by Wade Davis
That evening Lord Ronaldshay presided over a joint meeting of the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club, held as a memorial at the Royal Albert Hall. All the leading figures in the Everest adventure were there: Francis Younghusband, Arthur Hinks and General Bruce, Douglas Freshfield, Norman Collie and Sydney Spencer of the Alpine Club, as well as Wollaston and Heron from the 1921 reconnaissance; Longstaff, Strutt, Norton, Geoffrey Bruce, and Finch from 1922; and Hingston, Beetham, Hazard, and Odell from the expedition of 1924.
Norton said of Mallory: “His death leaves us the poorer by a loyal friend, a great mountaineer and a gallant gentleman.” Odell remembered the mountain’s cold indifference, the wind howling in wild derision as he stumbled down to the North Col, certain at last that his friends were dead. The monsoon, he recalled, broke on the very day they retreated from the Rongbuk Valley. The shadow of Everest’s North Face, Hingston had written that night, “never looked larger, more magnificent or more impregnable than when we turned our backs on it today … I wonder when the next attack will be made on the mountain.”
This was very much an open question. Initially the Everest Committee proceeded as it had in the wake of the two earlier expeditions. Within a week of the memorial service at St. Paul’s, Odell spoke at Queen’s Hall. Somervell, identified by Hinks and John Buchan as another rising star, was soon delivering as many as three lectures a day, first in London and later at venues throughout the country; he would personally earn some £700, which he later used to purchase an X-ray machine for his Indian mission. The great hope, of course, was commercial success for John Noel’s film of the climb, The Epic of Everest: The Immortal Film Record of This Historic Expedition, scheduled to debut at the New Scala Theatre in London on December 8.
Since the inception of Explorer Films, incorporated on Christmas Eve 1923, John Noel had been running on nerves. From an initial offering of just two hundred shares at £1 each, the company had grown dramatically, fueled by the promise of the third expedition; by February 1924 Noel’s stake alone consisted of 350 preferred and 5,142 deferred shares. His goal, as he wrote to General Bruce, was to produce a film that could compete head-to-head with any movie “in the cinematograph trade,” meaning any dramatic feature coming out of Hollywood. It was a bold ambition. His 1922 effort, Climbing Mount Everest, had enjoyed only modest success. In 1924 he and his investors had put up £8,000, a small fortune. Much could go wrong. Noel fretted about Somervell’s score for the new film, the absence of footage from the higher camps, even the lack of a female star. He considered making two new films: a climbing saga of Everest and a grand travelogue of exotic Tibet. These very different themes morphed into one, somewhat awkwardly, and the pressure mounted. As Noel acknowledged from the start, only something on a scale previously unimagined in the documentary field would “obtain a large enough scope to repay the cost of producing the film. Success will depend virtually on whether the mountain is conquered.”
The death of Mallory and Irvine forced Noel to reconfigure the film from heroic triumph to sublime tragedy. As if to distract the audience from the expedition’s ultimate failure, he set out to create a total theatrical experience. Hiring a noted set designer, he transformed the stage of the New Scala into a Tibetan courtyard, with painted backdrops of Himalayan peaks illuminated in the haunting half shimmer of dusk. As the picture began, the lights would fade, the temple doors open, and the curtain rise to reveal the flickering drama of another world. For an added touch of authenticity, Noel arranged for John Macdonald to bring from Gyantse seven Tibetan monks, along with full ritual regalia: cymbals, copper horns, handbells and swords, trumpets made from thighbones, and drums crafted from human skulls. The monks, according to Noel’s plans, would tour with the film, performing before every screening an overture of religious music and dances, setting the mood, as he put it, with “large doses of local colour.”
The arrival of the “seven lamas” from India prompted newspaper coverage not likely to please the Tibetan authorities. Among the headlines in the Daily Sketch: “High Dignitaries of Tibetan Church Reach London; Bishop to Dance on Stage; Music from Skulls.” On the film’s opening night, a dreary Monday, a fog bank swept the length of Tottenham and Charlotte streets, seeping into the theater and disrupting the debut. Returning to their flat following the premiere, John Noel and his wife, Sybille, rather inauspiciously came within fifteen minutes of dying from a gas leak in their kitchen.
