Authors: Conrad Anker,David Roberts
By mid-June, with the party still far from the mountain, with Kellas dead and Raeburn laid low by diarrhea and injuries incurred in twice falling off his horse, the number of able mountaineers left on the expedition had dwindled to two: Mallory and Guy Bullock. This pair virtually by themselves would accomplish what in the long run amounted to a brilliant reconnaissance of Everest. During the following months, the other members puttered off in various directions, performing botanical and topographical missions that had little bearing on finding a route up the mountain.
As always, Mallory’s mood swung wildly between giddy enthusiasm and leaden disenchantment. By the beginning of 1921, as he prepared for Everest, now thirty-four years old, he had reached a gloomy crossroads in life. He had quit his teaching job at Charterhouse, with no clear notion of what to do next. Ideally, he would have become a writer, but he lacked confidence, complaining to Robert Graves in a letter from shipboard, “I can’t think I have sufficient talent to make a life-work of writing, though plenty of themes suggest themselves as wanting to be written about. Perhaps I shall get a job at a provincial university.” At the moment, he was reading that masterpiece by his Bloomsbury admirer,
Queen Victoria:
no
doubt Lytton Strachey’s sardonic command of prose set a daunting example to Mallory of what a real writer could do.
On June 13, Mallory caught his first sight of Everest—like “a prodigious white fang excrescent from the jaw of the world,” as he would write in the expedition book. The distant vision was daunting in the extreme: in a letter to Ruth, he recorded “the most stupendous ridges and appalling precipices that I have ever seen…. All the talk of easy snow slope is a myth.” Yet while the sight intimidated Mallory, at the same time it captivated him. The man’s obsession with Everest can be said to date from that first glimpse, still fifty-seven miles away from the mountain. As he wrote Ruth, during the subsequent days, “The problem of its great ridges and glaciers began to take shape and to haunt the mind, presenting itself at odd moments and leading to definite plans. Where can one go for another view, to unveil a little more of the great mystery?”
Part of Mallory’s genius was a deeply analytical grasp of the shape and structure of mountains. Other climbers might be content to stare with field glasses at a single aspect of the mountain, seeking routes; Mallory was eager, in effect, to create a three-dimensional model in his mind. As he wrote in the official report, “Our reconnaissance must aim at … a correct understanding of the whole form and structure of the mountain and the distribution of its various parts; we must distinguish the vulnerable places in its armour and finally pit our skill against the obstacles.”
As Mallory and Bullock trudged up one snow-struck valley after another, with the monsoon now in full force, the power of that visionary goal drove them across a succession of bleak landscapes. Mallory described one such clime in
Mount Everest: The Reconnaissance:
It was a desolate scene, I suppose; no flowers were to be seen nor any sign of life beyond some stunted gorse bushes on a near hillside and a few patches of coarse brown grass, and the only habitations were dry inhuman ruins; but whatever else was dead, our interest was alive.
By June 25, Mallory and Bullock had reached the terminus of the Rongbuk Glacier, the massive ice stream that drains the
whole north side of Everest. For a month, the indefatigable duo would explore approaches, only to be stymied and puzzled again and again. Few Europeans had yet traveled on any of the colossal Himalayan glaciers: used to the easy highways such rivers of ice formed in the Alps, the two British climbers were severely frustrated by the jumbled séracs, the crevasse-riddled icefalls, and the weird ice pinnacles, called
nieves penitentes
, that the Rongbuk threw in their path. The glacier was, Mallory wrote, “not a road but an obstacle”; and, “The White Rabbit himself would have been bewildered here.” Part of the time, the men hiked in snowshoes, but even so, in the soggy monsoon conditions they often could not avoid wading knee-deep through slush pools.
All the while, Mallory kept staring at the mountain, analyzing it. Early on, he had decided, as he jotted in his diary, “Last section of East arête should go.” Here was a pregnant observation, for on that last section of what would come to be called the northeast ridge, Mallory and Irvine would vanish three years hence.
Just as early, Mallory recognized that the key to reaching the northeast ridge was gaining the 23,000-foot saddle of snow and ice that he and Bullock named the Chang La, or North Col. The approach to the col from the main Rongbuk Glacier, however, looked impossible. For weeks, the two men reconnoitered, climbing lower peaks just to acclimatize and to gain new views of Everest, teaching their “coolies” (as they called the porters) the rudiments of mountaineering.
In the course of these explorations, the men climbed to another col on the west of Everest, called the Lho La. From here, the two became the first Europeans to behold the Khumbu Glacier and its upper basin, the Western Cwm (pronounced “Coom”), which Mallory named, slapping a Welsh term for an alpine basin onto a Himalayan landscape. The Khumbu and the Western Cwm would prove the route by which Hillary and Tenzing would make the first ascent of Everest, thirty-two years later. From the Lho La, however, the 1,500-foot drop to the Khumbu unfolded as a “hopeless precipice.” The question was moot, in any event, for at the pass, the men stood on the border of Tibet and Nepal, and they were forbidden to enter the latter country.
Always Mallory’s eye was fixed on the dotted line his imagination had already drawn from the North Col to the summit. “We saw the North Col quite clearly to-day,” he told his diary on July 15, “and again the way up from there does not look difficult.”
Thus the immediate task of the reconnaissance was to see if the North Col could be gained from the opposite, or eastern side. Later Mallory, that geographical perfectionist, would castigate himself for not discovering in 1921 that the East Rongbuk Glacier, a tributary ice stream that enters the Rongbuk proper by a V-shaped side valley two and a half miles above the terminus, would prove the royal road to the North Col. (Virtually all modern expeditions to Everest’s north side, including Simonson’s in 1999, haul their loads up a succession of camps on the East Rongbuk, establishing Camp IV on the North Col.) But that narrow, V-shaped entry of the East Rongbuk into the main glacier is all too easy to miss; and the existing Royal Geographical Society maps Mallory was using argued an entirely different structure of ridges on the northeast side of Everest.
To gain the North Col, then, Mallory and Bullock undertook a heroic end run to the north and east, skirting dozens of nameless subsidiary peaks, until they could find and ascend the Kharta Glacier. Before they could launch that effort—the second great prong of the reconnaissance—during a brief reunion with team leader Charles Howard-Bury, Mallory received some devastating information. The photographic plates he had labored for more than a month to expose, lugging a large camera to distant heights, were all blank, for he had been inserting them backwards. Once more, Mallory’s chronic mechanical ineptitude had taken its toll. This “hideous error,” as he called it in the expedition report, came as “an extremely depressing piece of news.”
Mallory’s attitude toward the “coolies” who were his only support in the reconnaissance, and without whom it could not have been undertaken, was a mixture of sympathetic curiosity and the cultural condescension that was endemic in his day. Recognizing the importance of being able to speak the porters’ own language, he set himself to learning Tibetan. He shared with them the precious chocolates and nuts he received in the occasional parcel from England that made its way to Base Camp.
Yet, as he watched the porters whom he had taught the basics of ice-craft apply their lessons for the first time, he wryly concluded, “It was not a convincing spectacle, as they made their way up with the ungainly movements of beginners.” The sirdar, or head porter, Mallory dismissed in exasperation as “a whey-faced treacherous knave, whose sly and calculated villainy” (a matter of selling food rations for personal profit) threatened to wreck the reconnaissance.
The reunion with Howard-Bury and Raeburn, who had done little to help the expedition, only exasperated Mallory further. “I can’t get over my dislike of him,” he wrote Ruth of the team leader; and with regard to Raeburn, who had arrived grizzled and weak, “When he is not being a bore I feel moved to pity, but that is not often.” The high-strung Mallory had even grown irritated with Bullock, his faithful partner in the reconnaissance. “We had rather drifted into that common superficial attitude between two people who live alone together,” he wrote Ruth—“competitive and slightly quarrelsome, each looking out to see that he doesn’t get done down in some small way by the other.”
In early August, Mallory and Bullock worked their way up the Kharta Glacier. So poor was local knowledge of this terrain that the team started southward on what would have been a wild goose chase, lured by a local tribesman’s assertion that Chomolungma (“Mother Goddess of the Snows”), the Tibetan name for Everest, lay five days away in that direction. With his keen sense of direction, Mallory grew skeptical, and a cross-examination revealed that in local parlance, there were
two
Chomolungmas: the tribesman had directed the party toward Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest mountain.
