Mountains of the Mind

by Robert Macfarlane

  A rough memorial cairn is built for the dead Sherpas at Camp III. Bruce is sanguine about the accident. Nobody’s fault, he says. Nor do the families of the dead men seem interested in blaming anyone: their men died when they were meant to die. But Mallory won’t be consoled. He considers their death his doing. ‘It was not a desperate game, I thought,’ he writes to Ruth, ‘with the plans we made. Perhaps with the habit of dealing with certain kinds of danger one becomes accustomed to measuring some that are best left unmeasured and untried … the three of us were deceived; there wasn’t an inkling of danger among us.’ He is aware, too, of how close he came to dying. ‘It was a wonderful escape for me & we may indeed be thankful for that together. Dear love when I think what your grief would have been I humbly thank God. I am alive …’

  The expedition limps back through Tibet to Darjeeling, wounded and depleted, very much ‘not the jolly company we were’. Morshead and Mallory are in pain from their fingers, Bruce’s toes are not healed, and the soles of Norton’s feet are grey and black with frostbite. And yet the further Mallory gets from the murderous mountain, the more he falls back in love with it. By Darjeeling, the subject of the dead Sherpas has disappeared from his letters. His thoughts are only with Ruth. With Ruth, and with the possibility of the next trip.

  29 February 1924 – Liverpool docks this time, and an inauspicious departure. Ruth has come to see Mallory off for what will be, surely, the last time. He stands on deck, leaning over the shining rail, wearing a dark trilby and a fur-collared coat. She is on the quayside waving as the SS California is cast off, and he waves back. For several minutes they carry on waving at each other, but the ship does not move. An announcement comes over the loudspeaker system. Out beyond the harbour wall, there is a westerly storm drumming up and the wind is keeping the ship pinned to its moorings. A couple of dirty little tug boats nose round the front and prepare to heave California out to sea. Ruth grows tired of waving at a stationary ship and Mallory at a stationary quayside. After a while she just walks away.

  Why is he going again? There is now an element of helplessness to it all, an awareness of forces at work which are beyond her control, beyond his. Worse than this, Mallory has a bad feeling about this trip. One of the last things he does before he leaves for India is to pay a visit to Kathleen Scott, widow of the polar explorer Robert Scott, Britain’s most heroic failure. There are mementos of Scott everywhere in the house: pictures in frames, letters. The absent husband, the fatherless children … It is all too suggestive of what might come to be. Mallory visits her in the company of Geoffrey Winthrop Young. In the taxi on the way back, Mallory tells Young that he believes this year on Everest it will be more like war than adventure, and that this time he does not think he will return alive.

  The long voyage begins again. The ship is crowded with a Scottish tour group bound for Egypt and a group of soldiers and their wives. For the first two days they are strafed by the westerly wind, and make heavy weather over the steel-grey sea of the Bay of Biscay. Mallory works out in the gym on board, and admires Sandy Irvine’s magnificent body. Andrew – Sandy – Irvine is a second-year undergraduate from Oxford who had impressed the Everest selectors with his resilience during a trip to Arctic Norway. He is a rowing Blue, but is missing the race this year to take part in the expedition. Mallory likes Irvine a lot; thinks he is ‘one to depend on, for everything perhaps except conversation’. He writes the now habitual first letter back to Ruth, giving an account of the rhythm of life on board, and of his companions. He writes, too, about life after Everest, and assures her that things will get better for them once the mountain has been climbed. Everything seems to divide itself – as it has done for three years now – into before and after Everest.

  How are you feeling, you poor left-behind one? … Dear Love, I shall be thinking of you often & often. We have been very close together lately I think & I feel very close to you now. You are going to be outwardly cheerful I know and I hope you will also be inwardly happy while I am away. I love you always, dear one.

