Читать книгу Last Hours on Everest: The gripping story of Mallory and Irvine’s fatal ascent - Graham Hoyland, Graham Hoyland - Страница 10

The British Empire was driven by bloody-minded individuals with a sense of mission, such as Livingstone, Napier and Burton, and one such was Francis Younghusband, the man largely responsible for the first attempts to climb Mount Everest.

He was a small, heavily moustached man, who was almost the personification of Empire. He had become the youngest member of the Royal Geographical Society, and in 1890 received the RGS Patron’s Medal for his great journey through Manchuria, undertaken when he was only 23. While on leave from his regiment, he pioneered a route between India and Kashgar, prime Great Game territory. Later, as a captain, he was ordered to survey part of the Hunza valley, where he bumped into his Russian counterpart, Captain Grombchevsky, who was surveying possible invasion routes. After dinner they swilled brandy and vodka, and compared their soldiers. They also discussed the possible outcome of a Russian invasion. After this friendly sparring, straight out of a buddy movie, they rode off in opposite directions.

The threat from Russia was therefore very real, and there was an obvious psychological advantage in gaining the high ground between the two great empires. Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India, clearly wanted the highest point of the Himalayas climbed, writing that:

As I sat daily in my room, and saw that range of snowy battlements uplifted against the sky, that huge palisade shutting off India from the rest of the world, I felt it should be the business of Englishmen, if of anybody, to reach the summit.

In this context it can be seen that the climbing of Mount Everest was more of a political decision than a ‘wild dream’. In its way it was the British Empire’s moon-shot, with similar political motivation to the United States’ moon-shot of the 1960s. Crucially, it would plant the British flag on the northern bounds of India. The problem was that the Tibetans didn’t want to talk to the British and pursued a policy of splendid isolation, keeping foreigners at an arm’s length. Myths arose about this forbidden land, and the desire to explore it grew.

Then in 1893 Captain Charles Bruce of the Gurkhas, who had climbed with Martin Conway in the Karakorum the previous year, met Younghusband at a polo match. He put the idea of climbing Mount Everest to him and between them they started a train of events that was to prove unstoppable. Younghusband was then Political Officer in Chitral, and the idea fermented within him, particularly as he knew that he could count on the support of the establishment. In the meanwhile Curzon became more anxious about Russian influence in Tibet and decided to do something about it. His chance came when a small group of Tibetans crossed the border and stole some Nepali yaks. This incursion was the excuse for the infamous Diplomatic Mission to Lhasa of 1904, led by Younghusband, who, on his way to Lhasa, saw the mountain at last:

Mount Everest for its size is a singularly shy and retiring mountain. It hides itself away behind other mountains. On the north side, in Tibet … it does indeed stand up proudly and lone, a true monarch among mountains. But it stands in a very sparsely inhabited part of Tibet, and very few people ever go to Tibet.

Younghusband certainly did go to Tibet, and in some style. He was leading a force of British soldiers carrying Maxim machine-guns and cannon. A force of 2,000 Tibetans attempted to resist at Gyantse with matchlock muskets, spears and swords. Their lamas assured them the British bullets would not harm them, but when the smoke cleared over 600 of their number had died. By the time the British reached Lhasa the casualties were nearly 3,000 Tibetans killed, compared with only 40 British soldiers. This was a lesson on the effectiveness of machine-guns as devices for cutting up men, a lesson that was initially ignored by the First World War generals.

Britain gained privileged access to the closed country, and eventually set up telegraph poles all the way to Lhasa. Trading could begin, although some in Europe were sad that one of the last veiled mysteries of geography had been ripped aside so brutally. Curiously enough, the belligerent Younghusband had a mystical experience on his way back from Lhasa and later became a spiritual writer. He saw Mount Everest from one of his camps ‘poised high in heaven as the spotless pinnacle of the world’. In later life he said he regretted his invasion of Tibet.

By Mallory and Somervell’s time the new breed of alpinist was thinking about even higher mountains than those in the Alps and the Caucasus, and were organising the first Himalayan expeditions. However, because both Nepal and Tibet were closed to foreigners Mount Everest seemed an impossible dream. This opinion changed subtly after the geographical poles were reached, and particularly after the tragedy of Scott’s expedition to the South Pole in 1912.

Scott’s endeavour was an example of serious exploration in the old style; that is, exploration with a strong scientific purpose. When his last camp was found it was only 11 miles from the next food dump that might have saved his party. And yet they had man-hauled 30lb of rock samples behind them all the way from the Pole.

There was another example of this serious scientific interest. The palaeobotanist Marie Stopes had applied to join Scott’s second expedition. She had been turned down on the grounds of her sex, but following her advice Scott had looked for a specimen of a coal-forming, fossilised fern named Glossopteris. The discovery of this specimen in the dead explorer’s collection established that Antarctica had once formed part of the first super-continent of Gondwanaland.

In his diary entry for 8 February relating to this discovery near the Beardmore Glacier, Scott writes that they spent ‘the rest of the day geologising … under cliffs of Beacon sandstone, weathering rapidly and carrying veritable coal seams. From the last, Wilson, with his sharp eyes, has picked several plant impressions, the last a piece of coal with beautifully traced leaves in layers, also some excellently preserved impressions of thick stems, showing cellular structure.’

Scott’s last words, written as he lay dying in his own lonely tent, made a powerful impression on me as a schoolboy:

For my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past. We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of providence, determined still to do our best to the last … Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.

There seems to be something in the English psyche that celebrates the concept of heroic failure. One doesn’t see it in Scottish culture, nor do the Americans have any truck with losers. It is hard to disentangle, but both Scott and Mallory are examples of this phenomenon. Franklin of the North-West Passage is another. I’d suggest it might have to do with the English public schools’ paradoxical injunction to try your very hardest, but not to boast of any success. Bragging is considered one of the cardinal sins. The top winning strategy in this contradictory game is therefore to die heroically trying to reach some impossible goal. I believe heroic failure may have played a small part in Mallory’s psychology, as well as in the minds of his predecessors.

Scott and his party had been beaten by the Norwegian polar explorer Amundsen, who pipped them to the post by employing more effective dog-teams, keeping his attempt secret and treating his expedition as a race. Scott thought it was unsporting to use dogs and insisted on man-hauling the sledges, rather as later explorers thought it would be unsporting to use supplementary oxygen to climb Mount Everest. British moral indignation rose in step with Scott’s elevation to heroic status. ‘Amundsen even ate his dogs!’ they cried. Edward Whymper had referred to Everest as the Third Pole, and this term now gained currency. British pride had to be assuaged, and the ascent of Everest would do as well as anything else.

So, after more years of negotiations and the intervention of the First World War, the Dalai Lama reluctantly gave permission for Mount Everest to be reconnoitred in 1921, with a climbing party to be led by General Bruce the following year. This turn of events was largely thanks to the persistence of Younghusband. By then president of the Royal Geographical Society, he was determined to get an expedition out to the mountain. His 1920 presidential address hints at why people still want to climb Mount Everest:

The accomplishment of such a feat will elevate the human spirit and will give man, especially us geographers, a feeling that we really are getting the upper hand on the earth, and that we are acquiring a true mastery of our surroundings … if man stands on earth’s highest summit, he will have an increased pride and confidence in himself in the ascendancy over matter. This is the incalculable good which the ascent of Mount Everest will confer.1

Before Younghusband’s address the Royal Geographical Society had staged a talk in March 1919 from a truly remarkable Everester. John Baptist Lucius Noel was another one of those privileged soldiers, his father being the second son of the Earl of Gainsborough. Noel was a handsome man and something of an entrepreneur, as later events revealed. I have an interest in Noel because he was the first man to film on Mount Everest, predating my own filming there by some 70 years.

He stood up to read a paper entitled ‘A Journey to Tashirak in Southern Tibet, and the Eastern Approaches to Mount Everest’. Noel described how, when stationed in Calcutta as a lieutenant, he would take his leave in the baking summer months up in the hills to the north, searching for a way to the highest mountain on earth. As with so many of us he became captivated by Everest. Eventually he crossed the Choten Nyi-ma La, a high pass in Sikkim to the north of Kangchenjunga (I saw this pass in 2009, which is now heavily guarded on both sides by soldiers from China and India). Unseen, Noel slipped across, disguised as an Indian Muslim trader:

To defeat observation I intended to avoid the villages and settled parts generally, to carry our food, and to keep to those more desolate stretches where only an occasional shepherd was to be seen. My men were not startlingly different from the Tibetans, and if I darkened my skin and my hair I could pass, not as a native – my colour and shape of my eyes would prevent that – but as a Mohammedan from India.2

His plan was to find the passes that led to Mount Everest and, if possible, to come to close quarters with the mountain. Unfortunately, as I too saw in 2009, there is a difficult tangle of high country between that north-west corner of Sikkim and Everest, and Noel could not get closer than forty miles before he was intercepted and turned back. But it was the closest any Westerner had been, and Noel would play a key part in the 1922 and 1924 expeditions.

