The Lost Explorer (19 page)

Despite their ailments, using oxygen Mallory and Irvine had come up from Camp III to IV on this last push in only two and a half hours—a time that some of the strongest climbers in the 1990s would be proud of. Up till the last minute, Irvine had fussed with the oxygen sets, jury-rigging final adjustments.

His spirit must also have been indomitable, for he cannot have gotten much sleep during his last nights on the North Col. The final diary entries reveal just how badly Irvine was suffering from his sunburn. On June 3: “A most unpleasant night when everything on earth seemed to rub against my face, and each time it was touched bits of burnt and dry skin came off, which made me nearly scream with pain.” June 5, on the eve of departure: “My face is perfect agony.”

Despite having slaved for more than a month to improve the oxygen apparatus, Irvine told Odell that “he would rather reach the foot of the final pyramid without the use of oxygen than the summit by means of its aid! He thought that if it were worth while doing at all, it was worth while doing without artificial means.” Such a purist sentiment would scarcely be voiced again for the next fifty years.

At 8:40
A.M.
on June 6, using oxygen, with eight lightly burdened porters going without, Mallory and Irvine left the North Col. Odell took a picture of the two: by his own admission a hurried snapshot, the men’s features unrecognizable as they putter with gear, it has nonetheless been reprinted hundreds of times over, for it is the last photo taken of either man—unless there are images lying dormant in the celluloid inside Mallory’s Vestpocket camera, lost somewhere still on Everest.

A clear morning deteriorated into a cloudy day with evening snow. At 5:00
P.M.
, four of the porters returned from the north face, with a note from Mallory, ensconced in Camp V: “There is no wind here, and things look hopeful.”

The next day, as planned, Odell and a Sherpa climbed to Camp V. Soon after they got there, the remaining four porters descended from above, bringing another message, this one from Camp VI at 26,800 feet:

Dear Odell,—

We’re awfully sorry to have left things in such a mess—our Unna Cooker rolled down the slope at the last moment. Be sure of getting back to IV to-morrow in time to evacuate before dark, as I hope to. In the tent I must have left a compass—for the Lord’s sake rescue it: we are without. To here on 90 atmospheres for the two days—so we’ll probably go on two cylinders—but it’s a bloody load for climbing. Perfect weather for the job!

Yours ever,

G. Mallory

To the end, Mallory was dogged by his forgetfulness and mechanical ineptitude. The loss of the cookstove was ominous, for unless the men had already filled their Thermoses with water or tea before it “rolled down the slope,” they would be hard put to melt any snow for breakfast or to carry on the climb. Not having a compass (Odell in fact found the instrument in the tent at V) would be less consequential on summit day, unless the pair were engulfed in a white-out. The “90 atmospheres,” Odell knew, amounted to a flow of about three quarters of the rig’s capacity. At that rate, each bottle ought to have lasted at least four
hours. If the men carried two cylinders apiece on June 8, they should have been able to climb for eight hours breathing gas.

With the message to Odell was the one to John Noel, exhorting the men lower on the mountain to start looking for Mallory and Irvine “either crossing the rock band under the pyramid or going up the skyline at 8.0 p.m.” Odell read this note, assuming at once, as all historians have, that Mallory meant 8:00
A.M.
on June 8.

After sending the five Sherpas down, Odell spent a peaceful night alone at Camp V. The sunset transported him, as he gazed in three directions at distant peaks sharply etched in the clear air, including the massive sprawl of peaks surrounding Kangchenjunga, the world’s third-highest mountain, 100 miles to the east. “It has been my good fortune to climb many peaks alone and witness sunset from not a few,” he later wrote, “but this was the crowning experience of them all, an ineffable transcendent experience that can never fade from memory.”

Odell started out to climb to Camp VI at 8:00
A.M.
on June 8. The day had dawned clear, but by mid-morning “rolling banks of mist commenced to form and sweep from the westward across the great face of the mountain.” The wind, however, was light. The day seemed propitious for a summit climb. “I had no qualms for Mallory and Irvine’s progress upward from Camp VI,” Odell reported, “and I hoped by this time that they would be well on their way up the final pyramid.”

Still climbing without oxygen, Odell was by now so completely in his element that, rather than take the shortest approach to Camp VI, he wandered about the north face, appraising its geology, discovering his beloved fossils. Just after noon, he climbed the “little crag” at 26,000 feet, stared at the skyline ridge, and made his legendary sighting. There, some 2,000 feet above him, he watched as the lead figure quickly climbed to the top of a step on the ridge, then waited as the second figure followed, both men “moving expeditiously as if endeavouring to make up for lost time.” Then the clouds moved in again, blocking his view.

It was 12:50
P.M.
, five hours later than the 8:00
A.M.
appearance Mallory had seemed to predict in his note to John Noel. Odell now felt a mild alarm, but he listed to himself all the reasons that could have contributed to his friends’ delay.
(Curiously, few commentators in the last seventy-five years have wondered whether Mallory’s 8:00
A.M.
prediction might have simply been the final example of his underestimating the mountain. No party had yet managed to leave a high camp on Everest before 6:30
A.M.
, and the skyline ridge lay more than 1,200 feet above Camp VI.)

In the midst of a snow squall, Odell reached VI at 2:00
P.M.
There he was disappointed to find no note from Mallory chronicling the pair’s departure, and further disturbed to see pieces of oxygen apparatus strewn about the tent. Yet he would not conclude from the debris that Irvine had made desperate last-minute repairs; instead, he rationalized that his protégé might simply have “invented some problem to be solved even if it never really had turned up! He loved to dwell amongst, nay, revelled in, pieces of apparatus and a litter of tools.”

