Authors: Conrad Anker,David Roberts
The 1924 party was even stronger than the 1922 team had been. General Charles Bruce was back as leader, now fifty-eight and in poor health even before the expedition started. But Howard Somervell and Teddy Norton were returning, seasoned
by their previous Everest foray. The cool-headed Norton was appointed climbing leader, despite Mallory’s greater experience and technical ability. Somervell brought along Bentley Beetham, a young climber of whom much was expected, for in the summer of 1923, the pair had had a season in the Alps few other Englishmen could match, climbing some thirty-five peaks in six weeks.
Noel Odell imported vast funds of exploratory wisdom and alpine expertise, and though he was slow to acclimatize, once he was in shape, he would outperform all his teammates except Norton and Mallory. Odell’s Spitsbergen protégé, Sandy Irvine, was an unproven quantity, but quickly showed that his solid athleticism and buoyant spirit could make up for lack of mountaineering experience. Rounding out the party were Geoffrey Bruce, now a mountaineer, thanks to his 1922 campaign; John de Vere Hazard, a fast and experienced climber in the Alps; and photographer-cinematographer John Noel, who would prove staunch in a supporting role.
Mallory thought the team “a really strong lot,” and Norton went even further: “I doubt if so strong a party will ever again be got together to climb Mount Everest.”
During the journey to the mountain, Mallory badly missed his wife, to whom he wrote often and at great length. The sense of having done her harm, during whatever “difficult time” the couple had gone through the previous autumn, afflicted him. “I fear I don’t make you very happy,” he wrote from the ship. “Life has too often been a burden to you lately, and it is horrid when we don’t get more time and talk together.” For Ruth, her husband’s absence was a constant ache: “Dearest one, I do hope you are happy and having a good voyage. I am keeping quite cheerful and happy, but I do miss you a lot.”
On the approach, General Bruce recurringly felt “seedy” and weak. Unable to keep up with his teammates, he chose a low-altitude detour to get himself to the village of Kampa Dzong two days after the main party. Before he could reach that town, however, he collapsed in a full-blown malarial fever, apparently the flaring up of a long-dormant infection. Bitterly disappointed, he resigned from the expedition and returned to India.
Teddy Norton was made leader of the party, and Mallory
climbing leader (which he would have been de facto in any case). Fortunately, the two men got along splendidly, even during the expedition’s lowest moments, and made no important decisions without consulting each other.
Mallory’s obsession had taken the form of trying to come up with a perfect plan for linked parties to push for the summit. John Noel noted that “he seemed to be ill at ease, always scheming and planning.” By April 14, still far from the mountain, he had devised a strategy, which he detailed enthusiastically in a letter to Ruth; then, only three days later, he was seized with what he called a “brain-wave” that presented him a new plan like an epiphany. Essentially it boiled down to putting a pair of parties simultaneously in position to go to the top from different camps. From Camp IV on the North Col, two climbers with fifteen porters would climb to Camp V, build four tent platforms, and descend. Another pair, the first, “gasless” summit party, would occupy Camp V one night, then push on with eight porters, skipping Camp VI, to set up a Camp VII at 27,300 feet—higher than anyone had yet been on earth. At the same time the second summit party, using oxygen, would establish a Camp VI some 800 feet lower than Camp VII. “Then the two parties,” wrote Mallory to Ruth, “start next morning and presumably meet on the summit.”
The plan looked good on paper, and Norton was won over by it; but of course on Everest the best-laid schemes of men and mountaineers “gang aft a-gley.” In the end two parties would indeed try for the summit, one without oxygen, one with, but they would launch four days apart, and by the time the second pair—Mallory and Irvine—set out for the top, the first pair had stumbled down to Camp III. The visionary Camp VII, perched high on an exposed shoulder just below the crest of the northeast ridge, would never be established.
As the team members had sailed for India, a nagging worry plagued their thoughts. The disaster of 1922, when seven porters had died, would still be fresh in the Sherpas’ minds: would any volunteers be willing to go back up on the mountain that had proved so deadly? The team was thus overjoyed when they learned through their trading agent that a “number of Sherpas, Bhotias, and hill-men generally” had come in, hoping to be hired.
Yet Mallory and his comrades were right to anticipate the Sherpas’ terrors. In 1924 it would take very little to demoralize the porters altogether. A foretaste of their ambivalence came in the behavior of Angtarkay, who had been dug out of the avalanche debris in 1922. “We felt bound to take him on again,” wrote General Bruce in the opening chapter of
The Fight for Everest
(which he was proud to pen, despite having given up the expedition), “but he soon broke down, and returned with me.” In Bruce’s view, the Sherpa had never “really recovered from that terrific experience” of being buried alive in snow.
Mallory’s paramount vow was to avoid a recurrence of the 1922 tragedy. As he wrote his sister Mary on May 2, in another passage that resonates with ironic foreshadowing, “No one, climber or porter, is going to get killed if I can help it. That would spoil all.”
With some seventy porters, cooks, and “domestic servants” in tow, the expedition rode on ponies through Tibet. An omen of bad fortune, however, awaited them at the Rongbuk Monastery. There they learned that the head lama was ill and could not perform the
puja
on which the porters set such store to keep them safe on the mountain. And there, the climbers beheld a fresh mural painting chillingly memorializing the 1922 accident: in Bentley Beetham’s words, it depicted “the party being pitch-forked down the mountain-side by hoofed devils and sent spinning into the colder hell.”
Two weeks later, during a lull in the foul May weather that thwarted the expedition, Norton marched the whole team back down to the monastery. Instead of a blessing, however, the head lama offered the Englishmen a malediction. “Your turning back brings pleasure to the demons,” he intoned in Tibetan, which an interpreter translated to John Noel. “They have forced you back, and will force you back again.”
For all this, as he reached Base Camp, armed with his “brain-wave” scheme, Mallory was still awash in the highest optimism. “I can’t tell you how full of hope I am this year,” he wrote his sister Mary. “It is all so different from ’22, when one was always subconsciously dissatisfied because we had no proper plan of climbing the mountain.”
All during the journey to India and the march across Tibet, Mallory had been sizing up Sandy Irvine. From the start, as he
wrote Ruth, he found the Oxford undergraduate “sensible and not highly strung,” though he could not resist an impish sketch of Irvine as “one to depend on for everything except conversation.” Later, during a storm on the mountain, Mallory read poems out loud from his cherished anthology, Robert Bridges’s
The Spirit of Man
. Somervell was surprised to learn that Emily Brontë had written poems as well as novels; Odell was stirred by the last lines of Shelley’s
Prometheus Unbound
; while “Irvine was rather poetry-shy, but seemed to be favourably impressed by the Epitaph to Gray’s ‘Elegy.’” (One wonders just how that gloomy meditation in a country churchyard on the anonymous dead resonated with the twenty-two-year-old: “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”)
Norton too was taken with Sandy Irvine’s quiet strength. In The Fight for Everest, he described his young teammate thus: “Irvine, as befitted a rowing blue, was big and powerful—with fine shoulders and comparatively light legs.” Irvine was a little heavier than Mallory, and in superb shape, having rowed two seasons for the Oxford crew that beat Cambridge in 1922 for the first time since 1913. Though not as classically beautiful as Mallory, he was a remarkably handsome young man. A family tradition records that at Oxford, Irvine became a womanizer, conducting an affair with his best friend’s stepmother. He had a very fair complexion, whence his nickname; on Everest, Irvine would suffer more than anyone else from sun- and windburn.
Herbert Carr, Irvine’s biographer, who knew him at Oxford, thought the youth innately shy. “He had an odd way of laughing,” Carr remembered. “It was a silent laugh, visible but not audible, a long low reverberating chuckle which lit up his face with sunny merriment. And as his normal expression was grave, the contrast was all the more striking.”
Irvine was born in Birkenhead into genteel circumstances not unlike Mallory’s. He attended Shrewsbury public school, then Merton College at Oxford. His academic fortes were chemistry and engineering; in French and Latin, on the other hand, he was woefully weak. Even in adolescence, he was extraordinarily adept at tinkering and inventing. While still at Shrewsbury, he sent the blueprints for two machines of his devising to the War Office—an interrupter gear for firing machine guns through propellers, and a gyroscopic airplane
stabilizer. Both had already been anticipated by Hiram Maxim (the inventor of the machine gun), but the flabbergasted War Office, according to Herbert Carr, sent him “most warm congratulations … with instructions to go on trying.”
