O ur interview with 1924 Everest expedition members Colonel Edward F. Norton, medical officer R. W. G. Hingston, Dr. Theodore Howard Somervell, Captain John B. Noel, and Noel E. Odell—the last three men particular friends of the Deacon’s—takes place in October, after the official memorial service for Mallory and Irvine. These former team leaders and members are attending an Alpine Club function at the Royal Geographical Society at 1 Kensington Gore, and we are told to meet them in the Map Room on that Saturday afternoon.
“I hope that they left word at the entrance that we’re expected,” I say as we get out of our taxi across from Kensington Gardens, evening shadows lengthening, the huge dome of the Albert Hall looming over the brick building of the Society. It’s sunset, and the October-colored leaves on the countless trees in the park across the boulevard seem to be catching fire from the reflected light from the dome.
“I’m a member,” says the Deacon. “There should be no problem getting up to the Map Room.”
J.C. and I glance at one another.
Other than a bust of the explorer David Livingstone set into a niche on a wall outside the courtyard, there’s no clue that this sprawling brick building is, for geographers and explorers, the center of the universe.
Inside, someone takes our hats and coats, and an older, silver-haired man in tails and white tie says, “Mr. Deacon. Welcome back, sir. It has been too long since we’ve had the pleasure of your presence here.”
“Thank you, James,” says the Deacon. “Colonel Norton and some others are awaiting us in the Map Room if I’m not mistaken.”
“Yes, sir. Their meeting ended just a few minutes ago, and the five gentlemen are waiting for you in the Club Room annex to the Map Room. Shall I escort you, sir?”
“We’ll find our way, thank you, James.” The wide hallways with their highly varnished floors and glass-cased displays make me want to whisper as if I’m in a church, but the Deacon’s tone remains the same as it had been outside.
The Map Room is beautiful—mezzanines with leather-bound books, long tables with maps set on wooden display wedges, a globe large enough that an acrobat could have balanced on it while rolling it down Kensington Boulevard—but it is not as huge a space as my imagination has been drawing. To one side of the main room is one of the 1875 building’s many-windowed porch annexes, a lighted fireplace set into one wall. Hingston, Noel, Norton, Somervell, and Odell stand as we approach, the Deacon introduces J.C. and me, and the three of us take the last deep leather chairs in the arc of eight chairs facing the fireplace. Through the windows behind us, the sunset light has mellowed into a general golden glow.
During the Deacon’s introductions and our handshakes, I realize that while I’ve met none of these men in person before, I thought I knew what they looked like through published photos of their various expeditions. But almost all of them had been sporting beards—or at least rampant whiskers—in those photographs, and now most are clean-shaven except for a couple of well-trimmed mustaches, so I probably would have walked right past them on the street without recognizing them.
Colonel Edward Felix “Teddy” Norton is exceedingly tall—at least an inch or two taller than my 6 foot 2, I realize—and everything about him, from his quiet, competent demeanor to his cool stare, reflects a military man who has long been comfortable in positions of command. Dr. Richard Hingston, 37 years old, is a slim man—not a climber (he’d served as both physician and expedition naturalist on last spring’s ’24 expedition)—but I knew that he’d pushed himself as high as Camp IV on the North Col to take care of snow-blinded Norton and other ailing patients stuck there. He’d served as a doctor in France, Mesopotamia, and East Africa during the Great War, and had been awarded the Military Cross for his courage under fire. Hingston may not be a climber, but I look at him with great respect.
Theodore Howard Somervell—called Howard by his friends and introduced as such to us by the Deacon—is also a surgeon as well as a former missionary, but looks as rugged as a stevedore. The Deacon has told us that Somervell never really returned to England after the 1922 Everest expedition and has chosen to live and work at a medical mission in Neyyoor in southern India ever since. Somervell is in London now only for the Mallory-Irvine memorial tribute and this round of Alpine Club and RGS meetings and banquets.
