Into The Silence

by Wade Davis

  The decision made, it fell to Geoffrey Bruce to get the men moving. As Norton reported, Bruce stood tall in the middle of the camp “in the teeth of the gale. How he got the men to work, only he can tell. Perhaps his stinging words cut more than the wind, but it is on record that he found time and opportunity to give exactly the right amount of sympathy to the really sick.” The evacuation took the broken men down what Norton described as a Via Dolorosa, traversing the length of the glacier to Camp II, “then the rough miles of tumbled moraine, withdrawing every man to Base Camp, with a melancholy procession of snow-blind, sick, and frost bitten men, being shepherded down by their comrades.”

  By the evening of May 11, Mallory, Beetham, Hazard, Irvine, and Noel were at base camp, twelve miles down from the North Col. Norton and Bruce, with half the porters, were at Camp II, while Odell and Somervell, with the remainder of the expedition, had reached Camp I. By extreme good fortune Major Hingston, the expedition’s medical officer, having escorted General Bruce to safety in Sikkim, had arrived at base camp at 4:00 p.m.

  At Camp I Howard Somervell had been dealing with the injured for much of the day. One of the Gurkhas, Lance Corporal Shamsherpun, lay comatose with what was believed to be a blood clot on his brain. The feet of the Darjeeling cobbler Manbahadur were frozen solid to the ankles; if he lived, they would have to be amputated. Several porters were down with severe pneumonia and bronchitis, including Sanglar, Kellas’s man in 1921, who had attached himself to Noel in 1922. Finally there was Tamding, Somervell’s servant on the march across Tibet, who had stumbled and broken his leg just below the knee during the retreat. Noel, Beetham, Mallory, and Irvine had rushed to his aid with a stretcher improvised from a carrying frame with strips of canvas ripped from a tent fly, only to find him being carried down the moraine by Dorjee Pasang. What sympathy his injury elicited was somewhat quelled once the British found him wearing clothes that had been stolen from Somervell. Irvine, in particular, was appalled by the way the Sherpas treated the injured. On his way down the mountain he had found Manbahadur at Camp I “lying out in the cold making no attempt to keep warm or look after himself. The three porters that had carried him down from II took absolutely damn all notice of him. I’m afraid both his feet are lost from frost-bite.”

  Hingston, having traveled for twenty days to rejoin the expedition, headed immediately for Camp I on May 12, to assist Somervell. “On the way I met our porters coming down from the mountain,” he wrote that night in his journal. “They were a sorry lot. Worst of all I fear that their morale may be sapped. The only thing to do was to evacuate the mountain and rest until the weather changed.” Returning to the base that afternoon, Hingston spent the rest of the day treating the sick and injured.

  On the morning of May 13 Norton sent Karma Paul to the Rongbuk Monastery with a request that the lama bless all of the members of the expedition at a ceremony in two days’ time. Geoffrey Bruce and Hingston, meanwhile, returned to Camp I, with the hope of moving Shamsherpun down to base camp. They found him, Hingston reported, “even worse than when we had left him. However we had to try and get him down. We improvised a stretcher out of blankets and tent-poles, got six Tibetans to act as carriers, and marched him as comfortable as conditions allowed. It was a long and difficult carry. They got him down to near the Base Camp where he suddenly died.” His body was brought into camp just after sunset and buried the following morning, in a shallow grave later marked by a memorial stone.

  Of the other casualties, all would survive save the cobbler Manbahadur. Hingston did his best, but the man’s legs were dead to the hips, his feet black and putrid with rot. He hung on for a fortnight before finally dying on May 25, a victim, in some sense, of Mallory’s obsession with the summit, or at least his failure to supply the porters at Camp III properly. It is difficult to know what impact these deaths had on the British, whose attentions turned quickly to the task at hand. Hingston considered it “unfortunate that the casualties should have occurred at this time. They will tie me down to the Base Camp. I am anxious to get at least as far as Camp III.” In their various journals and diaries, there is little mention of the deaths that had occurred but no shortage of remarks about the delights and comforts of base camp: hot food and lots of it, spacious and warm tents, camp beds and chairs.

