Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine (17 page)

Younghusband acknowledged that it might well have been more desirable for Everest to be climbed by a team of climbers that had initiated the expedition themselves but there were overwhelming reasons for that not working.  First and foremost, Everest was not easily accessible.  It was situated in one of the most secluded countries of the world, a country which rarely opened its borders to foreigners of all descriptions.  Moreover, the Tibetans held the mountains in high regard, places of the gods, and they did not welcome the proposition of these holy sites being violated by foreigners.  The British government was respectful of Tibet’s deep sensitivities, so much so that even after the Mission to Lhasa in 1904 the India Office in London felt unwilling to ask permission from the Tibetan government for a British explorer to enter Tibet.  Younghusband and the other members of the Mount Everest committee felt, however, that whatever the India Office and the Tibetan government might not feel able to agree to on behalf of an individual, they might well consider a representation from such serious scientific bodies as the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club.  This was perhaps the overwhelming reason for the formation of the Everest Committee. 

Another, more practical reason, was that of organization and finance.  Sending an expedition half-way round the world to explore unmapped territory leading up to the highest mountain in the world was a very expensive and complex proposition.  The Everest Committee was at its best thoroughly realistic.  It realized that one if not two expeditions would have to be dispatched before the summit was finally reached.   Younghusband wrote in 1936:

Ideally it would have been delightful if a band of happy mountaineers, accustomed to climbing together on holidays in the Alps, would have undertaken the tremendous task of tackling Everest.  But in practice this was not feasible.  At any rate, no such band came forward.  And even if it had, the probability is that it would have been incapable of giving to the enterprise that sustained continuity of effort which the committee of a permanent society can provide.  Thus it came about that the attack on Mount Everest was organized by a committee and not by an individual.

At the time of the first Everest expedition the highest point on earth was seen by many as the last great adventure.  Both the Poles had been gained over the past two decades and the ‘third pole’, as some people chose to term Everest, was an adventure of equal importance and, moreover, a manifestation of the spirit of human endeavour.  The challenge from the start was the unknown factor of altitude.  It was not even known if man could survive at an altitude of 29,002 feet; indeed balloonists who had aimed to reach such heights had died from lack of oxygen at 26,500 feet.  Everest was already an enigma, it had cast a spell and the committee felt bound to attempt to break the spell if it was possible to do so.

The committee invited George Mallory and George Ingle Finch, both widely regarded as two of the strongest alpinists of the day, to make up the core of the climbing party.  Finch and Mallory had great mutual respect but little affection for one another.  From the outset Finch seemed to be at odds with the committee and, in the event, he was prevented from going on the 1921 expedition on slightly spurious grounds of his health.  Despite his own misgivings about Finch’s health and, to be honest, his ability to get along with him, Mallory was very concerned by the lack of strong Alpine climbers on the 1921 expedition.  He privately considered it unlikely that either Alexander Kellas or Harold Raeburn would get above 24,000 or 25,000 feet and after Finch was dropped Mallory was slightly desperate about the prospects of getting to any height on the mountain.  He finally succeeded in convincing the committee to include his old climbing partner and friend Guy Bullock, who was available at short notice and the party set off for India.

When the first British expedition left Darjeeling in 1921 no European had been within forty miles of the mountain and nothing was known about Everest other than its height, latitude and longitude.  The committee concluded, therefore, that the first expedition should have as its objective a preliminary reconnaissance of the region.  With this in mind a team of surveyors, mountaineers, medical officers and interpreters was assembled under the leadership of Lt. Col. Charles K Howard-Bury. Mallory was appointed Acting Climbing Leader and together with Guy Bullock, represented the climbers on the expedition.  Dr A. M. Heron from the Geological Survey of India accompanied Maj. Henry T. Morshead and Maj. Edward Wheeler, both from the Survey of India.  Dr Alexander Wollaston was the medical officer and naturalist.  Dr Alexander Kellas was a key member of the expedition: he had extensive knowledge of travelling in the Himalaya, having climbed over a period of seven years in Kashmir, Sikkim and the Garhwal Himalaya and had been the first mountaineer to ascend three of the great peaks seen on the Sikkim stretch of the march through Tibet: Chumiomo, Pawhunri and Kangchenjau.  He was the only member of the team who had given serious thought to the possible routes up Everest.  Prior to 1919 Kellas had been a chemistry lecturer at a London medical school.  He and the celebrated scientist, Professor Haldane had worked together and Kellas had conducted experiments in pressure chambers, concluding that bottled oxygen might well provide a help to climbing at altitude. He had made studies of the problem of acclimatization and was in fact the world’s expert at the time on mountain sickness and on the problems of lassitude that affect climbing and other performance at high altitude. He was planning to undertake experiments using the gas as an aid to climbing on this expedition.

Tragically the expedition was robbed of Kellas’s experience.  He died of heart failure on the last high pass on the trek across Tibet, before the expedition had even reached base camp.  His death was a tremendous blow to the expedition and Mallory personally was appalled by his loss.  He had greatly looked forward to getting to know Kellas better and to benefiting from his unique Himalayan experience.  

Howard Bury had not been the first choice of the Everest Committee for expedition leader.  They had wished to appointed General Charles Bruce but he could not be spared from the British Army at the time.  Howard Bury, however, travelling to India at his own expense, had been instrumental in gaining permission from the Dalai Lama for a British expedition of climbers to go to Everest.  This was rightly considered to be a real coup after years of abortive applications via the India Office and the committee felt deeply indebted to him and his efforts.  As this first mission had as its brief the reconnaissance of the area as its primary objective the Everest Committee concluded it would be better to employ Howard Bury in 1921 and to keep Bruce in reserve for 1922 when a climbing expedition would almost certainly be launched.  Howard Bury was, at forty, some five years older than Mallory.  He had been brought up by his cousin the Viceroy of India and had developed at an early age a great passion for travel.  He was widely respected as an excellent linguist as well as being a good photographer, a naturalist and a keen plant collector.  His Victorian upbringing coupled with his career in the British Army had turned him into a strict disciplinarian.  Mallory was wary of him and wrote to Ruth after their first meeting: ‘He is well-informed and opinionated and doesn’t at all like anyone else to know things he doesn’t know.  For the sake of peace, I am being careful not to broach certain subjects of conversation.’ With Raeburn Mallory also failed to form a satisfactory relationship.  Before the expedition had even left England he had been exasperated with Raeburn’s desire to cut down on the amount of climbing equipment, most of which Mallory considered to be essential.  Raeburn did not see the reason for taking with them adequate clothing nor making provision for the extreme cold they would encounter at great heights.  From the outset, Mallory believed the expedition to be fatally flawed.  In the event, Raeburn began to exhibit worrying symptoms shortly after the death of Kellas and Wollaston decided he should be taken down quickly – the expedition could not afford another fatality.  Raeburn’s departure further weakened the climbing team, but Mallory persevered. 

From Kampa Dzong, some forty miles from Everest, he gained his first sight of the mountain and the frustrations he was feeling with his fellow team members were momentarily swept away as he stood, awe-struck, contemplating its size.  He recognised Everest’s neighbour, Makalu, and described the mountains in a letter to Geoffrey Young: ‘That to the left must be Makalu, grey, severe, and yet distinctly graceful, and the other, away to the right – who could doubt its identity?  It was a prodigious white fang excrescent from the jaw of the world.’ Mallory was captivated.  The spell of Everest had caught his imagination and his enthusiasm began to shine through his letters to Ruth.  He reported to her: ‘I felt somehow a traveller.  It was not only that no European had ever been here before us, but we were penetrating a secret: we were looking behind the great barrier running north and south which had been as a screen in front of us ever since we turned our eyes westwards from Kampa Dzong.’