Somervell’s a handsome man, even without the thick dark beard he’d sported in photographs from Tibet, and his curly hair, deeply tanned face, expressive dark brows, and sudden white flash of a grin make him appear almost rakish. But that’s not his nature. The Deacon almost never spoke about his own experiences during the War, but he had mentioned one night while we were bivouacking high on an alpine peak last year that Somervell—a particular friend of his—had been turned into a deeply religious pacifist while serving in a surgical tent as one of only four doctors trying to deal with the thousands of wounded soldiers, many mortally wounded and knowing it, on the first morning of the Battle of the Somme. The Deacon said that Somervell had spoken with many of the hundreds of men lying outside the tent on their bloody stretchers or rain ponchos, each man undoubtedly knowing that waiting even moments longer for medical treatment might well cost him his life, but not one injured man had asked to be treated before the others. Not one.
As I shake Somervell’s hand—calloused for a surgeon—and look into his clear eyes, I consider the probability that such an experience might turn any sensitive soul into a pacifist overnight. The Deacon also has told us that while Somervell was a devout Christian, he certainly wasn’t a dogmatic one. “The only problem with Christianity,” Somervell had told the Deacon as they shared a two-man tent high on a snowy pass during the ’22 expedition, “is that it’s never really been tried.”
Captain John Noel is a thin man with a lined face and deep-set eyes that seem filled with worry. There may be reason for that: Noel had paid £8,000, the full cost of the 1924 expedition, in exchange for all film and photo rights—had brought specially devised still and cine cameras as high as the North Col to get long shots of the summiteers, presumably Mallory and Irvine, reaching the top of Everest—and had even brought a full darkroom tent to Everest Base Camp with him the previous spring. He’d paid for a series of runners to carry his developed photographs from Everest to Darjeeling for mailing to the major London papers. Now he is putting out his motion picture The Epic of Everest—but because clouds had obscured any last views of Mallory and Irvine, at least from the North Col, it was being whispered that Captain Noel had no satisfactory ending to his film. He somehow had managed to bring to London with him a troupe of dancing lamas from a Tibetan monastery—not the Rongbuk Monastery near Mount Everest—to liven up his showings, but that, along with “objectionable scenes showing Tibetans eating head lice” in his proposed film, seems already to be causing diplomatic problems. Unless Noel’s motion picture turns out to be a huge hit here in England and in America, the poor man is looking at losing the majority of his £8,000 investment.
As I stare at Odell, I realize that he has good reason to look worried and distracted this autumn evening in 1924.
Captain John Noel had been the last man to receive a note from George Mallory, but it is the last man we greet this night, the geologist and climber and the Deacon’s particular friend Noel E. Odell, who always will be known as the last man to see Mallory and Irvine alive.
Odell had been alone at Camp V the night before Mallory and Irvine made their attempt from the precarious tent higher at Camp VI, and as he ascended alone to Camp VI that day—what should have been the auspicious summit day—it was Odell who’d clambered up a 100-foot crag at about 26,000 feet at 12:50 p.m. and, as he recorded in his journal that night, “saw M & I on ridge, nearing base of final pyramide.”
But had he?
Already, only days after the memorial service for Mallory and Irvine and the jam-packed Alpine Club meeting which had set all of England abuzz, climbers—even other members of the same expedition—were casting doubts on what Odell said he’d seen. Could Mallory and Irvin
e possibly have been surmounting the so-called Third Step and silhouetting themselves against the final snowy Summit Pyramid, as Odell claimed, as early as 12:50 p.m.? It was possible, but seemed doubtful. Their climbing rate, even with oxygen, would have been very impressive indeed. No, argue some, it must have been the Second Step which Odell had seen them climbing. No, no, argue other experts who weren’t within 5,000 miles of the mountain at the time, it could only have been the First Step that Mallory and Irvine were passing that early in the day. Odell must be wrong, even though he’d pointed out via photographs and terrain maps that the rise of ridges and the bulk of the mountain blocked his view of the First Step from his particular vantage point on that crag. But the clouds had parted for only a minute, granting him just a glimpse of the two climbing human figures—if human figures they were (“mere rocks in a snowfield,” argued many alpinists)—before closing in to obscure his view.
We were all seated and another servant in white tie and tails had taken our orders for whiskeys when Colonel Norton broke the silence.
