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

Cover

Title Page

Preface

Prologue

1 Start of an Obsession

2 Getting the Measure of the Mountain

3 Renaissance Men

4 Galahad of Everest

5 The Reconnaissance of 1921

6 The Expedition of 1922

7 1922, and the First Attempt to Climb Mount Everest

8 ‘No trace can be found, given up hope …’

9 A Pilgrim’s Progress

10 John Hoyland and a New Clue

11 I First Set Eyes on Mount Everest

12 High Mountains, Cold Seas

13 The Finding of Mallory’s Body

14 When Did Everest Get So Easy?

15 Why Do You Climb?

16 What Does Mount Everest Mean?

17 The Theorists and Their Theories

18 Wearing Some Old Clothes

19 Perfect Weather for the Job

20 Utterly Impregnable

21 What Was in His Mind?

22 Weighing the Evidence

23 The Last Hours

Postscript: Goodbye to Everest

Chronology

Notes

Credits

Acknowledgements

Picture Section

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface

Mount Everest has been my arena. I have spent over two years of my life on the mountain, returning there again and again. I am drawn back because I see there the extremes of human experience played out in the most dramatic surroundings: greed and betrayal, loyalty and courage, endurance and defeat. It is a moral crucible in which we are tested, and usually found wanting. It has cost me my marriage, my home and half my possessions. Twice Everest has nearly killed me. But I find it utterly addictive. And so did George Mallory.

This volume is going to add to the vast pile of books about Mount Everest, a pile that must now must be higher than the mountain. I make no apology for this, for I think I have finally solved the mystery of what happened there on 8 June 1924, when Mallory and his young companion Sandy Irvine disappeared into clouds, climbing strongly towards the top.

My family had a unique relationship with Everest, and this helped me to climb the mountain and to find clues to what happened to Mallory, its most famous opponent. I spent a long time looking for his body, and then I spent a long time trying to prove that he climbed his nemesis before it killed him.

This is going to be a personal story, a detective thriller, a biography and a history book.

I hope it will set the record straight about how Mallory was found. It is about other things, too, such as why we believe in gods and mountains.

Most of all, though, it is about my life-long hunt for an answer to the greatest mystery in mountaineering: who first climbed Mount Everest?

Prologue

Dawn broke fine on that fatal day. A couple of thousand feet above the tiny canvas tent the summit of the world’s highest mountain stood impassively, waiting for someone to have the courage to approach.

Inside the ice-crusted shelter, two forms lay as still as death. Then there was a groan, a stirring, and eventually the slow scratch of match against sandpaper. Low voices shared the high-altitude agonies of waking, the heating of water and the struggle with frozen boots.

As the sun rose through wisps of cloud beyond the Tibetan hills to the east, one of the men emerged through the tent flaps. It was a fine morning for the attempt, with only a few clouds in the sky. The two of them stood for a while, shuffling their feet and blowing into their hands. Inside the tent lay a mess of sleeping bags and food. The men lifted oxygen sets onto their backs, then turned towards the mountain and stamped off into history.

Seventy years later, above the Hillary Step on the other side of the mountain, I was teetering along the narrow icy summit ridge between Nepal and Tibet, between life and death. The sun was intensely bright and the sky was that deep blue-black of very high altitudes. All around were the icy fins of the world’s highest mountains. And somewhere along that ridge I experienced one of those existential moments that gives you the reason for gambling with your life. The intenseness of the now, the sharp savour of living wholly in the present moment: no past, no worries. The chop of the ice axe, the crunch of the crampons, the hiss of breath – this is the very essence of life. Eventually I saw a couple of figures just above me, a couple of steps … and I was there.

I can’t remember much. Now it all seems a sort of vivid dream: bright sunlight, a tearing wind, a long flag of ice particles flying downwind of us. A vast drop of two miles into Tibet. We could see across a hundred miles of tightly packed peaks, and we could see the curvature of the earth. Contorted faces shouting soundlessly, lips blue with oxygen starvation. Doctors prove with blood samples that climbers are in the process of dying up there on the summit, but I would say that is where I started to live.

As I stumbled down the mountain one thought kept recurring to me. If I, a very average climber, could stand on this summit, how could the legendary George Mallory have failed to do so?

1

Start of an Obsession

Mountaineering is in my blood. My father started taking me out into the hills of Arran when I was five, and I can still remember the moment when we scrambled to the top of the island’s highest mountain. I saw the sea laid out almost three thousand feet beneath us like a polished steel floor. Down there was Brodick Bay, with the ferry steaming in from the mainland like a toy boat.

Climbing was filled with sensation: the sheer agony of panting up steep slopes in the summer sun, the sharp smell of my father’s sweat as we lay resting in the heather, the hard coldness of a swim in the burn. Then the gritty feel of the granite under your fingers, and the blast of wind in your face as you breasted the summit.

