Where man evolves a religion, he tends to do so in certain ways which are common to many countries and faiths. The most important and fundamental of these is the creation of a priesthood – a section of the community who are said to be in special contact with the gods, and therefore in a specialist’s position with regard to ordinary men and women.13
I am not for a moment suggesting that a Mallory religion is arising. But certain elements of a cult seem to be there: the martyrdom of a saint-like figure, a mysterious death, appeals to the spirit world through psychic mediums and the rise of an expert priestly caste that rejects heretics. What is even better is that the facts surrounding his death, like that of Jesus Christ, are reassuringly vague. Anyone can place their own construction of events upon the story, and add to it any meaning and significance they want. I think my own fascination, which has cost me dear, is something to do with a desire for uncovering the truth and giving credit where it is deserved.
A healthy dose of realism is well overdue. So it is now time to examine all the clues, reliable and less reliable, and try to cut through some of the verbiage that has gathered around the subject.
17
The Theorists and Their Theories
Over the years more and more attention has been focused on the story of Mallory and Irvine. All the participants of the 1924 expedition had their own well-informed views, and the consensus among them was that the pair had made it to the summit, but had fallen or – kinder to their families – been benighted. Somervell had a strong hunch that they had made it. They generally agreed that Mallory had become obsessed with the mountain and that when close to the summit, but dangerously late, he had climbed on to take the prize.
It must be remembered, though, that these men didn’t know of the difficulty of the Second Step, nor did they realise that the effects of foreshortening meant that the summit was further away than they thought. Modern theorists know more about the route just as the original participants knew more about the characters, so any intelligent analysis has to take into both views account.
Our finding of Mallory’s body in 1999 threw fuel onto the flames. There was much wishful thinking from people – like me – who would love to prove that he had been successful, but woolly thinking abounded. All kinds of proofs were put forward, such as the absence of a photograph of Ruth Mallory in her husband’s pockets. Family legend had it that George was going to put a picture of his wife on the summit but, as Audrey Salkeld has pointed out, in a letter to Ruth he chided her for not sending a picture. So we don’t even know if he had a picture on him, let alone whether he left it on the summit or not.
I think it is important to distinguish between this kind of evidence and the more reliable evidence of body, clothes and axe. It is fine to have a theory – in fact the more the merrier – but to have any credibility it has to be substantiated with hard facts. The risk is that some of the theorists use selective quotation and imaginative exposition to support their case.
Tom Holzel is one of the more combative theorists. The son of a German Second World War army officer and an American mother, he is a naturalised American. He became gripped by the Everest story after seeing an article in the New Yorker. Holzel calculated oxygen consumption and climbing rates, and wrote an article in Mountain magazine in 1971 claiming that Mallory might have been successful in his attempt on the summit by clever use of oxygen. It prompted a series of letters to the Sunday Times from Wyn-Harris (who found the axe) and other British climbing luminaries, all of whom dismissed his theory. Holzel enjoyed baiting the British climbers and quoted the exchange with glee:
The astonishing attack on my theory of what happened to Mallory and Irvine is as long as the original article, all of it written with the same intense fervour as the above finale, with the name of Holzel appearing 79 times!1
In the two chapters of The Mystery of Mallory and Irvine that he wrote he also claims that Mallory did indeed get to the top, but in later published work he completely changed his mind. This makes his theories particularly interesting to analyse, as by considering both sides we may get some way towards the truth.
In his 1971 article Holzel believed that climbers could not reach the summit without oxygen, a theory that was proved wrong in 1978 by Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler. So he had to invent a complicated sequence of events in which Odell sees the two climbers on the Second Step, which Holzel claims they climbed in five minutes. Mallory then takes Irvine’s remaining oxygen and leaves him at the top of the Step. ‘Splitting up at 1 p.m., Mallory quickly raced up the final pyramid.’
