Last Hours on Everest: The gripping story of Mallory and Irvine’s fatal ascent

I used the boiling-point technique to determine altitude at Base Camp on Mount Everest in 2007 while filming a science programme for the BBC. The first thing we did was to get a big pan of water to a good rolling boil, as Mrs Beeton would call it (she was writing her cookbook just as the pundits were setting off in the 1860s). I then stuck the big glass thermometer into the water and got a reading of only 85°C. Water boils at 100°C at sea level. This meant the altitude was around 4,600m (15,000ft). The reason that water boils at a lower temperature at higher altitude is that water is trying to turn into a gas (steam) when it boils, and it is easier for the steam to push against the air molecules when there are fewer of them (lower pressure). Bubbles – or boiling – are the result. When I got frostbitten fingers on the summit in 1993 I was able to dangle them in a pan of boiling water at Camp II. It only felt hot, rather than painfully hot.

If someone were to boil up a kettle for tea on the summit of Mount Everest – and I’m sure they will sooner or later – it would start boiling at only 68°C. And it wouldn’t make very good tea. Incidentally, it was hard to keep the long glass thermometer unbroken on our journey into Base Camp in 2007. Pundit Nain Singh concealed his in a walking-staff, but how he didn’t break it is beyond me.

The map-makers of British India now had a mystery on their hands. As well as locating the city of Lhasa, Nain Singh had also mapped a large section of a huge river in Tibet, the Tsangpo, which plunged into a gorge and disappeared. Hundreds of miles away the sacred river Brahmaputra issued from the Himalayas, but there were thousands of feet of height between them. Were they the same river? Nain Singh thought they were. So was there an undiscovered giant waterfall, many times higher than the Victoria Falls? That was the riddle of the Tsangpo.

It was partly solved by another pundit, Kinthup, in a truly amazing journey. In 1880 he was sent into Tibet in the company of a Chinese lama, to whom he would act a servant. They were to throw marked logs into the Tsangpo and surveyors on the Brahmaputra would wait to see if any logs came through. Unfortunately, the lama was a less than ideal master. He womanised and drank, then sold Kinthup into slavery. The pundit eventually escaped, but was captured and resold to another lama.

It took Kinthup four years to get to the point on the Tsangpo from which he had to send his timber signal. He prepared five hundred logs and threw fifty into the river per day. Eventually he got back to India, where he asked if anyone had seen the logs. But all of those who had sent him on his mission had either left India or died. ‘Which logs?’ the men of the Survey said, and poor, disillusioned Kinthup left to become a tailor. One can only imagine his chagrin after so many years of work, and what a modern employment tribunal might make of it all. In the end the surveyors Morshead and Bailey explored the river from the south, and at last, in 1913, Kinthup’s reports were believed. The Tsangpo and the Brahmaputra were accepted as the same river, and this great explorer was at last recognised with a pension, grants of land and a medal.

I have a personal theory about the pundits: I think they were partly the inspiration for James Bond, Agent 007. Consider this: they were numbered 001, 002, 003, etc., and were spies in enemy territory. They carried maps hidden in prayer wheels, and counted their carefully practised 2,000 paces a mile on special Buddhist rosaries on which every tenth bead was slightly larger …

At about the time Mount Everest was being measured, thousands of miles away in Europe the leisure sport of alpinism was being invented by the sons of English gentlemen who had been enriched by the Industrial Revolution. Before then, most sensible mountain-travellers regarded the high peaks as dangerous wastelands inhabited by demons. All this started to change in the early 19th century, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Romantic poet, wrote about his climb on Broad Stand, in England’s Lake District.

In June 2010 three friends and I retraced Coleridge’s route to try to experience exactly what he felt. He was on the summit of Scafell, England’s second highest mountain (Scafell Pike is the highest), having scrambled up a safe route. He then decided to experiment with the then fashionable sublime feelings of terror by picking a descent route that looked possible – but only just – down through a series of tumbling rock terraces. Later, boasting to his girlfriend (as we all do), he wrote:

I began to suspect that I ought not to go on, but then unfortunately tho’ I could with ease drop down a smooth Rock 7 feet high, I could not climb it, so go on I must and on I went. The next 3 drops were not half a Foot, at least not a foot more than my own height, but every Drop increased the Palsy of my Limbs – I shook all over, Heaven knows without the least influence of Fear, and now I had only two more to drop down, to return was impossible – but of these two the first was tremendous, it was twice my own height, and the Ledge at the bottom was so exceedingly narrow, that if I dropt down upon it I must of necessity have fallen backwards and of course killed myself.

