Young watched apprehensively, as he later wrote in On High Hills, as Mallory
fought his way up magnificently, until all that remained below the rock cornice, which cut off everything else above from my sight, was his two boots. They were clinging, cat-like, and continued to cling for long seconds, to almost imperceptible irregularities on the walls of the rift. The mere sight of them made me breathless; and I tightened every muscle, ready to spring the rope on its nick.
Losing strength, Mallory launched a desperate “gymnastic backward swing” as he tried to top the overhang. “I saw the boots flash from the wall without even a scrape,” remembered Young; “and, equally soundlessly, a grey streak flickered downward, and past me, and out of sight.”
Mallory fell forty feet free, touching nothing, before the shock came on the rope. Young held on tight as the cord ground his hands into the slab. In the days before stretchy, strong nylon ropes, such falls usually caused the climbers’ lifeline to break. Young anticipated as much. As he later put it,
We were using that year a then rather popular Austrian woven rope, since entirely condemned. Whenever, in later years, I have looked back at the tabulated rope-tests, which show that this rope is warranted to snap like a straw under the jerk of a man’s weight falling from, I think, five feet, I have thought again of the transfigured second in which I realized that the rope had, miraculously, held.
Mallory was unhurt, and so unfazed by the fall that he hadn’t even dropped his ice axe. Now he hooked his way up steep slabs back to his belayer. The two men continued up the Nesthorn, solving the pillar by another route, and Mallory led to the summit in the last light of the day. “He appeared, through the shadows,” wrote Young, “to float like a thistledown up the last abrupt steps: up and up, through always denser cold and closer darkness.”
Whether indeed, as Ann Bridge insisted, Mallory had no experience of fear, he related the attack on the previously unclimbed ridge of the Nesthorn in a letter to his mother as though it were merely another jolly outing in the Alps, rather than a desperate ascent that could well have proved fatal:
We were out twenty-one hours, and were altogether rather pleased with ourselves, as we started in bad weather which afterwards cleared up beautifully. The sunset from the Nesthorn was the most wonderful I have ever seen.
From such episodes, one might conclude that Mallory was a daredevil, supremely convinced of his own invulnerability, harboring perhaps a self-destructive demon. Yet David Pye, Mallory’s climbing companion as well as his first biographer, insists that his friend was “very careful of unskilled performers, and very down on any clumsiness or carelessness.” Reflecting on a climbing accident that befell a party tackling a route beyond their powers, he said—“in tones of angry grief”—“They had no business to be there!”
A month after the Nesthorn accident, Mallory suffered a more trivial fall that was to have far more important consequences. He was out walking with his sisters and friends near his parents’ home in Birkenhead, when he came to a small sandstone cliff in a disused quarry. As biographer David Robertson puts it, “There was no need whatever to climb it, but George naturally made for it and started up.”
Near the top of the short pitch he was soloing, Mallory ran into a troublesome sequence. One of the friends scrambled around to the top and lowered a rope, which George tried to grab just as he slipped, only to have it slide through his hands. With his feline agility, Mallory tried to spring outward and backward and land on his feet in the grass, but he came down hard with his right foot on a hidden stone.
Mallory assumed he had sprained the ankle, but for months it refused to heal. Writing Young in December, he reported, “Indeed it is still in a poor state and though I can walk well enough for a short distance, it is no good for the mountains.” Mallory blamed only himself: “The whole affair is almost too disgusting to think of, the result chiefly of my obstinacy.”
It was only eight years later, when the ankle caused him so much trouble on the Western Front during the Great War that he had to be invalided home, that Mallory learned he had broken the ankle in the 1909 fall; it had never properly healed. He underwent an operation that seemed to fix the problem, but seven years later, on his last expedition to Everest, he was still plagued by the injury. From Darjeeling in May 1924, full of optimism about the team’s chances, he wrote Ruth: “The only doubts I have are whether the old ankle one way or another will cause me trouble.”
After Cambridge, Mallory hoped to become a writer, and managed to publish a critical work called Boswell the Biographer, unread today. In his articles for the climbing journals, he went far beyond the dry recitations of passes gained and ridges traversed that were the norm of the day, striving for a lyrical flight to match the exaltation he felt in the mountains. In an ambitious 1914 essay he titled “The Mountaineer as Artist,” Mallory spun out an elaborate conceit comparing a day in the Alps with a symphony. Here, as in the overearnest pages of many another young mountaineer-writer, a note of preciousness could creep in:
And so throughout the day successive moods induce the symphonic whole—allegro while you break the back of an expedition and the issue is still in doubt; scherzo, perhaps, as you leap up the final rocks of the arête or cut steps in a last short slope, with the ice-chips dancing and swimming and bubbling and bounding with magic gaiety over the crisp surface in their mad glissade.
Yet as he matured, the loose lyricism of Mallory’s prose acquired a certain backbone, as he learned that he really had something to say. He had a true gift for the aphoristic formula; had he lived longer, Mallory might have become, as did Geoffrey Winthrop Young, one of the century’s finest writers about mountaineering. His most famous passage appears in an account of a difficult route on Mont Blanc, published in 1918 in the Alpine Journal: “Have we vanquished an enemy? None but ourselves. Have we gained success? That word means nothing here.”