This is glorious stuff, and utterly silly. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone quickly racing up anything at Everest Base Camp, let alone near the summit. Holzel has not climbed Mount Everest, but even he must have realised that walking very slowly and taking around ten breaths per step is the most you can manage on or near the summit. He has Mallory sitting out the night ‘dressed in hacking jacket and muffler’. In fact, as I was to find out later, his gear was rather more sophisticated than that.
What is refreshing about Holzel is that he changes his mind when confronted with new evidence. When Mallory’s body was found it was realised that he did not have a hole in his cheek, as was thought from Wang’s testimony. There was, however, a hole in his forehead. This was reported by Thom Pollard, who as I mentioned above returned to the grave with Andy Politz, disinterred the body, and lifted it to search underneath. He told me Mallory had some stubble on his face, and there was a hole above his left eyebrow.
More recently, Holzel has Mallory killed with a blow to his forehead from his own ice axe, and then rolled by Wang from a face-up position with the ice axe sticking out of his forehead to the face-down position he was found in. This was to explain Wang’s reported statement that his face had a hole in it. This seems unlikely, and once again too complicated to be believable. The head of an ice axe has a sharp pick and a broad adze. During self-arrest – stopping a slide on hard snow – the climber holds the adze in the uphill hand and presses the pick downwards into the snow. This is what Somervell did after he fell during the first attempt to climb the mountain. If Mallory was attempting to slow himself down in this manner the axe should not have jumped up and penetrated his forehead, and if it had the broad adze would have left a larger hole than that reported.
The irony is that Holzel regularly conjures up William of Ockham, an English monk active in the 14th century, and his famous Razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem (‘one should not multiply entities beyond necessity’). Ockham formulates it thus: ‘For nothing ought to be posited without a reason given, unless it is self-evident or known by experience or proved by the authority of Sacred Scripture.’
This, however, is precisely Holzel’s error. He has to invent a complicated sequence of events to explain a reported observation (Wang’s reported testimony that he saw a hole in the body’s face) that we cannot prove to be true. Mallory’s body took five man-hours to dig out of the frozen scree he was half-buried in, so it is unlikely that Wang was able to roll him over swiftly enough to look at the face, then get back to the tent (200 metres up the slope) within the reported 20 minutes. In addition, his body was literally frozen stiff, and would have been unlikely to adopt a new, spread-eagled position. Again, an unlikely deduction is being made from dubious evidence.
What had Wang really seen? The Japanese climber Ryoten Hasagawa who heard Wang’s testimony was interviewed in Japan for our BBC film of the find, Lost on Everest. Our English version of his Japanese account of a conversation with a man whose language he didn’t understand might have lost something in the translation, but here is a verbatim transcription.
In the interview he explained that Wang ‘had been a member of the Chinese attempt on the summit in 1975. On the way, at about 8,150 metres at the foot of a rock, he found the old remains of an Englishman. He was lying on his side. His clothes were very old and if you took a pinch [of them] you could blow it away. The remains were that old. The
re was a hole in the side of his face big enough to put your fingers in. He’d found the really old remains of an Englishman.’
There are a number of inconsistencies here. When found, Mallory was lying face down, frozen into the scree, and not lying on his side. There wasn’t a hole in the side of his face big enough to place fingers in, as Thom Pollard reported that the hole was above the left eyebrow. And the body was not at the foot of a rock – there was a clear slope of scree around it. Had Wang instead found the body of Sandy Irvine? Again, his verbal testimony seems inconsistent with the hard facts, and I think it has to be treated with caution.
