Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (39 page)

Soon the entire expedition would be transformed into one long rescue operation. While the assault was happening, Michael Ward, again in the role of doctor, had come up from the Makalu Col to Camp Six to attend to the Sherpa stuck there with a broken ankle. Ward had exhausted himself pioneering the route to the Makalu Col in early May, and his protracted stay on the col doing exercise tests had added to his problems.

Down on the Makalu Col, unaware of the dramatic events near the summit, Leigh Ortenburger and John Harrison began the third assault the following morning. Responding to a message from Ward over the walkie-talkie, asking for Sherpas to carry down the man with the broken ankle, they brought several extra Sherpas with them. When they got to Camp Six, they found Ward completely disoriented, perhaps succumbing to the life-threatening condition of high-altitude cerebral edema, where the brain swells and ceases to function normally. The Sherpas took Ward and the injured man down to the Makalu Col. Ward struggled into camp clinging to the arms of two Sherpas, then passed out and remained unconscious for forty-eight hours.

That same afternoon Annullu arrived down at Camp Six and gave Harrison and Ortenburger the terrible news about Peter Mulgrew. Two Sherpas were immediately sent up with a tent and some oxygen for Mulgrew and Nevison, who had been languishing 500 feet above Camp Six all afternoon, imagining they had been abandoned. On top of Mulgrew’s problems, Nevison, gray-faced and dehydrated, with no stove to melt water to drink, had begun to suffer seriously from the altitude too.

The following morning, while Harrison went down from Camp Six to summon help, Ortenburger and some Sherpas went up to relieve Nevison and set about bringing down the injured Mulgrew. With the utmost difficulty Ortenburger and the Sherpa managed, with the help of oxygen, to convey Mulgrew down to Camp Six, by which time his hands, feet, and parts of his face were severely frostbitten. The next day, crawling, slithering, often unconscious, he was somehow shepherded down to Camp Five on the Makalu Col, where he arrived in a terrible state, ashen-faced and “almost lifeless.”

The situation on the Makalu Col was becoming dire. Some five climbers in various stages of injury and altitude sickness were now dallying at the serious height of 24,400 feet, anoxic, bemused, and aimless, short of food, short of sleeping bags, and failing even to get a Primus stove working, so there was nothing to drink.

Down at Camp Three, physiologist John West was finding it hard to follow precisely what was happening higher up. Despite having only recently come down from the col, the physiological program complete, he now decided to go back up to see if he could help. Rounding up some Sherpas and a supply of rescue oxygen, he donned oxygen equipment himself and set off. Afterward he remembered finding the oxygen “nothing short of miraculous.” “I streamed up the mountain well ahead of the Sherpas who were accompanying me, and if anybody claims that supplementary oxygen is not of great value at high altitude, don’t believe them.”
¹⁹

West was one of the few expedition members who had little or no experience with climbing, but on reaching the Makalu Col he deeply impressed his ailing colleagues with the near-miraculous way in which he handled the situation. As Mike Gill later described the scene, West “swept through Camp 5 like Christ casting the money changers from the Temple.”
²⁰
Michael Ward and the other dazed climbers were brought to their senses, kitted up with oxygen sets, and dispatched down the mountain. Primus stoves were mended and lit, and snow melted for water. After helping one party of climbers down to Camp Three, West returned to the col where he treated the sick Mulgrew and directed operations to evacuate him from the mountain.

Eventually all the climbers and all the Sherpas got off Makalu without loss of life. This was an amazing achievement. The result could have been so much worse. Afterwards all the climbers paid tribute to the extraordinary part played by the non-climber in their midst.

Peter Mulgrew was gravely ill, and the doctors were convinced that his only hope of survival was to get immediate hospital treatment. So they used the radio link with Desmond Doig at the Silver Hut to summon the helicopter, and Mulgrew was flown, together with Ward and the Sherpa with a broken ankle—all watched over by West—to the hospital in Kathmandu. Had Pugh not persuaded Hillary to agree to the radio link and the helicopter, Mulgrew would have had to be carried by stretcher to Kathmandu, a trek that would have taken two weeks.

After the expedition, the climbers and the physiologists alike were left with a general view that those who had spent the winter at high altitude had not proved better able than the new arrivals to withstand the height on Makalu. Of the winter group—Ward, Gill, and Romanes—Ward was the worst affected. Gill and Romanes had had to retreat down the mountain exhausted after only one summit attempt. Three Sherpas had also become altitude-sick, one seriously.

The fresh climbers, Harrison and Ortenburger, seemed more resilient than their winter colleagues, and Ortenburger had felt strong enough to have a second try at the summit. But the other two climbers who suffered catastrophically from the altitude—Hillary and Mulgrew—had both been away for the winter, and had not returned to altitudes above 15,000 feet until mid-March. The same was true for Tom Nevison, who believed that he was suffering high-altitude pulmonary edema when he was stranded high on the mountain with Mulgrew.

Meanwhile, back at Mingbo, 30 miles away, Pugh, Lahiri, and Captain Motwani had rounded off the research program. Pugh confided in his diary, “I am well satisfied with the work we have accomplished.” They left Mingbo in mid-May with fifty porters, heading for Kathmandu. They had no radio on the trek, so apart from Hillary’s stroke, which had happened while they were still at the Silver Hut, they had no idea of the further dramas unfolding on Makalu, only hearing of them from Ward and West when they reached Kathmandu.
²¹
Nor did Pugh realize that he would soon find himself battling to prevent his expedition from being portrayed as a total failure.

24

“Gone to India. Your Dinner’s in the Oven”

Griffith Pugh landed back in London on June 8, 1961, to find only one member of his family at the airport to welcome him—me, his fourteen-year-old daughter. He had been away for nearly ten months.

My mother had been expected back from India six weeks earlier, but instead of coming home she had stayed on to spend more time at the Maharishi’s ashram in Rishikesh. My two elder brothers were away at school—David at a special school in Switzerland, Simon at public school in England. Five-year-old Oliver had been farmed out to cousins in Norfolk. I was the only child at day school at home. The woman my mother had employed to look after me had already moved on to her next job. Responding to a pleading telegram from my mother in India, an ancient family friend, Lady Pleasance McKenna, had stepped in to fill the unscheduled gap.

Doey’s desertion of her family was the talk of our neighborhood. One of our neighbors, the wife of an architect, was so concerned about my father’s plight that she took it upon herself to drive me to the airport to meet him. Although I was delighted to miss school, I was worried about how to greet my father in front of other people. Should I kiss him? How would he react if I did?

My father had been away so often that the nascent difficulties between us had not yet had a chance to blow up into full-scale hostilities. His absence on the Silver Hut expedition had come on top of the three earlier expeditions, which together with his skiing holidays and lecture tours had kept him away from home for much of my youth. I hardly knew him. When he wasn’t away, he was usually deeply preoccupied with his work. Disapprove as he might that I had been expelled—after only a term—from each of the two girls’ boarding schools I had been sent to at the age of thirteen (for refusing to cooperate or carry out punishments), he was too busy and too remote to take much notice, and I had ended up back where I had started, at the local day school, St. George’s in Harpenden. Oliver’s birth in 1955 had stimulated his sense of parenthood, and he had sent me and my brothers the occasional interesting letter from Antarctica and the Silver Hut, but I did not know him well enough to feel familiar in his company.

At the airport, it took me a few seconds even to recognize him. Watching the throngs of people walking out into the arrivals hall, my eye fell on a tall, thin man with shoulder-length light-ginger hair tied back in a straggly ponytail, who seemed familiar. Suddenly I realized it was him. Hair bleached by the Himalayan sun, face surprisingly pale and yellowish, he was dressed in the usual crumpled white shirt and beige trousers.

I do not remember our greeting. What stands out in my memory is that journalists crowded around us and we were ushered away to a room where my father was interviewed, first by the BBC and then by several journalists. Could Dr. Pugh tell them what had happened on Makalu, they asked; would Sir Edmund Hillary make a full recovery? Had the expedition been a terrible failure because of the events on Makalu?

I could see that he was getting agitated. “No,” the expedition was “not a failure,” he insisted. It was true that the climbers had not succeeded in their efforts to climb Makalu without oxygen, but the scientists had accomplished everything they had set out to achieve, and, yes, Hillary had made a complete recovery. The report in
The Times
the following day talked only of Hillary: “The expedition set out to discover how man would react to high altitude without the use of oxygen. During one climb Sir Edmund Hillary collapsed and had a stroke. Asked if this was due to their not taking oxygen equipment, Dr. Pugh said: ‘I would not like to say that at all. We didn’t go particularly high.’”
¹

Pugh was appalled at the reaction of the journalists who had ears only for stories about Hillary and Makalu, ignored Pugh’s assertions that the Silver Hut science was a success, and appeared to be convinced the entire expedition had been a disastrous failure. For the first time in his life, Pugh, the man with “no concept of PR” and “absolutely no concept of pushing himself,” felt a positive duty, as the leader of the scientific team, to try to ensure that his own and his team’s achievements were accurately presented to the public.

Writing at once to the expedition sponsors, Field Enterprises Corporation, he urgently requested permission to hold a press conference at the MRC to publicize the success of the Silver Hut science. He was anxious, he said, to correct “an unfortunate impression in the public mind that the expedition has been a total failure on account of the events on Makalu.”
²
But the sponsors wrote back, forbidding him to take any action until after the publication in the
Sunday Times
of what they described as an “excellent concluding article by Sir Edmund Hillary.”

When Hillary’s article appeared on July 2, it created precisely the impression of overall failure that Pugh had wanted to avoid. Furthermore, Hillary added insult to injury by leaving out Pugh’s name altogether. Sir Edmund had chosen his words carefully to make it seem as if the scientific project was entirely his own. “I had always expected Makalu to be the final testing ground of my acclimatisation theories,” he explained. Deploying that calculatedly disarming modesty for which he was widely admired, he freely admitted, “I was wrong, and my theories have been defeated.”

Allowing the scientists no glory, he laid the blame for his and his team’s failure on Makalu entirely on “the long periods we spent at 19,000 feet before the assault.” The use of the first-person plural ensured that Hillary’s readers would think that he—and Peter Mulgrew, who had suffered the stroke and the thrombosis on Makalu—had undermined their health by spending the winter at altitude. “This had weakened my men and made them easy targets for thrombosis and other high-altitude killers.” In fact, neither Hillary nor Mulgrew had spent a single night in the Silver Hut. These supposed martyrs to the cause of science had left Mingbo in late November, and had only returned to high altitude in the middle of March.

Irritated though he was, Pugh took no action and soon became engrossed in writing up the Silver Hut research results. His young scientific team was eager to get their papers published, and he was under great pressure to work faster than usual.

At home there were just the two of us and Pleasance McKenna. My father said nothing about my mother’s unexpected absence, but in the evenings he retired to the drawing room and sat for hours, listening to records over and over again. The strains of Tito Gobbi singing Scarpia in
Tosca,
Maria Callas singing
Norma
and
Traviata,
floated through the house. Sometimes when I went to call him to supper, I would find him wandering about the garden with the music booming through the window.

In the first few weeks he spent every weekend away, disappearing down the drive in his Austin-Healey convertible, which he had taken great trouble to order before he left for the Himalayas. He spent the weekends with his sisters in various parts of the country, or sailing on our boat, which was kept at Bosham Harbor on the south coast. The boat was a sleek, 98-square-foot Danish racing yacht which he had persuaded my mother to buy in the 1930s, early in their relationship.

About six weeks after his return, Griffith was on his way home from a weekend at Bosham with his friend, the millionaire furniture designer Donald Gomme, when he skidded while dicing with another car in the Sussex lanes, turning over his brand-new car. The vehicle was a write-off, and Griffith, lucky to be alive, was left lying in the road with a fractured hip.

Pleasance McKenna now found herself in a quandary. Already uneasy about my mother’s absence, she did not want to be landed with the responsibility of looking after my father when he came home from the hospital. Together she and Griffith decided to send a telegram worded to guarantee that my mother would rush home at once. The message they concocted read
GRIFFITH INJURED IN SERIOUS ACCIDENT STOP COME HOME IMMEDIATELY.