by Wade Davis
By prearranged code, Anker radioed news of the find to the other climbers, who as swiftly as possible at such heights converged on the discovery. Initially they assumed the body to be that of Irvine, and they were surprised to find a clothing label marked with Mallory’s name. Then it dawned on them that they were in fact at the final resting place of a legend. Wrapped around the midsection of the cadaver was a braided cord of cotton rope, altogether ten feet in length. The frayed end revealed that Mallory and Irvine had not separated on that fateful day, as some theories had suggested, or succumbed to the elements, as Odell had so hopefully maintained, but, rather, had fallen together, each to die violently. It was also possible, of course, that the rope had broken as Irvine belayed Mallory, perhaps down the slabs of the Yellow Band in the dark. Nothing was certain.
What transpired next is a matter of controversy. The expedition maintained that Mallory’s body was treated with the utmost dignity, and several of the climbers later confessed to having been emotionally and spiritually overwhelmed by the moment. But the subsequent dissemination of photographs of the corpse to media outlets throughout the world caused considerable offense. Sir Edmund Hillary was appalled that “expedition members should flog off the photograph of this heroic figure.” Sir Chris Bonington, himself an Everest legend, told the Observer: “Words can’t express how disgusted I am. These people don’t deserve to be called climbers.” Mallory’s own grandson remarked, “Frankly it makes me bloody angry. It’s like digging for diamonds without having to do any of the digging.”
Part of the conflict was a matter of culture. No one really had expected to find Mallory’s body, and in retrospect the discovery was due to a combination of luck, Anker’s rare sensibilities as a mountaineer, and the fact that snowfall on Everest that year had been unusually slight. Few of the American climbers—young mountain guides such as Jake Norton and Tap Richards, both in their mid-twenties—were media-savvy, and all were thrust overnight into the spotlight. For the British it was one thing that the body of a national hero had been found and, in the eyes of some, exploited by a party of Americans; it was quite another to endure online commentary that was singularly inarticulate and dominated by words such as “awesome.” Eric Simonson, an exceptionally fine expedition leader, did not help when, having sold images of Mallory’s corpse, he told a magazine reporter, “We all think this is a totally cool picture … We were kind of surprised people were bummed.” Nor did it soothe British sentiments when, during the May 2 webcast announcing the discovery, he acknowledged his many commercial sponsors in the United States but failed to recognize his British partners on the expedition, including Graham Hoyland, the grandnephew of Howard Somervell, who had been instrumental in securing the participation of the BBC.
Footage shot in the moment of discovery reveals a more complicated scenario than the sanitized version conveyed to the media at the time. No one can expect exhausted climbers in bitter winds at 26,700 feet to perform precision high-altitude archaeology. But the suggestion that the body was handled with deference is a matter of interpretation. For several hours the search party hacked and gouged the frozen ground with ice axes and knives, prying up the limbs, crudely tearing at the clothing, creating the very cloth fragments later so carefully cataloged as rare specimens at base camp. At one point a climber is seen standing on Mallory’s left leg as he struggles to prop up the torso of the cadaver. “He’s almost free, let’s go ahead and free him,” says one voice. “There’s still some more shit here,” comments another. “This is something … I think it’s frozen fucking closed” ends another exchange.
Clearly, the immediate priority of the team was the excavation of the corpse and the recovery of artifacts. A number of items were found: a broken altimeter, a pair of scissors, a tin of beef lozenges, a box of matches, and a tube of zinc oxide. A pair of goggles tucked into a pocket suggested that the accident had occurred after dark—unless, of course, Mallory, acutely aware of what had happened to Norton the previous day, had elected to carry a spare pair. The climbers found a batch of letters, silk scarves, a pocketknife, but in the end no camera. Cutting away a piece of the skin for DNA analysis, with prior permission from the Mallory descendants, they then in true solemnity and at considerable effort dug stones from the frozen ground and covered the body, committing it with an Anglican prayer and a recitation of the 103rd Psalm, as the family had requested.
