Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine

by Julie Summers

  Bruce had arranged for three NCOs to manage Camps I, II and III, ensuring that the porters were fed and kept warm and fit, and that the loads, coming up the ‘line’, to use the military phrase adopted by the expedition, were getting to the right camps. All the high altitude equipment destined for the higher camps was to be left at Camp II. With this superb organization in place and the weather fair, the expedition members felt quite rightly that a very good start had been made. They celebrated that evening with a five-course dinner and champagne.

  The instructions to the NCOs had been for seventy-five of the Tibetan porters to return to Base Camp for further loads and for the other seventy-five to stay at Camp I in preparation for load carrying to Camp II the following day. They were greeted with the news the next morning that fifty-two of the Tibetans who had been meant to stay at Camp I had disappeared in the night. ‘This was a very serious matter’, Bruce wrote, ‘for everything depended on these men, and a transport strike at this juncture would effectively cripple the whole programme.’

  Norton, Shebbeare and Bruce hot-footed it up to Camp I to see what was going on and to ascertain the whereabouts of the fifty-two defectors. As they arrived, a convoy of Tibetans came down from Camp II, full of good cheer. They were told that there would be more rations and higher wages if they carried more loads from I to II and this they did in great heart. Order was restored but the fifty-two men were not to be found. The performances of the women really impressed Bruce and he could not resist noting in his account of the stocking of the lower camps, that one woman had carried her two-year-old child on top of her 40 lb load from 17,500 feet to 19,800 feet, deposited the load and carried the child back down again. She had declared herself ready to repeat the process. Another older woman had performed a little step dance for them having returned from carrying her load, and before she had her food. With these willing helpers, and a little additional help from the porters they had brought from India, Bruce felt happy that they would be able to keep to the original schedule. His confidence was well placed and on the evening of 2 May he received a message from the NCOs at Camps I and II that the work had been completed, all the loads had arrived and safely stored and the Tibetans could be paid off.

  The next job was to establish and stock Camp III and for this the expedition would use their own porters. It was now time to start the process of acclimatization at higher altitude for the climbers, hence the departure on 3 May from Base Camp of Sandy, Mallory, Odell and Hazard. Before they left, Somervell took specimens of their blood for a haemaglobin test. ‘Mine came out by far the greatest percentage of red corpuscles, and Odell next, showing very good acclimatization’, Sandy noted with some pride, adding, ‘hope this is a really good sign.’ It was planned for Mallory and Sandy to remain at Camp III for acclimatization whilst Odell and Hazard had been briefed to push on to establish the North Col Camp or Camp IV at 23,000 feet. The four climbers left Base Camp after an early lunch arriving in Camp I in exactly two hours. They had sent off fifteen porters an hour or so before they left carrying all the kit including the oxygen apparatus. ‘I’m glad that I didn’t have to carry any of their loads 100 yards’, Sandy observed in his diary that evening. In fact the climbers overtook most of the porters on the way up to Camp I and Sandy overheard good deal of grumbling about the heavy loads. They encountered very unpleasant conditions at Camp I, which was generally held to be the most comfortable of all the camps, catching any sun going. They spent a draughty, cold night and headed the following morning up to Camp II.

  The going from I to II was very rough. Mallory and I kept to the lateral moraine as long as possible. After crossing onto the glacier just opposite a side glacier we found a lovely frozen lake surrounded by seracs where we rested for about half an hour – photographing and studying the map. When we moved on a devil must have got into Mallory for he ran down all the little bits of downhill and paced all out up the moraine. It was as bad as a boat race trying to keep up with him, in spite of my colossal red corpuscles.

  Climbers and porters in the trough. Those in the foreground were on Sandy’s rope. The tiny figures in the background amongst the towering seracs were with Hazard.

  In Camps I and II the porters slept in stone shelters they called sangars, with a tarpaulin or fly sheet over the top. At Camp I a sangar was also used as the mess tent. When Mallory and Sandy arrived at Camp II they could see that the porters had rather lost heart and were not willing to prepare their own accommodation. After cups of tea and a brief rest, Sandy and Mallory put up two Whymper tents for themselves, Odell and Hazard, who were coming up behind them, and then set to work collecting boulders in order to make a two-room sangar for the porters. ‘I worked for about 2½ hours shifting colossal boulders – trying to set an example to the coolies which was quite successful as they all started to work with quite a heart singing and shouting’ Sandy wrote. The effort was too much and his nose began to bleed after the strenuous work, so he took a well-deserved break while Mallory and Odell went out up the glacier to prospect a route up to Camp III. That evening they had dinner in Captain Noel’s tent, who was also on his way up to Camp III with his cameras and assistants. Noel’s movements on the mountain were independent of the rest of the expedition but he was always a popular figure in camp. His plan was to establish himself and his team at Camp IV and to film the summit attempt from there. Sandy was feeling positive, despite the rather worrying weather they were experiencing. Whenever he felt confident he made observations about his surroundings whereas when he was anxious he tended to worry about his own physical condition and the nuts and bolts of the organization. In Camp II on 4 May he was full of optimism. The schedule worked out on the march had so far been kept to with barely a hitch and he was off up to Camp III in the morning, to an altitude 2500 feet higher than he had ever been before. That evening when they went to bed at 7.30 Sandy observed that a certain amount of snow had fallen, ‘The great ice cliff behind the camp looked very fine in what little evening sun we got between the rather stormy looking clouds.’ Sandy was clearly pleased with his performance to date, despite the nose bleed he had suffered earlier in the day, now recognizable as a sign of the effect of altitude.

