Read Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain Online
Authors: Harriet Tuckey
A few days into the trek, Hunt wrote home that he regretted having had to split the two medical men off from the main party: “It’s a pity we are not all in one party, particularly as I wanted to get to know Mike Ward better, and for ‘Pug’ [Pugh] to settle in with the rest; he is the only peculiar one, and it would be good to let people get used to him and for him to be used to being laughed at.”
13
In his mountaineering bible,
Mountain Craft
, which Hunt had almost certainly read, Geoffrey Young emphasized that having a person in a mountaineering party whom all the others could “laugh with or at” had a beneficial, unifying impact on “the collective good humour” of the group.
14
Hunt consciously seemed to intend this role for Pugh, who, with his absentminded ways and distracted air, was a natural candidate.
Wylie also took the view that laughing at Pugh fulfilled a useful, morale-boosting function: “I liked him yes, very much—I think everybody liked him, loved him, they really did. But they could pull his leg . . . We laughed at him for his absentmindedness. And that was a very good thing that we had somebody on the expedition whom the others could talk about and laugh about.”
15
Hunt’s deliberately jokey stance toward Pugh was evident in his description of the moment halfway through the trek, when he and Hillary left the lead convoy and went to check on how the second convoy was faring, only to discover that “there had been sacrifices to science” in the latter. Hunt and Hillary left immediately, to avoid getting roped in.
Pugh had taken baseline measurements—blood samples, body weights, pulse rates, and the like—from all the team and most of the Sherpas in Kathmandu. Now he and Ward had begun doing exercise tests to measure the changes in their maximum exercise rates as they gradually acclimatized and grew fitter.
16
Far from finding them burdensome, Pugh and Ward thought the tests were improving their fitness, and enjoyed competing with each another.
Betraying not a hint that it was experiments like this that had underpinned the entire planning of the expedition, Hunt wrote in a typically jocular tone:
Griff Pugh had subjected the party [actually only himself and Ward] to a fearful ordeal known as the “maximum work test,” which consisted of rushing uphill at best possible speed until the lungs were bursting and then expiring air into an enormous bag until it swelled out like a balloon . . . It was satisfactory to learn that Griff . . . had not spared himself the tortures he inflicted on his guinea-pigs.
17
The outfit Pugh wore for the trek—sky-blue pajamas (which soon became gray), a hat, and an umbrella to shade his fair skin from the sun—was also seen as immensely eccentric and comical. Surprisingly indifferent to the strong sun, Hunt and the other climbers remained impervious to the fact that Pugh’s pajamas were vastly more practical than the shorts they chose to wear, even when they suffered painful sunburn as a result. In an effort to keep cool, Charles Wylie went so far as having his hair cut with “short back and sides.” Pugh was quick to record the painful consequences: “Wiley [
sic
] had the back of his neck shaved halfway up to the crown of his head at Banepa; as a result he has second-degree sunburn, and the back of his head is all swollen and blistered.”
18
Another of Pugh’s practical measures that Hunt treated as a tremendous joke was a huge, lightweight aluminum box weighing only 13 pounds into which Pugh had packed 100 pounds of his physiological equipment. He was exceedingly proud of his weight-efficient box, but Hunt ridiculed it as a “formidable monster,” “a coffin [that provoked] protests and jests on all sides.” Pugh delighted in pointing out that the boxes Hunt was using to transport the expedition’s oxygen weighed more than the equipment carried inside them.
When they were together as a group the climbers often laughed at Pugh, but individually most of them found him very good company. Evans wrote in his diary that Pugh was “[a]musing, vague, irascible and likeable—takes ten times as long as everyone else to get packed—except Tom S[tobart]—5 times as long as me.” His best remark, Evans thought, was: “The thing is to avoid this awful up at 9 (to London, that is) back at 6 life.”
19
Hillary reported that Pugh “kept us amused with his sardonic, absentminded humour.”
20
Noyce enjoyed his “wealth of stories told in the slow academic voice . . . usually ending on a note of startling frivolity.”
21
The second convoy arrived at the small settlement of Thyangboche on March 27. Pugh described this little village, situated at 12,000 feet amidst lush green vegetation, with the dramatic Everest cirque of mountains rising all around, as “the most beautiful place I have ever seen.”
Pugh and Ward had insisted that higher standards of hygiene were essential to avoid ill health. Hunt had therefore placed the camp on a hill above the village, a safe distance from the local population with its endemic infections. Pugh and Ward arrived to find tents already pitched and a scene of industrious unpacking and rearranging of equipment.
Not long after their arrival, tensions flared when the first consignment of oxygen was brought into camp and it emerged that a third of the forty-eight cylinders for the training program were empty, having leaked in transit. Since Hunt had already eliminated Pugh’s fifteen cylinders, some of the oxygen intended for the assault would now have to be given over to training. Thereafter, shortage of oxygen remained an acute worry. Ward described the loss as “a major catastrophe, as it meant that we would not be able to start using oxygen as low down as we had intended.”
22
Pugh saw immediately that if Peter Lloyd had succeeded in persuading Hunt to bring less oxygen they would have had “a grossly inadequate supply.”
The predictable reaction of the climbers was to feel that such oxygen as they had must not be wasted on physiological experiments. “Inevitably,” Pugh noted, “this seriously curtailed the training and the research.”
23
Hunt’s refusal to provide him with his own supply of oxygen had come back to haunt him.
The climbers now embarked on their formal acclimatization program. Pugh had recommended that this should be carried out away from Everest itself, so the team would remain fresh and interested. Hunt split the climbers into three groups and sent them off on five-day acclimatization trips, giving them opportunities to practice using the oxygen equipment and improve their fitness. Each group visited a different area, exploring and climbing some of the unconquered local peaks, which they greatly enjoyed.
One person for whom this period was particularly stressful was Tom Bourdillon. The onus was on him to show that the closed-circuit sets passionately championed by himself and his father really did work. They had toiled for many months to resolve the technical problems; now it was time to find out if they had succeeded.
Pugh stayed mainly at Thyangboche with Stobart, the cameraman. Tall and slim with tousled, sun-bleached hair, Stobart looked much younger than his thirty-nine years. He was rather unfit but exceptionally charming. Charles Evans described him as an “attractive vagabond” who kept everyone amused with thrilling tales of his travels in Antarctica and his adventures photographing wild game in Africa. Recognizing him as a kindred spirit, Pugh had made friends with him in Kathmandu, and the two men had bonded well. Stobart wrote of Pugh that he combined “the two traditional qualities of the professor—clear-sighted intelligence and absentmindedness. . . . He had that sort of speculative curiosity, wonder and originality of thought possessed by all the scientific elite. He never became dull and we never ran out of topics for conversation.”
24
Stobart also liked Pugh’s attitude toward comfort, describing himself and the physiologist as “the most sybaritic members of the team.” Together they undertook their own three-day acclimatization trip, after which they each resumed work at Thyangboche—Stobart with his camera, Pugh taking detailed records from the climbers as they returned from their excursions. He reported to Edholm:
It turns out that each party had camped one or more nights at about 18,000 feet and had worked probably harder than was good for them. However, recovery was quick and I got the impression that there was less trouble with altitude symptoms than last year, even among the “new boys.” Of course there is a good deal of competition between the climbers and they tend to push themselves pretty hard. This applies particularly to John Hunt.
25
At the beginning of the expedition, most of the climbers were still skeptical about oxygen. Charles Evans and Ed Hillary both secretly hoped to have a shot at the summit without it. But attitudes were becoming more positive. Pugh was gratified when they reported finding the oxygen helpful even as low as 19,000 feet.
26
George Lowe was one of many who started out believing that the oxygen could not compensate for the weight of the 35 pounds of equipment. But during his acclimatization trip with Tenzing, when he had been feeling lethargic, off-color, and had a bad headache, breathing oxygen had been a revelation. “We fitted on the mask, checked the bottles and flow rates, connected up and set off . . . adding to our natural intake three litres of oxygen every minute. Instead of puffing and panting I breathed deeply without the feeling of fatigue that one has before being acclimatised.”
27
When he turned up the flow rate to 6 liters a minute: “I felt like running and could climb at sea level pace.”
As they came and went, a few of the climbers agreed to participate in the exercise tests that Hunt and Hillary had studiously avoided on the march-in. When Hillary—always looking to show his mettle—realized the tests could be seen as a measure of his fitness and strength, he threw himself into them. Tenzing and a few other Sherpas also did the tests, but Pugh remarked ruefully that he was unable to persuade the Sherpas to “exert themselves as much as Ed Hillary.”
Hillary was the kind of man who never felt that men walking alongside him were merely keeping pace with him in a companionable way. Instead, he
always
assumed that they were racing him and invariably responded with a “surge of speed” designed to put them in their place. Only once his primacy had been established could normal walking be resumed. His description of Hunt on the Everest march-in is typical:
Hunt drove himself with incredible determination and I always felt he was out to prove himself the physical equal of any member—even though most of us were a good deal younger than himself. I can remember on the third day’s march pounding up the long steep hill from Dologhat and catching up with John and the way he shot ahead, absolutely determined not to be passed—the sort of challenge I could not then resist. I surged past with a burst of speed, cheerfully revelling in the contest, and was astonished to see John’s face white and drawn as he threw every bit of his strength into the effort. There was an impression of desperation because he wasn’t quite fast enough. What was he trying to prove, I wondered?
28
Pugh also noticed that Hunt was so competitive that he often pushed himself almost to the point of compromising his health: “I wonder if he will stand the pace. He always likes to go faster and further and carry more than anyone else, and although he is very strong he gets very exhausted.”
29
In the second phase of the acclimatization period, an advance party consisting of Hillary, Lowe, Westmacott, and Band, plus six Sherpas and thirty-eight porters, went ahead to lay the foundations of the base camp at 17,900 feet and start to form a route up the fearsome Khumbu Icefall. Pugh and Stobart went with them. One of the six major glaciers on the slopes of Everest, the Khumbu Glacier flows gently down the mountain until it arrives at a height of 19,500 feet, where the slope steepens and it tips over the edge and is transformed into a vast waterfall of ice. This tumbling frozen torrent of chaotic jumbled ice-pillars, cliffs, and chasms shifts, groans, and cracks its way downward for 2,000 feet before giving way to a rocky terminal moraine where the base camp was to be established. Finding and preparing a relatively safe route up the dangerous icefall, negotiating the cliffs and visible crevasses, and avoiding the still more treacherous hidden chasms was the first major climbing hurdle the expedition had to overcome.
On the way to the base camp site, some of the low-altitude porters began to suffer from snow blindness. Dark goggles had been provided for the Sherpas but not for them. Pugh’s diary tells how he and Stobart made “improvised goggles for about twenty porters” using cardboard and yellow Perspex, bound together with Stobart’s black photographic tape. The story seems to have improved in Stobart’s memory; the number of goggles multiplied. In his book
Adventurer’s Eye
he recalled: “Soon we had sixty pairs of goggles made and fitted.”
30
The last part of the route was rough, stony, and uneven, and some of the porters slipped under their 60-pound loads. One girl porter fell down with her load pressing her head into the ground, causing the supporting strap to catch around her neck. Pugh went forward to help and was touched that she averted her face as he released her. He supposed that “she was ashamed at having fallen” and did not want him to see who she was. Offered the chance to leave the expedition and go home on full pay, on the grounds that the load was too much for her, she was most indignant. He tried to pay off another girl who was “almost snow blind,” but she too “refused to take the money and insisted on going on.” Several such incidents moved Westmacott to note that Pugh “was very caring.”
Once base camp had been established on the bleak gray stones and boulders of the icefall’s terminal moraine, the vanguard climbers began to pioneer the route upward. George Lowe, who was “on his back with diarrhoea,” was the only climber unable to go with them.
31
Pugh and the cameraman, Stobart, made their own excursion up the icefall. Climbing a third of the way up, constantly threatened by yawning crevasses and tottering ice seracs, “which seemed about to fall on us,” Pugh was gratified that his alpine “glacier technique” was coming back to him.