On August 7, Mallory fell ill, succumbing to a “weariness beyond muscular fatigue.” For several days, Bullock and the porters pushed ahead, while Mallory tried to recuperate, lying in his sleeping bag, agonizing over the thought of Bullock reaching the North Col without him. His veering spirits plunged: at such moments, he wrote later, “I hated the thought of this expedition.”
To Mallory’s further dismay, it turned out the Kharta Glacier did not head on the slopes of Everest after all: the party would have to find and cross another high pass simply to get to
the East Rongbuk Glacier. Finally in mid-August, buoyed by the unexpected addition of another climber, H. T. Morshead, who had hitherto been off on a lowland surveying mission, a rejuvenated Mallory and the steady Bullock crested the Lhakpa La, at 22,500 feet. At last they could see, only three miles away, across easy glacier, the slopes leading up to the North Col from the east. They looked climbable.
By now the monsoon hung so heavy on the Himalaya that it was snowing from eight to ten hours a day. On this interminable expedition, it would turn out to be a major accomplishment simply to reach the North Col, and thus pave the way for a true attempt in some future year. Yet now Mallory’s spirits soared wildly, as he anticipated making an assault on the summit in September.
It can be argued that on all three Everest expeditions, Mallory underestimated the mountain. It was a common foible: during the early years, one crack European mountaineer after another misjudged the Himalaya in general. In 1895, Alfred Mummery, the finest British climber of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a genius in the Alps, had tried to climb 26,660-foot Nanga Parbat with only two teammates and a pair of Gurkha porters. From the mountain, he jauntily wrote his wife, “I don’t think there will be any serious mountaineering difficulties on Nanga. I fancy the ascent will be mainly a question of endurance.” Treating the massive peak as though it were merely a slightly outsized version of Mont Blanc, Mummery vanished with the two Gurkhas on a reconnaissance of the west face. Their bodies were never found. Nanga Parbat would not be climbed until 1953.
Almost never during subsequent decades would a Himalayan mountain fall to the same expedition that first reconnoitered it (the glorious exception being the French on Annapurna in 1950). In his more judicious moments, Mallory recognized how weak the 1921 party was, how formidable Everest’s defenses; but then he would stare again at his dotted line from the North Col to the summit and imagine himself sailing past each easy obstacle …
In topping the Lhakpa La, the trio of climbers had found the key to the mountain. But now, snow conditions were so atrocious that the party dared not attempt those three miles
separating their farthest push from the North Col. For a full month, they played a demoralizing waiting game.
At last, on September 16, the weather changed, as the monsoon began to peter out. In the meantime, the full team had finally assembled on the Kharta Glacier. Mallory organized a carry that got eleven loads of supplies to the top of Lhakpa La. Four days later, he set out with Bullock and Edward Wheeler, the expedition’s chief surveyor, to cross the East Rongbuk and climb to the North Col. By now, it had been four months since the party had set out from Darjeeling on horseback.
All through these latter weeks, Mallory’s mood had characteristically swung between joy and despair. In his letters home, sometimes the expedition was “a thrilling business,” at others “a fraud.” “Our present job is to rub our noses against the impossible,” he wrote in a despondent moment. Yet in a hopeful one, he blithely predicted, “It is now only a question of waiting for the weather and organizing our push to the summit.”
On the morning of September 24, Mallory, Bullock, Wheeler, and three porters got a late start from the Lhakpa La: only Mallory had slept well the night before. The crossing of the East Rongbuk, however, and the climb to the North Col, was mostly a matter of “straightforward plugging,” with the leader cutting about 500 steps in the ice just below the Col. They reached the saddle—that prized and elusive goal Mallory had been gazing at for almost three months—at 11:30
A.M.
The climb had been easy enough, but now the six men stood fully exposed to a bitter gale that tore across the gap: it “came in fierce gusts at frequent intervals, blowing up the powdery snow in a suffocating tourbillon.” Wheeler was resolute about turning around at once; Bullock, though exhausted, knew how much the effort mattered to Mallory, and was willing to follow him a little farther. After a shouted discussion, the men staggered a few feet on, leaning against the gale, then “struggled back to shelter” on the lee side of an ice cliff. “The wind had settled the question,” Mallory later wrote. Yet he felt in retrospect that he could have climbed another 2,000 vertical feet that day, wind or no wind.