“It’s good to see you, Richard. I’m sorry we have only twenty minutes or so before the formal Alpine Club dinner begins. Since you’re a fellow in the RGS and former expedition member, we could always find room for you…”
The Deacon waves that away. “I’m hardly dressed for it, Teddy, and it wouldn’t be appropriate at any rate. No, my friends and I only want to ask a few questions of you gentlemen, then we’ll be on our way.”
Our drinks arrive: whiskey, neat and amber-colored and aged eighteen years in sherry casks. It is warm going down. My hands aren’t shaking, but I realize that they want to. I also realize that I probably will never be in such an august company of world-class climbers again, which must be the cause of this tension. I’m not afraid of trying to climb Mount Everest, but I’m almost frightened to be in the presence of these men who’ve become world-famous by attempting and failing to do so.
“About Mallory and Irvine, I presume?” says Norton to the Deacon, his tone—I think—rather cooler. How many times has this group been asked questions about the disappeared “heroes” in the past four months?
“Not at all,” says the Deacon. “I had a visit with Lady Bromley this summer and promised that I would help her find out as much as I can about the disappearance of her son.”
“Young Percival Bromley?” says the filmmaker Noel. “How on earth can we help her? Bromley wasn’t with us, you know, Richard.”
“I was under the impression that he traveled from Darjeeling to Rongbuk with you.” The Deacon sips his whiskey, his aquiline profile lighted by the fire from where I sit.
“Not with us, Richard,” says Howard Somervell. “Behind us. By himself. Just himself on a Tibetan pony and his gear on a single mule. Always a day or two behind us. He caught up with us and visited our camp…what, John?” He is asking the filmmaker, Noel. “Three times?”
“Only twice, I believe,” says Noel. “The first time at Kampa Dzong, where we spent three nights. The last time at Shekar Dzong, before we turned south toward the Rongbuk Monastery and Glacier. We spent two nights at Shekar Dzong. Young Bromley never seemed to spend more than one night camped anywhere. He had a simple Whymper tent. One of the smaller, lighter kinds.”
“Should he not have passed you, then, on the trek in?” asks Jean-Claude. He is obviously enjoying his whiskey. “I mean, if you spent multiple nights in certain spots and Bromley would camp only one night…”
“Oh, I say,” says Dr. Hingston with a laugh. “I see your point. But no…Bromley seemed to be making little side trips. South along the Yaru Chu River, for instance, after we spent two nights at Tinki Dzong. Possibly to get a glimpse of Mount Everest from the low mountains there. At any rate, he was behind us again when we arrived at Shekar Dzong.”
“Strangest thing,” says Colonel Norton. “Whenever young Lord Percival did drop in for a visit—both times—he brought his own food and drink. Would accept no hospitality from us, though God knows we had enough food to spare and left a ton of tinned goods behind at the end.”
“So he was well provisioned?” asks the Deacon.
“For a weekend camping trip in Lincolnshire,” comments John Noel. “Not for a solo expedition into Tibet.”
“How could he have traveled alone without official permission from the Tibetan government?” I hear myself asking. I feel the blush rising to my cheeks, as warm as the whiskey in my belly. I’d not planned to speak tonight.
“Rather good question, Mr. Perry,” says Colonel Norton. “We wondered ourselves. Tibet is in a state of relative barbarism, but the local dzongpens—the tribal and village headmen—as well as the government, do post guards and soldiers here and there, especially on the high passes which one cannot bypass. Guards checked our papers there, so I have to assume that Lord Percival had some formal permission papers—perhaps received through the governor of Bengal. The Bromley plantation there near Darjeeling—Bromley-Montfort now—has long been a friend of the Tibetans and whoever is in charge of Bengal and Sikkim.”
“I rode over to Lord Percival’s camp once or twice,” Noel Odell says. “Early in the expedition, just after we’d crossed into Tibet after cresting Jelep La. Young Percival seemed very content to be alone—not overly welcoming, but certainly friendly enough once I sat by his fire. I was worried about his health, you see—so many of us had either dysentery or the beginnings of real mountain lassitude by that point—but Bromley appeared perfectly fine. Every time we saw him, he seemed healthy and in high spirits.”
“And did he follow you from Shekar Dzong to your Base Camp at the foot of the Rongbuk Glacier?” asks the Deacon.