  On May 11, the initial day of the evacuation, they gathered, as Irvine recalled, for

  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 a flying helmet with a bristly chin sticking out even further. 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 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 in candle grease. Noel as usual, leaning back with his chin down and cloth hat over his eyes, grinning to himself. Everyone was very happy to be back in a Christian mess hut eating decent food.

  THE RETREAT stretched into a hiatus of six days. Irvine tinkered the entire time, while Mallory, for the most part, fretted. “He seemed ill at ease,” wrote Noel, who invited him to bunk in his tent, “always scheming and planning. It was obvious to me he felt this setback more acutely than any of us.” If idleness drove Mallory to distraction, Norton’s decision to rest and regroup proved uncannily prescient. By bringing his men to altitude, then leading them off the mountain for an extended period before returning them to the heights, he had inadvertently anticipated what in time would become standard mountaineering procedure for optimizing acclimatization at extreme elevations. It was a good bit of serendipitous luck on an expedition that would need a great deal of it.

  On Thursday, May 15, the entire party, save Somervell and Beetham, walked down from base camp to the Rongbuk Monastery for the audience with Dzatrul Rinpoche, arranged successfully by Karma Paul. No one knew what to expect. While the porters waited in the outer court, the climbing party shared a long meal of minced meat and macaroni, radishes and hot peppers, before finally being ushered into a smaller courtyard lined on all sides with elaborate embroidered benches and sheltered at one end by an overhanging wooden roof. There, beneath the veranda, was the high lama, seated on a red throne and flanked by attendants. “He was an imposing person,” Hingston recalled, “with a striking face full of character and humour, and quite different from the ordinary Lama type. He is considered a person of extreme sanctity, an equal even to the Dalai Lama. He is said to have spent twelve years incarcerated in a hermit’s cell. His dress was of the usual dark red material, but in addition he wore a yellow hat elegantly adorned with gold. Round him were the assistant functionaries, other lamas who held various sacred implements.”

  One by one the British sahibs silently went forward. According to Hingston, “He pressed a silver prayer-wheel against our heads. The interior of the wheel held some sacred objects, probably a collection of Buddhist prayers. The porters then were blessed in turn. Each prostrated himself three times before the Lama and then came forward to receive the touch of the wheel. Each porter made an offering and also presented a white scarf. Geoff made an offering for all the Sahibs, and Norton presented the sacred gentleman with a roll of embroidery and a watch.”

  Norton asked the rinpoche for a few words of encouragement for the men. The lama instructed the porters to obey the British and work hard on the mountain; he assured them that he would pray for their well-being. “This,” Hingston wrote, “from our point of view, was the main object of the ceremony, since the porters are naturally somewhat disheartened after the severe trials through which they have passed. Then the Lama proceeded to prayers. The men were very reverent and impressed. It ended up with many repetitions of Om mani padme hum, which we all followed in a chorus in the same way as one does in a church at home. The Ceremony seemed to have an excellent influence on the porters, and we left satisfied wit
h the day’s business and impressed with the whole affair.”

  Not all of the climbers were similarly touched. Mallory made no mention of the event in the letters he wrote the following day to his wife and mother. Odell scratched a quick note in his diary: “Typical Thibetan tiffin with chop-sticks, before interesting and solemn blessing by the dignified yet genial lama who touched our head with a silver prayer-wheel and gave very sensible exhortation to coolies.” John Noel, who filmed the entire proceedings from the rooftop of the courtyard, rather fancifully claimed that the lama had uttered an ominous and dire warning: “Your turning back brings pleasures to the demons. They have forced you back, and will force you back again.”

