by Wade Davis
His depression finally began to lift as he beheld at last the gray shadow of Gibraltar slowly dissolving to reveal the full dimensions of the rock, silhouetted against a blue Mediterranean sky. “It grew in the growing day from the vague delineation to a defined shape,” he wrote to Ruth, “very grand, as Browning said, majestic and impressive and also in the simplest way beautiful—the most splendid imaginable headland.” Reflexively he sought a climber’s line to the top. “It is a very fine face; its sheerness is no fable and one could almost leap clear into the sea from the summit, a vertical distance I suppose of 700 to 800 feet.”
For Mallory, the Mediterranean was another world, a place of warmth and luminosity, far removed from the “wild ocean with its ceaseless swells.” With the rise in temperature, a pleasant change came over him: “I felt we had now entered the world of pleasure, the cloudless sky above and everywhere else the placid shimmering sea.” To the north, banks of pink clouds rose from land that had to be Spain, and from out of the pale horizon emerged a range of “clean and radiant mountains, snow covered to the waist … The loveliest imaginable sight, snow mountains over the sea.”
With each day came splendid new sights. To starboard lay the coast of North Africa, so close that with field glasses Mallory could distinguish individual houses in small villages and identify crops of maize and wheat planted on slopes that rose to a horizon burnished in haze and dust. Beyond the sky, hovering in the sunset, were the white summits of the Atlas Mountains, crowning the crest of Africa. On April 15, on the eve of landing in Malta, he wrote to Ruth of “the beauty of the sunlit Mediterranean and the slow peace which comes as we steam gently and I sit up in the bows alone watching the wide sea and the passing land … We shall have six hours in Malta and I must go and see some flowers. Farewell sweet angel. Ever so much love to you and many kisses to the children.”
After Malta it was on to Egypt. As the Sardinia entered the Suez Canal, both sides were strewn with the detritus of battle, wreckage of Turkish attacks in the early years of the war. The desolate scene, this “great ugly conglomeration of things meant for war,” provoked in Mallory “disgust and contempt.” The Sardinia, in his imaginings, appeared to glide over the sands, and the passage through the canal was uneventful, save for a growing mood of melancholy, which Mallory initially dismissed as a symptom of the dysentery that had run through the passengers and crew, laying low even the captain. But the despair deepened, and by the time the ship steamed out of the Red Sea and approached the fueling station of Aden, Mallory had been touched by a darker intuition, a foreboding sense, as he wrote to Ruth, “of the nearness of disaster or danger.” By night it was too hot to sleep, and he lay naked on his bunk with the fans whirling the languid air. By day there was only the sea and the horizon, its monotony broken by schools of porpoises and flying fish scudding over the surface of waves. On the eve of reaching Colombo, having crossed the Indian Ocean, he had once again slipped into gloom. “All this appearance of a civilized life is a hollow sham,” he wrote on May 2. “The Sea is as deeply evil as it is attractive … There’s an unquiet spirit in the ocean—even at the dead calm times when the surface really appears frozen in stillness, the heart seems to go on beating with a long slow swell and we go perpetually rolling and pitching in a lazy gentle fashion as though we might so go on to the end of time … so that we seem to be pursued by the shadow of its brute nature, not allowed to forget the violence of which it is capable.”
Nothing if not mercurial, Mallory was back to his ebullient self on May 9 when he woke in keen anticipation of Calcutta. Already he had been touched by the wonder of India. In Madras he had spent several hours ashore and, as he wrote to Ruth from the approaches to the Bay of Bengal, his experience in the native quarter had been “thrilling beyond description—the mere presence of so much humanity in so small a space and at every turn some inconceivable sight revealing a manner of life and a manner of people as unlike the West as a Pyramid from Westminster Abbey.”
Reality reconvened in Calcutta on the morning of May 10. There was no one to meet him. A letter received on board the Sardinia the night before from Howard-Bury, leader of the expedition, had instructed him to make his own way up the docks to the customs house, two miles in the hot sun, to clear the several thousand pounds of gear and supplies dispatched in his care by the Everest Committee. The letter concluded, with the casual assurance of one who knew the Raj and understood its ways, that Mallory, having secured transport to Darjeeling for the vital supplies, was to then proceed, at his leisure, to the rail station, where he might catch an overnight train for the mountains. “I start for Darjeeling this evening at 5 and get there midday,” Mallory wrote to Ruth from Calcutta. “I am to stay with the Governor of Bengal—very splendid and comfortable but I don’t look forward to official circles and would rather have been at the Hotel Mount Everest where I imagine Bullock is. The rest are now in Darjeeling. All except Kellas, who was last heard of as having climbed a mountain on April 5th. Raeburn was evidently a shade anxious about him. It’s dripping hot here now, but I greatly enjoyed a good walk before breakfast. Farewell, George.”
THE MAN WHOSE DEATH on Everest would cause an entire war-stained nation to weep was born in modest circumstances on June 18, 1886, the first son of the vicar of Mobberley, a large and prosperous Cheshire parish located sixteen miles outside of the industrial center of Manchester. His father, the Reverend Herbert Leigh Mallory, was devout, respectable, and staid, the scion of a lineage that had placed family members in the village pulpit as far back as 1621. His mother, Anne Beridge Jebb, herself the daughter and granddaughter of vicars, was, by contrast, emotionally chaotic, impetuous, indecisive, and unpredictable. Hopelessly disorganized, profligate in her spending, and yet much of the time great fun, she was a loving if unhappy person, reverent in her own way, and quietly tolerant of the unorthodox. Given to bouts of hypochondria, and a compulsive eater who insisted that her servants lay out each day a full complement of meals—breakfast, elevenses, lunch, midafternoon snack, high tea, dinner, and supper—she was a conflicted woman and would, in the spring of 1904, suffer a nervous breakdown. Her husband’s response to her quiet desperation was to feign deafness, even as he summoned the servants to every meal so that they might listen as he read aloud from the Bible.
Elements of his mother’s character shadowed Mallory throughout his life. He flirted with the unorthodox and, like her, was emotionally volatile, constantly concerned about money, and so absentminded that he would drive his colleagues on Everest to distraction. But there is little to suggest that her unhappiness registered on him as a child. He was a beautiful if mischievous boy, doted on by his two sisters, Avie and Mary, lionized by his younger brother, Trafford, and already given to adventure by the time he could walk. Dispatched at the age of seven to his room for misbehaving at tea, he soon appeared, catlike, on the roof of the church, having scaled the downspouts of the house and scrambled up the sheer rock wall of the ancient bell tower. His younger sister, Avie, described him as an inspiration: “He had a knack of making things exciting and rather dangerous. He climbed everything that it was at all possible to climb. I learnt very early that it was fatal to tell him that a tree was impossible for him to get up. ‘Impossible’ was a word that acted as a challenge for him. When he once told me that it would be quite easy to lie between the railway lines and let the train go over him, I kept very quiet, as if I thought it would be quite an ordinary thing to do; otherwise, I was afraid he would do it.”
At thirteen, George won a mathematics scholarship to Winchester. Arriving in September 1900, he was assigned, along with the brightest academic prospects, to College House, where he slept that first year high above the quadrangle in a fourth-floor dormitory shared with ten other boys, all children of the British elite. Mallory loved everything about Winchester: the games at which he excelled, the spirit of ardent patriotism, the value placed on honor, loyalty, sportsmanship, and duty, the prayers and hymns, and the rousing renditions of the national
anthem that summoned the boys to ever higher imperial challenges.
His was a generation nursed on empire, born at a time when British suzerainty over the entire world was simply the way of things. A year before Mallory’s birth, General Gordon had been martyred at Khartoum. At nine, he was able to read, in the Boy’s Own Paper, of Kitchener’s revenge, and see photographs in the newspapers of the Mahdi’s bloodied head, skewered on a pike. He and his peers grew up to tales of imperial adventure, with dashing heroes who, through English pluck and courage alone, overwhelmed far superior forces of savagery and wickedness. From the Klondike to the Guianas, from Sarawak to the Zambezi, from Hong Kong to Calcutta, the map of the world was red. To be British was to ride a wave of destiny, and to do so with moral rectitude. “We happen to be the best people in the world,” Cecil Rhodes famously said, “and the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for humanity.”