I was impressed by Coleridge’s boldness. The route descends over downward-sloping ledges that are separated by higher and higher rock walls, with a deadly drop-off onto the jagged scree below. It all feels rather intimidating. Halfway down an irreversible descent he got himself completely stuck above a big drop, unable to return upwards or progress downwards. This same predicament has since led to the deaths of climbers. He then experienced those feelings of terror that are only too familiar to us:

My Limbs were all in a tremble – I lay upon my Back to rest myself, and was beginning according to my Custom to laugh at myself for a Madman, when the sight of the Crags above me on each side, and the impetuous Clouds just over them, posting so luridly and so rapidly northward, overawed me. I lay in a state of almost prophetic Trance and Delight – and blessed God aloud, for the powers of Reason and the Will, which remaining no Danger can overpower us!1 (#litres_trial_promo)

I lay in exactly the same spot and thought about Coleridge’s power of Reason. He was clearly not just an excitable Romantic. He had calmed himself down and thought about how to get out of his predicament. Just below and to the left of this final ledge there is a narrow chimney that is not immediately obvious. In the event he was able to explore sideways and slither down this chimney, which is now known as Fat Man’s Peril. If there had been no exit we may have lost one of our most interesting literary figures. This just goes to show the importance of careful reading. If only British climbers had stuck to Coleridge’s idea of rock-climbing downwards, modern mountaineering would be very different.

His wasn’t the first rock climb in Britain, though. There are modern routes that were first climbed long before the sport evolved, some by shepherds rescuing crag-fast sheep, some by birds-nesters, and some just by young dare-devils. In 1695 men were described using ropes for rock climbing on traditional fowling expeditions in the St Kilda archipelago. Slowly, rock climbing evolved into an activity in its own right, and as with many cultural movements it is hard to pin down a moment when rock climbing as a sport began. It started in at least three areas: the sandstone crags of the Elbsandsteingebirge, near Dresden; the Dolomites in Italy; and the Lake District in England, where a small group of climbers started rock climbing above the valley of Wasdale, beneath Scafell Pike.

Many were serious-minded, middle-class Victorian gentlemen who sought an escape from the industrial northern towns of Liverpool and Manchester. The father of English rock climbing was Walter Parry Haskett Smith, who, 84 years after Coleridge’s climb, made a solo first ascent (upwards instead of downwards) of Napes Needle, an obelisk-like pillar just across the Wasdale valley from Broad Stand. An early climb that is in touch with modern standards was O. G. Jones’s 1897 climb of Kern Knotts Crack, graded Very Severe, and significantly Jones was attracted by a photograph of Napes Needle that he saw in a shop on the Strand in London. Similarly, the television films that we make on Mount Everest draw new recruits to mountaineering. And if they learn about the fun of climbing, then why not?

The British are usually credited with inventing the sport of alpinism, and it was largely because of leisure. Britain was ‘an island of coal surrounded by a sea of fish’, and happened for many reasons to be the first nation to industrialise (it could so easily have been the Romans, who were close to steam power, or the Indians, who had even more resources). The Industrial Revolution provided many a wealthy man’s son with ample time and money while the average Swiss peasant was far too busy scraping a living off the mountainsides to waste time raising his eyes to the summits.

Sir Alfred Wills, who was Edward Norton’s grandfather, kicked off the Golden Age of Alpinism with his 1854 ascent of the Wetterhorn (although it wasn’t actually the first ascent, which had been made ten years earlier by Stanhope T. Speer with his Swiss guides). There then followed an explosion of climbing, with most of the major peaks being bagged within ten years. There was a similar period in the Himalayas a century later, when all the 14 peaks over 8,000m (26,247ft) were climbed within 11 years of each other.

The Alpine Club was founded in London in 1857. Simon Schama in his Landscape and Memory notes that the members of the Club were predominantly upper-middle-class rather than aristocratic, and that they thought of themselves as a caste apart, a Spartan phalanx, tough with muscular virtue, spare with speech, seeking the chill clarity of the mountains just because, as Leslie Stephen, who became the club’s president in 1865, put it, ‘There we can breathe air that has not passed through a million pairs of lungs.’2 (#litres_trial_promo)

It is curious that so many writers had brothers who became Himalayan climbers: Greene, Spender, Auden. It is interesting, too, that it seemed to be the left-wing intellectuals who wanted to place themselves above the masses. John Carey writes:

The cult of mountaineering and alpine holidays among English intellectuals … seems to have been encouraged by Nietzschean images of supremacy. Climbing a mountain gave, as it were, objective expression to the intellectual’s sense of superiority and high endeavour, which otherwise remained rather notional.3 (#litres_trial_promo)

There is a danger in this search for purity that surfaced later in the Nazi fascination with mountain climbing.