  Young Irvine was intrigued yet bewildered by the entire scene, and he had serious misgivings about Tibetan cuisine. “After being blessed and having our heads touched,” he wrote, “with a white metal pepper pot (at least it looked like that) we sat down while the whole damn lot of coolies came in doing three salaams—head right to the ground—then presented their offerings and were similarly blessed. 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. We got back to camp about 3 p.m. My Tibetan food recurred rather often on the way back.” Norton and Bruce cared only that the event had fortified the porters, which clearly it had. “His prayers and blessings put fresh heart into them,” Bruce recalled, “and on the return journey to the Base Camp they were very nearly their cheery normal selves once more.”

  Beneath all, however, ran an undercurrent of uncertainty. No amount of ritual or prayer could alter physiological reality. Just seven terrible days at Camp III, as Somervell later acknowledged, had “reduced our strength and made us thin and weak and almost invalided, instead of being fit and strong as we had been during the 1922 ascent.”

  Mallory remained almost frenetically optimistic, as he always was on the eve of a mountain adventure, once decisions had been made and everything given over to the summit quest. “I must tell you, with immense physical pride,” he wrote to Ruth the morning after the visit to Rongbuk, “I look upon myself as the strongest of the lot, the most likely to get to the top, with or without gas. I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure Norton thinks the same. He and I were agreeing yesterday that none of the new members, with the possible exception of Irvine can touch the veterans, and that the old gang are bearing everything on their shoulders.”

  This was precisely the problem. The expedition was too thin. Odell and Hazard had been slow to acclimatize. Beetham, having more or less recovered from dysentery, remained weak. Hazard was also a problem for the group. He and Beetham did not get along. Indeed, of all the men, only the unflappable Odell could endure the temperamental Hazard, who, Somervell wrote, had since the war “built a psychological wall round himself inside of which he lives. Occasionally he bursts out with a ‘By gad, this is fine!’ for he enjoys, inside the wall, every minute of Tibetan travel, and even hardship. Then the shell closes, to let nothing in.”

  If Somervell had his doubts about Hazard, Mallory had his private concerns about his closest friends on the expedition. “Somervell seems to me a bit below his form of two years ago,” he wrote to Ruth on May 16, “and Norton is not particularly strong, I fancy, at the moment. Still they’re sure to turn up a tough pair. I hope to carry all through now with a great bound.” Increasingly, his allegiance and hopes turned to young Sandy Irvine, “the star of the new members,” he told his mother, “a very fine fellow … very decent with the porters … full of common sense, mild but strong, yet with high ideals.” Of all the men, he wrote to Ruth, “Irvine has much more the winning spirit, he has been wonderfully hard working and brilliantly skillful about the oxygen; against him is his youth (though this is very much for him in some ways) hard things seem to hit him harder—and his lack of mountaineering training and practice, which must tell to some extent when it comes to climbing rocks or even to saving energy on the easiest ground. However he’ll be an ideal campaigning companion and with as stout a heart as you could wish to find.”

  Friday dawned a crystal morning, just as the lama had predicted. “The weather has made a great change for the better,” Hingston wrote. “Norton seems pleased with the turn of affairs. He intends to start the new offensive tomorrow.” Saturday was even finer, “a perfect day,” Irvine noted in his diary. “No wind early. What a pity!” The date, May 17, originally designated for the assault on the summit, now marked simply a return, a new beginning, with all its potential for triumph or tragedy, transcendence or devastation. “This retreat is only a temporary set back,” Mallory had written. “Action is only suspended. The issue must shortly be decided. The next time we walk up the Rongbuk Glacier will be the last. We will gather up our resources and advance to the last assault.”

  LINGERING OVER everything was the specter of the monsoon. In 1922 it had arrived two weeks early, a “soft breath of the south-east wind,” as Norton recalled, that swept over the face of the North Col and lured seven men to their death on June 7, a black Wednesday. If what they had endured to date in 1924 was any indication, the first stage of the monsoon was already upon them. On May 17 they thus launched the second phase of their campaign, “obsessed,” as Norton wrote, “by the fear that we were already too late and that its full force would be on us before we had even established ourselves on the North Col.” There was little to do but persevere with the original plan, with the understanding that the final attack from Camps VI and VII would be launched on May 29, precisely two weeks later than originally scheduled.

