Last Hours on Everest: The gripping story of Mallory and Irvine’s fatal ascent. Graham Hoyland
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 sepoys of the Indian Army – the Indian 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