It must have been a double-edged pleasure for my father, though. His brother, John Hoyland had been killed on Mont Blanc in 1934. Jack Longland, a famous climber of the day who was on the 1933 Everest expedition, described John as ‘potentially the best mountaineer of his generation … there was no young English climber since George Mallory of whom it seemed safe to expect so much’.1

John had hoped to go on the next expedition to Everest, but his death at the age of nineteen had put paid to those hopes. Even I could feel the loss at thirty years’ distance.

My father told me about another climbing hero in our family, a man who had been close to the summit of Mount Everest in 1924. He called him ‘Uncle Hunch’, and Dad said that one day I would meet him. He said he’d been a close friend of George Mallory, and again that name was mentioned. Mallory, the paragon of climbers. My young mind took it all in.

I lived and dreamed mountains on those summer holidays. To me Goat Fell, the highest of the Arran hills, looked uncannily like Mount Everest when viewed from the south; indeed it does to me even now. And it is almost exactly a tenth of Everest’s height. I remember cricking my neck back and back on the Strabane shore and trying to count out ten Goat Fells standing on top of each other. I couldn’t imagine anything so impossibly vast. How could anyone climb so high?

Eventually, when I was 13 and he was 81, I met Uncle Hunch.

We were at the memorial service of my great-aunt Dolly, who was one of the Quaker Cadburys. She was wealthy and lived in a large country mansion. I remember her house had a wide, open, red-carpeted spiral staircase for the family, inside of which was an enclosed stone staircase for the servants. I would race up the outer stairs past glass-cased model steam engines and then clatter down the inner, hidden stairs. We, the poor relations, used to receive a huge box of Cadbury’s chocolates every Christmas from Aunt Dolly, and I was particularly fond of her for her gentleness and the P. G. Wodehouse books she used to pass on to me.

Her death was a shame, I thought, a further distancing from a more romantic past. But oddly enough, I was about to be more firmly connected with that past.

I remember standing on the lawn outside Verlands and looking up at Uncle Hunch – the legendary Howard Somervell, who was actually a cousin, not an uncle.

He really was an extraordinarily gifted man: a double first at Cambridge, a talented artist (his pictures of Everest are still on the walls of the Alpine Club) and an accomplished musician (he transcribed the music he heard in Tibet into Western notation). He served as an army surgeon during the First World War and was one of the foremost alpinists of the day when he was invited to join the 1922 Mount Everest expedition. He took part in the first serious attempt to climb the mountain, and his oxygen-free height record stood for over 50 years. General C. G. Bruce, the expedition leader, described his strength on the mountain: ‘Stands by himself … an extraordinary capacity for going day after day.’2

Furthermore, the great explorer Sir Francis Younghusband said that of all the Everest men he met he liked Somervell the best.3

At that stage in my life I knew nothing about this, I was only interested in the incredible story he was telling me. He was a stout old man by then, with the slight stoop that gave him his family name, but his voice still contained the excitement of his twenties youth.

‘Norton and I had a last-ditch attempt to climb Mount Everest, and we got higher than any man had ever been before. I really couldn’t breathe properly and on the way down my throat blocked up completely. I sat down to die, but as one last try I pressed my chest hard’ – and here the old man pushed his chest to demonstrate to his fascinated audience – ‘and up came the blockage. We got down safely. We met Mallory at the North Col on his way up. He said to me that he had forgotten his camera, and I lent him mine. So, if my camera was ever found,’ said Uncle Hunch to me, ‘you could prove that Mallory got to the top.’ It was a throw-away comment that he probably had made a hundred times in the course of telling this story, but this time it found its mark.

Gripped by Uncle Hunch’s story, I discussed it endlessly with my father. The mystery seemed simple enough. Mallory and his young companion Sandy Irvine, on their desperate last attempt to climb Mount Everest in 1924, had just disappeared into the clouds. No one knew whether they had succeeded or not. When a British expedition finally got two men to the top in 1953 they looked for signs of the pair but found nothing. The only way of proving their success would be to find Somervell’s camera on a dead body, develop the film and discover a photograph of them on the summit. The story of Mallory and Irvine gripped my imagination. I read all the climbing books I could lay my hands on, and dreamed of being a mountaineer.

I had an idyllic boyhood in some ways. We were living in Rutland then, a rural part of England where rolling hills modulate into the flat lands of the Fens. This, the smallest of all the counties, is a secret Cotswolds of golden limestone villages, Collyweston stone slate roofs and fine churches. Our home was an archetypal English village, with a beautiful squire’s hall, a spired church and a huge vicarage dominating a cluster of alms cottages, pubs and farm houses. I went to a Victorian primary school that taught Victorian religion.

My brother Denys and I once scrambled on to the church roof in an attempt to climb the steeple with its conveniently placed stone croquets, intricately carved ornamental bosses about four feet apart. The reason for our climb was a village legend that a drinker in the Boot and Shoe public house had one evening wagered that he could shin up the slender steeple and bring down the weathercock from the very top. He had done so, and had then returned it to its place. The thought of climbing to that ultimate stone point, up there in the pale moonlight, filled me with excitement and dread. We had to try! After getting up a drainpipe in a corner we crossed the lead roof and started up the square tower on the east side. About ten feet up I grasped a stone corbel – and it came off in my hand. We hastily rammed it back into place. The climb was over.

Years later I found out that George Mallory had climbed the roof of his father’s parish church in Cheshire in a very similar way. Boys will be boys.

This idyll ended when I was sent to a local public school. The headmaster was an ex-Guards officer and, like Mallory, I was drafted into the Officer Training Corps as soon as I could polish a pair of boots. I got into trouble because my army boot toe-caps were scuffed by the Scottish heather.

Denys and my father had started taking me out climbing in the summer holidays on the Isle of Arran around the time we moved to Rutland. George Mallory went to Arran in August 1917 to climb with his friend David Pye and test a healing ankle. It was the first time he had walked in the Scottish hills and he enjoyed it:

The mountains themselves are so lovely, and when one gets high … the view of the islands and peninsulas in these parts is like being in some enchanting country – nothing I have seen beats it for colour.4

He stayed in Corrie, a small village on the east coast of the island, from which some of my ancestors came. My Scottish mother was brought up on Arran, and our family decamped to the island every summer holiday to stay with my grandmother. We didn’t live in the Front House, her solid sandstone terraced house in Brodick, but camped in the Back, a tiny, two-roomed cottage with wooden cabins behind it in another, recessive Back. Grandmother came with us, as well. From here, in an atmosphere of paraffin lamps and the smell of damp, come my oldest memories of the island.

The reason for my grandmother’s seasonal move was to make room for ‘the Folk’. Nearly everyone in Arran seemed to let their houses to holiday-makers from Glasgow. Lying in a dominant position in the Firth of Clyde made the island an attractive holiday destination from the late 19th century, but somehow its very popularity blinds people to the fact that it is one of the real gems of the British Isles.

The Scottish poet Robert Burns seemed indifferent to Arran, too. He must have seen its hills from the inland Ayrshire farms where he spent his youth, but he fails to mention the island in any of his writings. I became curious about this: could it be that a love of mountain beauty was just not fashionable in his time and place? Today Burns’s omission seems unaccountable; arriving at the dismal town of Ardrossan to catch the ferry it’s hard not to be impressed by the view across 14 miles of sea – if it is not raining. Then you might just see a dirty, grey smudge. But on a clear day, the island floats there in all her glory.

Arran is ancient. It was an island before the mainland of Britain parted company with Europe, and the mountains here were once as high as the Himalayas, which are youngsters by comparison at only 55 million years old. Now Goat Fell has worn down to just under 3,000ft, and so it is not even big enough to qualify as a Munro, a Scottish mountain over that height. This serves to point out the absurdity of a system based on size.

2

Getting the Measure of the Mountain

As a schoolboy I had become curious about how the height of Mount Everest was calculated. You could hardly bore a hole in the summit and drop a tape measure from the top until you hit the bottom. So how was it done? I found the answer in Aunt Dolly’s 1920s Encyclopaedia Britannica, and I found it even more amazing than the story of the attempts to climb the mountain.

The British in the 19th century were fascinated by exploring their world, measuring its features and naming them. They were making an inventory of their empire, but perhaps they were also trying to make sense of a planet of rock and sea whirling through the universe. They were particularly captivated by India. My missionary grandfather and his medical cousin Somervell – and I in turn – all fell in love with the sub-continent, and my father was born in Nagpur. India is a great, exotic, bohemian mother of our imagination, and the England of my childhood seems a pale reflection of her culture and peoples.

The Great Trigonometrical Survey was commissioned by the East India Company to survey all their lands in the sub-continent. The survey started in 1802, and it was initially estimated it would take just five years to complete the work. In the end, it took more than sixty years, and cost the Company a fortune.

Imaginary triangles were to be drawn all over India, starting at the southern end and eventually reaching the Himalayas over 1,500 miles away. A great arc of 20° would be drawn along the earth’s surface. This would also establish how much the earth flattened towards the poles. The measurements had to be extremely accurate otherwise errors would build up by the time they reached the Himalayas.

The precision the surveyors attained was remarkable. A baseline between two points visible to each other about seven miles apart would be carefully measured with 100ft chains. Later, special metal bars that compensated for the expansion due to temperature were used. If there was a village in the way it would be moved, and 50ft masonry towers were built at the end of the baseline if there wasn’t a convenient hill available. Then a huge brass theodolite would be hoisted to the top of the tower, and the exact angle between the baseline and the sightline to a third point would be measured. Sightings were made using mirrors to flash sunshine at far-distant colleagues, and blue lights were used at night if the heat of the day caused refraction.

