Sandy was suffering not only from an altitude-induced headache but from severe dehydration. He had neither eaten nor, more importantly, drunk sufficient quantities for several days and the result was that when he and Mallory set off down the glacier towards Camp II he was very close to collapse. ‘Must have been touched by the sun or something, for I have found it difficult to keep up with George and the rough ice shook my head terribly. Just at the top of the Trough I became completely exhausted panting about twice to every step and staggering badly at times. George trying a new route took us through a narrow crack between seracs which made me still more exhausted.’ To his sister Evelyn he confided, ‘it was all I could do with George’s praises & curses to get down to II alive with piles of snow on my head. However I think a lot if it was lack of food & drink as the fuel question made snow meltings very few & far between. After about 6 cups of tea at II & a couple of glasses of glacier water I quite recovered.’ Feeling considerably revived by the liquid and food he was delighted to find six letters waiting for him in camp. He retired to his tent and read the letters until it was too dark to see.
Camp III was still being battered by wind and snow. Norton, Somervell and seventeen porters succeeded in bringing up to the camp the remainder of the loads that had been dumped on the glacier by the exhausted men four days previously. Bruce was deeply shocked by the state of the porters when they returned and it became obvious to Norton, as the storm continued to rage, that there was no other course open but to retreat. The temperature at night plummeted again to –21 °F (-30 °C) and sleep was impossible. The next morning Camp III was evacuated, the tents were collapsed and Norton and Somervell made lists of what was left in the camp. The porters took a great deal of persuasion to leave their tents and it was only due to Bruce’s cajoling and convincing them of the delights of Base Camp that they emerged and set off down the glacier.
As they headed down to Camp II they were met by Sandy who, completely recovered from his dehydration and exhaustion of the day before, ‘sped up towards Camp III to hurry Somervell’. One of the porters, Tamding, had fallen on the ice and broken his leg. He was in great pain and Somervell’s help was required to set the leg. Tamding had been his servant during the journey across Tibet and en route Somervell had noticed that one or two articles of his underwear had gone missing, never to be traced. On inspecting the fractured leg Somervell was somewhat bemused to discover that the missing garments had been ‘borrowed’ by Tamding. A makeshift stretcher had been arranged, using a carrier and a Whymper fly, and the sick man was carried down to Camp II by two porters. When Sandy got to Camp I he found another porter, Manbahadur, lying out in the cold making no attempt to keep himself warm. Sandy was horrified. ‘The 3 coolies that had carried him down from II took absolutely damn all notice of him. I’m afraid both feet are lost from frostbite’, he wrote in his diary.
He finally got down to Base Camp on the afternoon of 11 May to discover that Hingston had arrived from Darjeeling. That night they all relaxed and after a very good dinner Sandy wrote an assessment of his fellow climbers:
George and I and Noel came to the base camp to find Hingston just arrived and very cheery having left the General quite fit again. We had a very amusing dinner with a couple of bottles of champagne. A very dirty and bedraggled company. Hingston clean shaven and proper sitting opposite Shebbeare with a face like a villain and a balaclava inside out on the back of his head. Hazard in flying helmet with a bristly chin sticking out farther than ever. Beetham sat silent most of the time, round and black like a mixture of Judas Iscariot and an apple dumpling. George sitting on a very low rookie chair could hardly be seen above the table except for a cloth hat pinned up on one side with a huge safety pin and covered with candle grease. Noel as usual leaning back with his chin down and cloth hat over his eyes, grinning to himself. Everyone very happy to be back in a Christian mess hut eating decent food.
Relieved though they might have been to be back in the comfort of Base Camp, sleeping in luxurious camp beds and breathing the thick air of 17,800 feet, which had left them breathless two weeks previously, there were still men higher up the mountain and all was not well. Sandy had written a bald assessment of the situation to Evelyn. ‘One has I think pneumonia, one has lost both feet from frost bite & one has a broken leg.’
