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

Too many amateurs fail to do good mountain pictures because they don’t draw their mountains. They do capable pine trees and lush green valleys, and behind it they put a mountain without proper dignity, or solidity, or beauty … don’t try to make them steeper than they are in order to be more effective … Simplify the general outlines, almost one might say ‘cubify’ them; let not details however delightful or however significant to the climber, take your eye or your pencil from the right proportions.1 (#litres_trial_promo)

To me he has something of John Sell Cotman’s luminous, almost abstract watercolour style, but without his limpid English light. Before one goes to Tibet, Somervell’s hard-blue skies and orange hills might look harsh, but once one travels through the country it is clear that he painted what he saw. Mallory wrote of him:

His most important activity when we were not on the mountain was sketching. His vast supply of energy, the number of sketches he produced and oil paintings besides, was only less remarkable than the rapidity with which he worked. On May 14th he again walked over the uncrevassed snowfield by himself to the Rapiu La. Later on I joined him, and as far as I could judge, his talent and energy were no less at 21,000 feet than on the wind-swept plains of Tibet.2 (#litres_trial_promo)

That first trip out to India had been a revelation to Howard Somervell, as it is to most of us. In contrast to the 1921 expedition, the members of the 1922 expedition all travelled together, first crossing to France and then taking the train to Marseilles to join the P&O liner SS Caledonia, which departed for Bombay on 3 March. Included in the baggage was a set of steel cylinders.

If there was one helpful word from the future we could whisper to those pioneers it would be ‘oxygen’. The vast majority of successful climbs on Mount Everest today are made using the gas, and now we now know that the attempts made without it faced a nearly impossible task. Next to the Sherpas, it was the second innovation introduced by Kellas that eventually made the mountain climbable. The technology was there; the high-altitude war in the skies above the trenches had led to nearly every aeroplane by 1918 being fitted with a set of cylinders and a mask.

The problem was that although it was viewed as a logical tool by the Enlightenment scientists – and how did it differ, they asked, from polar clothing or Thermos flasks? – its use was regarded as unethical by the Romantic alpinists. There was a similar debate around Scott’s use of dogs to haul sledges, with the conclusion always being drawn that it was more ‘sporting’ to man-haul the sledges.

But a further, more subtle reason existed, I would suggest, to the flinching away from the use of supplementary oxygen. Poison gas during the war had been regarded with particular abhorrence as a cowardly form of warfare. Gas masks were dehumanising in appearance and were a horrific reminder to this group of men who had been so scarred by the war. This could explain the strength of the language used. At the time, Mallory described using oxygen as a ‘damnable heresy’.

Somervell could see both sides of the argument, and was eventually convinced by Professor J. B. S. Haldane, the world authority on the gas, that although the mountain could in theory be climbed without oxygen, its use would ensure success. Somervell wrote to Hinks on 23 January 1922: ‘The only way of being sure of the summit is to take oxygen up.’ He himself resisted using the sets as he went well at altitude without oxygen, and disliked wearing the apparatus. In the end he would set a long-standing record with Norton for the highest point reached without it.

The Mount Everest Committee had decided, far too late in the day, to take oxygen. Finch, who had been rejected in 1921, was the obvious man to choose to look after the apparatus, as he was one of the scientists who had worked with Kellas and Haldane. He also possessed formidable climbing skills on snow and ice. For most of the voyage out to India the expedition members were drilled by him in the use of the oxygen set. ‘I’m amused by Finch and rather enjoy him,’ confided Mallory to Ruth. ‘He’s a fanatical character and doesn’t laugh easily. He greatly enjoys his oxygen classes.’ Mallory would in the end be convinced by the use of oxygen, but not until two years later.

The problem was that the oxygen sets were too heavy and fragile, each bottle weighing 5?lb and the backpack, regulators, pipes, etc. coming in at 9lb. The all-up weight with four cylinders was 32lb, far too heavy a load to carry to the summit in addition to personal kit, drink and food.

The party disembarked on 17 March at Bombay, which Somervell thought was one of the eyesores of the world, the ugliness of West and East conspiring to spoil a lovely harbour. Here the dustiest train in India took them across the sub-continent to Siliguri, where the narrow-gauge steam train still puffs its way 6,000ft up to Darjeeling. (I filmed on this train in 2009 and it is a wonderful real-life Thomas the Tank engine.) In Darjeeling they met General C. G. Bruce, the leader of the expedition and the very same man who had suggested the idea of climbing Everest to Younghusband in 1893, nearly 30 years earlier. He was a jovial character, always ready with a joke and a laugh. As a Gurkha officer he had mastered the language, and with this and his bawdy humour he was popular with the local men. With him was his band of hand-picked Sherpa and Bhotia porters, seven of whom were destined to die that year.

John Noel, who had made the exploratory trip to Sikkim in 1913 and whose lecture had done much to inspire interest in Everest expeditions, was able to accompany them this year in the official role of expedition photographer and cinematographer, and eventually produced a short film, Climbing Mount Everest, released later that year.

Noel had been to school in Switzerland, where he found the teachers unconcerned about his actual presence, so he used to bunk off. ‘I used to go skating in the winter and mountaineering in the summer … I also started becoming dippy on photography.’

By 1922 Noel had combined these interests and decided to pursue expedition photography. He went no fewer than 16 times to London’s Philharmonic Hall to see Herbert Ponting’s exhibition of his photographs of Scott’s South Pole expedition. Ponting had immortalised Scott in the film 90 Degrees South, just as Noel and those of us coming after him have immortalised Mallory. Noel modelled his film equipment on Ponting’s, in the same way that the 1924 high-altitude clothing was modelled on that of the Scott expedition.

He had ?1,000 to spend – a large amount of money then – as the average house in Britain cost ?500. As well as a stills camera he took a Newman Sinclair 35mm cine camera with a couple of special modifications:

It was handmade in duralumin, which is as strong as steel and as light as aluminium; it weighed just 25 pounds. It also had jewel bearings, so like a watch it needed no oil – because Ponting had discovered in intense cold, oil congealed.

The back of the camera was faced with rubber because of the painful discovery by Ponting when he accidentally licked the back of the camera: ‘the tongue had immediately frozen on to the camera and he had to tear the top layer of skin off, freeing it.’ (In 1993 I had a similar experience when my face froze to my oxygen mask on my summit day, and I had to rip it off, taking a large patch of skin with it.)

Noel found that working with cameras on Everest introduced all kinds of unexpected problems. The dry air produced static discharges in the black bag he used for loading the magazines with unexposed film, which led to sparkles appearing on the film. He said the static inside his camel-haired sleeping bag was so powerful he could read his watch by the light if he rubbed hard enough. Drying the film was another problem. He brought a special light-proof tent and had to heat it with dried yak-dung ferried up to the camp by teams of men.

In the event the 1922 film was not a commercial success, but even so, before he returned in 1924 the enterprising Noel bought the rights of all photographic work on the expedition for the huge sum of ?8,000. This paid for the entire trip.

Edward Norton was one of the great finds of that expedition. He had fought throughout the First World War as an artillery officer, like Mallory. ‘Norton is one of the best,’ Mallory wrote to Ruth, ‘extraordinarily keen and active and full of interest and gentle and charming withal.’ He was a natural and inclusive leader of men, and Mallory readily deferred to him when Norton took the expedition leadership over from General Bruce in 1924. Like Odell he had lost a brother in the war; like some of the others he was a naturalist; and like Somervell he was a fine painter.

Morshead had proved so popular on the first expedition and such ‘a stout fellow’ that he had been invited back by General Bruce as a climber on the 1922 trip. As we saw earlier, in 1913 he had explored the Tsangpo Gorge, demonstrating beyond doubt that the Tsangpo and Brahmaputra rivers were one and the same, and thus confirming the work of the pundits Kinthup and Nain Singh. In 1920 he went with Kellas to Kamet, and then performed well on the Everest expeditions. However, this accomplished life came to a bizarre end. He was out riding in Burma one May evening in 1931 when he was murdered: shot dead by his sister’s Pakistani lover. He was only 49.

Somervell loved the forest country of Sikkim, and in After Everest he describes how their cavalcade set off in 1922 with 400 animal-loads and high hopes. This is often the very best part of an expedition, swinging along chatting to your new friends through beautiful country.

Soon, though, they crossed the border into Tibet. Here is Mallory, writing in the periodical Asia:

The sensation of coming up to Tibet from the Chumbi valley, from the country of flowers and butterflies, of streams and meadows, of rich greens on the hillsides and deep blue atmospheres, the regret of leaving all that has delighted the senses and exchanging it in one short march for everything that is dreary is one of the most poignant experiences that I remember.3 (#litres_trial_promo)

Some of the loads were carried by hill-women, whose strength is legendary. They heard of one woman who carried an upright piano from the Tista Valley to Kalimpong – a height difference of 5,000ft – and arrived fresh at the top (I imagine she then sat down and performed ‘Yes, we have no bananas’). Soon they crossed the Jelep La into Tibet and passed Chomolhari, one of the most beautiful peaks in the Himalaya, on their way to Phari, where Somervell was called to treat a rich young Tibetan lady who had broken her arm.

The house was a strange mixture of sumptuousness and neglect; priceless objects of Chinese and Tibetan art jostled with dirty hessian and cracked plaster … Her ladyship was clad in silk brocade, her broken arm wrapped in a brown, treacly mess. I was informed that this was bear’s bile, a cast-iron proof against devils. On removing it, I found beneath, beautifully applied by the local medicine-man, a splint on the principle invented by Gooch a few decades ago in Europe, but used probably for many centuries in Tibet. This curious mixture of periods set aside, the fracture was dealt with in accordance with modern surgical practice, and efficiently splinted – but hardly more efficiently than it had been before. A generous presentation of two carpets and a fine fox-skin ensued, after which the elite of Phari saw me courteously through their magnificent gateway into the filthy street.4 (#litres_trial_promo)

Somervell the musician was also fascinated by the country. Where his companions just heard a discordant cacophony, Somervell would be busy transcribing the music played by Buddhist monks into Western notation. He became excited when he developed the notion that jazz, just then popular in London, appeared to have its roots in Tibetan music.

After a month’s gruelling journey through Tibet the expedition arrived at Rongbuk monastery, where the head lama blessed the Nepalese and Tibetan porters. John Noel saw the subject of his film properly for the first time. I found the following descriptions of his on an obscure BBC recording: