Mountains of the Mind (38 page)

Mallory and the three others descend to Base Camp, and spend a month recovering there. Four of Mallory’s fingers have been injured by the cold. While he is recuperating, Finch and the young Geoffrey Bruce (cousin of Charles) take oxygen apparatus with them, and make an assisted bid for the summit. They get higher than Mallory’s party, but they too are repelled by the cold. Bruce hobbles back into Base Camp: his feet will take weeks to recover from their frostbite.

The season is getting on, and the monsoon snow has begun to fall. Once again there is talk of calling it a day. Two good attempts have been made, and both have failed. But again it is Mallory, more than anyone, who wants to have another ‘whack’. His finger is not healed, he tells Ruth, ‘and I risk getting a worse frostbite by going up again, but the game is worth a finger & I shall take every conceivable care of both fingers & toes. Once bit twice shy!’ On 3 June he and two other climbers, along with a train of Sherpas, set off for the ‘great battlements of ice on the North Col’. The snowfall has been heavy over the past forty-eight hours, and there is thick windslab lying on hard ice. It is classic avalanche territory. As he leads up the slope, Mallory tests the snow. It seems safe. He leads on.

Not far from the lip of the col, at 1.50 p.m., there is a cracking noise – like ‘an explosion of untamped gunpowder’ – and the snow Mallory is on begins to move. He loses his footing, and is swept a short way downhill before being spat out on to the surface of the snow. He pulls himself clear. There are cries from below him. Nine Sherpas have been swept by a faster torrent of snow over a sixty-foot ice cliff, and down into a crevasse. Two are rescued, amazingly unharmed. The other seven are never found, killed by the fall into the crevasse, or buried alive inside it by tons of snow.

A rough memorial cairn is built for the dead Sherpas at Camp III. Bruce is sanguine about the accident. Nobody’s fault, he says. Nor do the families of the dead men seem interested in blaming anyone: their men died when they were meant to die. But Mallory won’t be consoled. He considers their death his doing. ‘It was not a desperate game, I thought,’ he writes to Ruth, ‘with the plans we made. Perhaps with the habit of dealing with certain kinds of danger one becomes accustomed to measuring some that are best left unmeasured and untried … the three of us were deceived; there wasn’t an inkling of danger among us.’ He is aware, too, of how close he came to dying. ‘It was a wonderful escape for me & we may indeed be
thankful for that together. Dear love when I think what your grief would have been I humbly thank God. I am alive …’

The expedition limps back through Tibet to Darjeeling, wounded and depleted, very much ‘not the jolly company we were’. Morshead and Mallory are in pain from their fingers, Bruce’s toes are not healed, and the soles of Norton’s feet are grey and black with frostbite. And yet the further Mallory gets from the murderous mountain, the more he falls back in love with it. By Darjeeling, the subject of the dead Sherpas has disappeared from his letters. His thoughts are only with Ruth. With Ruth, and with the possibility of the next trip.

29 February 1924
– Liverpool docks this time, and an inauspicious departure. Ruth has come to see Mallory off for what will be, surely, the last time. He stands on deck, leaning over the shining rail, wearing a dark trilby and a fur-collared coat. She is on the quayside waving as the SS
California
is cast off, and he waves back. For several minutes they carry on waving at each other, but the ship does not move. An announcement comes over the loudspeaker system. Out beyond the harbour wall, there is a westerly storm drumming up and the wind is keeping the ship pinned to its moorings. A couple of dirty little tug boats nose round the front and prepare to heave
California
out to sea. Ruth grows tired of waving at a stationary ship and Mallory at a stationary quayside. After a while she just walks away.

Why is he going again? There is now an element of helplessness to it all, an awareness of forces at work which are beyond her control, beyond his. Worse than this, Mallory has a bad feeling about this trip. One of the last things he does before he leaves for India is to pay
a visit to Kathleen Scott, widow of the polar explorer Robert Scott, Britain’s most heroic failure. There are mementos of Scott everywhere in the house: pictures in frames, letters. The absent husband, the fatherless children … It is all too suggestive of what might come to be. Mallory visits her in the company of Geoffrey Winthrop Young. In the taxi on the way back, Mallory tells Young that he believes this year on Everest it will be more like war than adventure, and that this time he does not think he will return alive.

The long voyage begins again. The ship is crowded with a Scottish tour group bound for Egypt and a group of soldiers and their wives. For the first two days they are strafed by the westerly wind, and make heavy weather over the steel-grey sea of the Bay of Biscay. Mallory works out in the gym on board, and admires Sandy Irvine’s magnificent body. Andrew – Sandy – Irvine is a second-year undergraduate from Oxford who had impressed the Everest selectors with his resilience during a trip to Arctic Norway. He is a rowing Blue, but is missing the race this year to take part in the expedition. Mallory likes Irvine a lot; thinks he is ‘one to depend on, for everything perhaps except conversation’. He writes the now habitual first letter back to Ruth, giving an account of the rhythm of life on board, and of his companions. He writes, too, about life after Everest, and assures her that things will get better for them once the mountain has been climbed. Everything seems to divide itself – as it has done for three years now – into before and after Everest.