Holzel tries to reconcile Wang’s reported story with the hard facts of the Mallory find and gets in a fearful tangle, in the same way as he did when he argued that Mallory had reached the summit. To explain how this occurred he had to invent a complicated sequence of events: climbing the Second Step, borrowing Irvine’s oxygen, leaving Irvine behind and climbing alone to the summit. The problem with hierarchical theories like this is that if you pull out a brick at the bottom the whole edifice comes crashing down. Sherlock Holmes, our most famous detective, said this: ‘It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.’2
Holzel’s latest theory has Mallory and Irvine failing to climb to the summit, turning back at the Second Step, falling and separating at the ice-axe site during the squall, then Mallory falling again to his final resting place.3 In arguing this, he comes dangerously close to agreeing with the old English buffers of the Alpine Club who found him so irritating. We can examine all the new clues in the light of this theory.
For me, Ockham’s ‘known by experience’ is important here. If you look closely at what Mallory and Irvine’s peers experienced you may get an idea of what might have happened. If you climb the mountain yourself you might be able to judge what is likely. My own mantra is less complicated, and it isn’t in Latin. It’s ‘keep it simple, stupid’. They fell off and died. We have an ice axe, and below it we have a body. What’s the simplest and most likely way this accident could have happened?
Before our 1999 expedition Jochen Hemmleb pored over photographs and deduced that the body seen by Wang Hong Bao would be found near Wang’s camp. But neither he nor Holzel have climbed the mountain, and therefore they miss vital facts. For example, the Chinese climber was unlikely to have been on an evening stroll; he was probably answering a call of nature and scanning the terrain for a sheltered place to defecate, so we should look for places that would fit this bill. Also, on my summit climb the oxygen-demand valve froze up and didn’t deliver the full flow, with the result that I had more oxygen left on the top than expected. The problem was that I couldn’t get at it. Those early British oxygen sets were prone to leakage, so the climbers might have had more or less oxygen available to them. Therefore one cannot make such precise deductions with incomplete information.
As for Hemmleb’s claim that he guided the searchers over the radio to the location of the body: he didn’t. His prediction was that it would be found near his estimated position of the Chinese Camp VI. In fact it was found just where Frank Smythe saw it: at the foot of the Great Scree Slope. It took Conrad Anker’s mountaineering savvy to figure out where falling bodies were likely to collect:
Jochen had located the Chinese Camp VI higher than I thought it was likely to have been. I was using my mountaineer’s intuition, not the research manual. I thought, Now where would I pitch a camp on this part of the mountain? I was coming at it fresh – I hadn’t overanalyzed, projecting preconceived ‘facts’ onto reality.4
However, Hemmleb contributed much further work to the problem, calculating oxygen consumption and examining the detritus left by the British climbers in their high camps. Nothing conclusive was found. His latest conclusion seems in line with Holzel’s latest theory: the pair was unlikely to have made it to the top.
More recently, Geoffrey Furlonger, a pension lawyer in Belgium and another non-climber, has come up with an intriguing theory. Citing a piece of metal found on the Kangshung Face by the American climber Sue Giller, he postulates that if it is a part of Mallory or Irvine’s oxygen-cylinder carrying frame, it proves that one of the pair took off their frame on the summit and flung it down the mountain.
For me this is another example of wishful thinking. As much as I would love to prove that Mallory was successful, there are too many imponderables here. Was it part of a 1920s frame, or just another piece of the detritus that covers the mountain? Perhaps it was blown from the South Col. And where is it now? I was told by Breashears, who saw it, that it was stolen by a local man. Does the topography really support the claim that the piece came from the very summit? It seems unlikely.
Are there any more clues to come for future theorists?
How about rock fragments on Mallory’s boots? The rocks of the final pyramid are unique to this part of the mountain, and it occurred to me that if one found microscopic quantities of this in the nails of Mallory’s boots (which were recovered), one could establish where he had got to on the mountain.
