there is a difficult tangle of high country between that north-west corner of Sikkim and Everest, and Noel could not get closer than forty miles before he was intercepted and turned back. But it was the closest any Westerner had been, and Noel would play a key part in the 1922 and 1924 expeditions.
His lecture stirred up public debate about the possibility of climbing the mountain, which of course it was intended to do. After many years of wheeling and dealing, of encouragement from Lord Curzon and obstruction by Lord Morley, the Secretary of State for India, an expedition was mounted.
As a result, the 1921 Everest reconnaissance was highly political. The leader was the posh Lt Col Charles Howard-Bury, wealthy and well connected. He was just the man for the job. He moved easily in high diplomatic circles, and proved his worth in helping to secure permission for a reconnaissance in 1921 and a climbing attempt in 1922. He had a most colourful life, growing up in a haunted gothic castle at Charleville in County Offaly, Ireland, travelling into Tibet without permission in 1905, and being taken prisoner during the First World War. He was a keen naturalist and plant hunter (Primula buryana is named after him), and he was the first European to report the existence of the yeti. He never married and during the Second World War he met Rex Beaumont, a young actor with whom he shared the rest of his life. Mallory didn’t care for his high Tory views, nor for the way he treated his subordinates, but Howard-Bury got a difficult political job done, then led the expedition off the map.
The Mount Everest Committee, a joint committee of the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club whose purpose was to fund and organise the reconnaissance, chose the team members on the basis that they had to be able to provide a thorough survey of the massif and give a good assessment of the climbing possibilities. The committee was run by Arthur Robert Hinks.
Hinks is an excellent example of why bureaucrats should not run expeditions. He was a mathematician specialising in map projections and the weight of the moon, but he had no field experience whatsoever. He was contemptuous of those he regarded as intellectually inferior to him, and he was a snob. He failed to be open-minded about climbing talents such as Finch, and his ability to rub people up the wrong way annoyed everyone. Even though the press and film-makers paid for all the Everest expeditions, he was full of loathing for journalists. They were a ‘rotten lot … all sharks and pirates’. Hinks’s pernicious influence as secretary of the Mount Everest Committee probably helped to put back the climbing of the mountain by thirty years.
As with Scott’s Antarctic expedition, there was strong emphasis on the scientific value of the expedition, with the geographers keen to travel around the mountain and draw maps. The surveyors were Henry Morshead, Oliver Wheeler and Alexander Heron. The climbers were drawn from the ranks of the Alpine Club, which was desperate to get a man to the top. Harold Raeburn, a 56-year-old Scottish climber with an impressive record of guideless climbing, was appointed mountaineering leader, but proved to be prematurely aged and, struck down by illness, didn’t perform well. Then there was Alexander Kellas, who had huge Himalayan experience gained during his studies of high altitude, and Mallory. George Finch, another talented alpinist, was dislodged at the last minute by skulduggery within the committee, and so Mallory proposed his school-friend from Winchester, Guy Bullock, who had limited climbing experience. The team doctor was Sandy Wollaston.
Of all the climbers, Alexander Kellas brought most experience to the expedition. Even contemporary climbers owe him a huge debt, as he discovered the techniques necessary to climb the mountain. In 2009 I filmed and climbed in an area of Sikkim north of Kanchenjunga that was his high-altitude testing ground. This politically sensitive mountainous region had not been visited by Westerners since Frank Smythe’s climbs there in the 1930s, and it was hard to reach. I had gone there to learn about Kellas’s work on human physiology at high altitudes.
The ancient Greeks knew that the body would deteriorate at high altitude but it wasn’t understood why until the late 19th century, when it was realised that low levels of oxygen led to a condition known as hypoxia. Kellas spent the war at the Air Ministry, working with Professor J. B. S. Haldane on the high-altitude oxygen deprivation suffered by pilots who were flying higher and higher. Before that, he taught chemistry to medical students at Middlesex Hospital, combining laboratory experiments with tests on his own body while climbing high Himalayan peaks during the holidays.
He made many first ascents, culminating in an ascent of Pauhunri at 7,128m (23,386ft), and by 1921 he had spent more time at 7,000m than anyone else on earth. He realised that hypoxia led first to loss of appetite, then to loss of weight, reduced brain function and ultimately death. Above a certain altitude the body deteriorates faster than its natural ability to restore itself. Journalists like to call this the ‘Death Zone’, and fix it at 8,000m (26,247ft), but really it is any height above which people cannot sustain permanent habitation, which is around 5,100m (16,728ft). Climbers deteriorate steadily above this height, but it becomes marked on their summit days above the 8,000m contour, when their lungs are drowning in fluid and their brains are swelling with cerebral oedema.
Kellas’s achievements as a scientist and mountaineer were remarkable enough, but it was his discovery in this remote Sikkim valley that revolutionised the sport of Himalayan climbing, and it is one without which no modern Everest expedition would even be able to leave Base Camp. After being disappointed by a pair of hired Swiss guides in Sikkim in 1907 he came across an ethnic group called the Sherpas. He recognised their natural aptitude for mountaineering and noted: ‘They seemed more at home in diminished pressure.’
I worked with Sherpas in the very same area that Kellas first employed them, and their ability is immediately apparent; not only are they sure-footed on steep ground, they are remarkably strong and almost always good-humoured individuals – all vital characteristics on long mountain trips. I noticed a few years ago during blood oxygen-level testing on Everest that the Sherpas on the expedition had much the same or lower O2 levels than the rest of us, and yet they were able to climb much faster. How could this be? Recent research into why Sherpas do so well at altitude suggests that instead of having more haemoglobin in their blood stream than lowlanders, they have more capillaries to distribute the blood. As this ethnic group has only moved to high altitudes within the last 10,000 years, this research suggests that human evolution is still taking place.
The Sherpas might wonder why we lowlanders bother to come and join them at altitudes that are difficult for us. I asked Thendup Sherpa, our cook on the Sikkim expedition, why he thought Westerners came to the Himalayas: ‘To get famous,’ he instantly replied.
There is a danger in lumping together a disparate group of individuals as ‘Sherpas’. It is rather like the wider imperial designation of ‘natives’. In a recent obituary in the Guardian, there was a reference to two European women killed in 1959 in a Himalayan avalanche with ‘their Sherpa’. Imagine obituaries of two Nepalese men climbing in the Lake District with ‘their Englishman’. As with any group that seems homogeneous, a little time spent in their company reveals their differing characters.
Traditional Sherpa culture consisted of a few wealthy individuals employing a poor majority in work such as porterage or agriculture. In return they expected their chief to remain loyal and protect them, rather in the manner of the Scottish clan system. The switch to European employers was acceptable to them when they saw the money and equipment being offered. What they gave in addition was a degree of loyalty, even unto death, that surprised the foreign climbers. On the other side of the deal there was also ready acceptance of the Sherpas by British climbers. In the Alps British climbers were used to employing local guides and porters, and the historian Simon Schama suggests that mountain conquests were ‘a victory of imperial confidence over timorous native superstition’.3 The rulers were demonstrating to the ruled the virtues deriving from their muscular modernity, and by such demonstration they were legitimising their power. The whole imperial structure of the British Raj rested upon the
