by Wade Davis
Norton sent two additional reports by telegraph for London on June 13. First to the Everest Committee: “Our attempts for the year are definitely finished. I enclose a medical report on the six remaining climbers. All are entirely hors de combat for high climbing, and the same applies to the porters.” The second wire was addressed personally to Younghusband and Hinks: “I am afraid I can report success in no respect; for not only have we failed to establish a definite claim to have climbed the mountain—the point must always remain in doubt—but Mallory and Irvine have been killed and two of our native establishment have died.” On the very day he dispatched these reports, a new post arrived by runner. Among the mail was a packet of letters addressed to Norton wishing the expedition all success on their last climb.
On Sunday, June 15, Norton ordered all surplus supplies and equipment to be burned. Late in the day the climbers and all the porters gathered around the memorial cairn. It was an extraordinary monument, a square plinth of stones three feet high, with a pyramid of small boulders rising higher than a man, and all the names of the dead inscribed: 1921 Kellas, 1922 Thankay, Sangay, Temba, Lhakpa, Pasang Namgyn, Norbu, and Pema, 1924 Mallory and Irvine, Shamsherpun and Manbahadur. It stood on an open moraine against the backdrop of Everest, the North Face.
That evening several of the men visited the Rongbuk Monastery, slipping into the prayer hall in the middle of a service. Beetham later wrote,
Hitherto we had felt nothing but repulsion for the lamas: their mode of life and everything that pertained to them. We were therefore hardly in a mood to be prepossessed. Yet it must be admitted that that was one of the most impressive, the most moving services I, for one, have ever attended. Perhaps it was the unexpectedness of the whole thing, and especially of the worshippers’ profound devotion. In any case it must have been only an appeal to eye and ear, and not to the conscious mind, for we could not understand one word of what was said. It was an instinctive acquiescence in their earnest consecration. The building was in such darkness that at first we could see nothing, but as the eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, row upon row of lamas were revealed seated motionless as images upon the floor. Only the unimpassioned faces of the lamas chanting the deep guttural prayers appeared, their crouching bodies, swathed in dark togas, remained unseen. Such light as entered illuminated the faces of the idol-buddhas and filtered down between a maze of old silken banners reaching from the roof nearly to the worshippers. The music was supplied by a large number of deep drums, cymbals and some reed instruments, and as it rose and fell the air vibrated as with an organ. At intervals the worship ceased, and tea was brought round by little boys; then the service was resumed.
On Monday, June 16, the expedition departed Rongbuk. “We were a sad little party,” Norton later wrote. “From the first we accepted the loss of our comrades in that rational spirit which all 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. As so constantly in the war, so here in our mimic campaign Death had taken his toll from the best.”
THAT NIGHT, in the wake of their march away from the mountain, they camped high by the Dzakar Chu, on a hill at 18,000 feet overlooking the Rongbuk Valley and all of the glory of Everest. One of the men gazed out from his tent and spoke for all when he later recalled:
I could see the whole of the historic ground, the scene of the protracted adventure, spread out like a map and bathed in soft full moonlight. And what a strange impelling light it is! By daylight we view matters in an eminently earthly, worldly aspect; moonlight seems to bring us face to face with greater and more lasting ideas; it lends a touch of the supernatural to our vision. That night and with that scene in front of one, it was quite easy to realize that the price of life is death, and that, so long as the payment be made promptly, it matters little to the individual when the payment is made. Somewhere up there, in that vast wilderness of ice and rock, were two still forms. Yesterday, with all the vigour and will of perfect manhood, they were playing a great game—their life’s desire. Today it is over, and they had gone, without their ever knowing the beginnings of decay. Could any man desire a better end?