  It was a very cold night at Camp II, with the temperature dropping below 1˚F (-19 ˚C) and they awoke to powder snow on the glacier the next morning. After slightly revising the loads and deciding which boxes to send up to Camp III, they set off mid- morning in intermittent sunshine and driving snow. ‘We left camp at 11 am and had a very heavy day, starting up the glacier for 1½ miles and we dropped down into a trough about 100 ft tall amongst the most fantastic shaped ice seracs. Here we waited a long while to collect all or rather most of the coolies, which we roped up, myself with 6, Odell with 6 and Hazard on a long rope with 11, Mallory going alone, sometimes in front and sometimes behind. I led all the way up the gorge – found it very laborious going.’ He was forced to stop every five minutes for a rest while the porters caught their breath. He found this very frustrating and soon realized that the man behind him on the rope was ‘an awful dud, continually grumbling and stopping, so in fury I changed loads with him. It was not unduly heavy but awkward to carry. Fortunately for me Mallory insisted on me not carrying it any further, so we put the man off the rope and told him the ice devils would get him and proceeded as before.’ All the porters were feeling the altitude and their heavy loads further aggravated their condition. Although the acclimatization issue was well recognized in the 1920s the problems relating to altitude sickness were not so well understood. Sandy was as tough as Mallory on the men and insisted on setting an example to exhort them to increase their effort. What neither of them understood was that the men were not being lazy; they were genuinely suffering from altitude sickness. The result was that of the twenty-odd men they got to Camp III only four were not sick the following day.

  They finally reached Camp III at 6 p.m., cold, exhausted and hungry. The food supplies at the camp were not as well organized as they should have been and th
e climbers were without soup that night, and therefore vital liquid. Added to that the jam and cheese were frozen solid. ‘One course of mutton and veg, the first morsel since breakfast, and two cups of cool coffee left me very thirsty and hungry’, Sandy complained. At that height the human body requires an enormous amount of liquid each day, somewhere in the vicinity of six litres as it is now understood. In 1924 this was not appreciated and Sandy’s lack of liquid intake had a very big bearing on his performance over the following days. That night he slept for the first time at 21,300 feet. ‘I slept like a log despite the stones we lay on until midnight, after which I couldn’t get comfy. The sleeping bag grew to half its normal size, all my clothes felt uncomfy and I kept turning over into patches of frozen breath. From 5 am I slept soundly till 9.’

  Mallory was so concerned by the lack of food and drink at Camp III that he decided to descend to Camp II to supervise the stores coming up the line. He got up at 6:20 a.m., ‘energetic beggar’, Sandy observed, and set off down the glacier. Breakfast was an even more measly affair than dinner the night before. They ate a sausage each and had half a tin of condensed milk per man. To their distress most of the porters were too ill to get up, due, they believed, to sleeping with the tents tightly closed. Mallory returned around lunchtime and reported on the state of the stores. Later that afternoon Sandy, Odell and the four porters who were able and willing to work set off down the glacier to collect the loads dumped by the porters from Camp II some three-quarters of a mile short of Camp III. ‘We got 6 loads up, I led the pack with a Whymper tent so that none of the porters dared to complain of their loads or the pace I was setting.’ This was exactly the scenario Geoffrey Bruce had been at great pains to avoid. He and Norton knew full well that the only hope they had of getting to the summit of Everest was with wholly fit climbers and a strong team of porters to support them and carry loads high. Here were three of the key climbers squandering their energies carrying loads between camps that should, by right, have already been in Camp III. The picture was looking bleak.

  That night they had temperatures at Camp III of –21 ˚F, –30 ˚C, and the next morning the porters were in a very much worse state. Several of them were vomiting, a clear sign of severe altitude sickness, and were quite unable to go on. Mallory knew that there was no point in keeping them at Camp III so he escorted them part of the way down to Camp II. Sandy too was suffering from the altitude: he had developed the characteristic headache which is the blight of so many climbers past and present. Hazard went down the glacier to oversee other loads coming up from Camp II. Sandy and Odell remained in camp but by 3.30 p.m. they elected to descend to meet Mallory and Hazard as only four of Noel’s porters had reached them since the morning. They found Mallory, Hazard and eight exhausted porters about three-quarters of a mile below camp. ‘The porters were in a very exhausted condition. I carried their loads in turn to rest them, but they were almost too exhausted to walk without loads. At last we got them into camp and distributed the eight sleeping bags I was carrying and got a primus going in one of their tents.’ Sandy was frustrated by the situation he found himself in but he had neither the experience nor the knowledge to do very much about it, so he followed his instincts and tried to make a bad situation as good as possible for the porters. Meanwhile, Mallory was exhausted and off his food. He’d had a lousy day of it, they all conceded.