The pace of Alpine climbing accelerated, with Edward Whymper knocking off the Col de Triolet, the Aiguille de Trе-la-T?te and the Aiguille d’Argenti?re in one week in 1864 with guide Michel Croz. His 1865 book Scrambles in the Alps was a sensation, describing the first ascent of the Matterhorn and the ensuing accident that killed four of his companions. Suddenly, the new sport assumed a dangerous new edge in the public mind, and the short but golden age of Alpine climbing was over.

Back in England there was a disaster high on Scafell Pinnacle in 1903 that Somervell and Mallory would have been very well aware of, as it was much discussed at the time. The tradition then was that ‘the leader must not fall’, because the hemp ropes climbers used were not strong enough to take much of a shock, and modern protection devices such as Friends – camming devices that expand into cracks in the rock and to which a climbing rope can be attached – were as yet undreamt of. All that the climbers could do was to loop the rope over a spike of rock, if available, or jam a rock into a crack and pass the rope behind it. In the 1903 accident, there was no belay point available, and four men fell 200ft to their deaths.

As we shall see, George Mallory would have had the need for a belay very much in mind on 8 June 1924 as he scanned the cliffs above him for a route to the top of Mount Everest.

3

Renaissance Men (#u06d386a6-a3b9-55cb-b70d-5a5c09aa74c9)

I was a bookish child, and rather shy. I didn’t quiz Uncle Hunch about his story, but when we got home from Aunt Dolly’s memorial service I found out more about him, Mount Everest and his friend Mallory in the memoir that he wrote titled After Everest. I have the book next to me, still wrapped in my grandmother’s sewn cover. His climbing life, including Mount Everest, takes up less than a third of the pages, and he makes it clear that his medical missionary work was far more important to him. So many Everesters keep going back and back to the mountain of their obsession, and it is entirely typical of him that he was able to develop himself away from it.

One of the problems of assessing multi-talented individuals is that most of us can only appreciate one aspect of them at a time. If anyone has heard of T. H. Somervell nowadays they might think of him as one of Mallory’s fellow-climbers on Everest, or maybe as a painter of mountain landscapes. Some readers in India might still remember his medical work in their country, but he excelled in several fields and was one of the most interesting characters on those early Everest expeditions.

He was born in 1890 to a well-to-do evangelical family in Kendal who owned K Shoes, a prosperous boot-making company. At Cambridge he at first derided modern art, then adopted it. Similarly, he toyed with atheism, joining a society named the Heretics, and ‘for two years I strenuously refused to believe in God, especially in a revealed God’.1 (#litres_trial_promo) Afterwards he felt there was something missing from his life, and felt that his atheist fellow students were ‘wallowing in an intellectual nowhere’. After a chance prayer-meeting he rediscovered his faith and became for a while a passionate evangelical. This mellowed into a steady religious faith that remained with him and informed all the major decisions of his life. It is almost as if the young Somervell had to experiment with opposites, push hard in contrary directions, before he could find his place in both art and religion. Perhaps the extreme horror of his war-time experiences swung him towards extreme faith.

I wanted to know how he began climbing. The 18-year-old Somervell had taken to solitary walking in his native Lake District, and one day saw a party of rock climbers. He followed them up their route on his own, and when he reached the top he was ticked off for climbing without either a companion or a rope. On buying one of the Abraham brothers’ guidebooks he was delighted to realise he’d done a climb described as ‘Difficult’. He continued going rock climbing, and this eventually led to the Alps, where one of his early climbs had an ecclesiastical flavour: he teamed up with a parson and the Bishop of Sierra Leone. Unfortunately, the bishop slipped off an overhang and dangled in mid-air, swinging like a pendulum. Somervell started to lower him but the noose around his waist was loose, the unfortunate cleric raised his arms and the rope slid off. He hung by his hands alone, and ‘certain death was beneath him if he could not hold on.’2 (#litres_trial_promo) Somervell redoubled his lowering, and got the bishop to the safety of a snow-slope before his strength gave out. This calm rescue of another climber foreshadowed his rescue of porters on Everest in 1924.