In Mürren, in Switzerland, at Christmas 1923, Arnold Lunn, who conceived the slalom race, gave Irvine skiing lessons. “He is the only beginner I have ever known,” reported Lunn, “who brought off at his first attempt a downhill Telemark.” After only three weeks of practice, Irvine entered and won the Strang-Watkins Challenge Cup (a slalom race) against seasoned veterans. He loved the sport, writing Lunn in gratitude, “When I am old, I will look back on Christmas, 1923, as the day when to all intents and purposes I was born. I don’t think anybody has ever lived until they have been on ski.”
Intensely competitive, on the approach to Everest Irvine found good sport in challenging Mallory to a pony race. The older man was charmed by the self-confident youngster. After several weeks on the East Rongbuk Glacier, Mallory noted that Irvine “has been wonderfully hard-working and brilliantly skilful about the oxygen. Against him is his youth (though it is very much for him, some ways)—hard things seem to hit him a bit harder…. However, he’ll be an ideal companion, and with as stout a heart as you could wish to find.”
Mallory was genuinely dazzled by Irvine’s aptitude with the oxygen gear. After the young man had taken the apparatus apart, stripped some four pounds of useless metal from each set, and put the pieces back together, Mallory marveled, “What was provided was full of leaks and faults; and he has practically invented a new instrument.” For someone as mechanically inept as Mallory, Irvine’s facility was nothing short of miraculous: watching his comrade tinker with the ill-designed equipment, he was like a tone-deaf auditor listening in uncomprehending admiration to the playing of some twenty-two-year-old Mozart.
Ever since 1924, observers have second-guessed Mallory’s decision to take Irvine along on the summit push, rather than the far more experienced Odell. Many have wondered whether Irvine’s meager skills in the mountains could have contributed to the fatal accident. Walt Unsworth, in his definitive history of Everest, went so far as to speculate whether Mallory “had formed a romantic attachment for the handsome young undergraduate.”
One need not reach so far for an explanation. Once Mallory had committed himself to the use of oxygen on his summit attempt, Irvine’s expertise became critical. Odell was ostensibly in charge of the oxygen apparatus, but he was a withering skeptic about its benefits. Mallory clearly explained his reasons in a letter to Ruth: not only was Irvine the oxygen expert, but if Mallory paired with Odell, that would leave an all-too-inexperienced duo of Irvine and Geoffrey Bruce as backup.
And so Irvine will come with me. He will be an extraordinarily stout companion, very capable with the gas and with cooking apparatus. The only doubt is to what extent his lack of mountaineering experience will be a handicap. I hope the ground will be sufficiently easy.
Irvine kept a diary on Everest, making his last entry only the day before setting out with Mallory for the top. The diary was retrieved by Odell and published in 1979. It is a fairly stolid document, written for the most part in the pronoun-less staccato so often favored by the unintrospective: “Spent afternoon repacking Primus stoves, also negotiating to buy pony…. Put lightening fasteners on my sleeping bag.” Irvine wastes little breath on observing his teammates; a kind of tunnel vision dominates his perspective. Like many another Englishman on his first trip to Asia, he was a bit squeamish. In one Tibetan village, “I was very impressed by the dirtiness of the whole place, and also the smell.” In another: “Went this afternoon to see Tibetan Devil dancers—this most weird performance was continuous from 2:00
P.M.
to 6:30
P.M.,
and got rather monotonous towards tea-time.”
Somehow during the approach, Irvine received dismaying news from Oxford. “Got wire to say that Cambridge won by 4½ lengths—incredible!” A day later, he had not absorbed the shock: “I still can’t get over Oxford being beaten by four and a half lengths—I should like to have details of the race.”
Yet the diary captures Irvine’s obsessive tinkering, as he records one attempt to fix a piece of equipment after another. The balky oxygen gear became his greatest challenge. A typical passage:
I spent all afternoon and evening again patching up oxygen apparatus. Out of box No. 2023 I made up two complete instruments (1A and 2A), but without emergency tubes, as all in this box leaked—either the pipe or the brass of the union was porous. Number 3A had a dud flowmeter which I took to pieces—it appeared corroded inside around the bottom bearing. I cleaned this up as well as I could, but it is still sticky at 1½ + 3, but works alright if hit every now and then. Number 4A had a blocked reducing valve, so was turned into MkIII pattern.