Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine (39 page)

As final plans were being made the following day Norton was lying in his tent, the tent covered in sleeping bags, coping with his condition.  He occasionally crawled to the edge of the tent to offer help in encouraging the porters, but he had a very hard day of it.  In fact it was trying conditions for all of them with freezing air temperature and the heat in the sun being somewhere about 120 °F  (38 °C) with a very strong reflection off the snow. 

Sandy spent the last day in Camp IV with Odell putting finishing touches to the oxygen sets.  They talked a little about his delight at the prospect of having his chance to climb for the summit before turning in.  The last entry in Sandy’s diary reads ‘My face is perfect agony.  Have prepared two oxygen apparatus for our start tomorrow morning.’

The diary breaks off at this point.

It is 50 to 1 against but we’ll have a whack yet and do ourselves proud

George Mallory to Ruth Mallory, 27 May 1924

Sandy and Mallory left Camp IV at 7.30 a.m. on 6 June 1924.  Odell and Hazard were up early preparing a breakfast for them of fried sardines, biscuits and ample hot tea and chocolate.  Odell was not a little indignant that, despite being pleased that breakfast had been fixed, they did little justice to the meal.  Out of excitement or restlessness, he concluded.  Their packs, which included the modified oxygen apparatus with two cylinders each, some food rations and a few other small items, weighed some 25 lb.  It may sound like a heavy load, which indeed it was, but it was considerably less than the 35 lb the load would have weighed with the apparatus of the original design.  Sandy’s assiduous work had not been in vain.  They were accompanied by eight porters who had in their packs bedding, provisions and the additional oxygen cylinders.  The porters were not using oxygen.

Sandy and Mallory (left) preparing to leave Camp IV on 6 June 1924

They looked in on Norton who was lying in his sleeping bag still suffering badly from snowblindness.  ‘My last impression of my friends,’ he wrote later, ‘was a handshake and a word of blessing, for it was only in my imagination that I could see the little party winding its way amid the snow humps and ice crevasses leading to the Col.’

Odell took out his camera just as they were preparing to leave and snapped a shot of the two men, Sandy with his hands in his pockets, head bowed, waiting patiently, while Mallory fiddled with his oxygen apparatus.  Little did Odell know that this would be the very last photograph taken of Mallory and Sandy alive. He watched them as they climbed the col and disappeared out of sight amidst the broken ice masses. 

The weather that morning was brilliantly sunny although later in the afternoon cloud gathered and it began to snow a little in the evening.  They made good progress from the Col up to the Camp V at 25,600 feet  and at five o’clock that evening four of Mallory’s porters returned with a note for Odell to say that there was no wind and that things were looking hopeful.  The following morning Odell and his porter, Nema, headed up to Camp V in support.  Owing to the limited size of the camp,  - two tents, one for the climbers and one for the four porters, - Odell had to restrict his support activity to one camp below the high camp occupied by Mallory and Sandy.  Not long after their arrival the four porters who had carried loads to Camp VI arrived in V with a note from Mallory which read:

Dear Odell, 

We’re awfully sorry to have left things in such a mess – our Unna cooker rolled down the slope at the last moment.  Be sure of getting back to IV to-morrow in time to evacuate before dark, as I hope to.  In the tent I must have left a compass – for the Lord’s sake rescue it; we are without.  To here on 90 atmospheres for the two days – so we’ll probably go on two cylinders – but it’s a bloody load for climbing.  Perfect weather for the job! 

Yours ever G Mallory.

Odell, it must be said, was sceptical about the benefit of oxygen.  He had tried a set on more than one occasion and claimed to have derived no benefit from it.  He carried a set up to V, even though it had no mouthpiece as Sandy had taken it with him as a spare.  He thought he might find a mouthpiece in Camp V.  Interestingly, when Norton and Somervell had been offered oxygen from this same set on their return from the summit attempt they had derived no obvious benefit either.  This led them all to conclude that oxygen was of no great help.  How can it then be that Sandy could claim his breathing was slowed down by three times when he used oxygen and Mallory elected to use it for his final climb, despite it being a ‘bloody load?’  I  suggest that Odell was attempting to use a rogue set, an apparatus Sandy knew to be faulty, otherwise he would not have taken the mouthpiece from it.

