The Lost Explorer (5 page)

It was good fortune that George was lying on his stomach, because most of the stuff you carry when you climb is in the front pockets, so it had been protected by his body for seventy-five years. It may seem funny, or even pretentious, but we referred to him as “George,” not as “Mallory.” All through the weeks before, we’d talked about Mallory and Irvine so much that it was as if we knew them, like old friends; they had become George and Sandy.

We left George’s face where it was, frozen into the scree,
but once I could lift the lower part of his body, Tap and Jake could reach underneath him and go through the pockets. The body was like a frozen log. When I lifted it, it made that same creaky noise as when you pull up a log that’s been on the ground for years.

It was disconcerting to look into the hole in the right buttock that the goraks had chewed. His body had been hollowed out, almost like a pumpkin. You could see the remains of seeds and some other food—very possibly Mallory’s last meal.

We didn’t go near George’s head. We moved the loose rock away from it, but we didn’t try to dig it out. I think that was a sort of unspoken agreement, and at the time, none of us wanted to look at his face.

Of course we were most excited about the possibility of finding the camera. Jake even thought for a minute he’d found it. George had a small bag that was lodged under his right biceps. Jake reached in there, squeezed the bag, and felt a small, square object, just about the right size. We finally had to cut the bag to get the object out, and when we did, we found it wasn’t the camera after all, it was a tin of beef lozenges!

The clincher that it was Mallory came when Jake pulled out a neatly folded, new-looking silk handkerchief in which several letters had been carefully wrapped. They were addressed to Mallory. On the envelope of one of them, for instance, we read, “George Leigh Mallory Esq., c/o British Trade Agent, Yalung Tibet.”

Besides the letters, we found a few penciled notes in other pockets. As we found out later, they were all about logistics, about bringing so many loads to Camp VI, and so on. We read them carefully, hoping Mallory might have jotted down a note about reaching the summit or turning back, but there was nothing of the sort.

One by one, Jake and Tap produced what we started calling “the artifacts.” It seemed an odd collection of items to carry to the summit of Everest. There was a small penknife; a tiny pencil, about two and a half inches long, onto which some kind of mint cake had congealed (we could still smell the mint); a needle and thread; a small pair of scissors with a file built into one blade; a second handkerchief, well used (the one he blew his nose on), woven in a red and yellow floral pattern on a blue
background, with the monogram G.L.M. in yellow; a box of special matches, Swan Vestas, with extra phosphorus on the tips; a little piece of leather with a hose clamp on it that might have been a mouthpiece for the oxygen apparatus; a tube of zinc oxide, rolled partway up; a spare pair of fingerless mittens that looked like they hadn’t been used.

Two other artifacts seemed particularly intriguing. Jake found a smashed altimeter in one pocket. The hand was missing from the dial, but you could see that the instrument had been specially calibrated for Everest, with a range from 20,000 feet to 30,000 feet. Inscribed on the back, in fine script, was “M.E.E. II”—for Mount Everest Expedition II. And in the vest pocket, we found a pair of goggles. The frames were bent, but the green glass was unbroken. It was Andy who came up with the possible significance of the goggles being in the pocket. To him, it argued that George had fallen after dusk. If it had been in the daytime, he would have been wearing the goggles, even on rock. He’d just had a vivid lesson in the consequences of taking them off during the day, when Teddy Norton got a terrible attack of snow blindness the night after his summit push on June 4.

As we removed each artifact, we put it carefully in a Ziploc bag. Andy volunteered to carry the objects down to Camp V. To some people, it may seem that taking George’s belongings with us was a violation. We even had a certain sense that we were disturbing the dead—I think that’s why we had hesitated to begin the excavation. But this was the explicit purpose of the expedition: to find Mallory and Irvine and to retrieve the artifacts and try to solve the mystery of what had happened on June 8, 1924. I think we did the right thing.