His lecture stirred up public debate about the possibility of climbing the mountain, which of course it was intended to do. After many years of wheeling and dealing, of encouragement from Lord Curzon and obstruction by Lord Morley, the Secretary of State for India, an expedition was mounted.

As a result, the 1921 Everest reconnaissance was highly political. The leader was the posh Lt Col Charles Howard-Bury, wealthy and well connected. He was just the man for the job. He moved easily in high diplomatic circles, and proved his worth in helping to secure permission for a reconnaissance in 1921 and a climbing attempt in 1922. He had a most colourful life, growing up in a haunted gothic castle at Charleville in County Offaly, Ireland, travelling into Tibet without permission in 1905, and being taken prisoner during the First World War. He was a keen naturalist and plant hunter (Primula buryana is named after him), and he was the first European to report the existence of the yeti. He never married and during the Second World War he met Rex Beaumont, a young actor with whom he shared the rest of his life. Mallory didn’t care for his high Tory views, nor for the way he treated his subordinates, but Howard-Bury got a difficult political job done, then led the expedition off the map.

The Mount Everest Committee, a joint committee of the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club whose purpose was to fund and organise the reconnaissance, chose the team members on the basis that they had to be able to provide a thorough survey of the massif and give a good assessment of the climbing possibilities. The committee was run by Arthur Robert Hinks.

Hinks is an excellent example of why bureaucrats should not run expeditions. He was a mathematician specialising in map projections and the weight of the moon, but he had no field experience whatsoever. He was contemptuous of those he regarded as intellectually inferior to him, and he was a snob. He failed to be open-minded about climbing talents such as Finch, and his ability to rub people up the wrong way annoyed everyone. Even though the press and film-makers paid for all the Everest expeditions, he was full of loathing for journalists. They were a ‘rotten lot … all sharks and pirates’. Hinks’s pernicious influence as secretary of the Mount Everest Committee probably helped to put back the climbing of the mountain by thirty years.

As with Scott’s Antarctic expedition, there was strong emphasis on the scientific value of the expedition, with the geographers keen to travel around the mountain and draw maps. The surveyors were Henry Morshead, Oliver Wheeler and Alexander Heron. The climbers were drawn from the ranks of the Alpine Club, which was desperate to get a man to the top. Harold Raeburn, a 56-year-old Scottish climber with an impressive record of guideless climbing, was appointed mountaineering leader, but proved to be prematurely aged and, struck down by illness, didn’t perform well. Then there was Alexander Kellas, who had huge Himalayan experience gained during his studies of high altitude, and Mallory. George Finch, another talented alpinist, was dislodged at the last minute by skulduggery within the committee, and so Mallory proposed his school-friend from Winchester, Guy Bullock, who had limited climbing experience. The team doctor was Sandy Wollaston.

Of all the climbers, Alexander Kellas brought most experience to the expedition. Even contemporary climbers owe him a huge debt, as he discovered the techniques necessary to climb the mountain. In 2009 I filmed and climbed in an area of Sikkim north of Kanchenjunga that was his high-altitude testing ground. This politically sensitive mountainous region had not been visited by Westerners since Frank Smythe’s climbs there in the 1930s, and it was hard to reach. I had gone there to learn about Kellas’s work on human physiology at high altitudes.

The ancient Greeks knew that the body would deteriorate at high altitude but it wasn’t understood why until the late 19th century, when it was realised that low levels of oxygen led to a condition known as hypoxia. Kellas spent the war at the Air Ministry, working with Professor J. B. S. Haldane on the high-altitude oxygen deprivation suffered by pilots who were flying higher and higher. Before that, he taught chemistry to medical students at Middlesex Hospital, combining laboratory experiments with tests on his own body while climbing high Himalayan peaks during the holidays.