Epilogue
COLONEL NORTON’S MESSAGE acknowledging the death of Mallory and Irvine took eight days to pass by runner overland to Phari and eight hours to circle the globe by telegraph to London. The cable reached Arthur Hinks at the Royal Geographical Society on the afternoon of Thursday, June 19, just as he returned to his office from a late lunch at his club. Nothing had been heard from the expedition since Norton’s dispatch of May 26, written on the eve of the final campaign. Hinks eagerly tore open the telegram, keenly anticipating the phrase “Voiceful Lud benighted Charles,” prearranged code indicating that the summit of Everest had been achieved. His eyes fell instead on nine words. He knew from the length of the text alone that the expedition had ended in disaster.
The secretary informed the Times, but kept the news from the families for nearly twenty-four hours. Sandy Irvine’s mother and his two youngest brothers were on holiday at their cottage in Wales; his father was home in Birkenhead. The telegram from Hinks arrived just after 7:00 p.m. on Friday evening. It read: “Committee deeply regret receive bad news Everest Expedition today Norton cables your Son and Mallory killed last climb remainder return safe President and Committee offer heartfelt sympathy Hinks.”
The wording of Hinks’s telegram to Ruth Mallory was the same, save for a shift in the order of names; he concealed from her, too, that he had known of the deaths since the previous day. His wire reached Herschel House, in Cambridge, at 7:45 p.m. A journalist from the Times got there first. The editors wanted to spare Ruth the shock and indignity of learning of her husband’s death in the morning paper. She went out for a walk with old friends, and then returned home to gather her three children into her bed. She told them what had happened. Curled under the covers, they “all cried together.”
Despite the efforts of the RGS, Hinks, and the Times to embargo the news, the story broke that night in the Westminster Gazette. The following morning, Saturday, the Times rushed into print its world exclusive: “Mt. Everest Tragedy, Two Climbers Killed, Fate of Mr. Mallory and Mr. Irvine.” By afternoon the language of war once again dominated headlines throughout the country. “Mallory and Irvine Killed in the Final Assault,” proclaimed the Daily Graphic. “The Grim Tragedy,” read the Sphere. “The Fight with Everest,” “Triumph Frustrated by Death,” “The Battle with Everest: The Mountain’s Heavy Toll,” declared others. Obituaries ran alongside the news; they had been prepared well in advance. “I knew long ago that this was going to happen,” wrote Geoffrey Keynes in a mournful letter to Ruth, “but that doesn’t make the fact any easier to bear.”
A formal message from the king appeared in the Times on Monday, June 23, expressing support for the families and heralding the heroic efforts of the “two gallant explorers.” On Tuesday students and teachers at Cambridge gathered at Magdalene College Chapel. Younghusband went up from London for the memorial, as did Hinks and Spencer. Two days later, the bishop of Chester addressed a service at St. John’s Church in Birkenhead, attended by both the Mallory and the Irvine families. Throughout the country the outpouring of concern and grief was intense and beyond all expectations. “We have been overwhelmed,” Hinks wrote to Norton on June 26, “with telegrams and messages of sympathy from the King, from many geographical societies and climbing clubs all over the world and from numbers of individuals in this country. The papers have vied with one another in paying their respect to the glorious memory of Mallory and Irvine.”
Attention soon turned to the question on everyone’s mind. Had Mallory and Irvine died on their way up the mountain or upon their descent? Had they achieved their highest goal or slipped into the void having failed to reach what Mallory had long called the “summit of our desires”?
In the immediate wake of the tragedy, Norton had moved to forestall idle speculation. At a conference at base camp on
June 12, he, along with Somervell and Bruce, Hazard, Beetham, Noel, and Shebbeare, had agreed to hold firm to the opinion that the two climbers, roped together, had suffered a fatal fall. Odell alone maintained that Mallory and Irvine had died of exposure, trapped in a bivouac somewhere above Camp VI. This was unlikely yet, for Odell, reassuring. He felt responsible for Irvine’s fate. Upon his return to London in September, he would stay with his own wife and child for little more than a day before traveling to Birkenhead to visit and console Sandy’s parents. It was comforting to believe that his young protégé did not lie broken and bloody on the rocks of Rongbuk, but rather had died a painless death, his unblemished body wrapped and numbed by the cold, his older companion silent by his side. In Odell’s grief, mercy did not demand truth.
