The Lost Explorer (10 page)

For the record, there were several different letters from various family members. The handwriting on some of them is a little tough to read, and it’s not entirely clear whether the letter from his wife was in fact from his wife, but we’re working on that.

There is no doubt that, as late as 1924, Mallory was still deeply in love with his wife. His long letters to her from the expedition breathe that passion, and the pain of separation: “How I wish I had you with me! With so much leisure we should have enjoyed the time together…. Great love to you, dearest one.”

Yet at the same time, those letters adumbrate certain recent problems the couple had faced: “I know I have rather often been cross and not nice, and I’m very sorry.” “We went through a difficult time together in the autumn.” Mallory’s biographers have always assumed that the troubles thus alluded to had to do with career and money, and with the many months Mallory was away on Everest.

Upon his return to the U.S., Simonson kept the letters under lock and key at the Washington State Historical Museum. In late July, he traveled to California to present the letters to Clare Millikan and her brother, John Mallory, who traveled to the U.S. from South Africa to retrieve them. Her memory prodded by the Stella letter, Clare remembered one Stella Mellersh, a woman who had married a cousin of Ruth Mallory’s. She had been a generation older than George Mallory.

Rick Millikan, Clare’s son and Mallory’s grandson, carefully
read the letter and decided that the apparently intimate phrase had been misread at Base Camp: all it really said, Millikan thought, was something like, “Much love to you, George.” Simonson pointed out some penciled scribblings on the envelope in Mallory’s hand, which he thought might be an inventory of oxygen bottles. It occurred to Simonson and Millikan that perhaps Mallory had carried the Stella letter so high mainly to use the envelope as a piece of note paper!

From this California meeting, John Mallory carried the letters back to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where they were to be archived with the existing Mallory correspondence. Eventually scholars will be able to puzzle over the Stella letter to their hearts’ content, determining whether it really is an intimate message from a phantom lover or only a pleasant note from a distant older relative.

As striking in its own way as the anomalous Stella letter was the absence of any missive from Ruth in that neatly folded handkerchief. On the journey from Darjeeling, and even at Base Camp, Mallory had received letters from his wife. Clare Millikan was told at age eight that her father carried a photo of Ruth, which he intended to leave on the summit. Among those who most wanted to believe Mallory could have made it to the top, here was another circumstantial argument: perhaps the great mountaineer had indeed left the most precious thing he could carry—a letter from or a photo of his wife—among the summit snows.

CA

O
N
M
AY
8,
WE DESCENDED
from Base Camp to the Rongbuk Monastery—the highest monastery in the world, destroyed by the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution, but mostly rebuilt since. Liesl shot some film footage there, but the main idea was to bide our time, to fatten up and recharge prior to heading back up for the second and more demanding summit phase of the expedition.

My method of recharging is to eat all the junk food I can, all day long. Candy bars, potato chips, little bits of cheese, sardines—anything with a high fat content. The downside of this day-long grazing was that when we were served dinner, I didn’t have much appetite for a plateful of rice with stewed cabbage, because I’d been eating a lot of chocolate. But calories are calories. It’s not so much a question of fattening up as of trying to keep weight on. I knew I had already lost weight on the expedition. My legs were getting thinner.

At Bouddanath, in Kathmandu, at the beginning of the expedition, we had had a
puja
ceremony, a blessing for the expedition. Later, on April 1, the monks from the Rongbuk Monastery came up to Base Camp to give us a second
puja
. The high lama who led the ceremony at Bouddanath had tied a red prayer knot around my neck. Three months later, I haven’t taken it off: it’s a common Buddhist practice to leave it on until it disintegrates.

At the
puja
at Base Camp, we had trucked in some juniper to burn, and we made offerings to the monks. I gave them a bunch of Skittles—a hard candy I sometimes eat when I’m rock-climbing—some turkey jerky, and a Coca-Cola. The monks tossed rice around, which all the birds came to feed on, and they smeared tsampa flour on our faces and gave us tsampa cake to eat.

Some of the guys on our expedition didn’t take the
puja
very seriously. Peter Firstbrook, the BBC director, was washing his socks at the Rongbuk
puja
. You wouldn’t wash your socks during services at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Other Westerners just more or less tolerated the ceremony. You can see that in the way Dave Hahn wrote up the Base Camp
puja
on Mountain-Zone:

We had our Puja yesterday. That is when we put the packing and planning on hold and get down to some serious begging. The Puja is a ceremony designed to get some good credit with the gods, seeing as how we are now going to get up to our eyeballs in this thing. Really, it is for the Sherpas and their brand of mountain Buddhism. We try to show our respect for them and their beliefs by allowing the ceremony.

The
puja
is indeed a deeply serious ceremony for the Sherpas. And I take it very seriously too. At the Bouddanath
puja
, from a little tray of offerings the lamas passed around, I picked out a walnut that I intended to leave on the summit.

I wouldn’t call myself a Buddhist, but I have a great admiration for the religion. The Dalai Lama says his religion is kindness. If you’re going to be kind to yourself, be kind to your friends, to your partner, your family, the animals, the trees. I believe in that. I also believe in karma. It’s not just a matter of the right actions; you have to have the right intentions as well.

There was the same kind of range in response to the
puja
way back in the 1920s. Expedition member Bentley Beetham, in
The Fight for Everest
, the official book from 1924, describes coming upon a service in progress in the Rongbuk Monastery as the team left the mountain. “Hitherto we had felt nothing but revulsion for the lamas,” Beetham writes; after all, these Buddhist monks were idolaters, worshiping false gods. Yet as he watched, he got caught up in the ceremony, until he had to admit that it was “the most impressive, the most moving service I, for one, have ever attended.” Beetham was so moved that his cultural superiority was tempered: “These Tibetans may be wrong, they may be deceived, but they are obviously in earnest; an English congregation may not be deceived, but are they in earnest?”