Next came his experience of the army. After Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, and qualification as a surgeon at University College Hospital, London, he joined up in early 1915 and went to the Front. This experience had a profound effect on him, as it did on other members of the Everest expeditions. His casualty-clearing station, the 34th, was on the Somme Front, at Vecquemont, between Amiens and Albert. Another Cambridge man, Second Lieutenant George Mallory of the 40th Siege Battery, was not far away at Pioneer Road, Albert. Mallory’s job as an artillery officer was to pound the enemy lines with high-explosive shells in preparation for the greatest British offensive of the war, when 300,000 men attacked the Germans on 1 July 1916.

It was a disaster. Somervell’s clearing station, with its two surgeons per six-hour shift, was expected to deal with a thousand casualties; instead, streams of motor-ambulances a mile long brought nearly 10,000 terribly wounded young men after the attack. The camp, in a field of five or six acres, was completely covered with stretchers. The surgery was a hut with only four tables, and Somervell had to walk among the victims and choose which they could try to save.

Occasionally, we made a brief look around to select from the thousands of patients those few fortunate ones whose life or limbs we had time to save. It was a terrible business. Even now I am haunted by the touching look of the young, bright, anxious eyes, as we passed along the rows of sufferers.

Hardly ever did any of them say a word, except to ask for water or relief from pain. I don’t remember any single man in all those thousands who even suggested that we should save him and not the fellow next to him … There, all around us, lying maimed and battered and dying, was the flower of Britain’s youth – a terrible sight if ever there was one, yet full of courage and unselfishness and beauty.3 (#litres_trial_promo)

Beauty seems an odd word to use about this most grotesque of wars, and it is worth being alert to it, as it is relevant to our subject. Somervell goes on to explain:

I know that, again and again, when, sick of casualties and the wilfulness of man that maims these poor bodies, I did see an unselfishness, a fine spirit, and a comradeship, that I have never seen in peace-time. But in spite of all that, the very gloriousness of the spirit of man is a call to the nations to renounce war and give love a chance to bring forth the best that is in mankind.4 (#litres_trial_promo)

Note the reference to the spirit of man. The Poet Laureate Robert Bridges chose The Spirit of Man as the title for an anthology of prose and poetry, published in 1915. It is a curious book, written during the war under the auspices of the War Propaganda Bureau, and full of exhortations to self-sacrifice. ‘We can therefore be happy in our sorrows,’ writes Bridges, ‘happy even in the death of our beloved who fall in the fight; for they die nobly, as heroes and saints die; with heart and hands unstained by hatred or wrong.’5 (#litres_trial_promo) Mallory and Somervell were to read selections from the book as they lay in their shared tent on Everest in 1922.

It was not noble to die chopped up by a machine-gun or gassed. The Spirit of Man was an encouragement towards self-sacrifice. Like the older members of my family, these men had a culture of public-spiritedness and Christian unselfishness that would be inconceivable to most of today’s Everest climbers. I think it might have influenced the climbing choices that Mallory and Somervell made, and partly explains the extreme guilt they felt when seven Sherpas died in the accident that ended that expedition of 1922, a guilt I have rarely seen in the carnage of a modern Everest season.

The casualty work was exhausting, and on one occasion Somervell had to operate for two and a half days on end, without sleep. One day during the Somme campaign he went for a short walk on the battlefield and sat down on a sandbag. He saw a young lad asleep in front of him, looking very ill. After a while, with horror, he realised what he was looking at:

My God, he’s not breathing! He’s dead! I got a real shock. I sat there for half an hour gazing at that dead boy. About eighteen … For a moment he personified this madness called War … Who killed him? The politicians, the High Command, the merchants and financiers, or who? Christian nations had killed him by being un-Christian. That seemed to be the answer.

Somervell’s view was that the two world wars were simply one prolonged war, with the failure of the Versailles Treaty to curtail German aggression meaning that it reasserted itself during the 1930s. Somervell felt that if Germany had been occupied and stabilised, the horror and madness of the Third Reich could have been contained.

A few miles away, Mallory’s experience as an artillery officer was somewhat different, as he would not have seen as much of the bloody consequence of shelling as would a surgeon. Although the two men’s roles were different, the common experience of the Great War formed a similar outlook and cemented their later friendship.

It is difficult to exaggerate the effect the conflict would have had on those survivors of the Great War. Gas was used on the Somme on 18 July:

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime …

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.