Last Hours on Everest: The gripping story of Mallory and Irvine’s fatal ascent. Graham Hoyland
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.
6
The 1921 expedition established that there was a route to the top, and Mallory had not only performed his reconnaissance with Bullock, he had also taken the first steps on the mountain proper. Moreover, thousands of square miles of uncharted territory around Everest had been mapped by the surveyors. It was a hugely impressive achievement, and preparations raced ahead so that a serious attempt could be made the very next spring. This time they planned to arrive on the mountain well before the monsoon.
To his delight Somervell was informed that he had been chosen by General Bruce for the next expedition, probably because of his recent tally of Alpine routes. It was also a cunning ruse on Bruce’s part to increase the number of strong climbers, while appearing to recruit a doctor. I am sure they felt an extra doctor wouldn’t go amiss, considering Kellas’s fate the previous year. Somervell would have to pay his way to Darjeeling, but from there all costs would be met by the organisers. He replied that as his salary from University College Hospital, London, was £150 a year he would indeed be able to pay his way. He would even contribute something to the expedition by the sale of paintings of the mountain.
Somervell’s father William had himself been a painter, and he encouraged his son from early on. Howard had only exhibited nine works to date, but he was already showing great talent – and great self-confidence and he wasn’t too impressed by rank. His son David, who was doctor to Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales, remembered his father having a meal with Prince Philip, who enquired after dessert, ‘Do you fancy coming back to my place for a drink?’ He meant Buckingham Palace, the residence of the British monarch. Somervell thought for a moment, and then shook his head. ‘Sorry, no. I promised my wife I’d be back early tonight.’
(I had my own Royal encounter when I did a lecture at Ludgrove, the prep school attended by Princes William and Harry. My cousin Philip was their English teacher, and when he greeted me at the door I heard some rustling noises in the shrubbery. ‘What’s that?’ I asked. ‘Oh, the bodyguards, I suppose.’ At the end of my talk I gestured to the pile of oxygen equipment and climbing gear in front of me: ‘and if any boy would like to come and try on any of this …’ There was a stampede of small boys to the front, led by Prince Harry, who started wielding an ice axe. I noticed that William, the future King, remained sitting soberly in the dark.)
Somervell was fairly comfortable in any social situation, which was normal for an upper-middle-class Englishman of his time. He also had a good eye for a practical joke. At Cambridge in 1911 he and two other undergraduates organised a spoof Futurist exhibition and then secretly painted suitably modernist art works. They then booked a hall and invited the London critics. The bait was taken, and the critics swooned. But, having satirised modern art, Somervell later took it up. His painting style was a sort of muscular cubism, with very well-drawn mountains, although he wasn’t as abstract as Picasso or Braque, the pioneers of the movement. Historian David Seddon considers that ‘probably no other artist applied cubism to the high mountains in such a consistent and authoritative way as Somervell’. And Somervell himself said:
Too many amateurs fail to do good mountain pictures because they don’t draw their mountains. They do capable pine trees and lush green valleys, and behind it they put a mountain without proper dignity, or solidity, or beauty … don’t try to make them steeper than they are in order to be more effective … Simplify the general outlines, almost one might say ‘cubify’ them; let not details however delightful or however significant to the climber, take your eye or your pencil from the right proportions.1
To me he has something of John Sell Cotman’s luminous, almost abstract watercolour style, but without his limpid English light. Before one goes to Tibet, Somervell’s hard-blue skies and orange hills might look harsh, but once one travels through the country it is clear that he painted what he saw. Mallory wrote of him:
His most important activity when we were not on the mountain was sketching. His vast supply of energy, the number of sketches he produced and oil paintings besides, was only less remarkable than the rapidity with which he worked. On May 14th he again walked over the uncrevassed snowfield by himself to the Rapiu La. Later on I joined him, and as far as I could judge, his talent and energy were no less at 21,000 feet than on the wind-swept plains of Tibet.2
That first trip out to India had been a revelation to Howard Somervell, as it is to most of us. In contrast to the 1921 expedition, the members of the 1922 expedition all travelled together, first crossing to France and then taking the train to Marseilles to join the P&O liner SS Caledonia, which departed for Bombay on 3 March. Included in the baggage was a set of steel cylinders.
If there was one helpful word from the future we could whisper to those pioneers it would be ‘oxygen’. The vast majority of successful climbs on Mount Everest today are made using the gas, and now we now know that the attempts made without it faced a nearly impossible task. Next to the Sherpas, it was the second innovation introduced by Kellas that eventually made the mountain climbable. The technology was there; the high-altitude war in the skies above the trenches had led to nearly every aeroplane by 1918 being fitted with a set of cylinders and a mask.
The problem was that although it was viewed as a logical tool by the Enlightenment scientists – and how did it differ, they asked, from polar clothing or Thermos flasks? – its use was regarded as unethical by the Romantic alpinists. There was a similar debate around Scott’s use of dogs to haul sledges, with the conclusion always being drawn