As interesting as what we found was what we didn’t find. George had no backpack on, nor any trace of the frame that held the twin oxygen bottles. His only carrying sack was the little bag we found under his right biceps. He didn’t have any water bottle, or Thermos flask, which was what they used in ’24. He didn’t have a flashlight, because he’d forgotten to take it with him. We know this not from Odell, but from the 1933 party, who found the flashlight in the tent at the 1924 Camp VI.

And we didn’t find the camera. That was the great disappointment.

It was getting late—we’d already well overstayed our 2:00
P.M.
turnaround. The last thing we gathered was a DNA sample, to analyze for absolute proof of the identity of the man we’d found. Simonson had received approval for this procedure beforehand from John Mallory, George’s only son, who’s seventy-nine and living in South Africa. I had agreed to do this job.

I cut an inch-and-a-half-square patch of skin off the right forearm. It wasn’t easy. I had to use the serrated blade on Dave’s utility knife. Cutting George’s skin was like cutting saddle leather, cured and hard.

Since the expedition, I’ve often wondered whether taking the tissue was a sacrilegious act. In Base Camp, I had volunteered for the task. On the mountain, I had no time to reflect whether or not this was the right thing to do.

We wanted to bury George, or at least to cover him up. There were rocks lying around, but not a lot that weren’t frozen in place. We formed a kind of bucket brigade, passing rocks down to the site.

Then Andy read, as a prayer of committal, Psalm 103: “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth./For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone …”

We finally left at 4:00
P.M.
I lingered a bit after the other four. The last thing I did was to leave a small Butterfinger candy bar in the rocks nearby, like a Buddhist offering. I said a sort of prayer for him, several times over.

The other guys traversed back to Camp VI to rejoin the normal route down to V, but I saw that I could take a shortcut and go straight to V. I got there at 5:00
P.M.
, the others forty-five minutes to an hour later.

Dave and Andy were in one tent, Tap, Jake, and I in the other. Dave said later that it was only back in Camp V that what we’d done really began to sink in, that his emotions spilled out, that he was filled with satisfaction and amazement.

We had some food and tried to sleep. I was pretty tired—it had been a twelve-hour day. I slept soundly for a couple of hours, then I woke up. I was on the downhill side of the tent, getting forced out of the good spot. The wind kept blowing. The rest of the night, I couldn’t sleep. Just kept tossing and turning. It was miserable.

In my sleeplessness, I kept reviewing the day. Despite the broken leg and the gorak damage, at George’s side I had experienced
a powerful feeling that he was at peace with himself. As I had sat next to him, I thought, This man was a fellow climber. We shared the same goals and aspirations, the same joys and sorrows. Our lives were motivated by the same elemental force. When I thought of what a valiant effort George had made, to climb this high on the north side of Everest in 1924, given the equipment and clothing of his day, I was flooded with a sense of awe.

And already, my mind was turning over the implications of what we had found. It seemed unlikely that it was Mallory whose body Wang Hongbao had discovered in 1975. His description—of a man lying on his side, with one cheek pecked out by goraks—was too different from what we had seen. So if Wang had found Irvine, where was he? Did the broken rope mean that the two men had fallen together? In that case, was Irvine’s body nearby? And what were the chances that the camera lay with Irvine? Already I was anticipating our second search.

I knew we’d made a major find, but the full impact of it didn’t hit me until we went on down the mountain. Despite our radio silence and our cryptic coded messages to each other, by the time we reached Base Camp two days later, the whole world was buzzing with the news that we’d discovered George Mallory.

