Rongbuk Glacier on April 29. At once, the members started sorting out 300 yak-loads of gear to be carried to subsequent camps on the East Rongbuk. Mallory’s optimism had reached full bore: he had already decided that May 17, give or take a day or two, would be the summit day; and he predicted to Ruth, “The telegram announcing our success … will precede this letter, I suppose; but it will mention no names. How you will hope that I was one of the conquerors!”

Then everything started to go wrong. The weather was fiercely cold and stormy even at the comparatively low altitude of Base Camp. On April 28, “a bitterly cold wind blew, the sky was cloudy, and finally we woke up to find a snowstorm going on. Yesterday was worse, with light snow falling most of the day.” The team tried to impose English cheer on their desolate camp, feting their arrival with a five-course meal and several bottles of champagne.

By now, the number of porters and yak herders had swelled to 150. With Gurkha leaders who were veterans from 1922, these natives set out on April 30 without sahibs, singing and joking, to establish Camps I and II. The plan was for half to turn back after dumping their loads at I, with the other half pushing on to II the next day. But on their way back to Base Camp, night caught the porters, and only twenty-two of the seventy-five arrived. They were found the next day unharmed; but their disappearance had launched a devastating series of porter problems that would cripple the expedition in the following weeks.

On May 7, carrying loads to Camp II, the porters ran into such atrocious weather that Mallory ordered them to leave their loads a mile short of camp. Meanwhile another contingent of porters had been trapped at Camp III, at 21,500 feet, “with only one blanket apiece,” as Geoffrey Bruce wrote in the expedition book, “and a little uncooked barley to eat, and were now driven out unable to bear it longer, utterly exhausted.” When they staggered down to II, they swelled a crowd of porters to twice the number for whom there was tent space. There was no choice but to break open the food and tents intended for higher on the mountain.

At Camp III, Mallory and three teammates endured temperatures as low as −22º F. with high winds. If conditions were this bad low on the mountain, they would be unendurable above the North Col.

Mallory had hoped to establish Camp IV on the North Col by May 9, but that day Odell and Hazard were turned back in a blizzard only three quarters of the way up, dumping their loads in the snow. The men spent a wretched night at III, later described by Bruce:

The blizzard continued with unabating violence, and snow drifted into our tents covering everything to a depth of an inch or two. The discomfort of that night was acute. At every slightest movement of the body a miniature avalanche of snow would drop inside one’s sleeping-bag and melt there into a cold wet patch.

In these conditions, the porters’ morale plunged alarmingly. Mallory and his companions did everything they could to exhort the natives to further efforts, but it was a losing battle. No doubt the failure of the men to receive the lama’s
puja
at the Rongbuk Monastery contributed to their apathy, as did the frightful weather. Mallory blamed an “Oriental inertia”: “They have this Oriental quality that after a certain stage of physical discomfort or mental depression has been reached they simply curl up. Our porters were just curled up in their tents.” But he had to admit that the sahibs themselves had also curled up to wait out the storms: they spent “most of the time in the tents—no other place being tolerable.”

At last Norton bowed to the inevitable, ordering all the porters and climbers to retreat all thirteen miles back to Base Camp. The column formed, in Bruce’s word, “a melancholy procession of snow-blind, sick, and frost-bitten men.” Even in retreat, disaster struck, as one porter fell and broke his leg, another developed a blood clot on the brain, and a cobbler had “his feet frost-bitten up to the ankles.” The latter two died shortly after, to be buried near Base Camp.

The Englishmen were faring little better, with ailments ranging from hacking coughs to “glacier lassitude.” Mallory had weathered intestinal problems so severe it was suspected that he had appendicitis. Beetham was laid low by sciatica so persistent that he would never climb very high on the mountain.

In 1922, the team had reached the North Col by May 13, and Mallory, Somervell, and Norton had launched the first summit attempt only seven days later. During the corresponding week in 1924, the party had failed even to reach the North Col. Instead, they spent six days at Base Camp, licking their wounds. Mallory wrote Ruth, “It has been a very trying time with everything against us.”

Not until May 17—the day Mallory had originally plotted for the summit—did the debilitated climbers head back up the mountain. Somervell later judged that the appalling week of waiting out storms at Camp III had “reduced our strength and made us … thin and weak and almost invalided, instead of being fit and strong as we had been during the 1922 ascent.”

Nonetheless, Mallory rallied his waning optimism, fixing May 28 as his new summit date, and wrote Ruth with dogged hope, “It is an effort to pull oneself together and do what is required high up, but it is the power to keep the show going when you don’t feel energetic that will enable us to win through if anything does.”

At last, on May 20, Mallory, Norton, Odell, and one Sherpa gained the North Col. Mallory took the lead up a steep ice chimney that formed a difficult but safe alternative to the slope that had avalanched in 1922. Norton left a vivid description of that 200-foot lead: “You could positively see his nerves tighten up like fiddle strings. Metaphorically he girt up his loins…. Up the wall and chimney he led here, climbing carefully, neatly, and in that beautiful style that was all his own.”

The ascent, wrote Mallory, was “a triumph of the old gang.” Yet on this expedition where nothing seemed to go right, a further catastrophe struck the four men as they descended.