Their fortunes improved in the coming days as positive reviews rolled in, not only from Kinematograph Weekly and the Bioscope, the industry rags of record, but from all the daily papers. Noel’s concern about the lack of a female love interest proved unwarranted. The Weekly Dispatch identified the mountain itself as the “leading lady,” with the film being the story of “man’s passionate struggle to conquer the dreadful virgin of the snows.” In time The Epic of Everest would tour Britain and Germany and crisscross North America seven times; in Canada and the United States alone, more than a million people would see it. Noel’s financial gamble paid off, at least in the short term, but the very success of the film doomed any hope for an immediate return to Everest.
Inevitably the production came to the attention of the Tibetan government, which lodged an official diplomatic protest. Ostensibly the offenses were cultural and religious. Aristocratic Lhasa did not take kindly to scenes of local men and women delousing their children and eating the lice. That seven monks had traveled abroad without the permission of their abbot, only to perform rituals onstage like some carnival show, provoked outrage, especially among the conservative monastic factions then ascendant in the Tibetan capital. Noel promoted his film as if it had emerged from a quaint and timeless void. In truth, Lhasa in 1924 teetered on the brink of revolution, with the fate of the nation in the balance.
At the center of the diplomatic firestorm was Morshead’s old companion in exploration F. M. Bailey, warrior, diplomat, and spy, who had succeeded Charles Bell as political officer in Sikkim in 1921. If Bell had tolerated the Everest expeditions, Bailey dismissed them as pointless provocations that compromised the key British diplomatic initiative in Tibet, the modernization of the country as a foil to the aspirations of both China and Soviet Russia. The Thirteenth Dalai Lama, personally committed to the path of modernity, was actively opposed by the monastic orders, which wanted no European presence in Lhasa, and certainly no British expeditions marching across the southern frontier of the nation, disturbing the deities and corrupting the people. Tensions in the capital were high, and there was even talk of overthrowing the Dalai Lama, an outcome certain to be disastrous for British interests.
In June 1924, even as Norton and Mallory had made their final plans for Everest, Bailey had traveled to Lhasa, officially to promote trade but with the actual goal of fomenting an uprising against the traditional religious orders. The key players were Tsarong Shapé, commander in chief of the army, and Laden La, the Darjeeling police inspector Bailey had sent to Lhasa some months before with the task of recruiting a two-hundred-man cadre to serve as the core of the rebel force. In the summer of 1924 Bailey himself remained in Lhasa for four weeks, meeting repeatedly with both Tsarong Shapé and the Dalai Lama. It is not clear what transpired, but in the end there would be no revolt. When Bailey returned to Sikkim, Tsarong Shapé joined him in exile, soon to be followed by Laden La. The traditionalists retained power, and a pronounced chill came over diplomatic relations between Tibet and the Raj.
With the Dalai Lama and the liberal factions in the army already on the defensive, Noel’s film could not have come at a worse time. The maharaja of Sikkim found the scenes of Tibetans eating lice so insulting that he banned John Noel from his kingdom. The Dalai Lama considered the entire extravaganza an affront to the Buddhist religion and called for the immediate arrest of the seven Gyantse monks who had gone abroad. The prime minister of Tibet sent a formal note to Bailey, demanding their immediate return; he ended his reprimand with a phrase the Everest Committee had hoped never to read: “For
the future, we cannot give permission to go to Tibet.”
There would be no return to Everest in 1925. Within a year Explorer Films would be out of business. When, in 1926, the Everest Committee again sought permission to mount an expedition, Bailey did not deem it necessary even to forward the request to the Tibetan authorities. What became known as the “Affair of the Dancing Lamas” had profound and lasting political consequences. Reinforcing the strength of the traditionalists, it undercut the reforms of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, policies that no doubt would have placed Tibet in a much stronger position to cope politically and militarily with the Chinese onslaught of 1949 and the subsequent invasion that led, a decade later, to the death of a free nation.
AS FOR EVEREST, it would not be until 1933, nine years after the disappearance of Mallory and Irvine, that another British climbing party would reach the base of the North Col. Two of the old veterans went along as transport officers—Colin Crawford from 1922 and E. O. Shebbeare from 1924—but the climbers were of a new generation, Eric Shipton and Percy Wyn-Harris, Bill Wager, Frank Smythe, and Jack Longland, all too young to have known the war. Only the expedition leader, Hugh Ruttledge, might have served, had not a hunting accident kept him on administrative duty in India for the duration of the conflict.
