Mallory, Irvine and Everest, page 17
We can reasonably assume that what Noel recorded with his telephoto lens, Mallory had also seen many times through binoculars, and approximately from the same angle and with a similar resolution. He would be aware of the triangular snowfield with its two distinct ridges, offering a choice of terrain. We can conjecture that from Mallory’s point of view, the ridge to climber’s right would be preferable, since he could skirt the snowfield, stay largely on rock, and thereby avoid cutting steps in snow.
Conversely, Noel was correct in understanding that what he called the Eastern Ridge offered better protection from the prevailing and often violent west wind. On that ridge, the whole vast bulk of the pyramid would shelter the climber from the wind. Mallory’s note to Noel seemed to imply that he would make that decision in situ.
At this point, we may understand that Mallory, once he reached the final pyramid, had a Route 1, whereby he would work up and along the right-hand margin of the snowfield. Modern climbers typically go up the centre of the snowfield, but before the crest, they make a detour to the right (to the north), followed by a sharp left turn towards a feature now known as the Dihedral, which is the easiest pathway to the summit. A straight climb to the top of the snowfield would also work, but it would be more difficult. Mallory would not have known of the Dihedral, though given time, he might have found it.
Figure 9.6a. The ‘final pyramid’ of Mount Everest, as defined by the 1924 expedition. (left) Author, after a photograph by John Noel; (right) base image © CNES / Airbus / Google Earth, 2021. Graphics and legend by author)
Figure 9.6b. The ‘final pyramid’ of Mount Everest, viewed from the plateau between the Second and Third Steps. (Stuart Holmes. Graphics and legend by author)
Mallory’s note to Noel said nothing per se regarding the route whereby he would arrive at the snowfield.
However, Mallory also referred to the ‘gully’. This was emphatically part of the 1924 climbers’ vocabulary; they also knew it as the Couloir. It is the immense gully which can be seen on every photograph of Everest from the north; it runs from just below the summit pyramid down to the Rongbuk Glacier, a drop of around 9,000 feet.
Later, the gully would be universally known as the Norton Couloir, after Colonel Norton who entered it on his high climb on 4 June 1924, and could find no safe way up and out. The Norton Couloir was outside the frame of Noel’s telephoto; Norton’s high point was about 500 feet horizontally from, and about 350 feet below, the closest point on the final pyramid. When Norton reached his high point he was alone, and he was faced with a section of steep and crumbly rock that he could not attempt; he made the decision to turn around.
As Noel understood him, Mallory was clearly considering a route through the gully, but he surely did not want to reach the same impasse as Norton. His plan seemed to anticipate a way up and out of the gully at a different point from where Norton had run out of options.
Summit day
With that, our story resumes on summit day, 8 June 1924.
The camp diary for that day, maintained by Hazard, reads in part as follows:
‘Min. night temp. = Ther [Thermometer] removed. Cloudy, occasional gusts of wind.
08.30 [8:30 am] Air temp. = 28°F. Sun [temp] = 81°F. Mist, mountain almost entirely obscured, calm and very close.
12 noon. Air temp. = 36°F. Sun [temp] = over 125[F.] (ceases to register). Calm, very close, mountain mist. …
16.00 hrs [4:00 pm]. Air temp. 29°F. Sun [temp] = 48°F. Calm, clouds inclined to lift, patches of dew etc.’20
In short, a cool, calm and misty day at Camp IV: no cause for alarm.
In the tent at their Camp VI, Mallory and Irvine were alone on the mountain. The nearest human being was Odell, some 2,000 feet below; they had no means of communication with him. There is nothing on the record as to what Odell was supposed to do in case of any setback or emergency.
If the climbers’ watches were still set to Darjeeling time (and there would have been no reason to reset them), the sun rose at 4:41 am. On that day, the moon would not rise until 9:25 am by Darjeeling time; they had no compass and probably no torch; therefore there was no reason to depart before sunrise. As a working assumption (and it is no more than that), we might place their departure at around 5 am.
