soldiers themselves – and when they revolted in the Indian Mutiny, or Great Sepoy Rebellion, of 1857, all the vicious insecurities of the imperialists, and the resentment of the ruled, came boiling to the surface.
So Kellas dispensed with the usual mountain porters, and employed Sherpas instead. This collaboration was not, however, appreciated by everyone. When Kellas was being considered as a possible expedition leader in 1919, John Percy Farrar, the President of the Alpine Club, sneered:
Now Kellas, besides being fifty, so far has never climbed a mountain, but has only walked about on steep snow with a lot of coolies, and the only time they got on a very steep place they all tumbled down and ought to have been killed!
This is an absolute travesty, and shows that the elders of this particular tribe were considerably less tolerant of outsiders than the young bloods. In fact, Kellas was doing the kind of climbing that is currently much admired by members of the Alpine Club.
In a paper published in the Geographic Journal in 1917 Kellas wrote that in his opinion ‘a man in first-rate training, acclimatised to maximum possible altitude, could make the ascent of Mount Everest without adventitious aids, provided that the physical difficulties above 25,000 feet are not prohibitive’. By adventitious aids he means bottled oxygen. The advances made during the First World War in aircraft-engine design meant that pilots struggled to stay conscious at the higher altitudes being achieved, and there were greater losses of pilots as a result of hypoxia than enemy action. This led to the design of lightweight oxygen sets, which Kellas soon realised could be carried up high mountains. There soon followed a vigorous debate about this.
History has shown that Kellas was right, in that the very strongest climbers can just reach the summit of Mount Everest without supplementary oxygen, providing the air pressure is not too low on that particular day. Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler did exactly that in May 1978, Habeler racing down from the summit to the South Col in just one hour, terrified by his fear of brain damage. Creationists might ponder the fact that the highest summit on earth is just achievable with the strongest pair of human lungs. However, I was very glad to sleep on oxygen just before my attempt, despite the fact that the actual climb was dogged by an intermittent supply. On the summit I found that it was perfectly possible to take off my mask and move about, although climbing would have been much harder without it.
In 2007 I filmed a medical research expedition to Mount Everest that was trying to identify the genes that enable certain people to survive at high altitude while others deteriorate and suffer from hypoxia. We conducted the most comprehensive medical-expedition tests ever attempted at altitude, using over 200 subjects and taking arterial-blood samples near the summit. It was remarkable that the partial pressures measured in live climbers were so low that they had only previously been seen in corpses. In other words, you are not only dying on the summit – you are very nearly dead.
Kellas had to suspend his mountain research during the First World War while he worked for the Air Ministry, and his letters reveal that he suffered a breakdown, possibly brought on by overwork. He experienced hallucinations and wrote that he heard malicious voices threatening death, speculating that a sensitive microphone could make these voices audible to others. This suggests that he believed they were real, and today he would be diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia.
This condition is difficult to live with, and it may be that he felt more comfortable with Sherpas than with his colleagues. He had to resign from his post at the Middlesex, possibly because he was behaving oddly. In Sikkim he would remonstrate with the voices in his tent at night, but the Sherpas assumed that he was talking to the spirits of the dead and accorded him respect. After travelling in the area I am staggered that a man labouring under such a disability could have achieved so much with such slender means.
His Himalayan record won him a place on the 1921 expedition. He was 53, with more high-altitude experience than anyone alive and he knew the effects of altitude on the body. Furthermore, he had good relations with the Sherpas. He was given the job of designing and testing oxygen equipment for the expedition. He had carried out oxygen trials at altitude during the previous climbing season but had concluded that the cylinders were ‘too heavy for use above 18,000 feet, and below that altitude were not required’. In the end the equipment was simply too heavy to use that year.
Sandy Wollaston was another interesting character. He had led two expeditions to New Guinea, very nearly getting to the top of Carstensz Pyramid – now considered one of the Seven Summits – in 1913. He was only 500ft from the top, which must have been infuriating, particularly after his lengthy disputes with the Dutch authorities, followed by the difficulties of penetrating dense forest. He, too, was a keen botaniser, and like Howard-Bury he discovered a new primula on the 1921 trip. It was subsequently named after him as Wollaston’s Primrose, Primula wollastonii. Like several others on that expedition he was to meet a violent end. After Everest he was invited to be a tutor at Cambridge by John Maynard Keynes, but he was murdered in his rooms in 1930 by Douglas Potts, a deranged student who first shot Wollaston and then a police officer, before turning the gun on himself.
The individual members of the 1921 Everest reconnaissance expedition made their own separate ways to India, and over a period of a few weeks in April and May they assembled in Darjeeling. By the time they were ready to leave, there was already discord in the party. Howard-Bury, the Tory, and Raeburn, who was rather insecure in his role as climbing leader, clearly didn’t get on. Mallory, who could be a charming man, tried to smooth things between them.
To avoid difficulties with accommodation on the long march, the 1921 Everest reconnaissance expedition set off in two groups on 18 and 19 May through Sikkim, heading for Mount Everest. However, Kellas was weakened by his recent expedition around Kangchenjunga, where he was trying to get further pictures of the approaches to Mount Everest, and soon contracted dysentery. On 5 June he insisted that his countrymen went on ahead, possibly as he did not want them to witness his misery. He died as he was carried over the pass by his Sherpas into Khampa Dzong.
The official cause of death was heart failure, as it often is in the last stages of dysentery, but this was possibly to avoid embarrassment to his family. The other members of the expedition were appalled at this disaster. Mallory was mortified: ‘He died without one of us anywhere near him.’
They buried him in a place looking south over the border into Sikkim at the great mountains he had climbed. Mallory described the scene:
It was an extraordinarily affecting little ceremony burying Kellas on a stony hillside … I shan’t easily forget the four boys, his own trained mountain men, children of nature, seated in wonder on a great stone near the grave while Bury read out the passage from Corinthians.4
We now commit his mortal body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
The very next day the expedition caught the first sight of the summit of Mount Everest, although it was still over 100 miles and many days march away. George Mallory’s description of that first view enchanted me as a schoolboy:
It may seem an irony of fate that actually on the day after the distressing event of Dr. Kellas’s death we experienced the strange elation of seeing Everest for the first time … It was a prodigious white fang excrescent from the jaw of the world. We saw Mount Everest not quite sharply defined on account of a slight haze in that direction; this circumstance added a touch of mystery and grandeur; we were satisfied that the highest of mountains would not disappoint us.5
Now Raeburn was not feeling too well either, after contracting dysentery, and then twice being rolled on by his mule, and then twice kicked in the head. The doctor