He made many first ascents, culminating in an ascent of Pauhunri at 7,128m (23,386ft), and by 1921 he had spent more time at 7,000m than anyone else on earth. He realised that hypoxia led first to loss of appetite, then to loss of weight, reduced brain function and ultimately death. Above a certain altitude the body deteriorates faster than its natural ability to restore itself. Journalists like to call this the ‘Death Zone’, and fix it at 8,000m (26,247ft), but really it is any height above which people cannot sustain permanent habitation, which is around 5,100m (16,728ft). Climbers deteriorate steadily above this height, but it becomes marked on their summit days above the 8,000m contour, when their lungs are drowning in fluid and their brains are swelling with cerebral oedema.

Kellas’s achievements as a scientist and mountaineer were remarkable enough, but it was his discovery in this remote Sikkim valley that revolutionised the sport of Himalayan climbing, and it is one without which no modern Everest expedition would even be able to leave Base Camp. After being disappointed by a pair of hired Swiss guides in Sikkim in 1907 he came across an ethnic group called the Sherpas. He recognised their natural aptitude for mountaineering and noted: ‘They seemed more at home in diminished pressure.’

I worked with Sherpas in the very same area that Kellas first employed them, and their ability is immediately apparent; not only are they sure-footed on steep ground, they are remarkably strong and almost always good-humoured individuals – all vital characteristics on long mountain trips. I noticed a few years ago during blood oxygen-level testing on Everest that the Sherpas on the expedition had much the same or lower O2 levels than the rest of us, and yet they were able to climb much faster. How could this be? Recent research into why Sherpas do so well at altitude suggests that instead of having more haemoglobin in their blood stream than lowlanders, they have more capillaries to distribute the blood. As this ethnic group has only moved to high altitudes within the last 10,000 years, this research suggests that human evolution is still taking place.

The Sherpas might wonder why we lowlanders bother to come and join them at altitudes that are difficult for us. I asked Thendup Sherpa, our cook on the Sikkim expedition, why he thought Westerners came to the Himalayas: ‘To get famous,’ he instantly replied.

There is a danger in lumping together a disparate group of individuals as ‘Sherpas’. It is rather like the wider imperial designation of ‘natives’. In a recent obituary in the Guardian, there was a reference to two European women killed in 1959 in a Himalayan avalanche with ‘their Sherpa’. Imagine obituaries of two Nepalese men climbing in the Lake District with ‘their Englishman’. As with any group that seems homogeneous, a little time spent in their company reveals their differing characters.

Traditional Sherpa culture consisted of a few wealthy individuals employing a poor majority in work such as porterage or agriculture. In return they expected their chief to remain loyal and protect them, rather in the manner of the Scottish clan system. The switch to European employers was acceptable to them when they saw the money and equipment being offered. What they gave in addition was a degree of loyalty, even unto death, that surprised the foreign climbers. On the other side of the deal there was also ready acceptance of the Sherpas by British climbers. In the Alps British climbers were used to employing local guides and porters, and the historian Simon Schama suggests that mountain conquests were ‘a victory of imperial confidence over timorous native superstition’.3 The rulers were demonstrating to the ruled the virtues deriving from their muscular modernity, and by such demonstration they were legitimising their power. The whole imperial structure of the British Raj rested upon the sepoys of the Indian Army – the Indian soldiers themselves – and when they revolted in the Indian Mutiny, or Great Sepoy Rebellion, of 1857, all the vicious insecurities of the imperialists, and the resentment of the ruled, came boiling to the surface.

So Kellas dispensed with the usual mountain porters, and employed Sherpas instead. This collaboration was not, however, appreciated by everyone. When Kellas was being considered as a possible expedition leader in 1919, John Percy Farrar, the President of the Alpine Club, sneered:

Now Kellas, besides being fifty, so far has never climbed a mountain, but has only walked about on steep snow with a lot of coolies, and the only time they got on a very steep place they all tumbled down and ought to have been killed!

This is an absolute travesty, and shows that the elders of this particular tribe were considerably less tolerant of outsiders than the young bloods. In fact, Kellas was doing the kind of climbing that is currently much admired by members of the Alpine Club.

