Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine (36 page)

Mallory had returned to Base Camp on 11 May and confided at the end of a long letter to Ruth, in which he’d described their climb and retreat in great detail, ‘I felt that I was going through a real hard time in a way I never did in ’22.  Meanwhile our retreat has meant a big waste of time.’  Part of the problem had been that when Mallory had arrived at Camp III he had not found the situation that he had anticipated.  The Gurkha NCO had not taken the control Bruce and Norton expected of him and Mallory found himself having to fulfil the role he felt least comfortable with, that of camp organiser.  Sandy, Odell and Hazard were of little use to him other than in support as none of them had been up to III before, and, more importantly, had had no experience of an expedition on this scale.  Had he had Bruce or Norton there with him it is likely that the problems that arose in the line of supplies could have been dealt with in another way.  But the lost days were what really bothered Mallory.  The later the summit day the more likely they would be to encounter the onset of the monsoon.  He revised his climbing schedule with a new summit day of 28 May and agreed the proposal with Bruce and Norton.  The climbing parties were to remain as before: Norton and Somervell without oxygen, Mallory and Sandy with.

The single most important aspect of the whole summit attempt was the morale of the porters.  It had been that which had most deeply concerned Bruce on his arrival in Camp II and it was Norton’s foremost thought now.  If their morale and courage could be restored there would be hope for a renewed assault.  He sent Karma Paul, the interpreter, down to Rongbuk Monastery to enquire as to whether the Chief Lama would grant them an audience.  Norton knew that this would mean a very great deal to the porters who held the lama in the highest regard.  He agreed and on 15 May the whole party of climbers and porters made their way down to the monastery for the ceremony.  Norton had arranged for each of the porters to be given some rice and a few coins to use as an offering to the lama, while he had with him a gift of a painting on silk of the Potala Palace and a wrist watch. 

Sandy’s account of the visit is a slightly tongue in cheek version of the blessing but it is at least factually fairly accurate, bearing in mind the pepper pot to which he refers was a prayer wheel and the iron bedstead the Lama’s throne.

After sitting for an hour and a half eating meat and macaroni with chop sticks (well, chewed ends), drinking Tibetan tea and eating radish with very strong pepper in an ante-chamber, we were ushered into the presence of the Lama who sat on a red throne on an iron bedstead just inside a kind of veranda … we sat on beautifully upholstered benches on either side of an alcove in the roof.  Noel had his camera about 30 ft away on the edge of the roof. After being blessed and having our heads touched with a white metal pepper-pot (at least it looked like that) we sat down while the whole damn lot of coolies came in turn doing 3 salams – head right onto the ground and then presented their caddas and offerings and were similarly blessed. Next bowls of rice were brought and the Lama addressed the coolies in a few well-chosen words and then said a prayer or prayers – it all sounded the same, ending on a wonderfully deep note.

Shebbeare also noted the ceremony in his diary and commented on the Lama’s address, ‘which as interpreted by Kama Paul afterwards, was very much what the Archbishop of Canterbury would have said in similar circumstances; if the spirits were willing we should succeed, the sahibs must not plan anything that would endanger human life and the porters must obey the sahibs’.

The effect of the Holy Lama’s blessing was dazzling.  The porters returned to Base Camp in fresh heart and with renewed vigour and determination.  ‘Nothing could have been more satisfactory’, concluded Bruce. ‘The reverence with which the men entered and left the presence of the great Lama was eloquent proof of his influence over them.’ 

The lama’s blessing may well have made a good impression on Sandy but the food he’d eaten at the monastery had not and he had a disagreeable few days when he was troubled with diarrhoea which left him at times feeling rather rotten.  He was in good spirits, however, and wrote in his diary the next morning: ‘Perfect morning – evidently the direct result of the Lama’s prayers.  After a conference about our future plans I gave the coolie cooks another lesson in Primus stoves. Lots of odd jobs kept us busy all day. Lots of carrying frames, etc, to be repaired before they go up the glacier again. Hingston performed his awful tests on us after tea.’  The results of these tests had Sandy still looking fit.  He was able to hold his breath for thirty seconds (as opposed to 120 in Darjeeling), with only Somervell markedly stronger at forty-one seconds.  His expiratory force was the same as Norton and he was strongest in the endurance test, when they had to blow mercury up a tube and hold it there.  In the mental arithmetic tests Mallory was spectacularly quicker than any of them, so his faculties appear to have been little affected by the altitude to date. 