  The voyage is largely unmemorable. Mallory, who has become a celebrity in Britain, is pestered by the Scottish tourists for photographs, signatures and bons mots about Everest. He escapes to the bows to read André Maurois’s biography of Shelley, or keeps to his quarters. There is one moment, though – the sort of moment which sends excitement thrilling through him. They approach the Straits of Gibraltar one morning before sunrise and Mallory goes out on deck, as he did three years earlier, to watch them pass through the jaws of land:

  We were steaming due East and straight ahead was the orange glow spreading over the sky. Towards the centre of it the long thin lines of land on either side converged & left a gap – quite a small gap between little lumps of land, for the straits were 20 miles away or more. We were aiming straight for this little hole in the sky line where the light was brightest & I had the most irresistible feeling of a romantic world; we had only to pop through the hole like Alice through the garden door to reach a new scene or a whole kingdom of adventures.

  That idea of crossing barriers, popping through holes, solving mysteries, in a word, of exploration: it exercises the profoundest fascination on Mallory. Everest is for him the greatest unknown, the deepest mystery.

  At Port Said the other passengers leave the ship, which is a relief to Mallory. They sail on through the Canal and the Red Sea, and out on to the unusually smooth water of the Indian Ocean. Once more his thoughts turn to Ruth. He imagines the two of them in their silk dressing gowns, going up on deck to breathe the fresh morning air together: ‘Dear girl we give up & miss a terrible lot by trying to do what is right, but we must see we don’t miss too much.’ What is right, Ruth might reply, is for Mallory to stay at home with his wife and children, and earn a less glamorous, but far safer, living as a lecturer and teacher. But there is a bigger ‘right’ at work here, sunk so deeply inside Mallory that it’s invisible to him – his right to stand on the top of Everest, to be the first man up that matchless mountain.

  The train journey across India is even hotter than before, and it is a relief to get up into the tepid air of Darjeeling. Bruce, who is leading the expedition again, joins them there, fresh from a successful tiger hunt near the border with Nepal. They are being put up this year in the Hotel Mount Everest; from his balcony Mallory can see the white and pink magnolias, ‘startlingly bright against the dark hillside’, he tells Ruth, writing a lengthy letter to her on the floridly headed notepaper of the hotel. He writes to her even more passionately and longingly than in previous years, repeating words for emphasis, as if grammar could somehow erase the fact of physical absence, the fact that he has gone away yet again:

  Dearest one, I often & often want you with me, to enjoy things with, & to talk over things & people quietly; and I want to take you in my arms & kiss your dear brown head … Would there were some way of bringing you nearer. I think the nearness depends very much upon the state of one’s imagination. When it boils up, as it does sometimes at night, under the stars I could almost whisper in your ear, and even now dear I do feel near you … & I come very near to kissing you.

  On 29 March they begin the trek through Sikkim. The weather is excellent this time, and Mallory feels full of ‘valley-ease, warmth & languor, and the delights of the lotos-eater’. He bathes naked in rock-pools, and surprises ‘a very fine jungle cat’ in a glade – ‘it is extraordinary how it makes the whole forest seem alive to see a beast like that’. The group are getting on famously, perhaps better even than the 1922 Everesters.

  The trek to Base Camp on the East Rongbuk glacier takes five weeks this time. It is cold and the wind insistent, but the temperatures are not as low as in 1922. Indeed it is the sun and not the snow which is the chief peril this year. On the deserts near Kampa Dzong everyone’s face gets burnished to the colour of chestnut. Fissures open in Mallory’s lips and cheeks, and he keeps a pot of grease with him to rub into them. He walks with a shepherd’s crook, and grows a goatee beard. Irvine wears h
is motorcycle helmet and goggles in an unsuccessful attempt to keep out the wind and the sun. Despite the sunburn, Mallory feels fitter than in any previous year, and his guts are holding firm for once. The sense keeps growing in him that there will be closure this time, one way or the other. To Ruth he writes that ‘it is almost unthinkable that I shan’t get to the top; I can’t see myself coming down defeated’. To his friend Tom Longstaff he is even more adamant: ‘We are going to sail to the top this time and God with us – or stamp to the top with our teeth in the wind.’ There are other reasons for feeling good about it all: this year the quail are in foie gras, not aspic, and the champagne is vintage – 1915 Montebello.