  Geoffrey Bruce worked miracles; his was the strongest voice in camp and, according to Somervell, the most essential in the crisis. “Some people know naturally what is the right thing to do,” Somervell later wrote, “others have the ability to make others do what they think ought to be done. Geoffrey is one of the few people I know who combines these two qualities. He knows exactly how to get the best out of the porters, and does it with strength combined with kindness.” Mallory had similar regard for Norton. “I’m glad the first blow lies with me,” he wrote in one of his last letters home. “We’re not going to be easily stopped with an organization behind us this time.” Norton, he added, deserved all the credit. If they were to get up the mountain, it would be on the backs of the soldiers, Bruce and Norton.

  The weather on Saturday, May 17, was glorious. After a light lunch, Norton, Odell, Somervell, Shebbeare, and Mallory, along with eleven porters, started up for Camp I, intent on reaching Camp II by Sunday evening. Irvine, down with dysentery, took a heroic dose of lead and opium and managed to join Hazard and Noel the following morning, leaving only Hingston at base to look after the invalids, including Bentley Beetham, crippled with sciatica. By Monday evening Noel and Bruce were at Camp I, en route directly the next day for Camp III; Irvine and Hazard were at Camp II ready to push on for Camp III; and Shebbeare had returned to Camp II from Camp III, having secured at the high camp the four strongest and most experienced climbers on the expedition: Norton, Somervell, Mallory, and Odell. After all the setbacks, in but forty-eight hours Norton had gotten the expedition once again poised at the base of the North Col.

  On the morning of May 20, even as Irvine and Hazard rose to Camp III, Mallory and the others set out to fix a route up the North Col. As they trudged up the lateral moraine above camp, struggling to catch their breaths at 21,000 feet, the sky opened and for the first time they had a chance to glass the upper reaches of the col. As expected, everything had changed. In 1922 there had been a narrow crevasse just a few feet wide running across the col just below where Camp IV had been. In just two years the entire lower side of this crevasse had fallen hundreds of feet away from the face; what had been the upper side was now exposed as a formidable cliff of blue ice, dark and brittle.

  Mallory and Norton took a line somewhat to the north of the 1922 route, and rather than traverse, they went straight up, more difficult but ultimately safer. Somervell fell out within the hou
r, weak with fever. Mallory took the lead, followed by Norton and eventually by Odell and Lhakpa Tsering, a veteran of 1922 who carried wooden pickets and coils of rope to fix lines. In short order they came to a formidable obstacle, a narrow chimney that could not be turned, rising 200 feet up the sheer face of the ice cliff. The wall was manageable, but the narrow chimney, smooth on both sides, with not a sign of a toehold and with a base that fell away into the darkness of a bottomless crack, was, as Norton put it, “the deuce.” He glanced at his companion. “Confronted with a formidable climbing obstacle,” he later wrote, “Mallory’s behavior was always characteristic. You could positively see his nerves tighten like fiddle strings. Metaphorically he girt his loins, and his first instinct was to jump into the lead. Up the wall and chimney he led here, carefully, neatly and in that beautiful style that was all his own.” It was less a climb, Norton added, than a gymnastic exercise, “and one is little fitted for gymnastics above 22,000 feet. I suppose the whole 200-foot climb to a most welcome little platform at the top took us an hour of exertion as severe as anything I have experienced.”

  Odell suffered terribly, and Mallory took note of it, but eventually he and Lhakpa joined the others, and they continued on, traversing the face and straddling, at one point, a narrow ridge of ice that fell away on one side to the blackness of a fathomless crevasse and on the other to open space and the head of the glacier, thousands of feet below. Finally, at 2:30 p.m., some seven hours after starting out, they reached the high shelf where their camp had been in 1922. There was no sign of it. The configuration of the snow and ice was completely different. Though still protected from the winds of the col by a high wall, what had been a broad platform was now a narrow band at no point more than thirty feet wide, a “hog-backed ridge of untrodden, glistening snow,” Norton recalled, “barely affording level space for our proposed row of little 6-foot square tents.”