It began as Mallory decided to head down by the ill-starred 1922 route. Early on, the men hit slopes where they needed the crampons they had left at Camp III. Mallory chopped occasional steps, but following unroped, first Norton slipped, then the Sherpa—both fortunately stopping after short slides. Leading downward, Mallory suddenly plunged ten feet into a hidden crevasse. As during his fall on the Nesthorn in 1909, when, belayed by Geoffrey Winthrop Young, Mallory never let go of his axe, now he showed remarkable self-possession even in midplunge. As he wrote Ruth, “I fetched up half-blind and breathless to find myself most precariously supported only by my ice-axe, somehow caught across the crevasse and still held in my right hand—and below was a very unpleasant black hole.”

Mallory shouted for help, but his teammates, caught up in their own perils, neither heard him nor knew what had happened. Eventually he “got tired of shouting” and managed to excavate a delicate sideways passage out of the crevasse—only to find himself on the wrong side of it. “I had to cut across a nasty slope of very hard ice and, further down, some mixed unpleasant snow before I was out of the wood.” The four men regained Camp III thoroughly exhausted.

Even so, they had finally reached the North Col, the platform from which all summit attempts must be launched, and the weather showed signs of ameliorating. The ice chimney Mallory had so deftly led presented a logistical obstacle to porters getting loads to the col, but fixed ropes eased the passage, and eventually Irvine wove a rope ladder and hung it on the chimney, turning the pitch into a reasonable scramble for laden men.

Then, just as hope glimmered in Mallory’s breast, yet another dire predicament thwarted the team’s progress. On May 21, Somervell, Irvine, and Hazard led twelve porters up to the North Col. While Somervell and Irvine descended, Hazard and the porters remained at Camp IV, awaiting the arrival of Bruce and Odell, who planned to use the porters to push on to establish Camp V. But a snowstorm began that evening and continued through the next day, while the temperature again dropped
to −22º F. Odell and Bruce never left Camp III. The next day, Hazard decided to descend with the porters.

Among the expedition members, Hazard was distinctly the odd duck. A loner, he was not well liked by his teammates. As Somervell later wrote, Hazard “built a psychological wall round himself, inside which he lives. Occasionally, he bursts out of this with a ‘By Gad, this is fine!’ … Then the shell closes, to let nothing in.”

Now, as he led the porters down the slope made treacherous with new snow, Hazard failed to notice that four of them balked and returned to their tents at Camp IV. When Hazard showed up at III with only eight porters, Mallory was furious. “It is difficult to make out how exactly it happened,” he wrote; “but evidently he didn’t shepherd his party properly at all.”

This was perhaps too harsh a judgment, as the demand that one man be responsible for twelve porters in marginal conditions was a well-nigh impossible one. What the fiasco meant, however, was that four porters, no doubt terrified and possibly suffering frostbite, were stranded above all the sahibs on the mountain.

On May 24, Somervell, Norton, and Mallory headed up to rescue the porters. Norton judged the situation so desperate that, as he later wrote, “I would have taken a bet of two to one against a successful issue to our undertaking.” Norton and Somervell were off form, but “Mallory, who on these occasions lived on his nervous energy, kept urging us on.” Above the ice chimney, the snow slopes were loaded, ready to avalanche. With the other two belaying from the last safe stance, Somervell led a diagonal traverse, using every bit of the 200 feet of rope the men had carried. He ran out of line some ten yards short of the crest of the col. The porters, having heard the men approach, peered nervously over the edge. It was 4:00
P.M.
—dangerously late.

Norton, who spoke Tibetan, coaxed the porters into trying the ten-yard descent to Somervell on their own. Two men made it safely, but the other two fell, slid and tumbled, then came to rest in precarious spots a short distance from Somervell. With no other option, he drove his axe into the slope, untied, fed the rope over the axe shaft, and, simply holding the end of the rope in his hand, sidled toward the trembling porters. With hardly an
inch to spare, he grabbed each by the scruff of the neck and hoisted them back to the anchored axe. The worn-out men regained Camp III long after dark.

This debacle demoralized the porters utterly. After May 24, only fifteen of the fifty-five porters were of any use at all. The team dubbed these stalwarts “Tigers,” a hortatory epithet that has been current on Everest ever since. In the meantime, however, the party was in such disarray that Norton had no other choice than to order once more a wholesale retreat. By May 25, the team had limped all the way down to Camp I, at 17,900 feet.

“It has been a bad time altogether,” wrote Mallory to Ruth on May 27, in the last letter she would ever receive from him. “I look back on tremendous effort and exhaustion and dismal looking out of a tent door into a world of snow and vanishing hopes.”

A
T HIS MOST PESSIMISTIC
, Mallory had never foreseen a rout as complete as the one Everest had dealt his team during the preceding month. Less plucky men might have packed up and gone home at this juncture, with less than a week of May remaining. Instead, the 1924 expedition held what they called a “council of war.”

Neither food nor oxygen had yet been carried to Camp IV; only tents and sleeping bags were stocked there. Norton’s revised plan was to forget altogether about oxygen, in hopes that two light, fast parties of two men each, supported by porters, could make leaps on three successive days to Camps V and VI and then to the summit. The plan, of course, was pie in the sky, for as yet no climber had taken a single footstep above the North Col.

Both Somervell and Mallory had developed racking coughs. Mallory described his to Ruth: “In the high camp it has been the devil. Even after the day’s exercise… I couldn’t sleep, but was distressed with bursts of coughing fit to tear one’s guts—and a headache and misery altogether.”