As the international fuss about our discovery started to calm down a bit, we planned the second stage of our expedition. We’d hoped to make a second search for Sandy Irvine and the camera. But it had snowed a fair amount since May 1, and we weren’t so sanguine about our chances of making a second find.

And four of us—Dave Hahn, Tap Richards, Jake Norton, and I—wanted to have a shot at the summit. In addition, I had a personal aspiration, which Simo and I had discussed even before we left the States. I wanted to try to free-climb the Second Step. That, for me, was the crucial test of the likelihood that Mallory and Irvine could have made the summit.

To free-climb a pitch is to scale it using only one’s hands and feet, without relying on artificial objects—pitons, machined nuts, even ladders—to gain upward progress.

Some background is in order. On June 4, 1924, Teddy Norton
had reached a height calculated as 28,126 feet by traversing west across the north face and entering the Great Couloir. In 1933, Frank Smythe exactly matched that high point, which stood, in the absence of any sure knowledge of Mallory and Irvine’s achievement, as the world altitude record until 1952, when the Swiss Raymond Lambert and the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay turned back on the South Col route only 800 feet below the summit.

The Great Couloir would prove a feasible route up the north side of Everest, as Reinhold Messner demonstrated in making his amazing oxygenless solo ascent in 1980. But we know this was not the route followed by Mallory and Irvine, because Odell saw them high on the skyline of the north ridge.

The Second Step is a ninety-foot-high, nearly vertical cliff that interrupts the north ridge at 28,230 feet. There’s no way of skirting it: you have to tackle it head-on. Unless Mallory and Irvine climbed it, the first men to grapple with this formidable obstacle were the Chinese team in 1960. By their own account, which appeared in a propaganda organ called
China Reconstructs
, after an all-out effort in which one climber took off his boots and gloves and tried the cliff in stocking feet, a partner solved the climb by standing on another teammate’s shoulders. Three men then went on to the top in the dark.

Or so the article claims. I’ve always had my doubts about that purported ascent, and so have others.

The first well-documented ascent of the north ridge, also by Chinese, came in 1975, during the expedition on which Wang Hongbao found his “old English dead.” Aware of the difficulty of the Second Step, the team hauled a ladder up to the crux and tied it to pitons they pounded in place. All subsequent ascents of the north ridge have used the ladder and/or the myriad fixed ropes now in place on the Step.

Mallory and Irvine, of course, had had no ladder. So if I could free-climb the Second Step and judge its difficulty, that would tell us a lot about whether Mallory and Irvine could have pulled it off in 1924, in hobnailed boots and tweed jackets, holding a thin cotton rope in an anchorless gentleman’s belay.

We were just getting organized to head back up the mountain when something happened that put all our plans on hold. That spring, among the several expeditions on the north side of
Everest, we’d been the first to get up high, to fix ropes and pitch Camps IV and V. Following right after us was the strong Ukrainian team, who, despite the language barrier, had become our friends.

They’d decided early on that May 8 was to be their summit day. Unfortunately, May 8 turned out to be the worst day of our forty so far on the mountain. Even down at the Rongbuk Monastery, it was snowing on us. I could see that the weather wasn’t just the usual afternoon buildup of clouds. There were squalls and flurries developing into a major storm.

We decided to head back up to Base Camp. The weather got worse and worse. By 9:00
P.M.
, we knew the Ukrainians were in serious trouble. Instead of climbing the mountain ourselves, we were going to have to go out and try to rescue them.

DR

T
HE
1921
RECONNAISSANCE OF
E
VEREST
, pursued through the monsoon summer and into the autumn season, was in many respects a colossal mess. The party’s talents were wildly uneven, with several over-the-hill, out-of-shape veterans in leadership positions. Entrusted with choosing a team, the Everest Committee—a national board of exploratory experts formed for the express purpose of claiming the “Third Pole” for the Empire—valued years of hill-walking and Himalayan rambling over technical mountaineering skills.

From the start, Mallory was at serious odds with the team’s leader, Charles Howard-Bury, and its climbing leader, Harold Raeburn, both much older than he. Of the former, he wrote Ruth, “He is not a tolerant person. He is well-informed and opinionated and doesn’t at all like anyone else to know things he doesn’t know. For the sake of peace, I am being very careful not to broach certain subjects of conversation.” Of Rae-burn: “He is dreadfully dictatorial about matters of fact, and often wrong.”

Before the party even got near Mount Everest, the well-liked but fifty-year-old Scottish doctor, A. M. Kellas, died of dysentery. His teammates buried him on a stony hillside, in what Mallory called “an extraordinarily affecting little ceremony.”

In view of the 1999 controversy over scoops on the Internet and secrets guarded by Simonson’s teammates, it is interesting
to note that the same kinds of worries afflicted the first expedition to approach the world’s highest mountain. The Everest Committee had made a deal with the
Times
of London for exclusive coverage, irritating rivals such as the
Daily Telegraph
. Even before the team had found Everest, one of the committee’s potentates wrote the surveyor-general of India, expressing his fears about “unexpected leakage,” and fingering a reporter for the Calcutta
Morning Post
as a particularly dangerous suspect. A kindred paranoia had dictated an oath that all the team members had been required to sign before leaving England, enjoining them “not to hold any communication with the press or with any press agency or publisher, or to deliver any public lecture” without the approval of the Everest Committee.

So a motley assortment of mountaineers and travelers, already torn by jealousies and disparate ambitions, stumbled toward Everest in the wrong season. George Bernard Shaw later memorably characterized a group portrait of the team as looking “like a picnic in Connemara surprised by a snowstorm.”