The British public schools, some with ancient traditions, like Eton, Harrow, and Winchester, others born of the nineteenth century, reached their apogee in the decades before the war. The schools existed to create a cadre for the empire, civil servants to man the distant outposts, officers to lead the armies, politicians to determine the fate of millions of dark-faced subjects of the crown. Education was valued, with more than half of classroom work devoted to the classics, but for the most part the atmosphere in the schools was fiercely anti-intellectual. Their real purpose was to infuse students with a certain ethos, a blind obedience to those of higher rank, a reflexive inclination to dominate inferiors, and, above all, the cultivated air of superiority so essential to the stability of the empire.
Boys from the highest levels of wealth and society entered the lower forms of schools like Winchester and were immediately stripped of their identity. Dressed in uniforms, deprived of personal possessions, billeted in open dormitories, they lived a spartan existence of cold baths, miserable food, and intense physical activity. Exposed to the caprice of older students, who were empowered as prefects to discipline on a whim, and subject to the wrath of cloistered masters who enjoyed the proper use of the cane, young boys learned to conform in a thousand ways, suppressing emotions behind a thick skin of wit and repartee. What counted most was not academic excellence but character, which was measured in grit, toughness, loyalty, stoicism, uniformity, and, most important, success on the playing fields. One could be neither too smart nor too slow. Crying was not an option. What went on behind closed doors was never mentioned.
At Winchester, Mallory fell into the orbit of an unusual teacher, a college tutor, Graham Irving, who at twenty-seven was already a member of the Alpine Club and an accomplished if unorthodox climber. Irving was the first of many mentors to draw attention to Mallory’s physical beauty. “Mallory was just an attractive, natural boy,” he wrote, “not a hard worker and behind rather than in front of his contemporaries in intellectual attainments, a boy thoroughly at home and happy in his milieu … He was tallish with long limbs, supple and not over muscled as gymnasts are apt to be. He was extremely good looking, with a gentleness about his features, and a smoothness of skin that might suggest effeminacy to a stranger; it never did to a friend.” Writing Mallory’s obituary in the Alpine Journal in 1924, Irving in remembrance would be even more effusive: “He had a strikingly beautiful face. Its shape, its delicately cut features, especially the rather large, heavily lashed, thoughtful eyes, were extraordinarily suggestive of a Botticelli Madonna, even when he had ceased being a boy.”
In the summer of 1904, Irving invited George and another schoolboy, Harry Gibson, to accompany him to the Alps. In a season so wild it would result in a formal letter to the Alpine Club from Geoffrey Young, Tom Longstaff, and Douglas Freshfield, renouncing the reckless tactics, Irving, Mallory, and Gibson climbed without guides, surviving rock falls, a nearly fatal slip into a crevasse, desperate winds, and storms so fierce they were battered off the flanks of mountains. Mallory loved every moment. On his very first alpine ascent, he vomited a dozen times but kept climbing, until finally forced to turn back just below the ice summit of Vélan, even as the sun rose over Mont Blanc. Irving was astonished by Mallory’s athletic ability: “It was not till you saw him at work on steep rocks or ice, the perfect balance and the completely natural grace of upward movement, that you knew his body to be the perfect servant of his mind; and that mind was, above all, a climbing mind.” After a particularly dangerous and exposed traverse of Mont Blanc, Irving recalled, “from that day it was certain that he had found in snow mountains the perfect medium for the expression of his physical and spiritual being.”