After Odell had received the note, he searched the tent and found Mallory’s compass.  His man Nema was suffering badly from the altitude at Camp V so Odell sent him back down to IV with Mallory and Sandy’s four porters.  He was not entirely sorry to be on his own.  He would be able, he wrote later, to spend more time on the ascent to Camp VI examining the geological aspects of the upper mountain.  He sat outside his tent on the evening of 7 June looking across to the impressive and ‘savagely wild jumble of peaks towering above the upper Rongbuk glacier … culminating in the might Cho-Oyu [26,750 feet] and Gyachung Kang [25,910 feet], bathed in pinks and yellows of the most exquisite tints.’ Opposite him were the cliffs of Everest’s north peak and as he surveyed them he considered ‘with what hopeful feeling and exultant cheer Mallory and Irvine would take their last look around before closing up their tiny tent at VI that night.’ Odell had shared a tent with Sandy several times on the mountain and more than once Sandy had told him how desperately he wanted to have a ‘go’ at the summit.  He also told Odell that despite his work on the oxygen apparatus and his complete understanding of its functions, he would rather get to the base of the final pyramid without it rather than to the top with it. Mallory’s experience of his attempt with Bruce, however, had convinced him that the top would not be reached without oxygen and Sandy immediately accepted that view, foregoing any personal preference in the matter, as Odell put it.  In fact, Odell recalled him welcoming the chance to have a crack at the summit with almost boyish enthusiasm.  Sandy ‘though through youth without the same intensity of mountain spell that was upon Mallory, yet was every bit, if not more, obsessed to go ‘all out’ on what was certainly to him the greatest course for ‘pairs’ he would ever be destined to ‘row’.’

No one knows for certain what Mallory and Sandy did on the afternoon of 7 June  after their arrival at Camp VI.  In the past Mallory had tended to arrive in camp and then go for a walk, prospecting his route for the next, upward leg, as Norton had done the afternoon he and Somervell got into VI.  Mallory had done this on his first arrival at Camp IV earlier in May, so it is probable that he spent that afternoon considering their possible route for the following day.  It is known that Mallory favoured the ‘ridge route’, or ‘skyline’ as he called it.  This was a very exposed ridge but it was always his preferred option.  The route favoured by Norton was across the face of the upper mountain and up the couloir to the base of the summit pyramid. 

Nowadays climbers tend to follow ‘skyline’ or Mallory’s route, and when I talked to the Himalayan guide Russell Brice we discussed at some length which route he thought Mallory would have taken. He has summited twice, both times from the north side, but this record hides the fact that he frequently climbs above 28,000 feet from where, at a camp some 1000 vertical feet below the summit, he keeps track of his guides and clients.  His knowledge of the north-east ridge route of Everest is unrivalled. Given the distance from the 1924 Camp VI and the fact that Mallory and Sandy were route-finding, which is by its nature slower than following a known route, and one in part with fixed ropes, he felt it unlikely that they had made it.  He also pointed to the old chestnut, the Second Step. ‘No one can agree whether they could have climbed it or not,’ he said, ‘hey, not even the guys from last year were agreed.’

More interesting, however, than whether or not Brice thought Mallory and Sandy could have free-climbed the Second Step is his contention that the distance from Camp VI to the summit is so great that he had introduced a further camp, CampVII.  He recalls that the elite climber Ed Viesturs has climbed to the summit and back from roughly the site of the 1924 Camp VI but he points out that Viesturs is in a class of his own when it comes to performance at high altitude.  ‘It’s just too far,’ Brice considered, ‘with route finding and all that, I just don’t think they could have made it.’  Then he stopped and composed his thoughts again: ‘Of course, that’s assuming that Mallory and Irvine took the same route that we take up the ridge nowadays.’  This was too much for my son, Simon, who had been sitting patiently listening to the conversation, nodding his head at references he recognised  ‘Why don’t you try a different route?’ he enquired. ‘Well, Simon,’ Brice replied, ‘I guess we’re just too lazy to try a different route!’  It was a good point though.  The fundamental difference between now and then is that climbers are using a known route.  Sandy and Mallory were pioneering the path to the summit and there is no certainty that they did not find a way around the difficult obstacle of the Second Step which may or may not exist.  No one knows.  Nowadays all climbers take the ridge route and use the Chinese ladder and the thought of setting out to try to find a different route is not on the agenda of most modern Everesters. ‘In that harsh environment experience counts,’ Brice concluded.  No climber with any sense is going to question that
.
  