The greatest anxiety for the climbers now was the weather.  The onset of the monsoon over the Himalaya would, they all understood clearly, make an assault on the summit quite impossible.  They were receiving information on its progress from Mallory’s sister, who lived in Colombo, Ceylon, where the monsoon typically arrived three weeks earlier than in the Himalaya, and from the meteorological department in Simla.  Owing to the slowness of the postal service the most important information on the monsoon arrived with them at Base Camp only after the final descent on 11 June.  They knew, however, that in 1922 the monsoon had broken on 1 June and they also knew that it was generally preceded by a fortnight of warm, clear weather.  It was this period on which they were pinning their hopes of a successful attempt on the summit. 

On 17 May, originally planned as their summit day, Norton, Somervell, Mallory and Odell set off for Camp I and Sandy followed them the following day in the company of Hazard and Noel.  Geoffrey Bruce, Hingston and Beetham remained at Base Camp, Beetham having been struck by a bad attack of sciatica, adding insult to injury to this poor man.  Sandy was not feeling as fit as he had been and noted in his diary at Camp I ‘have had diarrhoea for 3 days and feel rather rotten with it.  However am trying the effect of lead and opium.  It looked a very dirty day on the mountain this afternoon.’ After a very warm and comfortable night at Camp I he was feeling considerably better and set a record time between Camps I and II, arriving at II in one and three-quarter hours.  ‘Rested in Camp II till 4:30 then as no other sahibs had arrived I strolled up the glacier and met Shebbeare at the entrance of the trough – very tired.  I took his rucksack full of crampons and we both returned by easy stages to Camp II.’  The next morning he and Hazard made their way up to Camp III as planned.  They sorted porters on their way up, helping them to exchange loads and ensuring that as much of the food, fuel and equipment as possible got into camp.  When they arrived they discovered Somervell suffering badly from the effects of sunstroke, with a high fever.  Sandy, as usual, found that various repair jobs had been left for him in camp, so he spent the early afternoon mending the primus stoves which were malfunctioning in the cold.  He also effected repairs to various tent poles which had suffered in the last winds.  After these jobs were completed he set out towards the North Col to meet Norton, Mallory and Odell who had been up to establish Camp IV, but he was not properly dressed for the cold on the glacier and had to return to Camp III before he met up with them.  ‘They had a pretty exciting time coming down.  Norton glissading out of control and George going down a crevasse unseen and unheard by the rest.  All were very tired when they got in.’

This bald statement hides the truth behind a dramatic story.  Norton, Odell, Mallory and a porter named Lhakpa Tsering had made their way up from Camp III that morning, equipped with Alpine rope and pickets.  Their intention was to fix ropes in all the most difficult places on the climb up to the North Col where they would then establish Camp IV, the true jumping-off point for any summit attempt.  As Norton explained in his chapter entitled ‘The North Col’, in the expedition book
The Fight for
Everest
, the nature of the slopes above Camp III changes every year, for they cross the path of a glacier which, after all, is a frozen river that moves, albeit slowly but inexorably down the mountain.  In 1924 the approach to the North Col had changed considerably from that in 1922.  They were confronted by an enormous crevasse which they would have to cross before gaining access to the slopes below the North Col.  Mallory lead the route through the crevasse and up a steep, icy snow chimney which Norton described as ‘the deuce’.  ‘It was very narrow, its sides were smooth blue ice and it was floored – if the term floor can be applied to a surface that mounts almost vertically – with soft snow which seemed merely to conceal a bottomless crack and offered little or no foothold.  The climb was something of a gymnastic exercise, and one is little fitted for gymnastics above 22,000ft.’  The 200 foot chimney took an hour to climb and the exertion was utterly exhausting.  Above the chimney were steep slopes of snow and ice where the climbers fixed ropes using pickets and tying on, where possible, to natural features such as a large serac, or block of ice, which would act as a good anchor.  The system of fixing ropes is adopted now as it was then, and it offers some protection over highly exposed, steep ground, such as those they now encountered.  One Himalayan climbing guide told me that nowadays he and his team of Sherpas fix 6,000 metres of rope on the route up to the summit from the north side of Everest.  In 1924 they succeeded in fixing less than 1,000 metres.  A well-recognized technique in the 1920s was step cutting, at which Mallory was an acknowledged master.  He cut broad, deep steps up the steepest sections of the slopes above the chimney in order that the porters might use them when they carried their loads up to the North Col.  Step cutting is exhausting work, especially at altitude, but vital for the sake of the porters who were less at home on the steep ice and snow than the British climbers.