DR

I
T MIGHT BE ARGUED
that in disappearing into the clouds that June day seventy-five years ago, Mallory and Irvine performed the most perfect vanishing act in exploring history. The question of what went wrong to cause their deaths is, in the long run, secondary. Even in the 1990s, it is all too easy to fall off those loose, downward-sloping slabs—like roof tiles, in the words of Teddy Norton—on the north face of Everest, and just as easy to freeze to death in an unplanned bivouac on one of its high, storm-swept ledges. Nor is it particularly surprising that the two men’s bodies should have been lost for so many years. Over the decades, any number of stellar mountaineers have disappeared on Everest—among them the British climbers Mick Burke, Pete Boardman, and Joe Tasker, as well as four stalwart Czechs in 1988 who, having made a daring, fast ascent of the southwest face, were never seen or heard from again after making an exhausted last radio call. Despite all the climbers who yearly swarm onto Everest, the mountain is huge enough to hide many secrets, and the glaciers that carry away everything that falls from its slopes have sealed many a hapless mountaineer in an icy tomb.

The conundrum that elevates Mallory and Irvine’s vanishing to the realm of the mythic is the possibility that the pair could have reached the summit before they died. Over the years, pressed to pin down exactly where he had seen his friends moving fast along the ridge at 12:50 on June 8, Noel
Odell vacillated. A skeptical man by nature, he allowed other skeptics to convince him that in all likelihood he had seen Mallory and Irvine climbing up the relatively easy First Step, more than 1,000 feet below the top. Yet in his original diary entry, which presumably noted his fresh first perception, Odell wrote, “At 12:50 saw M & I on ridge nearing base of final pyramid”—in other words, less than 500 feet below the summit.

None of the fourteen peaks in the world surpassing 8,000 meters (about 26,240 feet) would be climbed for another twenty-six years, until the French ascent of Annapurna in 1950. This, despite a dozen bold attacks on K2, Kangchenjunga, Nanga Parbat, and Everest in the 1930s, by teams loaded with topnotch American, English, and German mountaineers. If Mallory and Irvine summitted in 1924, their deed stands unique in mountaineering history.

Beyond all this, Mallory himself was one of the most talented, charismatic, and at the same time enigmatic figures ever to cross the stage of mountain conquest. He was born in Cheshire on June 18, 1886, a parson’s son. He attended Winchester public school, then went up to Magdalene College, Cambridge. As a child, his sister Avie recalled, “He climbed everything that it was at all possible to climb. I learnt very early that it was fatal to tell him that any tree was impossible for him to get up. ‘Impossible’ was a word that acted as a challenge to him.”

Once, at age seven, George was sent to his room for behaving badly during teatime, only to have his nonplussed family discover him climbing the roof of the adjoining church. “I
did
go to my room,” he rationalized with the impudence of youth—“to fetch my cap.”

The letters George faithfully wrote his mother during his teenage years brim with boyish high spirits, and with a cocky self-confidence, as he unabashedly narrates his triumphs. For a while, his favorite epithet was “perfectly ripping”: “The Grand Combin is 14,100 feet, and of course the view from the top was perfectly ripping.”

Bright, charming, and restless, Mallory was inclined at Winchester toward a certain scholastic laziness. Wrote one of his tutors, “Mallory was just a very attractive, natural boy, not a hard worker and behind rather than in front of his contemporaries
… in intellectual attainments.” At Winchester he excelled in football (i.e., soccer) and gymnastics, and “did not like to lose.” At Cambridge, he became captain of the Magdalene Boat Club and rowed in the Henley Regatta.

But it was not until the age of eighteen, during the summer before his last year at Winchester, that Mallory first did any real mountaineering, when a tutor, R. L. G. Irving, took him and another student to the Alps. The climbs Irving dragged his novices up were surprisingly ambitious, and during those arduous outings on Monte Rosa and Mont Blanc, Mallory discovered the passion that would center his life.

From his first years onward, two characteristics emerged that would ultimately bear on his fate on Mount Everest. Mallory had a kind of addiction to risk that skeptical observers considered simple recklessness. His sister remembered him telling her that in theory a boy ought to be able to lie on the railroad tracks and escape unharmed as a train ran over him. A characteristic childhood stunt at the beach is recounted by David Robertson, Mallory’s definitive biographer: