Mountains of the Mind (39 page)

As they draw nearer the mountain, Mallory starts to get excited. He is ‘eager for the great events to begin’. They pitch camp at Rongbuk on 29 April, and almost immediately things start to go wrong. A blizzard – the blizzard they didn’t meet in the badlands on the way in – tears into the Base Camp. The air is furious with snow. The temperature plunges to a depth almost too low for the thermometers to record. The plan this year is even more complex and multi-cogged than the effort of two years earlier. There are more camps, more porters, more equipment. This would have been fine in
good weather, but the pitiless turn in the temperature – it drops as low as fifty degrees of frost at night – has made epic even the simplest segment of the operation, the ascent of the East Rongbuk glacier. The blue surface ice on the glacier is the texture of glass and the hardness of diamond. It is difficult to walk on in hob-nailed boots, and practically impossible for the porters in their slipshod shoes. But still the expedition battles on, everybody deteriorating by the day. Reaching Camp III, the camp below the North Col, Mallory finds the dud oxygen cylinders from 1922, piled against the rough cairn they had built to commemorate the seven dead Sherpas. The whole place has changed less than he can believe possible: the cold and the altitude have done their preservative work, stopping time in its tracks. Nothing ages up here; the snow just configures and reconfigures itself, drifts up against the cairn and melts away. There is nothing to tell the time by.

The weather at Camp III is unremittingly hostile, and for a day they are confined to their tiny tents. The snow gets in everywhere, whirled in by the wind, a fine powder which settles on every surface. As comfort and consolation Mallory, Irvine, Somervell and Odell – those four men up there in their tiny shelters, perched precariously on the shoulder of their mountain, enveloped in a blizzard, separated from the nearest sea by a desert and a jungle, and separated from Britain by four more seas – read poetry to each other from Robert Bridges’s anthology
The Spirit of Man
. They find solace in Coleridge’s
Kubla Khan
– with its ‘sunny pleasure dome’, its ‘caves of ice’ – in Thomas Gray’s famous elegy, in Shelley’s poem ‘Mont Blanc’, and in Emily Brontë’s mournful lyrics (‘I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading – / Where the wild wind blows on the mountainside’). On their mountainside the snow continues to fall, and it clumps on the outside of the tent, muffling the sounds they make. After a fitful night, Mallory wakes to find himself mired in two inches of snow. Twitching back the tent door, he can see cyclones of
ice crystals, gyring and twisting in the air. And beyond them just whiteness: whiteness and the scream of the wild wind.

There is no option but to pull out. Every day spent up high, under such conditions, is at a cost to their bodies. The climbers and the porters retreat right back to Base Camp. Fifty porters have deserted, slipped away into the storm and back to their families and their farms at lower levels. A hospital is set up at Base Camp, and the injuries inflicted by the cold are treated. Frostbite, snow-blindness and hypothermia are ubiquitous. One Tibetan porter dies from a brain clot induced by the altitude. Another has to have his boots cut off because his legs are in so much pain, only to reveal that his feet are darkly purpled with frostbite up to his ankles, as though he has stood in ink. This porter dies too.

Mallory, miraculously, has remained fit, and he chafes at the delay. He wants to be up there, getting the job done. ‘The retreat is only a temporary setback,’ he declares in a letter. ‘Action is only suspended. The issue must shortly be decided. The next time we walk up the Rongbuk Glacier will be the last.’

Around the pale boulders and among the stores boxes at Base Camp stride glossy ravens, opportunists who have come to try their luck while everything is in such disarray. They tilt their heads inquisitively, or hop about with both feet together, like long-jumpers, or sit in black-cloaked quorums. Fat pigeons, too, and the odd mountain sheep, come to investigate. Everest itself, when it is visible, is, as Mallory puts it, ‘smoking hard’: the plume of ice streams out from its summit, proving the force of the wind.

For a week they recoup and gather their strength at Base Camp. Then there is a break in the weather, and Mallory, Somervell and Norton push back up to the North Col. But the blizzards enfold them again, and the temperature drops to −24°F. They are driven back down once more to Camp II. More porters are injured by the cold, and the climbers are starting to suffer psychologically as well as
physically. Even Mallory is no longer as optimistic. ‘Dear Girl,’ he writes to Ruth on 27 May, ‘this has been a bad time altogether – I look back on tremendous efforts & exhaustions & dismal looking out of a tent door on to a world of snow and vanishing hopes – & yet, & yet, & yet there have been a good many things to set on the other side.’

And then, as if to reward his refusal to despair absolutely, there is a window in the weather. The wind drops, and there is sunshine. This is it. Mallory writes a penultimate letter to Ruth, telling her that they will make the bid. ‘The candle is burning out & I must stop. Darling I wish you the best I can – that your anxiety will be at an end before you get this – with the best news, which will also be the quickest.’