As for the summit, it was anybody’s guess. Norton and Somervell had deliberately stayed well below the Northeast Ridge, traversing the entire breadth of the Yellow Band to reach the couloir and avoid the Second Step. Odell had been at least 2,000 feet below the skyline when he had last seen Mallory and Irvine alive. They had vanished in a world known only to them.
AND SO, as in war, the survivors simply moved on; Noel headed directly to Darjeeling to work on his second Everest film, Hazard back up the West Rongbuk to complete mapping work with the Gurkha surveyor Hari Singh Thapa, Norton and the others to the Rongshar Valley for rest and recuperation before beginning the long journey home to Darjeeling. “I feel the loss of Mallory and Irvine very much,” Norton wrote to Sydney Spencer on June 28. “I wish one could know whether they succeeded or not before the end.”
In London, where Spencer received Norton’s letter at the Alpine Club, such uncertainty was unbearable, given the nobility of the effort and the agony of the loss. On July 5 the Times published Norton and Odell’s dispatch of June 14, the first account sent from Rongbuk in the wake of the tragedy. “We leave here with heavy hearts,” Norton wrote. “We failed to establish success, for who will ever know whether the lost climbers reached the summit before the accident which caused their death.” Just this hint of doubt gave editors at the Times license to run the story under the headline “Everest: The Last Climb: Hopes That Summit Was Reached.” Odell went much further than Norton. “Has Everest been climbed?” he asked with deliberate flourish. “It will ever be a mystery.” He then added, “Considering all the circumstances and the position they had reached on the mountain I personally am of the opinion that Mallory and Irvine must have reached the summit.”
Odell gave people what they wanted to hear, but his choice of language was curious. He did not state directly that the climbers had reached the summit; he expressed his conviction that they must have done so. This wishful sentiment matched the mood of the nation. “In this country,” declared an editorial in the Times, “which owes its very existence and its vast Empire to the adventurous spirit of its sons, there should be no room for feeble reflections.” Mallory and Irvine had clearly stood “above everything in the world,” with a “glimpse almost of god’s view of things.” Mallory, as Norton himself acknowledged, was no mere mortal. “It was the spirit of the man,” the colonel said, “that made him the great mountaineer he was; a fire burnt in him and caused his willing spirit to rise superior to the weakness of the flesh; he lived on his nerves … The conquest of the mountain became an obsession with him, and for weeks and months he devoted his whole time and energy to it.” That he and Irvine had perished without final victory was simply inconceivable.
Even as the expedition’s survivors slowly made their way back to India, the men exhausted and beyond reach, their full stories yet to have been told, the leading figures of British mountaineering rallied in defense of Mallory’s honor, convinced that the summit had indeed been conquered. Writing from Darjeeling on July 11, General Bruce endorsed Odell’s “very reasonable opinion that the top was reached and that M and I were overtaken on their way back, probably by dark … It’s dreadful, heartbreaking but wonderful.” A week later Martin Conway argued in the Times that their failure to return safely was itself proof that they had reached the summit; otherwise they would have retreated in time to get back to their highest camp.
“It’s obvious to any climber that they got up,” Tom Longstaff told Hinks. “You cannot expect of that pair to weigh the chances of return … Nothing could have stopped these two with the goal well in their grasp.” Francis Younghusband invoked the metaphysical. Everest, he declared, was the embodiment of the physical forces of the world. Against it the climbers had only, as Norton had suggested, “the spirit of man.” But this, he implied, was enough. “Of the two alternatives, to turn back a third time, or to die, the latter was for Mallory probably the easier. The agony of the first would be more than he as a man, as a mountaineer, and as an artist, could endure.” Geoffrey Young, in France when the news broke in London, spoke with unique authority: “Difficult as it would have been for any mountaineer to turn back with the only difficulty past—to Mallory it would have been an impossibility … my own opinion [is] that the accident occurred on the way down and that if that is so, the peak was first climbed, because Mallory was Mallory.”