Their response to the reprimand from the Alpine Club was to keep climbing, and upon their return to school in the fall they formed the Ice Club, recruiting to the effort, among others, Guy Bullock. Increasingly, as Mallory entered his final year, Winchester felt like home. In the summer of 1904, while he had been away climbing in France, his father had inexplicably traded parishes with the rector of a church in Birkenhead, in the grim industrial docklands of the Mersey. A scent of scandal hovered over the move; there was talk of debts, and perhaps emotional entanglements. Whatever the provocation, the family crisis propelled George Mallory forward. At seventeen, having failed the entrance exams to Woolwich and happily forgone a career in the army, he switched his academic interests from math to history and earned a scholarship to Magdalene College. Before moving to Cambridge, he returned to the Continent in the summer of 1905, where with Irving and Bullock he climbed the Dent Blanche, a 14,293-foot peak in the Swiss Alps. The dawn of August 21 found them on the exposed and hazardous south ridge, making their way toward the summit. “Peak after peak,” Mallory later recalled, “was touched with the pink glow of the first sun, which slowly spread until the whole was a flaming fire—and that against a sky with varied tints of leaden blue.” They reached the top just before noon, a singular achievement for a party of schoolboys, on a mountain that had claimed the lives of mountaineers.
AWAITING MALLORY at Cambridge was a cloistered world, monastic in its ideals, a place of “books, music and beautiful young men,” as the essayist Arthur Benson recalled, and yet swirling with the intellectual, political, and emotional possibilities of a new century. Benson, who would become Mallory’s tutor at Magdalene and guide his studies for three years, had come to Cambridge after leaving Eton in scandalous circumstances, having taught there for twenty years. He was a complex, tormented scholar, a poet and prolific author who recorded every twist and turn of his emotional life in a diary that stretched ultimately to four million words, all of which he ordered sealed until fifty years after his death. Now largely forgotten, in his day he was one of the most respected writers in Britain.
Benson’s private melancholy was rooted in a brutal past. His father, headmaster of Wellington and later archbishop of Canterbury, endorsed the liberal use of the whip. His mother, broken and abused, suffered a mental collapse. Of their six children, two would die young, none would marry, and two, including Arthur Benson himself, would live with manic depression, inherited from the father. It is perhaps no wonder that Benson turned for solace to youth, the beauty of words, and a platonic ideal of friendship reaching across time, linking mentor and student as father and son, as brothers, and sometimes, in fleeting moments of yearning, as much more. At a time when Cambridge dons were obliged to resign should they elect to marry, Benson recalled the joys of university life in a popular collection of essays, From a College Window: “I love the youthful spirit that flashes and brightens every corner of the old courts, as the wallflower that rises spring by spring, with its rich orange tawny hue, its wild scent, on the tops of our moldering walls. It is a gracious and beautiful life for all who love peace and reflection, strength and youth.”
No one brightened Benson’s firmament as intensely as George Mallory. He first saw the young man in King’s College Chapel during morning service on the Sunday before the first day of Michaelmas term in the fall of 1905. Mallory was only a few weeks removed from the mountains of Switze
rland. “I noticed in King’s in the morning a fine looking boy, evidently a freshman, just in front of me—lo and behold the same came to call on me, and turns out to be Mallory, from Winchester, one of our new exhibitioners at Magdalene. He sat some time; and a simpler, more ingenuous, more unaffected, more genuinely interested boy, I never saw. He is to be under me, and I rejoice in the thought. He seemed full of admiration for all good things, and yet no touch of priggishness.”
Through the ensuing months, as Mallory adjusted to life at Cambridge, getting over his longing for Winchester, taking delight in rowing for his college, he and Benson met frequently, both formally as Mallory prepared for various academic hurdles and informally as Benson introduced him to the works of Boswell and Trevelyan, and a life of reading, scholarship, literature, and the arts. By December 1906, when Mallory agreed to join him at Hinton Hall, a country home Benson had rented for the holidays some ten miles outside of Cambridge, the older man was smitten.
For Mallory, just twenty, the sojourn at Hinton Hall was innocent, as, indeed, were all of his subsequent visits. “It is a jolly place to stay,” he wrote. “One generally arrives back in time for a late tea after which A.C.B. produces gems of literature and we both read till dinner at 8:15 … The joy of the place is that one can do exactly as one likes, and everything is so peaceful and quiet and comfortable.”
For Benson, by contrast, every encounter unleashed emotions and desires, which he struggled to sublimate. Mallory’s departure, a fortnight before Christmas, plunged him into despair. He noted in his diary, “I came back, through melting snow and saw my dear companion off … We were photographed at the door, but the results were somewhat grotesque. He appears impish. I like an old bear … I then took a lonely walk.”