On the mountain that year three men went high: first Harris and Wager, and then Frank Smythe climbing alone the following day. Avoiding Mallory’s route along the crest of the Northeast Ridge, they all traversed to the couloir, each managing to ascend just high enough to equal but not surpass Norton’s height record of 1924. Nothing so grand would be achieved by subsequent British efforts. The reconnaissance of 1935 barely reached the North Col. An early onset of the monsoon repulsed the 1936 expedition, much to the chagrin of John Morris, who went along to organize transport. In 1938 heavy snow limited all movement; no one climbed higher than 27,300 feet. That Noel Odell, at the age of forty-eight, struggled to within a day of the summit was remarkable, but hardly enough to inspire a nation grown tired of the entire endeavor.
Britain in 1938 was no longer a land of grand imperial gestures. After a decade of stunned silence, scores of novels, memoirs, books of poetry, letters, and diaries had flooded popular culture, redefining the narrative of the war, laying waste to any remaining illusions of glory. The war to end all wars had ended nothing, save certainty, confidence, and hope. The Great Depression had brought such misery that even those financially secure questioned the legitimacy of costly mountaineering expeditions, increasingly viewed as sport, that invariably resulted in failure. If achieving the summit of Everest had at one point been a symbol of imperial redemption, the record of seven unsuccessful attempts was a reminder of national impotence.
The Everest Committee met for the last time on June 14, 1939, eleven weeks before Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Arthur Hinks, who had dedicated twenty years of his life to the quest, resigned that day. There was talk of returning to the mountain, and permission was formally sought to launch expeditions in 1940, 1941, and 1942. Hitler’s war buried such dreams, and by the time it was over, the Chinese Maoists were poised to take over Tibet and shut down all access to Everest from the north. In 1950, succumbing to pressure from Britain and the United States, Nepal opened its borders. British and Swiss expeditions probed the mountain from the south, along the axis that Mallory and Bullock had scoped in 1921, when they peered down from the heights of the West Rongbuk Glacier to the Khumbu Icefall and the Western Cwm.
In 1953 victory came at last. Arthur Hinks had not lived to see the headlines, made not by Englishmen but by a beekeeper from New Zealand, Edmund Hillary, a farmer from the ultimate frontier of empire, and a bold Nepali Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, a man not simply ready for history but destined to invert history itself, transforming in a single athletic accomplishment the very definition of what it meant to rule and to be ruled. When Hillary and Norgay first returned to base camp from their triumph, Hillary motioned to Wilfrid Noyce, one of the other British climbers, and said simply, “Wouldn’t Mallory be pleased if he knew about this?” A telegram celebrating their success reached London on the eve of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Lest it overshadow the royal pageantry, the announcement was held back from the press for twenty-four hours. Only two people outside of a small inner circle were immediately told the news: the queen mother and Lieutenant Colonel Charles Howard-Bury, whose leadership during the 1921 reconnaissance had set the stage for the ultimate success.
As attention shifted to Nepal and the southern approaches, with Swiss and American expeditions reaching the summit in 1956 and 1963, the story of Mallory and Irvine faded into legend, their fate obscured on the northern side of the mountain, behind a veil of physical and political isolation. Certain clues had emerged, though. In 1933 Wyn-Harris came upon Sandy Irvine’s undamaged ice ax some sixty feet below the crest of Northeast Ridge, roughly two hundred yards east of the First Step. The 1933 expedition also located Mallory and Irvine’s Camp VI and found inside the tattered remnants of their tent a perfectly functioning electric torch, which Odell had apparently overlooked. If Mallory and Irvine had died of exposure stranded on the mountain at night, Norton had argued, there would surely have been some sign of a light. Evidently the notoriously forgetful Mallory had neglected to carry a torch on the fateful day, just as he had failed to bring his compass or flares.
Everything depended on the accuracy of Odell’s last sighting. Had he seen Mallory and Irvine mounting the Second Step, as he’d claimed, or cresting some other rise? The young cadre of British climbers on Everest in the 1930s examined the 100-foot face of the Second Step and dismissed scaling it as impossible. Such opinion hardly deterred Odell. He had climbed with Wyn-Harris, Shipton, and Wager in 1938. Though twenty years their senior, he had outpaced them with little effort. They, on the other hand, as Odell was wont to remind them, had never walked with Mallory, “a man with whom few could live uphill,” as Norton had written, “a knight amongst mountaineers and the greatest antagonist that Everest has had—or is likely to have.”