On May 16, a fortnight after the news of the discovery had flashed around the world, two members of the expedition, Thom Pollard and Andy Politz, returned to the burial site equipped with a metal detector. Bidding wars in the media had by then increased the price of a single photograph of the corpse to as much as $40,000. Stone by stone they exhumed the grave. Politz removed the hobnailed boot from Mallory’s right foot and found a watch in one of his pockets. The hour hand pointed to two. This could imply night or day, or even the possibility that the timepiece had ceased to function and been stashed in the pocket for safekeeping. Perhaps it had survived the fall and wound down after his death. Thom Pollard decided to examine Mallory’s face. They pried up the cadaver like a frozen log, and Pollard slithered on his back until his body lay supine beneath that of the corpse. The face, he reported, had been somewhat distorted by the weight of snow over the years but was otherwise perfectly preserved. Mallory’s eyes were closed, and a stubble of whiskers covered his chin. Over his left eye was a hole, with two pieces of the skull protruding. Blood could still be seen.
That same day Conrad Anker and Dave Hahn set out for the summit of Everest. Anker had never before been on the mountain and he had already resolved that should he reach the top of the world, he would touch it with his hand but, in deference to Buddhist tradition, not set foot upon the peak. Like any mountaineer, he was drawn inexorably to the highest point, but his quiet purpose was to ascertain whether, before their death, Mallory and Irvine could possibly have traversed the major impediments on the Northeast Ridge, especially the Second Step.
In the days since the discovery of the body, the entire expedition had become charged with speculation. The young climbers, Tap Richards and Jake Norton in particular, identified with Mallory and could not help but imagine that he had made it to the top before dying. Norton proclaimed with 90 percent certainty that the summit had been climbed; Richards suggested somewhat lower but still generous odds. Expedition historian Jochen Hemmleb, who never went above base camp, placed Mallory’s chances at fifty-fifty. As he studied, through his telescope, climbers moving up the Northeast Ridge, he determined his angle of sight to be very close to Odell’s in 1924. What he saw, albeit from a distance of thousands of feet, led him to believe that Mallory and Irvine had been observed by Odell not overcoming the Second Step but scrambling beyond the Third Step to the actual base of the summit pyramid. Andy Politz, posted far higher on the mountain, scaled the same rocky crag where Odell had stood the last time he’d seen Mallory and Irvine alive. Politz independently came to the same conclusion. If they were right, that would place Mallory and Irvine at 12:50 p.m. on June 8, 1924, within hours of the summit, with little but exhaustion and exposure to impede their progress.
It was of course in the interests of the expedition, which had already electrified the world with one stunning discovery, to prove that Mallory and Irvine had reached the summit of Everest. In all the excitement, it was only natural for the team members to envision success. Anker, by contrast, and to his credit, withheld judgment until he could study the route and know the actual ground as a climber. He had found Mallory’s body. He alone would carry the memory of that moment to the summit of the mountain. No climber on Everest in 1999 had a greater desire to learn the truth. His conclusions, carefully crafted and drawn from direct personal experience, resonate with authenticity. Unless and until further discoveries are made, they must surely be considered definitive.
Anker’s reservations are several. First, there is the matter of clothing and equipment. Mallory and Irvine had primitive crampons, but they could not use them a
t high elevation, as the leather straps impaired their circulation and increased the risk of frostbite. On his summit climb Anker found crampons essential; he never removed them, even on the rock face of the Second Step. He and his companion, Dave Hahn, also had the advantage of fixed ropes, which greatly facilitated route finding and the speed, ease, and safety of descent. All of their climbing ropes were made of nylon, with a breaking strength seven times that of the cotton weaves used by the British in the 1920s. Anker had modern climbing aids, a rack of cams and stoppers; Mallory lacked even metal pitons. Both teams climbed with oxygen, but Anker’s apparatus weighed fourteen pounds, Mallory’s over thirty. Mallory wore seven, perhaps eight, layers of thin silk and wool. Anker had double fleece, a wind parka, and a full down suit with four inches of insulation. In place of leather and hobnails, he had thick nylon boots insulated with closed-cell foam. Mallory covered his head with a leather helmet snitched from the Royal Air Force. Anker had a wool knit hat and a thick down hood engineered into his parka. Despite all of this protection, Anker still suffered from the cold, unless he was moving; he found it difficult to imagine how Mallory had managed.