The col is reached, and camps are set higher up the ridge. As arranged, the first proper attempt is made by the climbing pair of Somervell and Norton, without oxygen. They make good progress, keeping just off the brink of the ridge, where they are out of the wind, but where the terrain is more difficult. It is, writes Norton afterwards, like climbing up giant overlapping roof tiles. There is nothing to grip on to; everything is trying to shuck you off. Somervell has to stop, but Norton presses on to 28,000 feet before he realizes that he will die if he does not turn back. Precariously he descends the slabs, and meets Somervell. They descend together back towards the col, with Norton perhaps twenty yards ahead of Somervell. Suddenly Somervell coughs hard, agonizingly hard, and feels something from inside him, some object, detach itself and jam in his throat. He begins to choke to death. He cannot breathe, nor can he shout to Norton. Norton turns, but thinks that Somervell is hanging back to make a sketch of the mountain. No, he is hanging back to die. He sits down in the snow, and watches Norton walk on away from him. Then – a final effort – he hammers his chest and throat with his clenched fist, and simultaneously
coughs as hard as he can. The thing dislodges itself and jumps into his mouth. He spits it out on to the snow. It is a chunk of his larynx, killed by frostbite.

Somervell and Norton descend to Base Camp, and Irvine and Mallory prepare to leave the North Col. On the morning of 6 June they have a last breakfast of sardines, biscuits and chocolate inside the sagging A-frame tents, and then get out on to the sterile, stamped-down snow of the col to make final preparations for the ascent. Each man has two big silver pods of oxygen strapped to a frame on his back: they look like early Jet-Pack Willys, as though they could just crank a lever and lift off vertically for the summit. They’re wearing thick puttees, mitts and flying-ace goggles with silver rims to protect them from snow-blindness.

They proceed without incident up to Camps V and VI, and early on 8 June they depart for the summit. The air is clear when they begin to climb, but within hours a fine and oddly luminous mist has begun to gather about the mountain. Noel Odell, watching from a vantage point at 26,000 feet on the mountain, sees two black dots moving along the summit ridge. Then the mist closes around them.

Before they leave the mountain, the surviving climbers build a pyramidal cairn of stones. Embedded in it are slates, on which they scratch the names of the twelve men who have died for the mountain during the three expeditions. Nine of the bodies have not been recovered, but no one will forget their resting place, for it is marked by the biggest cenotaph in the world.

The trek back is a grim time. The Great War is only six years gone, and the empty chairs, the extra elbow-room at the dining table, the sense of ghosts – all of this has already been well practised by this generation. But practice makes it no less morbid. Everyone half-expects the hand on the tent flap in the middle of the night, the unexpected return from beyond the pale.

‘The Last to Leave’. Note the memorial cairn in the middle of the foreground ridge. Everest rears up behind, ‘smoking hard’. Photographer Bentley Beetham. © Royal Geographical Society.

At the Mallorys’ home in Cambridge, on the evening of 19 June, a telegraph arrives, composed in the staccato heartlessness of telegraphese. ‘Committee deeply regret receive bad news’, it begins. Ruth gathers up her children and takes them into her bed, and tells them, and they all cry together. For weeks afterwards, Mallory’s letters to her keep arriving – missives from the dead.

Almost as soon as he died, the process began of turning Mallory the man into Mallory the myth. Norman Collie, the Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, sent a telegraph to Base Camp. ‘Heroic
Achievements,’ read his message, ‘all deeply moved by glorious deaths.’
The Times
concurred, running an obituary for Mallory and Irvine which emphasized the fineness of their deaths and professed certainty that ‘they themselves could hardly have chosen a better end’. For Arthur Hinks, the Secretary of the Mount Everest Committee, the deaths were mitigated by ‘the knowledge that they died somewhere higher than any man had ever been before, and it is possible for their relatives to think of them as lying perhaps even at the summit’. Tom Longstaff, the climber who had been on the mountain with Mallory in 1922, picked up on the same idea. ‘Now they’ll never grow old,’ he wrote, ‘and I am very sure they would not change places with any one of us.’

The most astonishing response, however, came from Francis Younghusband. ‘He knew the dangers before him and was prepared to meet them,’ he wrote of Mallory:

It is an extraordinary idea; that Mallory should have chosen to die as an act of artistic formalism. To return thwarted but alive would, implies Younghusband, have been intolerable to him: far more artistic – far more aesthetically pleasing – to succeed, or to die up there. And, certainly, Mallory’s story has a purity of form or plot about it, which has contributed to its survival in the imagination.
It is, structurally, a myth or a legend. Three times the beautiful Mallory – brave Sir Galahad – ventures into the unknown at the risk of his life, leaving behind the woman he loves. Twice he is repelled, and the third time, returning despite his better judgement, he disappears into a cloud of unknowing.

So perhaps Younghusband, for all his brassy rhetoric, was right. Perhaps the pressure felt by Mallory to conform to an archetype – to push on until there was no turning back, to
either
death
or
glory, but not failure – affected his decision-making on that day in June. Everyone is susceptible to this pressure. In ways that are for the most part imperceptible to us, we all bend our lives to fit the templates with which myths and archetypes provide us. We all tell ourselves stories, and bring our futures into line with those stories, however much we cherish the sense of newness, of originality, about our lives.

The deaths of Mallory and Irvine seemed to almost nobody a waste of life: a fruitless stealing away of a family man, and yet another bright young boy from Oxford, for nothing more meaningful than altitude. Nobody, except the families and friends of the men who had died. The Irvines were devastated. Irvine’s mother would not relinquish the belief that her son might one day arrive home, and for years kept a light on in the porch of their house so he could see the way back. And there was Ruth, of course, whose world had been destroyed. She looked, Mallory’s mother noticed through the haze of her own grief, like ‘a stately lily with its head broken and hanging down’. To Geoffrey Winthrop Young, Ruth wrote despairingly: ‘Oh Geoffrey, if only it hadn’t happened. It so easily might not have …’