Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine (34 page)

Bruce arranged for loads of up to 40 lb to be handed out to the Tibetan men, women and boys who had been employed to carry.  He made an effort to ensure that the women and boys had lighter loads, but to no avail.  ‘I had to resort to the only plan that ensures swift allotment and complete satisfaction in Tibet.  Tibetans all wear prettily woven garters of distinct colouring round the tops of their boots, and immediately recognize their own colours.  The best method of distributing loads consists in collecting a garter from each person, shuffling them well, and throwing one on to each load.  The owner of the garter then claims his or her load, and carries it all day without further complaint.’  Norton was amazed that the porters were adopting a pace that he would imagine a fit climber in the Alps would only manage if he were carrying a load of 25 lb or less.  Not only were these men, women and boys rugged, often barefooted but they were cheerful as they walked up the valley towards the East Rongbuk glacier, singing and joking as they went.  A few of the women were carrying babies on top of their loads and one woman and her baby actually spent a night in the open at Camp II.

Bruce had arranged for three NCOs to manage Camps I, II and III, ensuring that the porters were fed and kept warm and fit, and that the loads, coming up the ‘line’, to use the military phrase adopted by the expedition, were getting to the right camps.  All the high altitude equipment destined for the higher camps was to be left at Camp II.  With this superb organization in place and the weather fair, the expedition members felt quite rightly that a very good start had been made.  They celebrated that evening with a five-course dinner and champagne.

The instructions to the NCOs had been for seventy-five of the Tibetan porters to return to Base Camp for further loads and for the other seventy-five to stay at Camp I in preparation for load carrying to Camp II the following day.  They were greeted with the news the next morning that fifty-two of the Tibetans who had been meant to stay at Camp I had disappeared in the night. ‘This was a very serious matter’, Bruce wrote, ‘for everything depended on these men, and a transport strike at this juncture would effectively cripple the whole programme.’

Norton, Shebbeare and Bruce hot-footed it up to Camp I to see what was going on and to ascertain the whereabouts of the fifty-two defectors.  As they arrived, a convoy of Tibetans came down from Camp II, full of good cheer.  They were told that there would be more rations and higher wages if they carried more loads from I to II and this they did in great heart.  Order was restored but the fifty-two men were not to be found.  The performances of the women really impressed Bruce and he could not resist noting in his account of the stocking of the lower camps, that one woman had carried her two-year-old child on top of her 40 lb load from 17,500 feet to 19,800 feet, deposited the load and carried the child back down again.  She had declared herself ready to repeat the process.  Another older woman had performed a little step dance for them having returned from carrying her load, and before she had her food.  With these willing helpers, and a little additional help from the porters they had brought from India, Bruce felt happy that they would be able to keep to the original schedule.  His confidence was well placed and on the evening of 2 May he received a message from the NCOs at Camps I and II that the work had been completed, all the loads had arrived and safely stored and the Tibetans could be paid off. 

The next job was to establish and stock Camp III and for this the expedition would use their own porters.  It was now time to start the process of acclimatization at higher altitude for the climbers, hence the departure on 3 May from Base Camp of Sandy, Mallory, Odell and Hazard.  Before they left, Somervell took specimens of their blood for a haemaglobin test. ‘Mine came out by far the greatest percentage of red corpuscles, and Odell next, showing very good acclimatization’, Sandy noted with some pride, adding, ‘hope this is a really good sign.’  It was planned for Mallory and Sandy to remain at Camp III for acclimatization whilst Odell and Hazard had been briefed to push on to establish the North Col Camp or Camp IV at 23,000 feet.  The four climbers left Base Camp after an early lunch arriving in Camp I in exactly two hours.  They had sent off fifteen porters an hour or so before they left carrying all the kit including the oxygen apparatus. ‘I’m glad that I didn’t have to carry any of their loads 100 yards’, Sandy observed in his diary that evening.  In fact the climbers overtook most of the porters on the way up to Camp I and Sandy overheard good deal of grumbling about the heavy loads.  They encountered very unpleasant conditions at Camp I, which was generally held to be the most comfortable of all the camps, catching any sun going.  They spent a draughty, cold night and headed the following morning up to Camp II. 

The going from I to II was very rough.  Mallory and I kept to the lateral moraine as long as possible.  After crossing onto the glacier just opposite a side glacier we found a lovely frozen lake surrounded by seracs where we rested for about half an hour – photographing and studying the map.  When we moved on 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, in spite of my colossal red corpuscles.

Climbers and porters in the trough.  Those in the foreground were on Sandy’s rope.  The tiny figures in the background amongst the towering seracs were with Hazard.

In Camps I and II the porters slept in stone shelters they called
sangars
, with a tarpaulin or fly sheet over the top.  At Camp I a sangar was also used as the mess tent.  When Mallory and Sandy arrived at Camp II they could see that the porters had rather lost heart and were not willing to prepare their own accommodation.  After cups of tea and a brief rest, Sandy and Mallory put up two Whymper tents for themselves, Odell and Hazard, who were coming up behind them, and then set to work collecting boulders in order to make a two-room sangar for the porters.  ‘I worked for about 2½ hours shifting colossal boulders – trying to set an example to the coolies which was quite successful as they all started to work with quite a heart singing and shouting’ Sandy wrote.  The effort was too much and his nose began to bleed after the strenuous work, so he took a well-deserved break while Mallory and Odell went out up the glacier to prospect a route up to Camp III.  That evening they had dinner in Captain Noel’s tent, who was also on his way up to Camp III with his cameras and assistants.  Noel’s movements on the mountain were independent of the rest of the expedition but he was always a popular figure in camp.  His plan was to establish himself and his team at Camp IV and to film the summit attempt from there.  Sandy was feeling positive, despite the rather worrying weather they were experiencing. Whenever he felt confident he made observations about his surroundings whereas when he was anxious he tended to worry about his own physical condition and the nuts and bolts of the organization.  In Camp II on 4 May he was full of optimism.  The schedule worked out on the march had so far been kept to with barely a hitch and he was off up to Camp III in the morning, to an altitude 2500 feet higher than he had ever been before.  That evening when they went to bed at 7.30 Sandy observed that a certain amount of snow had fallen, ‘The great ice cliff behind the camp looked very fine in what little evening sun we got between the rather stormy looking clouds.’  Sandy was clearly pleased with his performance to date, despite the nose bleed he had suffered earlier in the day, now recognizable as a sign of the effect of altitude. 