From the accounts of 1924 it is clear that Mallory and Irvine began their last climb physically depleted. They had lost their stove. Limited in their ability to melt snow, they set out for the summit already severely dehydrated. Irvine suffered terribly from the sun; his entire face was blistered and raw. That they left a torch in their tent suggests that they began their day after sunrise; Anker and Hahn, by contrast, set out in the early hours of the morning, at 2:00 a.m., and returned from their successful summit attempt only at 9:15 p.m., well after dark. They both found the route up the Northeast Ridge daunting, a knife edge of ice and rock, exposed on one side to the Kangshung Face, a drop of 10,000 feet, and on the other, after a fall of a mere 9,000 feet, to the North Face. Hahn, a highly accomplished mountaineer and in time a veteran of no fewer than twelve successful Everest summit attempts, by his own admission struggled much of the day, becoming both mentally and physically exhausted. Casting no judgment, neither he nor Anker could imagine what it must have been like for Sandy Irvine, whose experience was so limited.
But the final proof lay in the severity of the Second Step. In 1975 a Chinese expedition had secured an aluminum ladder over the steepest and most perilous pitch. Anker’s goal was to climb without making use of this artificial aid, facing the challenge just as Mallory would have done in 1924. The initial ascent of some 45 feet he rated as moderately difficult but not extreme: no trouble for Mallory, though possibly beyond Irvine’s abilities. But the next pitch, including the crack crossed by the ladder, was vertical rock, formidably difficult. Anker tried but was unable to free-climb it; the position of the ladder obliged him to set one foot on a rung. He later graded it a “solid 5.10,” a technical rating implying a rock challenge far more difficult than anything being attempted by British climbers in Wales or elsewhere in the 1920s. That Mallory and Irvine might have overcome such a pitch, a climb made doubly perilous by an exposure of 8,000 feet, defied belief. And even had they done so, it was not clear how they could have returned. Conrad and Hahn, like all modern climbers on the Northeast Ridge, counted on rappelling down the Second Step, their rope anchored to a large and prominent boulder at the top of the final pitch. The climbing ropes available to Mallory and Irvine were neither strong nor long enough for such a rappel. Had they surmounted the Second Step, Mallory and Irvine would have been forced, upon their return, to down-climb, an imposing challenge readily acknowledged by Anker, among the top technical rock climbers of the modern era, as being at the limit of his capabilities.
As Anker and Hahn crested the Second Step and began the long and still dangerous climb toward the summit of Everest, they had answered many of the essential questions. Mallory and Irvine had certainly reached the First Step; this would later be confirmed with the discovery in situ of a discarded oxygen cylinder, which Jochem Hemmleb dated positively to 1924. In all likelihood they overcame the First Step but then turned back either at the foot of the Second Step or somewhere along the ridge between the two. Perhaps in failing light, or blinded by the squall that swept the mountain that afternoon, Mallory removed his goggles as he attempted to find a route down through the slabs of the Yellow Band. Tied as one, perhaps with Mallory on belay, they fell together, not from the height of the Northeast Ridge but from far lower on the North Face, quite possibly within easy reach of their highest camp. Indeed, later expeditions would determine that Mallory had come to rest not three hundred yards from the safety of his Camp VI.
