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Mallory was followed next morning by Wakefield, Crawford, and Somervell, who brought down with them a certain amount of the lighter equipment. Morris was all this time working to salvage as much as he possibly could from the different camps. We had a large number of Tibetans pushed up as far as Camp II, and as many of our own porters as were available (not very many, I am sorry to say, by now) working with Morris in the evacuation of Camp III. In this work the cooks and orderlies also joined.

It was perfectly evident by now that the monsoon had set in in full force. On his return, Morris gave me a very vivid description of how, even during the one day that he stayed up after the others had left at Camp III, although the weather was fairly fine, the whole face of the mountain sides began to change; how under the influence of the soft South wind the mountains seemed to melt and disintegrate. Not only that, but even the great teeth formed by the pressure of the collateral glaciers, probably great séracs that spring out like the teeth of a huge saw on the glacier, and which seemed solid enough to last for all time, were visibly crumbling up, and some of them were even toppling over. The great trough of black ice up the centre of the glacier which Strutt has described had turned into a rushing torrent—and all this in an incredibly short period of time. Snow also fell at intervals, and it was quite apparent that when the monsoon settled down the whole of Camp III would be under a great blanket of fresh snow. Under these conditions a good deal of stuff, especially the supplies of grain, tzampa, and so on, for our porters, had to be abandoned. As for Camps IV, V, and VI, there was naturally no chance of rescuing anything from them. Thus was occasioned a fairly large loss of outfit; nor was there any possibility that any of it could have stood under any conditions more than a month’s exposure to the weather. There was a considerable loss in the oxygen apparatus, but Morris managed to bring down three full outfits in more or less dilapidated condition.