When they emerged from their tent, Mallory and Irvine would have seen a panorama something like that in figure 9.7. From our foregoing analysis, we have reason to believe that the two climbers were at 27,300 feet. If so, their ascent to the summit constituted a climb of 1,700 vertical feet. We might reasonably expect that Mallory had allowed for an ascent rate of 300 feet per hour, with judicious use of oxygen and some provision for route-finding; therefore he would expect a climb of under six hours.
Figure 9.7. A view of the North Face (including part of the Yellow Band), part of the Northeast Ridge and the summit of Everest from the approximate position of Norton’s and Somervell’s Camp VI. (Michael Tracy)
As for the descent: sunset by Darjeeling time would be at 6.29 pm.
Mallory would be aware that on 4 June, Norton had descended from his high point, in the gully, to Camp VI in two and a half hours, in a very weak physical condition (as Norton himself would later testify)21. The descent from the summit to the level of the gully might need an hour. Mallory might have judged himself and Irvine to be in better condition than Norton and Somervell had been; if so, he might have planned on a descent of three hours from the summit to his own Camp VI, if that was where he planned to spend the night of 8 June.
In this case, the turnaround time at the summit should not be later than 3:30 pm.
We might ponder whether at this juncture, Mallory had to make a strategic decision on the route to the summit. From everything that Mallory ever wrote about the route (as distinct from what others attributed to him), we would have to say no: that he had made his strategic decision long before. To reconstruct Mallory’s strategy for summit day, we have only to read what he had set down on paper about the route to the summit.22
On the back of a postcard that he sent to Marjorie Holmes, probably sometime in 1923, Mallory had written:
‘This was taken on one of the great days of discovery 1921 when we decided that the east face & N.E. ridge were alike impossible.’23
In the official account of the 1921 reconnaissance expedition, Mallory had written:
‘If ever the mountain were to be climbed, the way would not lie along the whole length of any one of its colossal ridges. Progress could only be made along comparatively easy ground, and anything like a prolonged, sharp crest or a series of towers would inevitably bar the way, simply by the time which would be required to overcome such obstacles.’24
In 1922, relating the story of his high climb with Norton and Somervell, he had written:
‘… it will readily be understood that there was no question for us of gymnastic struggles and strong arm-pulls, wedging ourselves in cracks and hanging on our finger-tips. We should soon have been turned back by difficulties of that sort. We could allow ourselves nothing in the nature of violent struggle. We must avoid any hasty movement.’25
Finally, in his hundreds of pages of contributions to official reports, lectures, interviews and letters to his wife and friends, Mallory never once used the term ‘First Step’ or ‘Second Step’. The modern term ‘Third Step’ did not exist in 1924; Mallory would have seen that formation through binoculars, and would have considered it part of the ‘final pyramid’.
From the documentation in the public domain, there is no evidence that Mallory ever contemplated climbing the First Step or the Second Step, or in taking any prolonged route along the crest of the Northeast Ridge.
Conversely, there was one tangible obstacle in Mallory’s mind: and that was the summit pyramid, or as Noel would call it, the ‘final pyramid’. In 1921, Mallory had observed it; he had this to say:
‘The summit itself is like a thin edge of a wedge thrust up from the mass in which it is embedded. The edge of it, with the highest point at the far end, can only be reached in the northeast by climbing a steep blind edge of snow. … it never looked anything but steep.’26
‘… the projected route to the summit presents no slopes of terrible steepness. … [but] the snow slope which guards the very citadel will prove … as steep as one would wish to find the final slope of any great mountain.’27
In short, in the course of hundreds of observations of the mountain, from afar and from close up, and from surely hundreds of hours of discussion and debate with his colleagues, Mallory had no doubt that he could reach the pyramid. Only the pyramid gave him pause.