In a paper published in the Geographic Journal in 1917 Kellas wrote that in his opinion ‘a man in first-rate training, acclimatised to maximum possible altitude, could make the ascent of Mount Everest without adventitious aids, provided that the physical difficulties above 25,000 feet are not prohibitive’. By adventitious aids he means bottled oxygen. The advances made during the First World War in aircraft-engine design meant that pilots struggled to stay conscious at the higher altitudes being achieved, and there were greater losses of pilots as a result of hypoxia than enemy action. This led to the design of lightweight oxygen sets, which Kellas soon realised could be carried up high mountains. There soon followed a vigorous debate about this.

History has shown that Kellas was right, in that the very strongest climbers can just reach the summit of Mount Everest without supplementary oxygen, providing the air pressure is not too low on that particular day. Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler did exactly that in May 1978, Habeler racing down from the summit to the South Col in just one hour, terrified by his fear of brain damage. Creationists might ponder the fact that the highest summit on earth is just achievable with the strongest pair of human lungs. However, I was very glad to sleep on oxygen just before my attempt, despite the fact that the actual climb was dogged by an intermittent supply. On the summit I found that it was perfectly possible to take off my mask and move about, although climbing would have been much harder without it.

In 2007 I filmed a medical research expedition to Mount Everest that was trying to identify the genes that enable certain people to survive at high altitude while others deteriorate and suffer from hypoxia. We conducted the most comprehensive medical-expedition tests ever attempted at altitude, using over 200 subjects and taking arterial-blood samples near the summit. It was remarkable that the partial pressures measured in live climbers were so low that they had only previously been seen in corpses. In other words, you are not only dying on the summit – you are very nearly dead.

Kellas had to suspend his mountain research during the First World War while he worked for the Air Ministry, and his letters reveal that he suffered a breakdown, possibly brought on by overwork. He experienced hallucinations and wrote that he heard malicious voices threatening death, speculating that a sensitive microphone could make these voices audible to others. This suggests that he believed they were real, and today he would be diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia.

This condition is difficult to live with, and it may be that he felt more comfortable with Sherpas than with his colleagues. He had to resign from his post at the Middlesex, possibly because he was behaving oddly. In Sikkim he would remonstrate with the voices in his tent at night, but the Sherpas assumed that he was talking to the spirits of the dead and accorded him respect. After travelling in the area I am staggered that a man labouring under such a disability could have achieved so much with such slender means.

His Himalayan record won him a place on the 1921 expedition. He was 53, with more high-altitude experience than anyone alive and he knew the effects of altitude on the body. Furthermore, he had good relations with the Sherpas. He was given the job of designing and testing oxygen equipment for the expedition. He had carried out oxygen trials at altitude during the previous climbing season but had concluded that the cylinders were ‘too heavy for use above 18,000 feet, and below that altitude were not required’. In the end the equipment was simply too heavy to use that year.

Sandy Wollaston was another interesting character. He had led two expeditions to New Guinea, very nearly getting to the top of Carstensz Pyramid – now considered one of the Seven Summits – in 1913. He was only 500ft from the top, which must have been infuriating, particularly after his lengthy disputes with the Dutch authorities, followed by the difficulties of penetrating dense forest. He, too, was a keen botaniser, and like Howard-Bury he discovered a new primula on the 1921 trip. It was subsequently named after him as Wollaston’s Primrose, Primula wollastonii. Like several others on that expedition he was to meet a violent end. After Everest he was invited to be a tutor at Cambridge by John Maynard Keynes, but he was murdered in his rooms in 1930 by Douglas Potts, a deranged student who first shot Wollaston and then a police officer, before turning the gun on himself.

The individual members of the 1921 Everest reconnaissance expedition made their own separate ways to India, and over a period of a few weeks in April and May they assembled in Darjeeling. By the time they were ready to leave, there was already discord in the party. Howard-Bury, the Tory, and Raeburn, who was rather insecure in his role as climbing leader, clearly didn’t get on. Mallory, who could be a charming man, tried to smooth things between them.

To avoid difficulties with accommodation on the long march, the 1921 Everest reconnaissance expedition set off in two groups on 18 and 19 May through Sikkim, heading for Mount Everest. However, Kellas was weakened by his recent expedition around Kangchenjunga, where he was trying to get further pictures of the approaches to Mount Everest, and soon contracted dysentery. On 5 June he insisted that his countrymen went on ahead, possibly as he did not want them to witness his misery. He died as he was carried over the pass by his Sherpas into Khampa Dzong.

