A final push

5th June 1924

After Norton and Somervell's failed attempt, Mallory told Norton that he had a final plan, for a further summit attempt with oxygen. And he wanted to go with Sandy: while Norton tried to tell him that Odell was more experienced and fitter, Mallory wanted someone who fully trusted the oxygen set (while Odell had expressed perplexities about its efficacy). Final plans were made on 5 June, while Norton was lying in his tent, coping with a sever attack of snow-blindness.

Sandy spent the last day in Camp IV with Odell putting finishing touches to the oxygen sets. They talked a little, before turning in, about his delight at the prospect of having his chance to climb for the summit. The last entry in Sandy’s diary reads: 'My sore face gave a lot of trouble during last night. Somervell still very exhausted but started for camp III before tiffin. Norton is badly snow blind + can’t be moved down just yet. We covered his tent with sleeping bags to keep it dark – he’s had a pretty miserable day of it – it has been very trying for everyone with a Freezing air temp + a temp of 120 in the Sun + terribly strong reflection off the snow. My face is perfect agony. Have prepared 2 Oxygen apparatus for our start tomorrow morning.' 

Sandy's last note can be better understood if we consider that, from the very beginning of the march, his fair skin had caused him great problems. He burned his elbows and knees badly in Sikkim but it was his face that was to cause him the greatest agony later on. By mid-April he had serious sunburn to his face and had lost several layers of skin around his nose and mouth. Most of the other members grew beards to protect their faces, but Sandy, for some reason, elected to keep himself free from facial hair. 

He was also painstaking about his daily washing and this did not go unremarked by the other members of the party. Norton, in a dispatch to the Times, went into some detail about the habits of the expedition members. 'The effect of the sun and wind is less felt than previously, thanks to the early issue of lanoline and vaseline, and to the cautious avoidance of the ultra-English vice of cold bathing in the open. Thus we have retained a high average proportion of skin on the nose, lips and finger-tips ... In this respect a fair man offers the most vulnerable target, and the Mess Secretary seems to have hit on the expedient of growing a new face every second day, but then he is suspected of indulging in the said English vice, or why his frequent pilgrimages in the direction of a frozen stream, clad principally in a towel?’. The great discomfort Sandy was now suffering was exacerbated by the use of the oxygen mask. 

Years later Odell told Bill Summers that in order to derive maximum benefit from the oxygen, Sandy had been forced to clamp the mask onto the scar which had developed above his nose and in the soft tissue around his mouth and that every time he removed it, the frozen material would remove another layer of skin from his face.