  But there are ominous moments, too. As when, one march short of Kampa, the team arrive at their destination well ahead of their pack animals. Unable to pitch their personal tents, they prop up the green mess tent and lie in its shade, waiting for the baggage to arrive. The white light refracted through the green canvas gives the tableau the glow of an aquarium. One by one they drop off to sleep, except Mallory, to whom, ‘as they lay there snoozing with faces rendered ghastly by the green light’, his team members looked exactly ‘like a collection of corpses’.

  The first blow to the expedition is struck on 11 April, when the group arrive at Kampa Dzong. General Bruce is so weakened by the approach march that, worried about his heart, he decides not to continue. Norton is promoted to commander of the expedition, and Mallory is made second-in-command and chief of the climbing team. It excites him to be in charge, and he quickly draws up what he thinks is a failsafe plan. There will be two summit bids made from Camp IV at the North Col. The first team of two will try without oxygen; the second team of two, which will set off after them, will use oxygen. Mallory puts himself in the oxygen party, and is confident that this will see him to the top.

  Crossing the high-altitude gravel deserts en route to Everest. The mountain in the background is Chomulhari. Photographer Bentley Beetham. © Royal Geographical Society.

  As they draw nearer the mountain, Mallory starts to get excited. He is ‘eager for the great events to begin’. They pitch camp at Rongbuk on 29 April, and almost immediately things start to go wrong. A blizzard – the blizzard they didn’t meet in the badlands on the way in – tears into the Base Camp. The air is furious with snow. The temperature plunges to a depth almost too low for the thermometers to record. The plan this year is even more complex and multi-cogged than the effort of two years earlier. There are more camps, more porters, more equipment. This would have been fine in good weather, but the pitiless turn in the temperature – it drops as low as fifty degrees of frost at night – has made epic even the simplest segment of the operation, the ascent of the East Rongbuk glacier. The blue surface ice on the glacier is the texture of glass and the hardness of diamond. It is difficult to walk on in hob-nailed boots, and practically impossible for the porters in their slipshod shoes. But still the expedition battles on, everybody deteriorating by the day. Reaching Camp III, the camp below the North Col, Mallory finds the dud oxygen cylinders from 1922, piled against the rough cairn they had built to commemorate the seven dead Sherpas. The whole place has changed less than he can believe possible: the cold and the altitude have done their preservative work, stopping time in its tracks. Nothing ages up here; the snow just configures and reconfigures itself, drifts up against the cairn and melts away. There is nothing to tell the time by.

  The weather at Camp III is unremittingly hostile, and for a day they are confined to their tiny tents. The snow gets in everywhere, whirled in by the wind, a fine powder which settles on every surface. As comfort and consolation Mallory, Irvine, Somervell and Odell – those four men up there in their tiny shelters, perched precariously on the shoulder of their mountain, enveloped in a blizzard, separated from the nearest sea by a desert and a jungle, and separated from Britain by four more seas – read poetry to each other from Robert Bridges’s anthology The Spirit of Man. They find solace in Coleridge’s Kubla Khan – with its ‘sunny pleasure dome’, its ‘caves of ice’ – in Thomas Gray’s famous elegy, in Shelley’s poem ‘Mont Blanc’, and in Emily Brontë’s mournful lyrics (‘I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading – / Where the wild wind blows on the mountainside’). On their mountainside the snow continues to fall, and it clumps on the outside of the tent, muffling the sounds they make. After a fitful night, Mallory wakes to find himself mired in two inches of snow. Twitching back the tent door, he can see cyclones of ice crystals, gyring and twisting in the air. And beyond them just whiteness: whiteness and the scream of the wild wind.

  There is no option but to pull out. Every day spent up high, under such conditions, is at a cost to their bodies. The climbers and the porters retreat right back to Base Camp. Fifty porters have deserted, slipped away into the storm and back to their families and their farms at lower levels. A hospital is set up at Base Camp, and the injuries inflicted by the cold are treated. Frostbite, snow-blindness and hypothermia are ubiquitous. One Tibetan porter dies from a brain clot induced by the altitude. Another has to have his boots cut off because his legs are in so much pain, only to reveal that his feet are darkly purpled with frostbite up to his ankles, as though he has stood in ink. This porter dies too.