In an obituary that ran in the Nation and Athenaeum on July 5, Young elevated Mallory into the realm of myth, writing,
From boyhood he belonged to mountains, as flame belongs to fire … In that final magnificent venture against the unknown, we are thrilled by the knightly purpose, by the evident joyousness of the attempt, as much as by the audacity and endurance. It is the burning spirit of chivalrous, youthful adventure, flaming at the close, higher than the highest summit of the known world. However the end of that great contest came … that flame, we know, burned radiantly to the last. George Mallory—Sir Galahad always to his early friends—gave back to the hills their life of inspiration, content. The greatest mountain upon earth is the monument to his clean and selfless use of his rare manhood. While there are hearts to quicken still at tales of heroism, merciless Everest—terrible to us—will remain for them a mountain of beautiful remembrance.
Ruth Mallory was touched by such sentiments, coming from their oldest and closest friend, a man she and George deeply loved and admired. But obituaries and personal letters of condolence did little to soften her pain. Hers was a private grief, fathomless and cruel. All of the climbers on Everest, “every one of them,” she noted in a gracious letter to Hinks, had been “heroic beyond words.” But she had little interest in public talk of conquest and sacrifice, of nobility and honor in death. Her generation of women had seen too much of it. As one of her well-known contemporaries, Nancy Cooper, had wearily remarked, “By the end of 1916, every boy I had ever danced with was dead.”
On July 1, the anniversary of the Somme, Ruth received a letter from Geoffrey Young, his first since learning of the tragedy. He spoke of a “long numbness of pain” even as he acknowledged that his sadness could be “but a shadow of yours, for indeed one cannot think of you separately.” He meant, of course, separately from her lover and husband, the boy-man he had described in his eulogy as the “magical and adventurous spirit of youth personified.”
“It is not difficult for me to believe,” Ruth replied, “that George’s spirit was ready for another life and his way of going to it was very beautiful. I do not think this pain matters at all. I have had far more than my share of joy and always shall have had. Isn’t it queer how all the time what matters most is to get hold of the rightness of things? Then some sort of peace comes.”
Later in the week she sent Young a more anguished note. “I know George did not mean to be killed,” she wrote. “I don’t think I do feel that his death makes me the least more proud of him. It is his life that I loved and love … Whether he got to the top of the mountain or did not, whether he lived or died, makes no difference to my admiration for him … Oh Geoffrey, if only it hadn’t happened! It so easily might not have.”
In later years, long after she had happily remarried, Ruth would slip into her garden alone with a copy of The Spirit of Man and read the
poems that George had whispered on Everest on cold nights when all thoughts turned to home. She raised her three children not in the shadow of a lost and mythic father but in the spirit in which he had lived: free, unfettered, and open to all the possibilities of life. She succumbed to cancer in 1942, even as George’s younger brother, Trafford, commander in chief of Fighter Command, orchestrated the aerial attack that would finally, a generation late, bring Germany to its knees. Like Ruth, Trafford would not survive Hitler’s war. En route to India in 1944, his plane crashed in a blizzard in the French Alps. He was buried at Le Rivier d’Allemont, in the shadow of the very peaks that so enchanted George in the innocent years of their youth, before the wars.
PRIVATE GRIEF gave way to national catharsis on October 17, 1924, when King George V and the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York, and the Duke of Connaught joined a sea of mourners at St. Paul’s Cathedral for a service in memory of Mallory and Irvine. It was the first and only time in British history that mountaineers had been so honored. The bishop of Chester delivered the eulogy, drawing all eyes to Odell’s final sighting, as if it were a collective vision: “That is the last you see of them, and the question as to their reaching the summit is still unanswered; it will be solved some day. The merciless mountain gives no reply. But that last ascent, with the beautiful mystery of its great enigma, stands for more than an heroic effort to climb a mountain, even though it be the highest in the world.”