Reviews
Wade Davis tells a very engaging and detailed story of the three British Everest expeditions of the 1920’s, in which he explains the profound impact of the Great War on the men who made those first attempts to climb the mountain, while also explaining how Buddhism came to Tibet, how it spread, what it meant to the people of Tibet. In the course of the story, Davis gives a wonderful travelogue of the Himalayas and their foothills, and ultimately describes Mallory’s fatal summit attempt. Davis spent ten years writing this book, and the massive amount of research he did, both on the ground in the Himalayas, and in libraries and discussions with descendants of the climbers shines through in the detail. He creates a full portrait of each man, and that makes the book more vivid by making the reader care about the expedition members. I’ve never climbed a mountain that required real climbing skills, and I've never really had an inclination to do so. However, in the process of backpacking I've hiked at 14,400 feet, and that was high enough that I experienced slight hypoxia which temporarily impaired my map-reading skills. While we were having lunch near the summit, my friends and I remarked on the fact that we were less than half as high as Everest, and yet we most definitely felt the effect of the thin air on our physical performance. Later I looked up the respective air pressures for 14,400 and 29,000 feet, and found that we were experiencing about 60% of sea level pressure on our mountain, whereas at the top of Everest the air pressure is only 30% of sea level. While it’s true that they had early oxygen tanks of limited capacity, it is still amazing to me that Mallory and Irvine got as high as they did with the equipment (boots, ropes, parkas, tents) available in 1924, and yet they did. It is entirely possible that they reached the summit, and they almost certainly got above 28,000 feet. But then something went badly wrong - we will likely never know what, despite the discovery of Mallory’s body in 1999 with many intriguing clues still intact in the form of papers and equipment stashed in his clothing. Almost all the men who formed the expedition parties had served as British Army officers in WW1, and as veterans of that bloodbath, they were a breed apart. They were not comfortable with their civilian contemporaries who had not served; an unbridgeable gap of experience divided the two groups. Men who had lived with death for months or years, both the threat of it, and the physical presence of the dead – the sight and smell of them – had difficulty at times fitting back into civil society in Britain. And then there was the veteran’s desire for meaning, or, less nobly, for an adrenaline rush that they had become accustomed to in combat. Many of them cast about for ways out of a boring, normal life, or for a mission with meaning, and Everest drew the climbers among them like a magnet. Some of the information that Davis presents about WW1 was new to me, such as General Haig’s penchant for a) always kicking off attacks at exactly 7:30AM after an artillery barrage, and b) his edict that British soldiers must walk, not run, toward the German lines. These idiotic consistencies of Haig’s mediocre intellect and unwillingness to learn from repeated failure insured that a) the Germans always knew what time to get ready, and b) allowed them plenty of time to mow down the walking British soldiers with machine guns. In some cases, the Germans would just stop firing when the Brits began to retreat, because they pitied such brave men being commanded by such appalling dolts, who sent them to their deaths in pointless, hopeless attacks, not once, but over and over. Haig deserves the low opinion that Davis, and most historians have of him. Davis says, “he acted as if he were on a one-man mission to reduce the population of (Britain)”. It was the great misfortune of the men of Mallory’s generation to be commanded by a such a man in that war. The book goes into great detail about the approach marches and reconnaissance climbs of 1921, perhaps too much, in my opinion. While there is interesting detail about flora and fauna, I think a summary of the various ways in which Mallory et al. attempted to find a route to the North Col would really have made the book flow better. Also, inserting maps at appropriate places in the text would have helped the reader understand the wanderings of the 1921 group. I read the excellent annotated bibliography that Davis provided, and I respect the amount of research Davis did to fully understand the expeditions, but sometimes he tells us just a bit more detail than we need to know, in my opinion. Nonetheless, the descriptions of green valleys at 12,000 feet, lush and full of wildflowers, have stayed with me. The description of Buddhism in Tibet, and the reactions to it by the British was intriguing, and the British Raj comes in for treatment by Davis which makes me curious to know more. One of the things that was shocking to me, from the excerpts of diaries, was how often the men were short of water. We now know that one of the primary ways that high altitude kills climbers is through dehydration, which turns blood in climbers’ bodies to something approaching sludge, but in the 1920’s, this was not understood. I have been in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona short of water, and I know what that means - it's awful. I sympathized with the oft-reported difficulty of getting up and going on a bitterly cold morning in the Himalayas – there are few things worse than trying to roll up cold, wet canvas in the morning with cold, numb hands, not to mention having to exit a warm sleeping bag to dress for the day when the temperatures are below freezing. One of my mentors in the Army summarized this with a saying, “The problems of a cold man can never be fully understood by a warm man”. This came to mind as I read about the Everest Committee Chair, Mr. Hinks, sitting in his office in London, who dispatched increasingly impatient letters to the expedition leaders asking for regular reports. Sandy Irvine emerges from Davis’ account as an amazing athlete and a mechanical genius. It’s sad that I’ve only previously read of him as an inexperienced climber who was possibly a drag on Mallory; instead, it seems he was the strongest, fittest man on Everest that year, despite his newness to climbing. He was also an inspiration, in a way, to the older men, who were all veterans, because he represented to them the best of England, emblematic of what they felt they had been fighting for in WW1. As the book went on, I felt more and more compassion for George Mallory. It’s true he could be judgmental, unfair, and overly critical, but I believe he felt trapped into doing the third expedition, and I don't think he really wanted to be there. His failure to sign on until the very last moment is revelatory of his ambivalence. He certainly knew his value to the expedition, and in some sense he wanted to climb Everest because he knew he was one of very few men with the fitness and skills to do it, but he also knew the extreme risks he would have to take. The war had been over for five years, and it seems to me that his desire for the adrenaline rush, common to most men who have been in combat or in elite military units had faded, as it does for most men. Ruth, his wife, was “transparently decent and good”, and he missed her and his children deeply. It seems to me that he just wanted it to be over so he could get back to his family, and he also knew that if he summited Everest, it would mean financial security for his family, from book contracts and speaking tours; after all, Mallory was not a wealthy man, and he had three children. The Mallory of 1924 was a different man than the one who went out in 1921. And yet, his familiarity with death, so aptly described by Wilfred Owen in his poem, “The Next War”, allowed him to move calmly right up to the edge of fatal danger on Everest. That was both a great advantage to him as a climber, but also a curse. Davis defers to Everest climbing experts as to whether Mallory and Irvine might have summited, and there are credible scenarios for that. Opinions differ. Noel Odell, who was watching the mountain during Mallory / Irvine’s ascent, said he saw the climbers “rapidly ascending” the second step, which is the gateway to the top. If that observation was accurate (and Odell was a giant in the climbing community, respected by all), it is possible that a snow pack had formed on the second step, something which has happened before, and it is really the only way a rapid ascent of the sheer face of the second step would have been possible. And if Mallory made it to the top of the second step, there was nothing except hurricane force winds, always a possibility at that altitude, that would have stopped him from summiting. Mallory had promised his wife, Ruth, he would leave a photo of her at the summit. It was well known that he always carried her photo on his person for that reason, but the photo was not among his effects and papers in his clothing when his body was found. When his body was found, Mallory was not wearing his snow goggles – they were stowed in his pocket – which indicated that he and Irvine were descending after dark. If, as Odell said, they were at the second step at 1PM, that argues for a summit by Mallory & Irvine, followed by a descent at night, which then went awry. But of course, the simple truth is that we will never know for certain, and really, it doesn’t matter. Whether they summited or turned back, the courage and skill of Mallory, Irvine, and the others who climbed Everest is not diminished, a point the book makes crystal clear.