A triangle was thus formed and, as every schoolchild knows, if the length of the baseline and the two angles are known, the length of the other two sides can be worked out. This meant that surveyors didn’t have to measure them on the ground.

The height of a mountain was calculated by measuring its angle of elevation from several different places, drawing vertical imaginary triangles this time. This was important, as it meant that the surveyors could now work out the height of distant unclimbed mountains in an inaccessible country.

A typical expedition employed four elephants for the surveyors and 30 horses for the military officers – both groups wishing to avoid encounters with tigers – and more than 40 camels for the equipment. The 700 accompanying labourers travelled on foot and clearly had to take their chance with the tigers.

The survey was begun in the southernmost point of the sub-continent, at Cape Cormorin, very close to where Somervell’s hospital at Neyyoor would later be built.

Begun by Major William Lambton, the survey was supervised for most of its extent by Colonel George Everest, a man noted for his exacting accuracy. When he took over the job the survey equipment used by Lambton was worn out. There was the great brass 36-inch theodolite made in London by Cary, weighing 1,000lb (which had been accidentally dropped a couple of times), a Ramsden 100ft chain that hadn’t been calibrated in 25 years, a zenith sector also by Jesse Ramsden, now with a worn micrometer screw, and a chronometer. These were all repaired by an instrument maker brought in from London, and Everest pressed on with his life’s work.

Ill-health, the bane of many a Briton in India, eventually caught up with Everest, and so Andrew Waugh had to finish off the job. Interestingly, he re-measured the Bidar baseline with the special Colby compensating bars. The error after 425 miles and 85 triangles was only 4 inches in a line length of 41,578ft.

What is not generally acknowledged is that the surveyors often became rich. Knowledge of the terrain was clearly useful. The Chamrette dynasty of surveyors – grandfather, father and son – owned over 1,800 acres, and George Everest bought 600 acres of land near Dehra Dun. The British Empire became wealthy, too, with the possession of this fabulous land. If I were an Indian citizen reading this now I would be feeling fairly angry. The only (poor) defence is that other nations were also playing the Great Game in the region, and partly what drove the British Empire to survey its borders was fear of invasion from the Russian Empire.

Eventually this great endeavour reached the border with Nepal, a land that was forbidden to the British. The surveyors focused their instruments on the far Himalayas, drew their triangles and measured 79 of the highest mountains, including K2 and Kangchenjunga. Eventually they computed in 1854 that the most lofty was a mountain on the remote border between Nepal and Tibet. They had to allow for the gravitational pull of the Himalayan range (which will even distort the surface of a puddle), the refraction of the atmosphere and a number of other variables, and it is a wonder to me that they got the height so close: 29,002ft. It took over 150 years to pin down a more accurate result, although still no one agrees on exactly how high the mountain is. All measurements are now made in metric units, and China insists that the measurement should be made up to the topmost rock, at 8,844m (29,015ft), whereas Nepal measures to the top of the overlying snow-cap, at 8,848m (29,028ft). The US National Geographic Society measurement using satellites came to 8,850m (29,035ft) – a difference of 33ft from the original Great Trigonometrical Survey result, or around 0.1 per cent error. Not bad, considering the pioneers were using telescopes and brass theodolites, aimed from across the border.

The first scrawl on the map announcing Mount Everest styled it as ‘Peak B’, then ‘Peak XV’, somewhat in the manner of K2 in the Karakorum, which after a brief existence as Mount Godwin-Austen reverted to its surveyor’s notation. There has been much debate about the name of Mount Everest. Traditionally, British surveyors always tried to use the local name for geographical features. This was an honourable intention, as otherwise the world’s maps would be plastered with the names of British dignitaries. In Mount Everest’s case, however, they found that there were several possible local names. The Swedish explorer Sven Hedin claimed that it was called Tchoumou Lancma, and said that the name had been recorded by French Jesuit priests who had been in China in the 18th century. When spelled as Chomolungma, the name has been fancifully translated by imaginative writers as ‘Goddess Mother of the World’, but this has little connection with the truth. Charles Bell, who knew a thing or two about Tibetan culture, insisted that the local name was Chamalung. David Macdonald, the trade agent who dealt with the early Everest expeditions, claimed the mountain was called Miti Guti Chapu Longnga, which translates rather more convincingly as ‘the mountain whose summit no one can see from close-up [true only from the south], but can be seen from the far distance, and which is so high that birds go blind when they fly over the summit’. I rather like this name, except that my companion on the summit in 1993 saw an alpine chough fly right over us. It didn’t appear to go blind. This name would also make all the innumerable books about the mountain even longer. In the end, though, the British chose the name of the former Surveyor-General Sir George Everest.