  The next day things had not improved much. Sandy was suffering from a splitting headache so he was detailed by Mallory to stay in camp and do various jobs there. Odell and Hazard set out for the North Col to reconnoitre the route and find a possible camp site; Mallory hurried down the glacier to Camp II to try again to organize the loads. Sandy’s job was to rearrange the camp to accommodate more men. The only help he could enlist was from Karmi, the indefatigable cook, who was of great assistance. Together they got the primuses going for each party that arrived from Camp II and distributed sleeping bags to the porters in the hope that this would stop them from going sick so often. That afternoon Somervell arrived from II while Hazard and Odell came in from above Camp III. They had been driven back from the North Col by the wind and bad weather. That evening Sandy got the roarer cooker to work and they had a better meal, prepared for them by Karmi.

  The situation at Camp II was little better than that in Camp III. Norton had asked Geoffrey Bruce to follow him up the glacier, a day behind, and to inspect the camps and ensure the NCOs understood exactly what was expected of them. The plan was for Bruce to arrive at Camp III by May 11 and from there be ready to go on to Camp IV on the North Col and then on to establish Camp V. When he arrived at Camp II on 8 May he expected to meet only the cook and a couple of porters, instead of which he found it fully occupied. Norton was there as well and it soon became clear that there had been some kind of major breakdown in the line. Of greatest concern to both men was the fact that the porters were miserable, demoralized and lacking in their usual courage and high spirits. With double the number of men in Camp II it was necessary to break open the stores of food and tents intended for the higher camps in order to meet this emergency. Some of the porters had struggled down from Camp III where they had spent two days holed up in their tents with a blanket between them and only a handful of barley to eat. This was a grave situation and Norton was deeply concerned. All he knew was that Mallory, Odell, Hazard and Sandy were up at Camp III in goodness only knew what conditions and that he had on his hands a large number of sick and dispirited porters. Mallory arrived the following morning and amplified the porters’ story, telling Norton of the high winds and low temperature they had suffered on the night of 7 May.

  The situation called for a radical reorganization and Norton, to his great credit, came up with a plan. He would send Somervell, who was a favourite with the men, up to Camp III with as many porters as he could muster. Shebbeare, who was currently in charge of Base Camp, would be brought up to run Camp II and Hazard would be sent down to replace Shebbeare in Base as Norton was unwilling to leave Base Camp without a sahib in charge as all their money, stores and remaining equipment was housed there. For the remainder of the day Norton, Bruce and Mallory made attempts to cheer up the porters and render Camp II more habitable. It was a great load off Mallory’s mind when he was able to discuss with Norton the problems he had encountered at III and he wrote to Ruth of his feelings that day ‘A great day of relief this with the responsibility shared or handed over.’

  The following morning with snow falling thickly around them, the three climbers, with twenty-six porters in tow, including the twelve reserve porters who had been assigned to Bruce and were therefore fit and willing, set off for Camp III. Half-way up the trough they met Hazard who told them of his and Odell’s reconnaissance of the North Col, or as far as it had gone, and painted a very bleak picture of Camp III to them. ‘We gathered from him that Camp III was an exceedingly unpleasant place. With the wind and snow increasing every moment it was obviously going to be even worse than he painted it, but it was little use trying to talk in half a gale, so we bade him farewell and pushed on as rapidly as possible.’

  Matters in Camp III were indeed bleak. ‘Perfectly bloody day – nothing else will describe it. Wind and driven snow,’ wrote Sandy who spent the morning in his tent trying to repair a cooker which had not been functioning well in the cold. It was a fruitless task and left him with very near frostbite in his fingers. Odell and Somervell considered the weather too inclement for a further foray towards the North Col so they remained in Camp where they were all joined by Bruce, Norton, Mallory and a few porters at lunchtime. The porters in Camp III were in a worse state than ever and would make no effort to look after themselves, despite the fact that Sandy busily prepared their primus stoves, pushing them into their tents so that they could cook some food for themselves. Bruce’s reserve porters were, however, much fitter, and they set about helping their friends and proving themselves to be invaluable in raising spirits among the porters’ ranks. Meanwhile the climbers all lay down in their tents as the wind
got up and the blizzard intensified. That night there was little sleep for anyone. ‘Had a terrible night with wind and snow. I don’t know how the tent stood it’, Sandy wrote, ‘very little sleep and about 2” of snow over everything in the tent. Had a lot of rheumatism in the night and an awful headache this morning.’ Bruce had an equally miserable time: ‘snow drifted into our tents covering everything to a depth of an inch or two. The discomfort of that night was acute. At every slightest movement of the body a miniature avalanche of snow would drop inside one’s sleeping bag and met there into a cold wet patch.’

  In the morning Norton, realising what a toll the six nights at Camp III had taken on Mallory and Sandy, decided that in order to conserve fuel and to give the two a respite they should descend to Camp II. ‘These two had been in the thick of it from the start, never sparing themselves for a moment. Irvine’s capacity for work was immense. After the most gruelling day on the glacier, he would settle down with his tools inside a tent, improving the oxygen apparatus, or mending stoves, regardless of time or temperature, long after the rest of us were inside our sleeping-bags.’