Hingston’s return on 11 May was auspicious and he wasted no time in assessing the health of the men. The climbers were all basically fit but when Hingston made an inspection of the porters who had come off the glacier he was very concerned by the condition of all of them in general, and one or two individual men in particular gave him very great cause for worry. There was Manbahadur, the cobbler: he was in a very bad state and Hingston judged that he would probably lose both feet above the ankles if he lived. Meanwhile Bruce and Norton had met up with Somervell in Camp I where they found him with his hands full tending to the casualties. The worst case was one of the Gurkha NCOs, Shamsher, who appeared to have a blood clot on the brain. He was probably suffering from what is now known as HACE – high altitude cerebral edema, an extremely dangerous condition when fluid leaks from the cerebral blood vessels causing swelling of the brain. As pressure builds up inside the skull, mental and motor skills deteriorate rapidly and unless the victim is quickly brought down to a lower altitude the risk is of slipping into a coma and dying.
By the time Somervell saw Shamsher he was already unconscious. He left him in the care of two NCOs and descended to Base Camp. Hingston and Bruce went up to Camp I to see Shamsher who, they hoped, would have improved with the rest and care he was receiving at Camp I. They were disturbed to hear that his condition had deteriorated overnight and Hingston immediately ordered his evacuation to a lower altitude. Despite their best attempts to carry him carefully to Base Camp Shamsher died about a mile from the camp without ever regaining consciousness. He was buried in a sheltered spot outside Base Camp.
End of Round One, as Norton put it. The setbacks they had suffered on the mountain had been a very great disappointment to them and Shamsher’s death a profound shock, but they were far from defeated. A few days rest in Base Camp was the first consideration during which the weather, it was hoped, might improve. For the first time since he left Darjeeling Sandy wrote in his diary that he’d done more or less nothing. ‘Restful day in camp. Mountain looked pretty beastly and clouds to north looked very threatening. Did nothing much all day.’
The following two days were also quiet, although Sandy was busy once again in his workshop tent. He spent the first morning making Noel a candlestick out of a broken reducing valve and the following day worked ‘practically the whole day up till 10 p.m. taking cinema motors to pieces and making gadgets for Noel’s camera.’ In between he gave the cooks for the higher camps instruction into how to use the primus stoves. This must have been quite amusing bearing in mind his inability to speak a word of their language. The training took place at the request of Norton and Geoffrey Bruce who spent the days after the retreat planning their next attack. One of the few advantages of the adverse conditions they had suffered was that they had been able to assess the performance of the porters and were now in a position to select the six strongest men who would become leaders. They allowed them, as far as possible, to pick their own teams thus encouraging an esprit de corps and a little friendly rivalry. In reallocating the porters they were very careful to ensure that each party had at least two men who knew their way around the primus stoves and the use of meta fuel (solidified spirit). There was a huge amount of organization to be completed before another attack on the mountain could be considered. Although the camps had been stocked as far as III, careful lists needed to be made to ensure the right quantity of food, fuel and equipment was in place. Lists had been made by the departing climbers as to what was where, so Bruce spent a whole day collating these and marrying the new schedule with Mallory’s revised summit campaign.
Mallory had returned to Base Camp on 11 May and confided at the end of a long letter to Ruth, in which
he’d described their climb and retreat in great detail, ‘I felt that I was going through a real hard time in a way I never did in ’22. Meanwhile our retreat has meant a big waste of time.’ Part of the problem had been that when Mallory had arrived at Camp III he had not found the situation that he had anticipated. The Gurkha NCO had not taken the control Bruce and Norton expected of him and Mallory found himself having to fulfil the role he felt least comfortable with, that of camp organiser. Sandy, Odell and Hazard were of little use to him other than in support as none of them had been up to III before, and, more importantly, had had no experience of an expedition on this scale. Had he had Bruce or Norton there with him it is likely that the problems that arose in the line of supplies could have been dealt with in another way. But the lost days were what really bothered Mallory. The later the summit day the more likely they would be to encounter the onset of the monsoon. He revised his climbing schedule with a new summit day of 28 May and agreed the proposal with Bruce and Norton. The climbing parties were to remain as before: Norton and Somervell without oxygen, Mallory and Sandy with.
The single most important aspect of the whole summit attempt was the morale of the porters. It had been that which had most deeply concerned Bruce on his arrival in Camp II and it was Norton’s foremost thought now. If their morale and courage could be restored there would be hope for a renewed assault. He sent Karma Paul, the interpreter, down to Rongbuk Monastery to enquire as to whether the Chief Lama would grant them an audience. Norton knew that this would mean a very great deal to the porters who held the lama in the highest regard. He agreed and on 15 May the whole party of climbers and porters made their way down to the monastery for the ceremony. Norton had arranged for each of the porters to be given some rice and a few coins to use as an offering to the lama, while he had with him a gift of a painting on silk of the Potala Palace and a wrist watch.
Sandy’s account of the visit is a slightly tongue in cheek version of the blessing but it is at least factually fairly accurate, bearing in mind the pepper pot to which he refers was a prayer wheel and the iron bedstead the Lama’s throne.
After sitting for an hour and a half eating meat and macaroni with chop sticks (well, chewed ends), drinking Tibetan tea and eating radish with very strong pepper in an ante-chamber, we were ushered into the presence of the Lama who sat on a red throne on an iron bedstead just inside a kind of veranda … we sat on beautifully upholstered benches on either side of an alcove in the roof. Noel had his camera about 30 ft away on the edge of the roof. After being blessed and having our heads touched with a white metal pepper-pot (at least it looked like that) we sat down while the whole damn lot of coolies came in turn doing 3 salams – head right onto the ground and then presented their caddas and offerings and were similarly blessed. Next bowls of rice were brought and the Lama addressed the coolies in a few well-chosen words and then said a prayer or prayers – it all sounded the same, ending on a wonderfully deep note.
Shebbeare also noted the ceremony in his diary and commented on the Lama’s address, ‘which as interpreted by Kama Paul afterwards, was very much what the Archbishop of Canterbury would have said in similar circumstances; if the spirits were willing we should succeed, the sahibs must not plan anything that would endanger human life and the porters must obey the sahibs’.
The effect of the Holy Lama’s blessing was dazzling. The porters returned to Base Camp in fresh heart and with renewed vigour and determination. ‘Nothing could have been more satisfactory’, concluded Bruce. ‘The reverence with which the men entered and left the presence of the great Lama was eloquent proof of his influence over them.’
The lama’s blessing may well have made a good impression on Sandy but the food he’d eaten at the monastery had not and he had a disagreeable few days when he was troubled with diarrhoea which left him at times feeling rather rotten. He was in good spirits, however, and wrote in his diary the next morning: ‘Perfect morning – evidently the direct result of the Lama’s prayers. After a conference about our future plans I gave the coolie cooks another lesson in Primus stoves. Lots of odd jobs kept us busy all day. Lots of carrying frames, etc, to be repaired before they go up the glacier again. Hingston performed his awful tests on us after tea.’ The results of these tests had Sandy still looking fit. He was able to hold his breath for thirty seconds (as opposed to 120 in Darjeeling), with only Somervell markedly stronger at forty-one seconds. His expiratory force was the same as Norton and he was strongest in the endurance test, when they had to blow mercury up a tube and hold it there. In the mental arithmetic tests Mallory was spectacularly quicker than any of them, so his faculties appear to have been little affected by the altitude to date.
The greatest anxiety for the climbers now was the weather. The onset of the monsoon over the Himalaya would, they all understood clearly, make an assault on the summit quite impossible. They were receiving information on its progress from Mallory’s sister, who lived in Colombo, Ceylon, where the monsoon typically arrived three weeks earlier than in the Himalaya, and from the meteorological department in Simla. Owing to the slowness of the postal service the most important information on the monsoon arrived with them at Base Camp only after the final descent on 11 June. They knew, however, that in 1922 the monsoon had broken on 1 June and they also knew that it was generally preceded by a fortnight of warm, clear weather. It was this period on which they were pinning their hopes of a successful attempt on the summit.