When he spoke about the ‘blind edge’ on the northeast, he surely meant what Noel would later call the ‘eastern ridge’, which is perpetually corniced with snow. Through these treacherous cornices, an unwary climber could fall fourteen thousand feet down the eastern face of Everest: what modern climbers call the Kangshung Face. It would be logical for him to tell Noel to look for him on a route to climber’s right (to the north): one more exposed to the west wind, but offering a climb on rock rather than snow.
The Norton route
We may then ponder whether there was a specific route in Mallory’s mind. Here we can only reconstruct what Mallory knew for sure on the morning of 8 June: that Norton had taken a route that led to within 900 vertical feet of the summit; that no-one else had found a viable route; and that at the end of Norton’s route, a lone climber could go no higher and no farther.
On the evening of 4 June, alone with the snow-blind Norton in their tent at Camp IV, Mallory would have absorbed, and surely would have memorized, every step of Norton’s route: every slab, every buttress, every obstacle, every landmark. It would have been either a template, or an exclusion, for his own climb.
We can be sure that at some moment in time, Mallory or Irvine was up to 200 feet above Norton’s route. We know this because, as we shall relate in chapter 11, during the 1933 expedition Percy Wyn Harris found an ice axe, Mallory’s or Irvine’s, either 200 or 250 yards north-east of the First Step and some sixty feet below the crest of the ridge. When Norton passed those points, he was about 250 feet below the crest.28 What we do not know is whether the person who had carried the ice axe, and who had dropped it or set it down at that point, was Mallory or Irvine; and whether he had passed that point on the ascent or the descent (or even on the day before summit day).
We can probably exclude the idea that Mallory would wish to converge on Norton’s route and follow it to Norton’s high point. Where Norton had been unable to climb alone, we can reasonably surmise that Mallory would not want to try, alone or with Irvine. He had already, in his letters, ruled out heroics, gymnastics and finger-holds.
We can probably also exclude Mallory’s following the Norton route for some way, but with a view to breaking out and upwards before the couloir. We can surely suppose that on the night of 4 June, Mallory had interrogated Norton for every possible exit from the route; and Norton would have said that there was none. Norton would be proved right in 1933, when Wager, Wyn Harris and Smythe would all follow his route to the bitter end, and would turn around approximately where he had turned around.
Figure 9.8. An approximation of Colonel Norton’s ascent route from his Camp VI to his claimed high point of 28,126 feet on 4 June 1924; and a hypothetical traverse from Mallory’s and Irvine’s high camp along the 27,300-foot contour. (Base image © CNES / Airbus / Google Earth; contour line by author from Contour Map Creator; graphics and legend by author. The author acknowledges Michael Tracy’s inspiration for this image)
We can still imagine, on behalf of Mallory, at least two tactical alternatives to Norton’s route:
• He could choose to remain parallel to Norton’s route but higher, in order to avoid the Couloir completely and to reach the final pyramid above the point where Norton had been blocked.
• He could choose to parallel Norton’s route but lower, which would take him into the Couloir below Norton’s point of turnaround.
To this author’s knowledge, no climber has ever attempted the first variant. Modern climbers with few exceptions, and all of those on commercial expeditions, follow the crest of the Northeast Ridge; they bypass the First Step, climb the Second Step via the ‘Chinese ladder’, scramble easily over the Third Step, and traverse the snowfield on the pyramid, to the Dihedral and the summit.
As we shall see later in this chapter, the second variant is an approximation of Reinhold Messner’s climb of 1980, which began with a shallow traverse across the North Face, and ended with a successful exit from the Couloir. If Mallory had had the inspiration that Messner would have in 1980, he and Irvine would have started out with a horizontal traverse from their high camp; they would have followed the contour at 27,300 feet all the way across the North Face, keeping to the foot of the Yellow Band; and they would have entered the Couloir close to the point where Messner, fifty-six years later, would find the exit.