The official cause of death was heart failure, as it often is in the last stages of dysentery, but this was possibly to avoid embarrassment to his family. The other members of the expedition were appalled at this disaster. Mallory was mortified: ‘He died without one of us anywhere near him.’

They buried him in a place looking south over the border into Sikkim at the great mountains he had climbed. Mallory described the scene:

It was an extraordinarily affecting little ceremony burying Kellas on a stony hillside … I shan’t easily forget the four boys, his own trained mountain men, children of nature, seated in wonder on a great stone near the grave while Bury read out the passage from Corinthians.4

We now commit his mortal body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

The very next day the expedition caught the first sight of the summit of Mount Everest, although it was still over 100 miles and many days march away. George Mallory’s description of that first view enchanted me as a schoolboy:

It may seem an irony of fate that actually on the day after the distressing event of Dr. Kellas’s death we experienced the strange elation of seeing Everest for the first time … It was a prodigious white fang excrescent from the jaw of the world. We saw Mount Everest not quite sharply defined on account of a slight haze in that direction; this circumstance added a touch of mystery and grandeur; we were satisfied that the highest of mountains would not disappoint us.5

Now Raeburn was not feeling too well either, after contracting dysentery, and then twice being rolled on by his mule, and then twice kicked in the head. The doctor Wollaston, no doubt made anxious by Kellas’s death, advised that he should return to Sikkim. I suspect Howard-Bury was privately relieved, but now the expedition had lost the only two climbers who knew anything about Himalayan mountaineering. After a long, gruelling trek across the Tibetan plateau the men of the 1921 reconnaissance were at last rewarded with their first view of the Rongbuk valley.

I have spent many long months there and to me it now feels like a home from home, although at first the air seems thin and the sun painfully bright. The sky is electric blue and the surrounding hills are rusty brown. At the head of the valley stands the great three-sided pyramid of their quest. Now they were closer and the whole mountain was going to be revealed. Mallory’s description reads like a monstrous strip-tease:

We caught a gleam of snow behind the grey mists. A whole group of mountains began to appear in gigantic fragments. Mountain shapes are often fantastic seen through a mist; these were like the wildest creation of a dream. A preposterous triangular lump rose out of the depths; its edge came leaping up at an angle of about 70 degrees and ended nowhere. To the left a black serrated crest was hanging in the sky incredibly. Gradually, very gradually, we saw the great mountain sides and glaciers and arêtes, now one fragment and now another through the floating rifts, until far higher in the sky than imagination had dared to suggest the white summit of Everest appeared. And in this series of partial glimpses we had seen a whole; we were able to piece together the fragments, to interpret the dream.6

Wheeler, a tenacious and highly skilled surveyor, was using a new photographic survey technique and he did a remarkable job. He would eventually become Surveyor-General of India and be knighted for his cartographical work in the Second World War. Along with Morshead he filled in a huge blank on the map around the mountain. Meanwhile, Mallory and Bullock undertook a close-up reconnaissance of the peak. They covered hundreds of miles and took scores of photographs from minor peaks around Everest. However, Mallory had put the glass plates in the camera the wrong way around and had to repeat many of his shots. He clearly had little mechanical aptitude.

Mallory and Bullock climbed up to the watershed between Tibet and Nepal, and peered down on to a vast icefall tumbling down a great, silent, icy valley. Mallory named it the ‘Western Cwm’, an echo of the Pen-y-Pass days in Snowdonia. This would be the way that the successful British expedition of 1953 would eventually go, but to him Nepal was still a forbidden country. It must have been so exciting, with the feeling of elation one has when going well in the mountains. Bullock, however, was beginning to feel unhappy about Mallory’s attitude to safety. His widow, writing many years later, reported:

My husband considered Mallory ready to take unwarranted risks with still untrained porters in traversing dangerous ice. At least on one occasion he refused to take his rope of porters over the route proposed by Mallory. Mallory was not pleased. He did not support a critical difference of opinion readily.7

This is a foretaste of the dreadful accident of 1922, when seven inexperienced porters were killed, and of the accident in 1924, when the novice Irvine was involved. As a climber I would suggest that Mallory perhaps did not know how good he was, and it should be noted that as a schoolmaster his manner of teaching was to assume equality with his pupils. This might have led to a climbing style that did not take the ability of the novices into consideration, an important point that bears on the solution to our mystery.