On 17 May, originally planned as their summit day, Norton, Somervell, Mallory and Odell set off for Camp I and Sandy followed them the following day in the company of Hazard and Noel. Geoffrey Bruce, Hingston and Beetham remained at Base Camp, Beetham having been struck by a bad attack of sciatica, adding insult to injury to this poor man. Sandy was not feeling as fit as he had been and noted in his diary at Camp I ‘have had diarrhoea for 3 days and feel rather rotten with it. However am trying the effect of lead and opium. It looked a very dirty day on the mountain this afternoon.’ After a very warm and comfortable night at Camp I he was feeling considerably better and set a record time between Camps I and II, arriving at II in one and three-quarter hours. ‘Rested in Camp II till 4:30 then as no other sahibs had arrived I strolled up the glacier and met Shebbeare at the entrance of the trough – very tired. I took his rucksack full of crampons and we both returned by easy stages to Camp II.’ The next morning he and Hazard made their way up to Camp III as planned. They sorted porters on their way up, helping them to exchange loads and ensuring that as much of the food, fuel and equipment as possible got into camp. When they arrived they discovered Somervell suffering badly from the effects of sunstroke, with a high fever. Sandy, as usual, found that various repair jobs had been left for him in camp, so he spent the early afternoon mending the primus stoves which were malfunctioning in the cold. He also effected repairs to various tent poles which had suffered in the last winds. After these jobs were completed he set out towards the North Col to meet Norton, Mallory and Odell who had been up to establish Camp IV, but he was not properly dressed for the cold on the glacier and had to return to Camp III before he met up with them. ‘They had a pretty exciting time coming down. Norton glissading out of control and George going down a crevasse unseen and unheard by the rest. All were very tired when they got in.’
This bald statement hides the truth behind a dramatic story. Norton, Odell, Mallory and a porter named Lhakpa Tsering had made their way up from Camp III that morning, equipped with Alpine rope and pickets. Their intention was to fix ropes in all the most difficult places on the climb up to the North Col where they would then establish Camp IV, the true jumping-off point for any summit attempt. As Norton explained in his chapter entitled ‘The North Col’, in the expedition book The Fight for Everest, the nature of the slopes above Camp III changes every year, for they cross the path of a glacier which, after all, is a frozen river that moves, albeit slowly but inexorably down the mountain. In 1924 the approach to the North Col had changed considerably from that in 1
922. They were confronted by an enormous crevasse which they would have to cross before gaining access to the slopes below the North Col. Mallory lead the route through the crevasse and up a steep, icy snow chimney which Norton described as ‘the deuce’. ‘It was very narrow, its sides were smooth blue ice and it was floored – if the term floor can be applied to a surface that mounts almost vertically – with soft snow which seemed merely to conceal a bottomless crack and offered little or no foothold. The climb was something of a gymnastic exercise, and one is little fitted for gymnastics above 22,000ft.’ The 200 foot chimney took an hour to climb and the exertion was utterly exhausting. Above the chimney were steep slopes of snow and ice where the climbers fixed ropes using pickets and tying on, where possible, to natural features such as a large serac, or block of ice, which would act as a good anchor. The system of fixing ropes is adopted now as it was then, and it offers some protection over highly exposed, steep ground, such as those they now encountered. One Himalayan climbing guide told me that nowadays he and his team of Sherpas fix 6,000 metres of rope on the route up to the summit from the north side of Everest. In 1924 they succeeded in fixing less than 1,000 metres. A well-recognized technique in the 1920s was step cutting, at which Mallory was an acknowledged master. He cut broad, deep steps up the steepest sections of the slopes above the chimney in order that the porters might use them when they carried their loads up to the North Col. Step cutting is exhausting work, especially at altitude, but vital for the sake of the porters who were less at home on the steep ice and snow than the British climbers.
They arrived at the place where they had pitched their tents in 1922, only to discover that the shelf was smaller this year, forming a ‘hog-backed ridge of untrodden, glistening snow barely affording level space for our proposed row of little 6-foot-square tents’. Well pleased with their efforts thus far, Mallory and Odell set off to prospect the route up towards the summit. The terrain between the camp site and the North Col itself was heavily crevassed and made crossing it extremely hard work. Odell succeeded in finding a bridge across the most serious crevasse, which meant that access to the col was easier than it had been in 1922. Nevertheless, Mallory, who had borne the brunt of the heavy work that morning on the way up, was played out and as the four of them turned to make for Camp III at 3.45 there were a number of incidents on the descent each of which might well have proven fatal. The first slip was by Lhakpa who, having tied himself on to Odell’s rope with an inadequate reef knot, slipped and fell, saved only from a disastrous tumble into oblivion by a soft patch of snow which arrested his fall. It was a very sobering moment for him and he was extremely afraid. Mallory, by his own admission severely exhausted, fell into a crevasse:
Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine Page 26