Odell did not notice that Mallory had left his flashlight in the tent—yet another instance, and a potentially weighty one, of his absentmindedness. The flashlight would be rediscovered by members of the 1933 Everest expedition, who turned on its switch and found that it still functioned nine years after it had been left there.

Hoping to find his friends on their way down and guide them back to Camp VI, Odell climbed another 200 feet in dense clouds, whistling and yodeling to signal his presence. Then, realizing that it was too early to expect the pair’s return, he made his way back to Camp VI. Just as he got there, the squall ended and the mountain cleared again. Now, however, Odell could see nothing, although warm afternoon light bathed the mountain’s upper slopes.

He lingered until 4:30
P.M.
, then, in obedience to Mallory’s note, started back down the mountain, not before leaving Mallory’s compass, which he had retrieved from Camp V, in “a conspicuous place in the corner of the tent by the door”—less, one suspects, to enable his friends to navigate down to the North Col than as a charm against the fates. Odell reached Camp V at 6:15
P.M.
, then, glissading much of the way, descended the 2,300 feet to the North Col in the astonishing time of thirty minutes.

Among the Englishmen, there was only Hazard there to greet him. The others, still weakened by their ordeals of the last
few days, were convalescing at Camp III. On the evening of June 8, everyone stared for hours at the upper slopes of Everest, hoping to see the beam of a flashlight or even the flaming burst of one of the emergency flares the porters had carried to Camp VI; but they saw nothing. Still rationalizing away his fears, Odell hoped that moonlight reflected off summits to the west might have aided his friends’ descent.

All next morning, Hazard and Odell swept the mountain with field glasses, detecting no signs of life. Unable to bear this idle vigil, at noon Odell started up the north face again with two Sherpas. The well-rested Hazard did not even consider joining him, for he had reached his limit at 23,000 feet.

The three men reached Camp V that afternoon, then spent a sleepless night as a nasty wind threatened to tear the tents loose. On the morning of June 10, with the wind still fierce and cold, the two Sherpas were incapable of continuing. Odell sent them back down to the North Col, then set out alone to climb to Camp VI. For the first time, he breathed bottled oxygen in hopes it would aid his performance, but, true to his ingrained skepticism, turned off the apparatus partway up and “experienced none of those feelings of collapse and panting that one had been led to believe ought to result.” Lugging the useless contraption on his back, Odell marched on up to VI, reaching it at midday.

Odell’s own account does not dwell on the terrible shock of his discovery. In the most understated fashion, he mentions simply that “I found everything as I had left it: the tent had obviously not been touched since I was there two days previously.” Dumping the oxygen set, he at once pushed on above to search for some trace of his companions, even as the weather deteriorated.

In a state of heightened awareness that the dawning tragedy had spurred in him, Odell was now granted something like a revelation:

This upper part of Everest must be indeed the remotest and least hospitable spot on earth, but at no time more emphatically and impressively so than when a darkened atmosphere hides its features and a gale races over its cruel face. And how and when more cruel could it ever
seem than when balking one’s every step to find one’s friends?

Odell struggled on for almost two hours, finding nothing. Back at Camp VI, he crawled into the tent to take shelter from the gnawing wind. Then, during a lull, he dragged two sleeping bags up to a precarious snow patch above the tent and laid them out in the form of a T. Four thousand feet below, looking with field glasses, Hazard saw the prearranged signal and knew the worst.

At last Odell closed up the tent and headed down. As he took one more look at Everest’s distant summit, his revelation of the utter inhumanity of the great mountain reached a spiritual pitch:

It seemed to look down with cold indifference on me, mere puny man, and howl derision in wind-gusts at my petition to yield up its secret—this mystery of my friends. What right had we to venture thus far into the holy presence of the Supreme Goddess…? If it were indeed the sacred ground of Chomolungma—Goddess Mother of the Mountain Snows, had we violated it—was I now violating it?

In that freighted moment, chilled to the soul by the mountain’s indifference, Odell all at once heard the siren’s song:

And yet as I gazed again another mood appeared to creep over her haunting features. There seemed to be something alluring in that towering presence. I was almost fascinated. I realized that no mere mountaineer alone could but be fascinated, that he who approaches close must ever be led on, and oblivious of all obstacles seek to reach that most sacred and highest place of all. It seemed that my friends must have been thus enchanted also: for why else should they tarry?

Lower on the mountain, Odell’s teammates had passed these last few days in an agony of ignorance. In hopes of curing his throat problems, Somervell had descended all the way to Base Camp. On June 11, he wrote in his diary, “No news. It is
ominous.” And the next day, after several comrades had arrived with their tidings: “There were only two possibilities—accident or benightment. It is terrible. But there are few better deaths than to die in high endeavour, and Everest is the finest cenotaph in the world.”

By June 12, the whole expedition had gathered at Base Camp. Wrote Norton later:

We were a sad little party; from the first we accepted the loss of our comrades in that rational spirit which all of our generation had learnt in the Great War, and there was never any tendency to a morbid harping on the irrevocable. But the tragedy was very near; our friends’ vacant tents and vacant places at table were a constant reminder to us of what the atmosphere of the camp would have been had things gone differently.

The men might accept the loss of Mallory and Irvine, but they could not resolve the mystery of what had happened to them. As they retreated from Mount Everest, they speculated ceaselessly as to how their friends had met their end. For the rest of their lives—John Noel the last to die, just short of his one hundredth birthday—they would continue to wonder and speculate, turning over and over like potsherds the fragmentary clues they had to base their guesses on.

CA

B
Y
M
AY
15,
SIX OF US
had reoccupied Camp V, at 25,600 feet. We had two separate agendas: to go for the summit and to conduct a second search. It wasn’t predetermined who would do which. Tap Richards, Jake Norton, and I were motivated to climb the mountain, because we hadn’t been on Everest before.