They arrived at the place where they had pitched their tents in 1922, only to discover that the shelf was smaller this year, forming a ‘hog-backed ridge of untrodden, glistening snow barely affording level space for our proposed row of little 6-foot-square tents’.  Well pleased with their efforts thus far, Mallory and Odell set off to prospect the route up towards the summit.  The terrain between the camp site and the North Col itself was heavily crevassed and made crossing it extremely hard work.  Odell succeeded in finding a bridge across the most serious crevasse, which meant that access to the col was easier than it had been in 1922.  Nevertheless, Mallory, who had borne the brunt of the heavy work that morning on the way up, was played out and as the four of them turned to make for Camp III at 3.45 there were a number of incidents on the descent each of which might well have proven fatal.  The first slip was by Lhakpa who, having tied himself on to Odell’s rope with an inadequate reef knot, slipped and fell, saved only from a disastrous tumble into oblivion by a soft patch of snow which arrested his fall.  It was a very sobering moment for him and he was extremely afraid.  Mallory, by his own admission severely exhausted, fell into a crevasse:

The snow gave way and in I went with the snow tumbling all round me, down, luckily, only about 10 feet before 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.  I had some nasty moments before I got comfortably wedged and began to yell for help up through the round hole I had come through where the blue sky showed – this because I was afraid my operations to extricate myself would bring down a lot more snow and perhaps precipitate me into the bargain.  However, I soon grew tired of shouting – they hadn’t seen me from above – and bringing the snow down a little at a time I made a hole out towards the side (the crevasse ran down a slope) after some climbing, and extricated myself – but was then on the wrong side of the crevasse, so that eventually I had to cut across a nasty slope of very hard ice and farther down some mixed unpleasant snow before I was out of the wood.  The others were down by a better line ten minutes before me.  That cutting against time at the end after such a day just about brought me to my limit. 

They arrived back in camp exhausted in the late afternoon.  While Mallory, Norton and Odell were recovering from their ordeal of the previous day, Sandy set out with Somervell and Hazard to take twelve porters and several loads up to the North Col.  The weather was diabolical ‘snow falling steadily, no signs of improvement.  Conditions and going were perfectly bloody.’  When they reached the ice chimney in the big crevasse it became clear that the porters would not be able to climb it with the loads on their backs, so Sandy and Somervell scrambled up to the ledge above it and spent two and three-quarter utterly exhausting hours hauling the loads up the 200 foot chimney.  Hazard stood at the bottom with the porters and oversaw the loading of the rope.  It was a gargantuan task and left all three men very weary.  When finally all the loads had been safely winched up and the porters and Hazard had climbed the chimney, Sandy and Somervell set off towards the North Col camp, fixing ropes in all the most exposed places.  As there was insufficient accommodation for everyone at Camp IV, they left Hazard and the porters on the North Col and returned to III ‘at the double as the mist and snow were thickening and the hour late’.  Sandy had a nasty slip on the way down but was none the worse for it.  The visibility on the glacier was less than 100 yards and they arrived at dusk at Camp III ‘very tired and thirsty’. Sandy’s first impression of the North Col had not been a favourable one.  He wrote a few days later to his mother, ‘I’ve been up to the North Col in a blizzard and never want to do it again.’