SO THE MATTER stood for more than half a century. There was every hope but little evidence that Mallory and Irvine had reached the summit before meeting their end. As Sir Edmund Hillary so patiently explained whenever asked his opinion, a good measure of success in mountaineering is surely returning from the adventure alive.
Then, in 1979, a curious report emerged from the north side of the mountain. Ryoten Hasegawa, a member of a Sino-Japanese expedition, casually asked a Chinese climber, Wang Hongbao, whether he had ever seen the body of Maurice Wilson, whose corpse mountaineers sometimes spotted at the foot of the North Col, where he had died in 1934 in his bizarre attempt to climb the mountain alone. Wang spoke no Japanese but through sign language managed to convey that during the Chinese expedition of 1975, he had indeed encountered a dead European dressed in vintage clothing—only not on the North Col but above 26,500 feet, just below the Northeast Ridge, a twenty-minute walk from the Chinese expedition’s highest camp. If this was true, the body could only have been that of either Mallory or Irvine. Before Hasegawa could learn more, however, Wang and two other Chinese climbers died the very next day in an avalanche on the North Col.
Over subsequent years dozens of expeditions would attempt Everest, and the mountain would become an open graveyard, littered with more than three hundred corpses, a dead climber for every ten who successfully returned from the summit. Many who went to Everest were familiar with the story of Mallory and Irvine, but few were inclined to exhaust precious resources in a search for evidence of their fate. The first dedicated research expedition was not launched until 1986, when noted Everest historians Tom Holzel and Audrey Salkeld, inspired by Hasegawa’s account, joined forces with David Breashears, a veteran of eight Everest expeditions, including five successful summit attempts, in a systematic attempt to locate the site of Wang’s reputed discovery. It was known that Howard Somervell had lent Mallory a small Kodak Vest Pocket camera. Technicians had assured Holzel that film froze
n even for decades might still be processed. The goal was to find the camera. Unfortunately, weather and the death of one of the expedition’s members on the North Col cut short the 1986 expedition before it could examine the rock terrace where the body of the “English dead” was said to lie.
The thread of the mystery was not taken up until 1999, when a young German geologist, Jochen Hemmleb, an acolyte of Salkeld and Holzel’s, organized a second search, to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the disappearance of the climbers. Known formally as the Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition, the team was composed largely of American climbers under the lead of noted Himalayan guide Eric Simonson, along with filmmakers from the BBC and PBS. Among those recruited for high altitude was Conrad Anker, arguably the finest climber of his generation—indeed, the Mallory of his era, in spirit, character, and deed. At 11:45 a.m. on May 1 Anker would make mountaineering history.
While Jochen Hemmleb, by radio and telescope from base camp, directed the systematic search of a grid determined by the careful study of maps and photographs, Anker drifted out of the zone, following his own intuitions as he studied the lay of the mountain. He looked up to the Northeast Ridge, south toward the Norton Couloir, and moved toward where he believed a body would end up, should a climber fall from the height of the Yellow Band. Between where he was, at roughly 27,000 feet on the north side of the mountain, and the summit there were known to be no fewer than seventeen dead. He soon came upon not one but two corpses, broken and shattered, and in the macabre way of Everest, the clothing and gear alone told him the decade in which each had died. Both were of the modern era, with plastic boots and down parkas.
Then his eye fell upon something white that was not snow, and as he approached more closely he recognized the frozen body of a man, facedown, arms extended as if clinging for survival. The left arm was exposed, the right buried in ice and rock, as was the head. A shock of brown hair stuck out of a leather-flapped helmet. The right leg was badly broken, both the tibia and the fibula. The left leg lay over the right, as if to protect the injury—which, along with the outstretched arms, suggested that the man had still been alive when his body had come to rest. A hobnailed boot on the right foot and the tattered remnants of silk and wool, eight layers altogether, clearly dated the corpse to early British expeditions. The man’s buttocks had been eaten away by goraks, Himalayan ravens, and the birds had eviscerated the gut. But the musculature of the back was firm and the skin, though tough as leather, covered a body perfect in form and as white as an Elgin marble.