“Oh, heavens no,” says Colonel Norton. “Bromley continued on west the dozen or fifteen miles to Tingri after we turned south toward Everest. We never saw him again. I had the impression that he was set to explore farther west and north beyond Tingri. Much of that area is essentially unexplored, you know, Richard. Tingri itself is a rather frightfully crude former Tibetan military garrison on a high hill. You were there with us when everyone went out of their way to Tingri Dzong in ’twenty-two, as I recall.”
“Yes,” says the Deacon, but adds nothing else.
“I also had the impression from young Bromley,” says Dr. Hingston, “right from the time we met him at the family’s tea plantation, that he was going into Tibet to meet up with someone. It was as if he had just enough food and gear to get to a rendezvous somewhere beyond Shekar Dzong.”
“What about climbing gear?” asks the Deacon. “Bruno Sigl has told the German press that Lord Percival and another man died in an avalanche high on Everest. Did any of you see climbing gear with Lord Percival?”
“Some rope,” says Norton. “One always can use some good rope in Tibet. But not nearly enough rope for an attempt on Everest…nor enough food, nor tents, nor Primus stoves, nor any of the other things he would have required to get even as far as Camp Three, much less up onto the North Col…much, much less the huge mass of material he would have needed to get up to Camp Five or out onto the Face.”
“This Bruno Sigl…,” begins the Deacon.
“Is a liar,” interrupts Colonel Norton. “I’m sorry, Richard. I did not mean to be rude. It’s just that everything Sigl has told the press is sheer rot.”
“So you never saw Sigl or any other Germans, including this possible Austrian Meyer, who’s supposed to have died with Lord Percival?” asks the Deacon.
“Never heard the slightest whisper that any Germans were within a thousand miles while we were on the mountain or glacier,” says Colonel Norton. There are pink spots high on his sharp cheekbones. I have to think that the Scotch he is finishing is not his first of the evening. Either that, or the idea of Germans having been anywhere in the area during their attempts on Everest this year is somehow infuriating and intolerable to Norton.
“I confess to being confused,” says the Deacon. “The last of your party left Base Camp…when? On sixteen June, some eight days after Mallory
and Irvine’s disappearance, no?”
“Yes,” says Odell. “We took time to let the most fatigued climbers rest, and to build the memorial cairn for George and Sandy—and for the porters lost in ’twenty-two—but the last of us were out of the Rongbuk Valley by the afternoon of the sixteenth. We were all in bad shape, except for me, strangely enough: heart conditions, the aftereffects of Colonel Norton’s snow blindness, frostbite, fatigue, constant altitude sickness, headaches for everyone. Everyone coughing constantly.”
“My cough almost killed me on the mountain,” says Howard Somervell.
“At any rate, we left in different groups—invalids, most of us—and the majority went with Colonel Norton to explore the never-before-visited Rongshar Valley under Gaurishankar—we had permission to do so—and to recuperate for ten days at lower altitudes before the hard march back.”
“I had to get my film back, so I came straight back to Darjeeling with the porters and mules,” says Captain Noel.
“John de Vere Hazard, our primary cartographer, wanted to finish up the survey your ’twenty-one expedition had begun, Richard,” says Colonel Norton. “We gave him permission to accompany Hari Sing Thapa of the Indian Survey to the West Rongbuk region for a few days. We waved good-bye to them as they and their few porters went west on sixteen June, the day most of us went north and east.”
“And I had my own detour,” says Odell. “I wanted to do a little more geological work.”
The other four famous men laughed. Odell’s geological ardor, even at altitudes above 27,000 feet on Everest, had evidently become a bit of a joke amongst these otherwise somber survivors.
“I told Odell he could have his little hundred-mile diversion during our trip back if he took our transport officer, E. O. Shebbeare, with him,” says Norton. “There are bandits in that Tibetan hill country. At least Shebbeare spoke some Tibetan.”
Odell looks at the colonel. “And Shebbeare admitted to me a week later that you warned him, Edward, that after our little trip was over, he would never want to set eyes on me again. I believe that was the precise quotation he gave me of your words—‘My dear Shebbeare, you may never want to set eyes on Odell again.’”