The voyage is largely unmemorable. Mallory, who has become a celebrity in Britain, is pestered by the Scottish tourists for photographs, signatures and
bons mots
about Everest. He escapes to the bows to read André Maurois’s biography of Shelley, or keeps to his quarters. There is one moment, though – the sort of moment which sends excitement thrilling through him. They approach the Straits of Gibraltar one morning before sunrise and Mallory goes out on deck, as he did three years earlier, to watch them pass through the jaws of land:

That idea of crossing barriers, popping through holes, solving mysteries, in a word, of
exploration
: it exercises the profoundest fascination on Mallory. Everest is for him the greatest unknown, the deepest mystery.

At Port Said the other passengers leave the ship, which is a relief to Mallory. They sail on through the Canal and the Red Sea, and out on to the unusually smooth water of the Indian Ocean. Once more his thoughts turn to Ruth. He imagines the two of them in their silk dressing gowns, going up on deck to breathe the fresh morning air together: ‘Dear girl we give up & miss a terrible lot by trying to do what is right, but we must see we don’t miss too much.’ What is right, Ruth might reply, is for Mallory to stay at home with his wife
and children, and earn a less glamorous, but far safer, living as a lecturer and teacher. But there is a bigger ‘right’ at work here, sunk so deeply inside Mallory that it’s invisible to him – his right to stand on the top of Everest, to be the first man up that matchless mountain.

The train journey across India is even hotter than before, and it is a relief to get up into the tepid air of Darjeeling. Bruce, who is leading the expedition again, joins them there, fresh from a successful tiger hunt near the border with Nepal. They are being put up this year in the Hotel Mount Everest; from his balcony Mallory can see the white and pink magnolias, ‘startlingly bright against the dark hillside’, he tells Ruth, writing a lengthy letter to her on the floridly headed notepaper of the hotel. He writes to her even more passionately and longingly than in previous years, repeating words for emphasis, as if grammar could somehow erase the fact of physical absence, the fact that he has gone away yet again:

On 29 March they begin the trek through Sikkim. The weather is excellent this time, and Mallory feels full of ‘valley-ease, warmth & languor, and the delights of the lotos-eater’. He bathes naked in rock-pools, and surprises ‘a very fine jungle cat’ in a glade – ‘it is extraordinary how it makes the whole forest seem alive to see a beast like that’. The group are getting on famously, perhaps better even than the 1922 Everesters.

The trek to Base Camp on the East Rongbuk glacier takes five weeks this time. It is cold and the wind insistent, but the temperatures are not as low as in 1922. Indeed it is the sun and not the snow which is the chief peril this year. On the deserts near Kampa Dzong everyone’s face gets burnished to the colour of chestnut. Fissures open in Mallory’s lips and cheeks, and he keeps a pot of grease with him to rub into them. He walks with a shepherd’s crook, and grows a goatee beard. Irvine wears his motorcycle helmet and goggles in an unsuccessful attempt to keep out the wind and the sun. Despite the sunburn, Mallory feels fitter than in any previous year, and his guts are holding firm for once. The sense keeps growing in him that there will be closure this time, one way or the other. To Ruth he writes that ‘it is almost unthinkable that I shan’t get to the top; I can’t see myself coming down defeated’. To his friend Tom Longstaff he is even more adamant: ‘We are going to sail to the top this time and God with us – or stamp to the top with our teeth in the wind.’ There are other reasons for feeling good about it all: this year the quail are in
foie gras
, not aspic, and the champagne is vintage – 1915 Montebello.

But there are ominous moments, too. As when, one march short of Kampa, the team arrive at their destination well ahead of their pack animals. Unable to pitch their personal tents, they prop up the green mess tent and lie in its shade, waiting for the baggage to arrive. The white light refracted through the green canvas gives the tableau the glow of an aquarium. One by one they drop off to sleep, except Mallory, to whom, ‘as they lay there snoozing with faces rendered ghastly by the green light’, his team members looked exactly ‘like a collection of corpses’.

The first blow to the expedition is struck on 11 April, when the group arrive at Kampa Dzong. General Bruce is so weakened by the approach march that, worried about his heart, he decides not to continue. Norton is promoted to commander of the expedition, and Mallory is made second-in-command and chief of the climbing
team. It excites him to be in charge, and he quickly draws up what he thinks is a failsafe plan. There will be two summit bids made from Camp IV at the North Col. The first team of two will try without oxygen; the second team of two, which will set off after them, will use oxygen. Mallory puts himself in the oxygen party, and is confident that this will see him to the top.

Crossing the high-altitude gravel deserts en route to Everest. The mountain in the background is Chomulhari. Photographer Bentley Beetham. © Royal Geographical Society.