Later that day Mallory and Bullock climbed up a little hill above Chiblung and waited patiently for another glimpse of the mountain.  He was not disappointed:

Suddenly our eyes caught … a glint of snow through the clouds; and gradually, very gradually, in the course of two hours or so, visions of great mountainsides and glaciers and ridges… forms invisible for the most part to the naked eye or indistinguishable from the clouds themselves, appeared through the floating rifts and had meaning for us – one whole clear meaning pieced from these fragments, for we had see a whole mountain range, little by little, the lesser to the greater until, incredibly higher in the sky than imagination had ventured to dream, the top of Everest itself appeared.

Once the excitement of the first sighting began to fade, Mallory’s mind started to focus on the problem of how best it could be tackled.  He considered which approach would lead him to a place from which he could plan an assault on the summit.  The real job had begun.

Howard-Bury dispatched Mallory and Bullock with a team of Sherpas and porters to reconnoitre the approach to the mountain from the glacier at the end of the Rongbuk valley that he named the Rongbuk Glacier.  Mallory ascended the glacier to near its source but was confronted by ‘the most forbidding, utterly unclimbable cliffs’.  There appeared to Mallory to be only one chink in the mountain’s defences, a gap which later became known as Chang La or the North Col.  This col, however, could not be reached from the source of the glacier so Mallory was forced to retreat and approach the mountain from the east side.  From here he climbed up the ice fall to a height on the North Col of 23,000 feet from where he was able to survey the problem of  the summit of  Everest from a closer a vantage.  He reported to Ruth in a letter: ‘For a long way up those easy rock and snow slopes was neither danger nor difficulty, but at present there was wind.  And higher was a more fearful sight.  The powdery fresh snow on the great face of Everest was being swept along in unbroken spindrift, and the very ridge where our route was marked out had to receive its unmitigated fury.’

By the middle of August Mallory and Bullock, who had by this time been joined by Morshead, found what they had been looking for, a breach in the mountain’s defences.  On 18 August  they spotted from their point on the Kharta Glacier the East Rongbuk Glacier which ran north under the north-east face of Everest.  A month later the weather, which had been stormy and made climbing impossible, cleared to give them another chance at the peak.  Towards the end of September they ferried stores and made a camp at 22,000ft below the Col that Mallory had christened the North Col.  Once again the weather was against them, this time in the nature of a ferocious wind which impeded their progress and forced them to descend.  Nevertheless, the climbing route for the summit had been spotted and Mallory wrote to Ruth, ‘It is a disappointment, there is no getting over it, that the end should seem so much tamer than I hoped … As it is we have established the way to the summit for anyone who cares to try the highest adventure.’

Despite his mixed feelings Mallory was forced to admit that several valuable lessons had been learned from the 1921 reconnaissance expedition.  One of the principal lessons was that they had approached the mountain at the wrong season, that is to say during the monsoon.  It was soon realized, and is now taken for granted, that the best season for climbing Everest is in the Spring, after the winter cold has lessened and before the monsoon has begun.  The reconnaissance mission had, in general terms, been a success.  A possible route up the mountain, to the North Col at least, had been established and there was great optimism within the Mount Everest Committee that a substantial attack on the mountain in the spring of 1922 might well lead to success.

With extraordinary energy and efficiency, an expedition was put together for the spring of 1922 under the leadership of Gen. Charles Bruce.  On account of his age Bruce would not be considered a member of the climbing party but he was a valuable member of the team nevertheless as his own experiences in the Himalaya were considerable.  He was charged with the responsibility of directing operations, organizing the expedition and, in particular, collecting local porters and enthusing them with an
esprit de corps
, a task for which he was most admirably suited.  Charles Bruce was described by many of his contemporaries as a boy at heart.  He was widely credited with having introduced shorts to the British Army, believing them to be less of an obstacle to climbing and scrambling over rough ground than trousers which were so easily holed at the knee.  His humour was school-boyish and it endeared him greatly not only to his fellow team members but also to the Sherpas with whom he dealt with firmness but affection.  The dispatches he wrote for the Times were frequently laced with repartie and his telegrams to the Mount Everest Committee were sometimes considered to be too flippant.