Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (24 page)

Shortly after the assault plans were announced, Pugh went up to Camp Three for a second time. Setting up his equipment, he did exercise tests on himself, took blood samples, and gathered samples of air from the bottom of the lungs of any willing climbers and Sherpas who were coming and going, transporting supplies up to Camp Four. Hunt had been driving himself relentlessly up and down the Western Cwm. Pugh gave him sleeping oxygen for the first time, which afforded him “a really restful night and pleasant dreams.”
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The preparation of the route up the Lhotse Face was so slow that the atmosphere at Camp Four (advanced base camp) became very tense. Eventually, feeling he could wait no longer, Hunt dispatched the first party of Sherpas with supplies for the South Col up the face before the last part of the steep slope had been climbed, let alone the route prepared. Most of the climbers had assembled at Camp Four by then, including Pugh. It was the highest camp he reached on the expedition because he did not adapt well to the altitude.

Pugh admired Hunt’s decision to press on without delay, regarding it as pivotal to the ultimate success of the expedition. Noyce climbed the Lhotse Face using oxygen and found it very useful: “A taste or breath of metallic new life seemed to slip through the mouth to the lungs, mocking every disadvantage and making life seem good once again.”
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But the Sherpas who accompanied him, carrying loads of about 50 pounds, struggled without it. After stopping for the night at Camp Seven, halfway up the Lhotse Face, only one of the eight Sherpas was willing to continue the next morning.
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He and Noyce went on alone, both using oxygen, and finally made it to the South Col. This was a great breakthrough.

Hunt sent up a second team of Sherpas with additional loads, led by Charles Wylie. But when they arrived at Camp Seven, they too refused to go higher, maintaining they felt too unwell. The camp had now become very crowded. Unless the Sherpas could be persuaded to continue, it would not be possible to establish the assault camp on the South Col. Hunt was so worried about the logjam that he dispatched his two star climbers—whom he had planned to keep fresh for their impending summit attempt—up to Camp Seven in hopes they might convince the Sherpas to resume their climb. Using oxygen, Hillary and Tenzing did the climb and, together with Wylie, succeeded in pressuring the Sherpas to make it to the South Col so the assault camp could at last be established.

But then there were further problems. Only two of the chosen team of elite high-altitude Sherpas were well enough to go above the South Col as planned.
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Pugh thought this was because they had not been given sleeping oxygen, and therefore had difficulty in recuperating from climbing up the Lhotse Face without oxygen. Similarly, if Hillary and Tenzing had made their unscheduled climb up the Lhotse Face
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oxygen, it would have taken an enormous toll on their energy just before their summit attempt. Even with the use of oxygen, Hunt had been reluctant to allow them to undertake the climb; without it, the entire expedition might have stalled on the Lhotse Face.
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Two days later, Bourdillon and Evans made the first attempt on the summit.
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As Pugh had feared, one of their closed-circuit oxygen sets malfunctioned, and they were forced to give up at 28,720 feet, returning to the col completely exhausted, with Bourdillon in a state of collapse.

In his Cho Oyu report Pugh had recommended that the high camp for the open-circuit summit attempt be placed at roughly 28,000 feet. Oxygen and supplies had to be carried up in advance. Hunt was so determined to be at the center of the action that, rather than giving this important job to one of the younger, fitter climbers, he had awarded it to himself. When he announced this, Ward was extremely critical, spitting out his words, journalist James Morris remembered, “with a vehemence that nearly knocked me off my packing case.”
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Ward later told his wife that his main fear was that if Hunt had an accident—which in his view was quite likely, because of his tired, overwrought condition—the expedition would be brought to a halt and might have to be abandoned.

As Bourdillon and Evans set off for the summit, Hunt, ignoring Ward’s strictures, embarked on the 2,000-foot, high-altitude “carry” with Sherpa Namgyal. Both were using open-circuit oxygen—Hunt at 4 liters a minute, the Sherpa at 2. Disaster struck when Hunt’s set malfunctioned, forcing him to stop 700 feet short of the destination.
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He became so exhausted while climbing back down without oxygen that he lost control of his bodily functions, suffered “spasms of collapse,” and was lucky not to have a serious accident. “Gasping and moaning for breath was an experience I’ll never forget,” he confided in his diary. “Self-control vanished . . . never have I been put to such physical strain.”
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Having finally arrived back on the col, Hunt failed to realize the seriousness of his condition and still wanted to remain at the heart of the action. His gait, according to Pugh, “resembled drunkenness,” and he was so debilitated that he had “the voice and appearance of an aged man.”
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Eventually he had to be forced by the younger climbers to give up his place in the assault camp to a fitter man and return to advanced base camp below the Lhotse Face.

Hillary and Tenzing began their two-stage summit assault with open-circuit oxygen on May 28 with Lowe, Gregory, and Sherpa Ang Nyima carrying a second load of oxygen and equipment for the high camp. All five men used open-circuit oxygen. When they picked up the additional loads dumped by Hunt and Namgyal two days earlier, they turned their oxygen up above 4 liters a minute to help them cope with the extra weight. This reduced the amount of oxygen available for the summit assault the next day.

The day’s work complete, Gregory, Lowe, and Ang Nyima returned to the South Col leaving Hillary and Tenzing alone in their high camp. That evening, sheltered by a tent made of the fabric chosen by Pugh, they started up their cooker (made to Pugh’s specifications) and, finding it “worked like a charm,” brewed “large amounts of lemon juice and sugar.” After consuming what Hillary described as a “satisfying meal out of our store of delicacies”—recommended by Pugh—they retired for the night using sleeping oxygen (courtesy of Pugh),
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resting on air mattresses also developed by Pugh.

Throughout the expedition Pugh had continually stressed to the climbers the vital importance of drinking plenty of liquid, even if they did not feel thirsty, and told them to observe how often they urinated, to check if they were getting dehydrated.
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Rising at 4:00 a.m. the next day, Hillary and Tenzing reignited their cooker and drank huge quantities of liquid in a “determined effort to prevent the weaknesses arising from dehydration.”
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Then, having donned their protective clothing (designed by Pugh) and their oxygen sets, they set out for the summit of Everest at 6:30 a.m.
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They dealt with the shortage of oxygen by using an average of 3 (rather than 4) liters a minute. This was an eventuality Pugh had contemplated in the Cho Oyu report. “Unless the efficiency of the oxygen cylinders can be improved,” he had written, “a flow rate of less than 4 liters per minute [might] have to be accepted, at any rate for part of the time.”
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Both men were extremely fit and very well acclimatized, and Pugh regarded them as exceptionally tolerant of oxygen lack.

What happened next on Everest has been described countless times. The route did not prove technically difficult except for a short section near the top, which later became known as the “Hillary Step.” After just five hours, Hillary, quickly followed by Tenzing, stepped onto the summit of Mount Everest and made history. On reaching the summit, Hillary found he had “no choice but to urinate on it.”

Two days before the final summit assault, Pugh, who had been up at Camp Four with the rest of the team for the previous two weeks, went down to base camp where he spent an evening “drinking and talking” with James Morris, who wrote afterwards:

On the evening of the 28th [he probably meant May 27] I had as my companion at base camp, Pugh, the physiologist, and we sat late beside the fire drinking and talking, while he puffed at an odd angular French pipe. I always enjoyed his company. He was full of peculiar knowledge and passed it on at surprising moments in a hesitating, slow spoken, pipe puffing manner; as if some gentle country parson, settling down for a quiet scriptural chat with his parishioners, were suddenly to present some theories about Kafka, the dipping hem line, or space travel. That night, I remember, we did in fact discuss religion, or at least those activities such as Yoga and Moral Rearmament, which leap and linger around the fringes of it.
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Morris was frightened that press competitors might infiltrate the base camp and steal his story, and was loath to leave his position next to the radio transmitter. Pugh disagreed. “I think you’re wrong,” he told Morris. “I think you ought to be up in the Cwm when they come back from the assault. What if somebody does arrive here? You’ll be bringing the news down yourself, so they can hardly get hold of it before you do.”

They set off together the next morning. On the way up, an avalanche rolled by on a parallel course. They threw themselves onto the ground but it swept past them “imperiously,” without touching them. Spending the night at Camp Three, they went on up to Camp Four the next morning, arriving at 11:30 a.m.

The conquest of Everest on May 29, 1953, was a triumph for every member of the Everest team, most of all for the leader and the two men who first stepped onto the summit. But for Pugh in particular, it was a truly magnificent personal achievement, a validation of his ideas and his indefatigable work before the expedition. Yet his Everest diary contains only the deadpan words—“2pm, Hillary and Tenzing arrive back”—then ceases altogether. He immediately became completely preoccupied with examining the climbers and Sherpas as they came down from the South Col. All proved to be in “surprisingly good condition,” including Hillary and Tenzing, who had no trace of frostbite and were in far better health than any previous Everest summit-assault pair.

15

A Gulf of Mutual Incomprehension

“Griff, this was a damn boring expedition; nothing went wrong,” Tom Stobart remarked to Pugh as they retreated down the mountain together after the Everest conquest.
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Stobart’s initial delight at the successful ascent had swiftly been replaced by a consuming worry that his film of the expedition would not prove up to scratch. There had been no “desperate ventures” of the kind that made good images; the climbers looked such “ordinary fellows”—hardly the heroes of successful film drama.

“Don’t worry,” Pugh replied. “You’ll see—the myth will grow.”

John Hunt had wept for joy at the news of Hillary and Tenzing’s triumphant climb, but Stobart was not alone in having mixed feelings. “Our first feelings in success,” Michael Ward wrote, “were those of relief. No member of the party was particularly elated.”
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“Don’t imagine our band . . . rolling and rollicking in an ecstasy brought on by victory,” George Lowe told his family.
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In his diary Tom Bourdillon had written, nobly, “Hillary and Tenzing have made it. Very pleasing.” But then he confessed to being beset by regrets. If only he had managed his own summit attempt a little differently: “I could have done it—very miserable.”
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Wilf Noyce, who was up on the South Col while Hillary and Tenzing were climbing to the summit, was unable to suppress his disappointment that there would be no third summit attempt in which he might have participated. Earlier, at advanced base camp, he had reacted angrily to the sight of Griffith Pugh experimenting and, in his view, wasting “a precious oxygen cylinder” that might be needed for that third attempt.
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Pugh had seized the moment, while the assaults were taking place and the rest of the climbers were waiting around, to put Stobart and Band through a series of exercise tests with and without oxygen.

Irritated though he was, Noyce was generous enough to acknowledge that he owed a debt of gratitude to Griff Pugh. The main reason he was able to entertain such ambitious thoughts at the rarefied height of the South Col was because “my body was plastered with the aids of modern science and technology . . . On the South Col I was breathing and appreciating and even feeling a certain inspiration—because I was wearing an oxygen mask and my feet were encased in special boots. Without the mask, away goes the enjoyment . . . I was feeling well partly because I had been told [by Pugh] to drink some six pints of liquid a day.”
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Pugh himself had been extremely busy since Bourdillon and Evans had returned to advanced base camp after the first summit attempt. The Swiss had warned him in 1952 that discrepancies had emerged between the stories told on the spot by their climbers and the accounts they gave later at home. So he had been making strenuous efforts to examine the climbers and Sherpas as soon as they came off the Lhotse Face, questioning them closely about their experiences. He was interested in every detail: how well they slept, what they ate and drank for breakfast, how much oxygen they used, and how they felt at each stage of the climb. All the men were tired and thin, but they were far healthier and much less exhausted than the climbers of prewar expeditions, or, indeed, the Swiss, who had come off the mountain as haggard, ghostly shadows of their former selves.

In some ways the success of the expedition was a disappointment even for Pugh, who had been unable to carry out as much research as he would have liked: “The scope of the physiological work accomplished was . . . limited by the fact that the expedition met with no setbacks, and members of the party were usually too fully occupied in other directions to concern themselves with the physiological experiments. On all occasions, however, they collaborated as far as could reasonably be expected.”
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