This route would have taken an extraordinary act of inspiration on Mallory’s part. At every point on the traverse, there would have been the temptation to climb leftwards and upwards, as Norton had done and as all three climbers in 1933 would do. Yet Mallory might have known, just as Messner would know, that such a course was wrong; he had to stay low down on the North Face.
If Mallory and Irvine did this (and to be clear, on the evidence that exists, we have no way to know), they would have found the exit from the Couloir, as Messner would do; they would have circumvented the crumbly Yellow Band and arrived at the grey band above it; and once there, a leftward traverse to the Third Step would have placed them briefly in Odell’s field of view.
Odell’s sighting
Odell would later relate that he had seen Mallory and Irvine at 12:50 pm on 8 June, in a fleeting interval when the clouds cleared around the summit. Odell’s sighting is central to the mystery of Mallory and Irvine. What we make of his sighting is crucial to our interpretation of the story. His narrative deserves and requires a chapter of this book, and it will follow.
Here we shall only observe that later in 1924, the London newspaper The Sphere, an imprint of The Illustrated London News, wanted to run a two-page illustrated article on the Everest expedition, and specifically on the question of whether Mallory and Irvine had climbed Everest. Their artist Douglas MacPherson was tasked with creating an impression of Odell’s sighting; The Sphere asked for Odell’s collaboration, and Odell agreed. The article appeared in the issue of 25 October 1924, under the heading ‘Has Everest been climbed? — a mystery which the death of Mallory and Irvine leaves unsolved’, and with the subtitle ‘Mr. Odell’s story of how he witnessed the two climbers approaching ‘the citadel’ at the summit of Mount Everest before they were overwhelmed is now being told in London’.29
Figure 9.9. Artist’s impression of Odell’s last sighting of Mallory and Irvine. (Douglas MacPherson / The Sphere, 25 October 1924, public domain)
An extract from MacPherson’s drawing is reproduced in Figure 9.9.
We can readily observe that MacPherson made some effort to create a perspective that corresponded to Odell’s vantage point, in at least two respects:
• Odell had been at an altitude, by his own account, of at least 26,100 feet: about 4,000 feet higher than Noel (so that the true summit was visible to him, and not hidden as it was from Noel’s ‘Eagle’s Nest’).
• Odell had been about a mile to the southwest of Noel, and to the left of Noel’s line of sight; therefore the summit snowfield appeared more face-on to him than it did to Noel.
Following Odell’s narrative, MacPherson’s drawing showed the climbers at two points, annotated in tiny letters ‘first position’ and ‘second position’. We are entitled to read the drawing as a depiction of the two climbers below, and then above, what we now call the Third Step. The reader may judge.
Odell’s first search
At the time of his sighting, Odell probably knew the contents of Mallory’s note to Noel. He would later record that he had been ‘surprised’ to see them there (wherever ‘there’ was) as late as 12:50 pm, and he made a specific reference to the presumed lookout time of 8 am.30
At this stage, nothing in Odell’s narrative conveys that he was alarmed. His account relates that after some time peering through the clouds, he continued his climb to Camp VI, and reached it at 2 pm. That interval alone tells us that the camp was not far above the point of his sighting; MacPherson’s illustration in The Sphere made the camp appear not more than fifty feet above that point, and Odell did not correct it.
The remainder of Odell’s first search may be briefly told. In the empty tent at Camp VI, he found ‘a rather mixed assortment of spare clothes, scraps of food, their [he meant: Mallory’s and Irvine’s] two sleeping-bags, oxygen cylinders, and parts of apparatus; outside were more parts of the latter and of the duralumin carriers.’31 He never recorded how many cylinders were there, and whether they were full or not; but none of this caused him concern. Recalling Mallory’s instructions to evacuate Camp V, he left Camp VI at 4:30 pm, passed Camp V at 6:15 pm without stopping, and executed a ‘fast standing glissade’ in the snow down to Camp IV: literally, he slid down the mountain in a standing position. He reached Camp IV at 6:45 pm, sixteen minutes after sunset.
