The Lost Explorer (13 page)

By the time the four men made it back to Camp III the next day, Morshead’s fingers had swollen and turned black with frostbite. The men had also become severely dehydrated. Somervell confessed to downing seventeen mugsful of tea; Mallory guessed the man had drunk even more.

T
WO DAYS LATER
, on May 24, George Finch set out on a second attempt, using oxygen. Because of the physical conditions of all the other team members, he had only one choice for partner—the plucky Geoffrey Bruce, who had climbed no real mountains before Everest.

Nonetheless, the two men set out full of optimism, telling each other, “Of course, we shall get to the top.” Finch believed oxygen would make all the difference.

In the end, the pair’s struggle up the north face turned into a fight for their lives. At Camp V, they held on to their tent all night while a gale tried to tear them from the mountainside. They waited out the next day, as the storm dispersed, then, with little food or water left, stretched their sortie into a third day as they headed up. Starting at 6:30
A.M.
, they passed the high point of Mallory, Norton, and Somervell and added 500 feet to the world altitude record. Oxygen
had
made the difference, for, thanks to the storm, Finch and Bruce were far more worn out as
they launched their summit attempt than their four teammates had been on their own thrust on May 20.

The choice to turn around was agonizing for Finch, but it was as canny a decision as Mallory’s had been. As Finch wrote in the expedition book, “I knew that if we were to persist in climbing on, even if only for another 500 feet, we should not both get back alive.” In the end, Bruce’s feet were so badly frostbitten that he had to be sledged part of the way down from the North Col.

Finch and Bruce’s gutsy push not only set the new altitude record, to a certain extent it eclipsed the luster of Norton, Somervell, and Mallory’s brave attempt four days before. And it convinced Mallory for the first time that bottled oxygen, far from a “damnable heresy,” might be the key to climbing Everest.

By June 1, the 1922 expedition had accomplished extraordinary things, reaching 26,500 feet and making known for the first time the secrets of the upper north face. The team had exercised such hubris at the cost of nothing worse than some cases of frostbite (Morshead, the worst afflicted, would lose one toe and six fingertips). Had the expedition now packed up and gone home, as most of its members were inclined to do, the venture would have been hailed in England as a grand success.

But fate was not to let the 1922 party off so easily. As May turned to June, and still the monsoon delayed its arrival, Mallory’s obsession turned his thoughts upward once more. He talked his teammates into a third, last-ditch attempt.

As it was, most of them were too worn down even to make another stab. Finch gamely set out, but, unrecovered from his ordeal of May 24-26, tossed in the towel at Camp I.

On June 7, Mallory, Somervell, and teammate Colin Crawford led fourteen porters up toward the North Col. An abundance of new snow had blanketed the slope, but Mallory found the conditions ideal for step-kicking. As the party neared the crest, Somervell led up a gentle corridor. Wrote Mallory, “We were startled by an ominous sound, sharp, arresting, violent, and yet somehow soft like an explosion of untamped gunpowder. I had never before on a mountain-side heard such a sound; but all of us, I imagine, knew instinctively what it meant.”

From a hundred feet above the party, an avalanche had
broken loose. The three Englishmen, highest on the slope, and the porters nearest them were swept off their feet and knocked a short distance down the slope, but came to rest and dug themselves out. The porters lower on the slope were caught in the avalanche and hurled over a forty- to sixty-foot ice cliff. Their teammates scrambled down the slope and frantically dug in the avalanche debris below the cliff. Six porters were found dead, more likely from the impact of the fall than by smothering under the snow. The body of a seventh was never found.

Overcome with sorrow, the ten survivors stumbled down to Camp III. Mallory was struck by the Sherpas’ forbearance in this tragedy:

The surviving porters who had lost their friends or brothers behaved with dignity, making no noisy parade of the grief they felt. We asked them whether they wished to go up and bring down the bodies for orderly burial. They preferred to leave them where they were.

As the team trudged out from the mountain, Howard Somervell agonized, “Why, oh, why could not one of us Britishers have shared their fate?” The blame for the accident was loaded onto Mallory’s shoulders, not only for pushing the late attempt, but because he had approached the North Col in dubious snow conditions. Tom Longstaff, who had already left Base Camp for home when the accident occurred, was unsparing. “To attempt such a passage in the Himalaya after new snow is idiotic,” he wrote a colleague two months later.

In the expedition narrative, Mallory painfully retraced his party’s steps toward the disaster, wondering out loud whether he ought to have recognized the danger. “More experience, more knowledge might perhaps have warned us not to go there,” he wrote, bewildered. “One never can know enough about snow.”

Mallory did nothing, however, to shirk his responsibility, writing Geoffrey Winthrop Young, “And I’m to blame…. Do you know that sickening feeling that one can’t go back and have it undone …?” For the rest of his shortened life, he harbored a black pool of guilt about the catastrophe. Clare Millikan believes that the chief reason Mallory went back to Everest
in 1924 was the idea that success might somehow mitigate the tragedy he had brought upon the seven faithful porters.

M
ALLORY’S ETERNAL FRIEND AND MENTOR
, Geoffrey Winthrop Young, tried to gentle his return, insisting the blame for the accident could not be laid on any man, but on “that shadow of huge, dangerous ‘chance,’” and reminding him, “You took your full share, a leading share, in the risk. In the war we had to do worse: we had to
order
men into danger at times when we could not share it.”

All this gave Mallory faint comfort. At home, he brooded about the expedition, even as he cast about looking for a new job. In the interim, he undertook a three-month tour of America, lecturing on Everest. The tour was a financial failure, Mallory disliked most of what he saw in the United States, and he was homesick for Ruth and his children. Clare was now seven, Beridge six, John only two. Since Clare had been born, thanks to the war and Everest, Mallory had been home less than half her days.

In the spring of 1923, Mallory landed a job teaching history to working men and women in Cambridge University’s extension school. He plunged into this new profession with enthusiasm, commuting between Cambridge and the family home in Holt. During these months, his relationship with Ruth was strained. As evidence, we have only certain ambiguous phrases in the letters. Yet the bedrock loyalty of each for the other was not seriously shaken. In October 1923, he moved his family to Cambridge; there, in Herschel House, he and Ruth set out with a will to furnish and beautify the ideal domicile.

Everest was never far from Mallory’s thoughts. Once again, he had been writing chapters for the official expedition book. And the very lectures he gave in America were predicated on explaining to the uninitiated the appeal of trying to reach the highest point on earth, from the famous “Because it is there” quip to more extended—if equally gnomic—rationales, such as these lines from one of his American speeches:

I suppose we go to Mount Everest, granted the opportunity, because—in a word—we can’t help it. Or, to state the matter rather differently, because we are mountaineers….
To refuse the adventure is to run the risk of drying up like a pea in its shell.

In a thoughtful unpublished essay he wrote about this time, called “Men and Mountains: The Gambler,” Mallory faced squarely the question of danger and risk in the mountains. Once more, his words seem eerily to foreshadow the future:

It is clear that the stake [the mountaineer] risks to lose is a great one with him: it is a matter of life and death…. To win the game he has first to reach the mountain’s summit—but, further, he has to descend in safety. The more difficult the way and the more numerous the dangers, the greater is his victory.

In closing, Mallory grappled with the inevitability of disasters such as the one that had befallen him below the North Col: “But when I say that our sport is a hazardous one, I do not mean that when we climb mountains there is a large chance that we shall be killed, but that we are surrounded by dangers which will kill us if we let them.”

That British mountaineers would return to Everest, if not in 1923, then in the spring of 1924, had become a foregone conclusion. And for all his ambivalence, it seems in retrospect inevitable that Mallory would join the expedition. The mountain had become his destiny.

Only months after he had taken his university extension job, he asked Cambridge to give him half a year’s leave on half pay; his alma mater was only too glad to comply. Yet as Mallory faced Mount Everest for the third time, it was not with the joyous anticipation of 1921 or ’22, but rather with a dark fatalism. To his Cambridge and Bloomsbury friend Geoffrey Keynes, he confided what he dared not tell Ruth: “This is going to be more like war than mountaineering. I don’t expect to come back.”

CA

I
T WASN’T UNTIL
9:00
P.M.
on May 8 that the Ukrainians high on the mountain, at the top of the First Step, sent out their distress call over the radio. We didn’t monitor the call directly ourselves. At Base Camp, the leader of the Ukrainian expedition, Valentyn Simonenko, would come by our tents every so often to ask how things were going. As the day wore on, he got more and more concerned about his teammates. Then he received the call on his handheld radio, and he told us what had transpired.

The Ukrainians were good climbers—full professionals, to the extent that one can be a professional climber in Ukraine. They were determined to go to the top without oxygen. I don’t mean to second-guess them, but that decision inevitably cut their margin of safety. Without oxygen, simple things like tying knots, rigging belays, and performing little bits of technical climbing all become much more difficult.

Compared to us, the Ukrainians had a very rigid way of climbing. Ten days beforehand, they told us, “We’re going to the summit on May 8.” They had planned their summit push based on a logistical pyramid, with climbers and supplies moving from camp to camp by a predetermined schedule. When May 8 turned out to be the worst day in the last month, they didn’t seem to have the flexibility to change their plans.

The three climbers going for the summit that day were Slava, Vasil Copitko, and Volodymyr Gorbach. They got to the
top about 1:30
P.M.
, which was good time, but then their problems began to multiply on the descent, as the storm intensified. It took them much longer to go down than they anticipated. In the end, only Slava—who’s an amazingly strong climber—made it back to Camp VI. Somewhere above him, Vasil and Volod had stopped to spend the night out. It was Slava who made the 9:00
P.M.
radio call from the First Step.

You don’t usually bivouac above Camp VI without serious consequences. Once we learned that Volod and Vasil hadn’t made it back to camp, we knew they were almost certainly in trouble.

I give the Ukrainians credit for having other teammates at Camp V, ready to go to the assistance of the summit climbers. By evening, the weather had cleared, but it was very windy up high. Wind makes a huge difference. You can be fit, well hydrated, well fed, and moving efficiently, but the wind will take whatever strength you have right out of you.

On May 9, as the storm cleared, we moved on up to ABC, to be ready to take our part in whatever rescue the situation called for. In the morning, Slava climbed back up from Camp VI to look for his partners. He found Volod alone near the First Step, in really bad shape, probably already suffering severe frostbite. Volod’s story was that the previous evening, he just sat down and tried to get through the night, because it was dark, he was terribly cold, and he was exhausted. But Vasil decided to continue the descent alone in the dark. That was still a plausible option, until his headlamp went out. Then the route-finding—especially at the exit cracks, where the northeast ridge merges with the Yellow Band—would have become extremely problematic.

Slava got Volod motivated and shepherded him down to Camp VI. To pull this off, still without oxygen, the day after summitting, and not incur any frostbite himself, makes Slava’s performance one of the most phenomenal I’ve ever seen in the mountains. There’s no question he saved Volod’s life. But as they descended, they saw no sign of Vasil.

One of the classic mistakes in high-altitude climbing is to separate, as Vasil and Volod did. Look at all the accidents on Denali over the years—almost every time a party separates up high, disaster strikes. I don’t know whether the two men really
made a calculated decision. But when you separate like that, all of a sudden you go from being able to care for someone else, being part of a team, to focusing on your own well-being.