It was a very cold night at Camp II, with the temperature dropping below 1˚F (-19 ˚C) and they awoke to powder snow on the glacier the next morning.  After slightly revising the loads and deciding which boxes to send up to Camp III, they set off mid- morning in intermittent sunshine and driving snow.  ‘We left camp at 11 am and had a very heavy day, starting up the glacier for 1½ miles and we dropped down into a trough about 100 ft tall amongst the most fantastic shaped ice seracs.  Here we waited a long while to collect all or rather most of the coolies, which we roped up, myself with 6, Odell with 6 and Hazard on a long rope with 11, Mallory going alone, sometimes in front and sometimes behind.  I led all the way up the gorge – found it very laborious going.’ He was forced to stop every five minutes for a rest while the porters caught their breath.  He found this very frustrating and soon realized that the man behind him on the rope was ‘an awful dud, continually grumbling and stopping, so in fury I changed loads with him.  It was not unduly heavy but awkward to carry.  Fortunately for me Mallory insisted on me not carrying it any further, so we put the man off the rope and told him the ice devils would get him and proceeded as before.’  All the porters were feeling the altitude and their heavy loads further aggravated their condition.  Although the acclimatization issue was well recognized in the 1920s the problems relating to altitude sickness were not so well understood.  Sandy was as tough as Mallory on the men and insisted on setting an example to exhort them to increase their effort.  What neither of them understood was that the men were not being lazy; they were genuinely suffering from altitude sickness.  The result was that of the twenty-odd men they got to Camp III only four were not sick the following day. 

They finally reached Camp III at 6 p.m., cold, exhausted and hungry.  The food supplies at the camp were not as well organized as they should have been and the climbers were without soup that night, and therefore vital liquid.  Added to that the jam and cheese were frozen solid. ‘One course of mutton and veg, the first morsel since breakfast, and two cups of cool coffee left me very thirsty and hungry’, Sandy complained.  At that height the human body requires an enormous amount of liquid each day, somewhere in the vicinity of six litres as it is now understood.  In 1924 this was not appreciated and Sandy’s lack of liquid intake had a very big bearing on his performance over the following days.  That night he slept for the first time at 21,300 feet. ‘I slept like a log despite the stones we lay on until midnight, after which I couldn’t get comfy.  The sleeping bag grew to half its normal size, all my clothes felt uncomfy and I kept turning over into patches of frozen breath.  From 5 am I slept soundly till 9.’

Mallory was so concerned by the lack of food and drink at Camp III that he decided to descend to Camp II to supervise the stores coming up the line.  He got up at 6:20 a.m., ‘energetic beggar’, Sandy observed, and set off down the glacier.  Breakfast was an even more measly affair than dinner the night before.  They ate a sausage each and had half a tin of condensed milk per man.  To their distress most of the porters were too ill to get up, due, they believed, to sleeping with the tents tightly closed.  Mallory returned around lunchtime and reported on the state of the stores.  Later that afternoon Sandy, Odell and the four porters who were able and willing to work set off down the glacier to collect the loads dumped by the porters from Camp II some three-quarters of a mile short of Camp III.  ‘We got 6 loads up, I led the pack with a Whymper tent so that none of the porters dared to complain of their loads or the pace I was setting.’ This was exactly the scenario Geoffrey Bruce had been at great pains to avoid.  He and Norton knew full well that the only hope they had of getting to the summit of Everest was with wholly fit climbers and a strong team of porters to support them and carry loads high.  Here were three of the key climbers squandering their energies carrying loads between camps that should, by right, have already been in Camp III.  The picture was looking bleak.

That night they had temperatures at Camp III of –21 ˚F, –30 ˚C, and the next morning the porters were in a very much worse state.  Several of them were vomiting, a clear sign of severe altitude sickness, and were quite unable to go on.  Mallory knew that there was no point in keeping them at Camp III so he escorted them part of the way down to Camp II.  Sandy too was suffering from the altitude: he had developed the characteristic headache which is the blight of so many climbers past and present.  Hazard went down the glacier to oversee other loads coming up from Camp II.  Sandy and Odell remained in camp but by 3.30 p.m. they elected to descend to meet Mallory and Hazard as only four of Noel’s porters had reached them since the morning.  They found Mallory, Hazard and eight exhausted porters about three-quarters of a mile below camp. ‘The porters were in a very exhausted condition.  I carried their loads in turn to rest them, but they were almost too exhausted to walk without loads.  At last we got them into camp and distributed the eight sleeping bags I was carrying and got a primus going in one of their tents.’  Sandy was frustrated by the situation he found himself in but he had neither the experience nor the knowledge to do very much about it, so he followed his instincts and tried to make a bad situation as good as possible for the porters.  Meanwhile, Mallory was exhausted and off his food.  He’d  had a lousy day of it, they all conceded.