On the plus side theirs was a good effort, considering the climbing party had lost Raeburn and Kellas. It might have gone down in climbing history as the most effective mountain reconnaissance ever undertaken, but Mallory and Bullock have been criticised by historians for their failure to spot that the outlet of the East Rongbuk glacier would provide a direct route up to the foot of the North Col. This is a swooping saddle that connects the North Ridge to Changtse, Everest’s neighbour to the north, and seemed to be the key to their attempts to climb the mountain from the north.

In Into the Silence Wade Davis levels a serious accusation at George Mallory. He points out that the surveyor Wheeler had already found the crucial East Rongbuk glacier, and had sent a rough map to Howard-Bury. But Mallory suggests in the official account that it was he who found the key to the mountain by his approach from the Kharta valley, and even ‘spun the story’ to his wife Ruth in his letters home. At the very least Mallory did not give a fair acknowledgement of Wheeler’s contribution, and if Davis is right it certainly is a black mark against his name.

From personal experience I know that people are very quick to claim all the credit on Everest expeditions. The stakes are high, and one’s better instincts are sometimes overcome by competition and bitterness. However, the historians are wrong if they think the East Rongbuk route is obvious. I was with a young climber in 2004 who had read the literature and attended the briefing at Base Camp given by the leader, who carefully explained the route the team should follow the next day. The next day I hiked up the Rongbuk valley and turned left as usual up the small glacial outflow of the East Rongbuk valley, which is a small breach in the great east wall of the main valley. I rested that evening at an interim camp. There was no sign of our youngster and we all became worried. As night fell we mounted a search party, and retraced our steps. Then came the radio call from a group of Russian climbers camped below the North Face: ‘Have you lost a climber? We have him here.’

He appeared the next day, shamefaced. Determined to get up the mountain first he had marched straight up the Rongbuk valley, just as Mallory had done, bypassing the small river that seems too small to drain the North Col basin. He had eventually come up against Everest’s huge North Face. These things are only too easy to do.

Incidentally, this route up to Advanced Base Camp is a gruelling start to the expedition. After the turn, one walks past the dry-stone walls that still remain from the British 1920s expeditions’ Camp I. There is a hurried traverse under the dangerously crumbling orange rocks of the cliffs above, then on to the glacier itself through the extraordinary ice sharks’-fins that alpinists call penitentes. These were up to 100ft high in 1990 when I first saw them, but now they have melted to around 60ft. The classically educated Norton called the next section the ‘Via Dolorosa’, after Christ’s route through Old Jerusalem, which is somewhat less steep and icy – and where you find another kind of penitent. After this comes a view of Kellas Peak, which the members of that 1921 reconnaissance named in honour of the extraordinary man who holds the unenviable record of being the first to die on an Everest expedition.

The 1921 reconnaissance expedition found that the North Col was indeed the key to climbing the mountain, providing both some shelter from the westerly winds and a ridge route attractive to that early generation of climbers. It is still used by the vast majority of climbers who approach from the north side of the mountain. Although the expedition was now well into the monsoon, and therefore too late for a realistic attempt on the summit because of heavy snowfall, they pushed a team of climbers and porters over a high pass and got Mallory and Bullock up to the top of the North Col at 23,000ft (7,010 m).

It is wonderful place, a giant hammock of snow and ice, with the vast wall of Everest’s North Face rising up behind. The route to the top looks deceptively easy, but in fact foreshortening disguises the fact that the summit is a terribly long way off.

As regards personal relations it was an unhappy little expedition, with almost a curse laid upon it in the same way that Tutankhamun’s tomb, opened two years later, was supposed to be cursed. Each one of the members seemed to dislike someone else. Kellas was the first to die, then Raeburn had a mental collapse on his return home and died shortly afterwards, thinking he had somehow murdered Kellas. Morshead was murdered in Burma in strange circumstances in 1931, and, as we have seen, Wollaston was murdered by a student in his rooms in Cambridge in 1930. And then Mallory was to die violently on the mountain in 1924.