I had met Professor Mike Searle one day fossicking among the rocks on my way up to Advance Base Camp, and subsequently had long chats with him about the geology of the Himalayas. A professor of earth sciences at Oxford University he is a recognised expert on the subject, so when I put the idea to him he gave me this reply:
The summit rocks are Ordovician limestones with tiny fragments of crinoid ossicles, it’s like a limey mudstone. The Yellow Band is a metamorphosed limestone, so marble, and Everest-series black schists are metamorphic – i.e. have biotite black mica, muscovite white micas and metamorphic minerals in. We have a good collection from the summit to the South Col. If there were tiny frags of pure sedimentary limestone in Mallory’s boots I guess you could say he got over the Yellow Band (highest step on NE ridge).5
So there we have it. A forensic examination of the boots might just find something. I realise I am clutching at straws here, as the snow on his return would surely have wiped off all traces of rock, but murder cases have been solved on similar evidence.
And so the theories go on. I now find the motivations behind them far more interesting than the theories themselves, which nearly always discount the reality on the mountain. Mount Everest has always attracted a driven sort of personality, and most of us have used the mountain’s reputation to further our own ends.
In the end history is written by the victors, and I did not feel free to write my account of the facts until I left the BBC. I tell the story as I experienced it, and will let you decide for yourself from among this fascinating bunch of theorists and theories. But Sherlock Holmes was right: we needed more data – particularly on the weather on that day, and on the clothes that the men were wearing.
18
Wearing Some Old Clothes
Later in the 2006 season I took a little time out from the Discovery series we were filming, and went for a climb in Mallory’s old clothes.
My arm arched over my head, and the old wooden ice axe bit into the snow of Mount Everest’s East Rongbuk glacier. Splinters of ice showered bright in the intense glare of the sun. I stepped up and felt the silk underlayers sliding smoothly beneath my Burberry jacket and plus-fours. 80 years old, and yet brand new, the clothes felt fine.
One of the tangible clues I felt that I hadn’t examined properly was the clothing. Many pundits claimed that, as they were wearing only tweeds, Mallory and Irvine couldn’t have survived the cold in the vicinity of the summit, and that it was therefore impossible for them to have reached it. But various members of the 1920s expeditions had got to 28,000ft (8,510m) in similar clothing. Holzel described Mallory’s clothing as a ‘hacking jacket and muffler’.1 And yet the clothing recovered from Mallory’s body didn’t look like tweed. So what was it?
Because one of the 1924 group pictures showed the expedition members at Base Camp wearing ordinary clothes, it was assumed that this is what th
ey wore to the top. George Bernard Shaw, for instance, saw a photograph of an Everest expedition and commented that the members looked like a ‘Connemara picnic surprised by a snowstorm’.
In fact, we now know that their clothing was at the cutting edge of contemporary technology, and in some ways was better than what we now use, although, as we shall see, in one particular way it could have been a death sentence to those wearing it.
Most of the hard work on uncovering the whole Mallory story has been done by unsung heroes – researchers working in the background. Yet we climbers working on the mountain get all the glory. In 2005 I found out about an extraordinary project to replicate Mallory’s clothing, dreamed up by Professor Mary B. Rose of Lancaster University and Mike Parsons of Karrimor, clothing manufacturers and suppliers to numerous expeditions. It was funded by the British Heritage Lottery Fund and organised through the Mountain Heritage Trust. People such as Joyce Meader, a replica maker, re-created every stitch of Mallory’s clothing by copying the fragments recovered from the body. With forensic techniques the team replicated two suits, one to Mallory’s measurements and one to mine.
From the start of the project it had taken three years and cost well over £30,000. The plan was to put one suit on exhibition and for me to test the other suit on Mount Everest to see if the clothing was adequate for a successful summit attempt. And so I found myself opening the aluminium flight case at Advanced Base Camp and taking out Mallory’s new clothes.
First impressions were of a warm, pleasant smell, and the feel of natural materials: silk shirts in wonderful muted colours, hand-knitted socks and cardigans, and a jacket and plus-fours made of gabardine. This is a tightly woven cotton fabric, proofed against wind and rain, and in this case a shiny green. There were six layers of material around my waist and yet it all felt warm, light and comfortable.
Last Hours on Everest Page 22