death, advised that he should return to Sikkim. I suspect Howard-Bury was privately relieved, but now the expedition had lost the only two climbers who knew anything about Himalayan mountaineering. After a long, gruelling trek across the Tibetan plateau the men of the 1921 reconnaissance were at last rewarded with their first view of the Rongbuk valley.
I have spent many long months there and to me it now feels like a home from home, although at first the air seems thin and the sun painfully bright. The sky is electric blue and the surrounding hills are rusty brown. At the head of the valley stands the great three-sided pyramid of their quest. Now they were closer and the whole mountain was going to be revealed. Mallory’s description reads like a monstrous strip-tease:
We caught a gleam of snow behind the grey mists. A whole group of mountains began to appear in gigantic fragments. Mountain shapes are often fantastic seen through a mist; these were like the wildest creation of a dream. A preposterous triangular lump rose out of the depths; its edge came leaping up at an angle of about 70 degrees and ended nowhere. To the left a black serrated crest was hanging in the sky incredibly. Gradually, very gradually, we saw the great mountain sides and glaciers and arêtes, now one fragment and now another through the floating rifts, until far higher in the sky than imagination had dared to suggest the white summit of Everest appeared. And in this series of partial glimpses we had seen a whole; we were able to piece together the fragments, to interpret the dream.6
Wheeler, a tenacious and highly skilled surveyor, was using a new photographic survey technique and he did a remarkable job. He would eventually become Surveyor-General of India and be knighted for his cartographical work in the Second World War. Along with Morshead he filled in a huge blank on the map around the mountain. Meanwhile, Mallory and Bullock undertook a close-up reconnaissance of the peak. They covered hundreds of miles and took scores of photographs from minor peaks around Everest. However, Mallory had put the glass plates in the camera the wrong way around and had to repeat many of his shots. He clearly had little mechanical aptitude.
Mallory and Bullock climbed up to the watershed between Tibet and Nepal, and peered down on to a vast icefall tumbling down a great, silent, icy valley. Mallory named it the ‘Western Cwm’, an echo of the Pen-y-Pass days in Snowdonia. This would be the way that the successful British expedition of 1953 would eventually go, but to him Nepal was still a forbidden country. It must have been so exciting, with the feeling of elation one has when going well in the mountains. Bullock, however, was beginning to feel unhappy about Mallory’s attitude to safety. His widow, writing many years later, reported:
My husband considered Mallory ready to take unwarranted risks with still untrained porters in traversing dangerous ice. At least on one occasion he refused to take his rope of porters over the route proposed by Mallory. Mallory was not pleased. He did not support a critical difference of opinion readily.7
This is a foretaste of the dreadful accident of 1922, when seven inexperienced porters were killed, and of the accident in 1924, when the novice Irvine was involved. As a climber I would suggest that Mallory perhaps did not know how good he was, and it should be noted that as a schoolmaster his manner of teaching was to assume equality with his pupils. This might have led to a climbing style that did not take the ability of the novices into consideration, an important point that bears on the solution to our mystery.
On the plus side theirs was a good effort, considering the climbing party had lost Raeburn and Kellas. It might have gone down in climbing history as the most effective mountain reconnaissance ever undertaken, but Mallory and Bullock have been criticised by historians for their failure to spot that the outlet of the East Rongbuk glacier would provide a direct route up to the foot of the North Col. This is a swooping saddle that connects the North Ridge to Changtse, Everest’s neighbour to the north, and seemed to be the key to their attempts to climb the mountain from the north.
In Into the Silence Wade Davis levels a serious accusation at George Mallory. He points out that the surveyor Wheeler had already found the crucial East Rongbuk glacier, and had sent a rough map to Howard-Bury. But Mallory suggests in the official account that it was he who found the key to the mountain by his approach from the Kharta valley, and even ‘spun the story’ to his wife Ruth in his letters home. At the very least Mallory did not give a fair acknowledgement of Wheeler’s contribution, and if Davis is right it certainly is a black mark against his name.
From personal experience I know that people are very quick to claim all the credit on Everest expeditions. The stakes are high, and one’s better instincts are sometimes overcome by competition and bitterness. However, the historians are wrong if they think the East Rongbuk route is obvious. I was with a young climber in 2004 who had read the literature and attended the briefing at Base Camp given by the leader, who carefully explained the route the team should follow the next day. The next day I hiked up the Rongbuk valley and turned left as usual up the small glacial outflow of the East Rongbuk valley, which is a small breach in the great east wall of the main valley. I rested that evening at an interim camp. There was no sign of our youngster and we all became worried. As night fell we mounted a search party, and retraced our steps. Then came the radio call from a group of Russian climbers camped below the North Face: ‘Have you lost a climber? We have him here.’
He appeared the next day, shamefaced. Determined to get up the mountain first he had marched straight up the Rongbuk valley, just as Mallory had done, bypassing the small river that seems too small to drain the North Col basin. He had eventually come up against Everest’s huge North Face. These things are only too easy to do.
Incidentally, this route up to Advanced Base Camp is a gruelling start to the expedition. After the turn, one walks past the dry-stone walls that still remain from the British 1920s expeditions’ Camp I. There is a hurried traverse under the dangerously crumbling orange rocks of the cliffs above, then on to the glacier itself through the extraordinary ice sharks’-fins that alpinists call penitentes. These were up to 100ft high in 1990 when I first saw them, but now they have melted to around 60ft. The classically educated Norton called the next section the ‘Via Dolorosa’, after Christ’s route through Old Jerusalem, which is somewhat less steep and icy – and where you find another kind of penitent. After this comes a view of Kellas Peak, which the members of that 1921 reconnaissance named in honour of the extraordinary man who holds the unenviable record of being the first to die on an Everest expedition.
The 1921 reconnaissance expedition found that the North Col was indeed the key to climbing the mountain, providing both some shelter from the westerly winds and a ridge route attractive to that early generation of climbers. It is still used by the vast majority of climbers who approach from the north side of the mountain. Although the expedition was now well into the monsoon, and therefore too late for a realistic attempt on the summit because of heavy snowfall, they pushed a team of climbers and porters over a high pass and got Mallory and Bullock up to the top of the North Col at 23,000ft (7,010 m).
It is wonderful place, a giant hammock of snow and ice, with the vast wall of Everest’s North Face rising up behind. The route to the top looks deceptively easy, but in fact foreshortening disguises the fact that the summit is a terribly long way off.
As regards personal relations it was an unhappy little expedition, with almost a curse laid upon it in the same way that Tutankhamun’s tomb, opened two years later, was supposed to be cursed. Each one of the members seemed to dislike someone else. Kellas was the first to die, then Raeburn had a mental collapse on his return home and died shortly afterwards, thinking he had somehow murdered Kellas. Morshead was murdered in Burma in strange circumstances in 1931, and, as we have seen, Wollaston was murdered by a student in his rooms in Cambridge in 1930. And then Mallory was to die violently on the mountain in 1924.
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