 

In 1924, however, the route was still to be established.  Mallory sent down a note to Captain Noel telling him to look out for them on skyline at about 8 a.m., but that was before the afternoon of 7 June.  ‘Dear Noel, We’ll probably start early to-morrow (8
^th
) in order to have clear weather.  It won’t be too early to start looking out for us either crossing the rockband under the pyramid or going up skyline at 8pm.’ It has been universally accepted that by 8 p.m. Mallory in fact meant 8 a.m. and some have used it to indicate that he was suffering from the well recognized malfunction of his cognitive powers as climbers do at altitude.  I find that a little difficult to accept in the light of the way he consistently outperformed the other climbers when Hingston conducted his ‘mental’ agility tests on them.  If Mallory was indeed out on a reconnaissance mission the afternoon of 7 June it is likely that Sandy was busy preparing their meal, the thermoses for the following day and making last-minute checks on the oxygen apparatus.  He had few tools with him for the final climb, but he probably had a pair of pliers and a spanner although he couldn’t have done a lot with those.

That evening, after supper, Sandy asked Mallory to help him make one last check on the oxygen cylinders.  While Sandy measured their individual oxygen contents, Mallory scribbled down the numbers of the cylinders and the pressures on the back of an envelope.  In all they checked five of the cylinders in their cache at Camp VI; four had a bottle pressure of 110 and the fifth of 100.  The envelope with these scribbles was found on Mallory’s body in May 1999 and it was a few months before the relevance of the notations was understood.

On the morning of 8 June Sandy was detailed to make their breakfast while Mallory got himself ready for the climb.  At what time they set off has always been a point of debate.  Norton and Somervell had aimed to leave at 6 a.m. but were delayed by the leaking thermos.  Mallory was known to like early starts and in the Alps he frequently set out before dawn on his climbs.  In April he had written to Ruth: ‘We shall be starting by moonlight if the morning is calm and should have the mountain climbed if we’re lucky before the wind is dangerous.’  The morning of 8 June dawned bright and clear so it could well be that he and Sandy left Camp VI before day break as Mallory had proposed.  Certainly if Mallory had suggested an early start he would have found no opposition from his young companion.  After all, Sandy’s greatest ambition, the single driving force in his life now, was to get to the summit and he would have agreed to anything that would have given them the best chance.  They closed up the tent and headed off towards the north east ridge, each man coccooned in a private world of hissing oxygen.  To communicate other than by hand signals they had to remove their masks and this Sandy would have avoided on account of his sunburned face. 

Odell awoke early on the morning of 8 June and, after two hours of preparations, breakfast and tidying the tent he set off up towards Camp VI, full of optimism for the climbers above him and enjoying the glorious weather.  He was fascinated by the geological finds he was making and was concentrating hard on the ground beneath his feet.  At a height of some 26,000 feet he climbed a 100 foot crag that he admitted could have been circumnavigated but which he elected to climb as much as anything else as to test his fitness.  When he reached the top of the crag, pleased with his performance and triumphant to have found the first fossil on Everest he looked up towards the highest reaches of the mountain.  As he did so the cloud, which had been building since the late morning, parted, affording him a view of the north east ridge and the summit.  What he saw, or what he claims to have seen, has been so minutely scrutinized that in the end Odell changed his story; however, in his expedition diary he recorded the following: ‘At 12.50 saw M & I on ridge nearing base of final pyramid.’