  Mallory, miraculously, has remained fit, and he chafes at the delay. He wants to be up there, getting the job done. ‘The retreat is only a temporary setback,’ he declares in a letter. ‘Action is only suspended. The issue must shortly be decided. The next time we walk up the Rongbuk Glacier will be the last.’

  Around the pale boulders and among the stores boxes at Base Camp stride glossy ravens, opportunists who have come to try their luck while everything is in such disarray. They tilt their heads inquisitively, or hop about with both feet together, like long-jumpers, or sit in black-cloaked quorums. Fat pigeons, too, and the odd mountain sheep, come to investigate. Everest itself, when it is visible, is, as Mallory puts it, ‘smoking hard’: the plume of ice streams out from its summit, proving the force of the wind.

  For a week they recoup and gather their strength at Base Camp. Then there is a break in the weather, and Mallory, Somervell and Norton push back up to the North Col. But the blizzards enfold them again, and the temperature drops to −24°F. They are driven back down once more to Camp II. More porters are injured by the cold, and the climbers are starting to suffer psychologically as well as physically. Even Mallory is no longer as optimistic. ‘Dear Girl,’ he writes to Ruth on 27 May, ‘this has been a bad time altogether – I look back on tremendous efforts & exhaustions & dismal looking out of a tent door on to a world of snow and vanishing hopes – & yet, & yet, & yet there have been a good many things to set on the other side.’

  And then, as if to reward his refusal to despair absolutely, there is a window in the weather. The wind drops, and there is sunshine. This is it. Mallory writes a penultimate letter to Ruth, telling her that they will make the bid. ‘The candle is burning out & I must stop. Darling I wish you the best I can – that your anxiety will be at an end before you get this – with the best news, which will also be the quickest.’

  The col is reached, and camps are set higher up the ridge. As arranged, the first proper attempt is made by the climbing pair of Somervell and Norton, without oxygen. They make good progress, keeping just off the brink of the ridge, where they are out of the wind, but where the terrain is more difficult. It is, writes Norton afterwards, like climbing up giant overlapping roof tiles. There is nothing to grip on to; everything is trying to shuck you off. Somervell has to stop, but Norton presses on to 28,000 feet before he realizes that he will die if he does not turn back. Precariously he descends the slabs, and meets Somervell. They descend together back towards the col, with Norton perhaps twenty yards ahead of Somervell. Suddenly Somervell coughs hard, agonizingly hard, and feels something from inside him, some object, detach itself and jam in his throat. He begins to choke to death. He cannot breathe, nor can he shout to Norton. Norton turns, but thinks that Somervell is hanging b
ack to make a sketch of the mountain. No, he is hanging back to die. He sits down in the snow, and watches Norton walk on away from him. Then – a final effort – he hammers his chest and throat with his clenched fist, and simultaneously coughs as hard as he can. The thing dislodges itself and jumps into his mouth. He spits it out on to the snow. It is a chunk of his larynx, killed by frostbite.

  Somervell and Norton descend to Base Camp, and Irvine and Mallory prepare to leave the North Col. On the morning of 6 June they have a last breakfast of sardines, biscuits and chocolate inside the sagging A-frame tents, and then get out on to the sterile, stamped-down snow of the col to make final preparations for the ascent. Each man has two big silver pods of oxygen strapped to a frame on his back: they look like early Jet-Pack Willys, as though they could just crank a lever and lift off vertically for the summit. They’re wearing thick puttees, mitts and flying-ace goggles with silver rims to protect them from snow-blindness.

  They proceed without incident up to Camps V and VI, and early on 8 June they depart for the summit. The air is clear when they begin to climb, but within hours a fine and oddly luminous mist has begun to gather about the mountain. Noel Odell, watching from a vantage point at 26,000 feet on the mountain, sees two black dots moving along the summit ridge. Then the mist closes around them.

  Before they leave the mountain, the surviving climbers build a pyramidal cairn of stones. Embedded in it are slates, on which they scratch the names of the twelve men who have died for the mountain during the three expeditions. Nine of the bodies have not been recovered, but no one will forget their resting place, for it is marked by the biggest cenotaph in the world.