Mallory and Irvine may not have reached the summit of Mount Everest, but they did, on that fateful day, climb higher than any human being before them, reaching heights that would not be attained again for nearly thirty years. That they were able to do so, given all they had endured, is surely achievement enough. “To tell the truth,” Dave Hahn remarked, “I have trouble believing they were as high as we know that they were.” And as Conrad Anker noted, there is still one possibility, one scenario by which they might have indeed surmounted the Second Step. Had the very storms that so battered the 1924 expedition, burying the high camps and causing Norton to retreat not once but twice from the North Col, brought heavy snows of similar magnitude to the Northeast Ridge, it is possible that a drift accumulated, large enough, if not to bury the cliffs of the Second Step, at least to create a cone covering the most difficult pitches of rock. Such a scenario did in fact unfold in 1985, albeit in the autumn. Had this been the case, Mallory and Irvine might simply have walked up the snow, traversing the barrier with the very speed and ease that Odell so famously reported. Had this occurred, surely nothing could have held Mallory back. He would have walked on, even to his end, because for him, as for all of his generation, death was but “a frail barrier” that men crossed, “smiling and gallant, every day.” They had seen so much of death that life mattered less than the moments of being alive.
Sir Charles Bell and His Holiness the Thirteenth Dalai Lama (seated, right) with Maharaj Kumar Sidkeong Trul-ku (standing)
General Charles G. Bruce drinking chang, fermented from barley, during the 1924 expedition. Photographed by Bentley Beetham.
The ice pinnacles of the East Rongbuk Glacier, photographed by Bentley Beetham in 1924
Geoffrey Bruce and George Finch returning to Camp IV at 23,000 feet after their record climb in 1922. Photographed by John Noel.
An expedition party heading up the North Col to Camp IV, photographed by Bentley Beetham, 1924
Everest, the Northeast Ridge, photographed by Sandy Wollaston, 1921
George Mallory and Teddy Norton approaching their highest point, 26,985 feet, on May 21, 1922. Photographed by Howard Somervell.
The last photograph of George Mallory (left) and Sandy Irvine, taken by Noel Odell at Camp IV on the North Col, June 6, 1924
A self-portrait of John Noel filming the ascent of Everest from the Chang La, the North Col, 1922
Another self-portrait: Noel Odell camped in the Zemu Forest, Sikkim, en route to Everest, 1924
The 1922 expedition at base camp, photographed with tripod and timer by John Noel. Back row (left to right): Henry Morshead, Geoffrey Bruce, John Noel, Arthur Wakefield, Howard Somervell, John Morris, and Teddy Norton. Front row (left to right): George Mallory, George Finch, Tom Longstaff, General Bruce, Edward Strutt, and Colin Crawford.
Oliver Wheeler with his photographic survey team, photographed by Sandy Wollaston, 1921
Howard Somervell, photographed by Bentley Beetham, 1924
The camp at Windy Gap, on the Lhakpa La (22,500 feet), photographed by Charles Howard-Bury, 1921
Members of the 1921 expedition with Lord Ronaldshay, governor of Bengal, photographed by Guy Bullock’s wife, Alice, outside Government House, Darjeeling. Left to right: Sandy Wollaston, George Mallory, Bullock, Ronaldshay, Charles Howard-Bury, and Harold Raeburn.
Summit of Everest and the North Col from the Lhakpa La, photographed by Charles Howard-Bury,
1921
The dedication of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club war memorial on the summit of Great Gable, June 8, 1924
George Mallory on the Moine Ridge of the Aiguille Verte, photographed by Geoffrey Young, 1909
George Mallory (right) and Siegfried Herford at Pen y Pass, photographed by Geoffrey Young, 1913
George Mallory and Sandy Irvine, photographed by Noel Odell, at the Pang La, looking southeast toward Everest, 1924. On the skyline to the right are Gyachung Kang and Cho Oyu.
The 1922 expedition heading overland, through Sikkim, to Everest, photographed by Howard Somervell