There is perhaps a rueful irony in the fact that the single phrase for which Mallory will forever be remembered was a spontaneous retort, in the midst of a tiring American lecture tour, to a journalist who asked him why he wanted to climb Everest. “Because it is there,” snapped Mallory, passing on to posterity an apothegm as pithy as any Confucian riddle. Some of Mallory’s closest friends insisted that the response was meant as an off-putting non sequitur, from a man weary in his bones of being asked the same unanswerable question mountaineers have always been scolded with.
In the chapters he contributed to the official 1921 and 1922 Everest books, Mallory writes vividly and well; but so do most of his teammates, so high were the standards of English education of the day. Noel Odell’s and Teddy Norton’s chapters in the 1924 book are the equal of Mallory’s.
In 1910, at age twenty-four, to eke out a living, Mallory took a teaching job at a public school called Charterhouse. He poured himself into the job, on holiday taking students climbing in Wales and the Alps, just as R. L. G. Irving had taken him. Some, such as Robert Graves, remained indebted to him the rest of their days. But Mallory was too disorganized to be a really effective teacher, too creative to be happy in his drudgerous and sedentary post. As Graves put it, “George was wasted at Charterhouse.”
Even so, he must have been a stimulating teacher. David Pye relates a stray remark that hints at the impishly subversive role Mallory played with his Charterhouse charges: “Imagine me to-morrow morning teaching the smallest boys about the fall of man! what the devil is one to say? It was such a wholly admirable business and God behaved so badly; mere petty jealousy!”
Politically, Mallory was a liberal on the far left, despite being a parson’s son. He considered himself a Fabian, and championed such causes as women’s suffrage and Irish home rule, traveling to the country in 1920 to witness for himself the barbarity of the English suppression. One night in Dublin, he was cross-examined in the glare of a flashlight by an official with a revolver in his hand, who apparently suspected him of being a rabid Sinn Feiner.
Starting in the spring
of 1916, Mallory served on the French front during World War I, where he suffered his share of close calls—a whizzing bullet that passed between him and a nearby soldier, two friends blown apart by a shell as they ran a few paces behind him. At first, in letters home, he kept up the jaunty pretense that war was like some schoolboy sport: “Personally, I get some fun out of this sort of performance.” “I played the game, on my way to the O.P., of shell-dodging for the first time. Quite an amusing game.”
But the suffering and horror he saw on the front knocked much of that schoolboy preciousness out of George Mallory. There was no jauntiness left in the plain account of his discovery of the bodies of his two friends killed by the shell that exploded just behind him:
I had not gone many paces when I saw that they were both lying face downwards. They seemed to be dead when we got to them…. They were very nice fellows—one of them quite particularly so. He had been with me up in the front line all day and proved the most agreeable of companions.
Mallory was lucky to be sent home, in May 1917, because of his bad ankle. Some of his closest friends were not so fortunate, such as his Cambridge classmate the poet Rupert Brooke, who died of blood poisoning; or Robert Graves, grievously wounded in the trenches; or Geoffrey Winthrop Young, who lost a leg above the knee, but would go on in his forties to climb at a high standard with an artificial limb.
In 1914, on a jaunt to Venice with friends, Mallory had met and fallen in love with Ruth Turner. She too was beautiful—“Botticellian” was his own word for her—and as he got to know her he formed a true union of souls with this quiet, loyal, well-educated woman. They were married only four months after meeting, just as Mallory had turned twenty-eight. He at once taught his bride to climb, hauling her along on far from trivial routes in Wales. Nor did he coddle or protect her. In the middle of a December gale on Snowdon, George, Ruth, and David Pye faced a “precipitously steep and terrifying” descent. When Ruth balked at plunging off the ridge, George took her by the shoulders and “simply pushed her forcibly over the edge! … Next he jumped over also and soon we were all gasping in comparative peace while the wind still roared overhead.”
Despite her brave apprenticeship in climbing, despite an aesthetic compatibility between herself and her husband, Ruth’s temperament was utterly different from George’s. According to Pye, Ruth was “a person of the wisest simplicity and a transcendent practicalness.” Her stability seemed to give Mallory an anchor in life. “A total stranger meeting both for the first time at some climbing centre, soon after their marriage,” wrote Pye, “spoke of the shock of delight and astonishment which they produced. ‘They seem too good to be true.’”
By the time he was fighting in the trenches in France, Mallory was the father of two infant girls—Clare, born in 1915, and Beridge, the year after. A third child, John, would be born in 1920. After being invalided home, Mallory had returned to the Western Front for the very last weeks of the war. When the Armistice came, he wrote Ruth, “What a wonderful life we will have together! What a lovely thing we must make of such a gift!”
So far as his biographers can ascertain, Ruth was the only important woman in Mallory’s life. After a decade of marriage, their passion for each other seemed utterly undimmed, as their letters, collected in the archives of Magdalene College, testify.
In the summer of 1919, Mallory returned to the Alps for the first time in seven years. Despite bad weather and companions far less bold or able than he, George pursued a joyous campaign of ascents. After an epic traverse of Mont Blanc in a storm, Mallory wrote Young a long letter, one phrase of which leaps out, in the retrospect of Everest 1924: “How incompetent tired men can become, going down!”
In the Alps, according to David Pye, Mallory demonstrated an uncanny eye for route-finding. “He was always drawn to the big and the unexplored—the great walls that mountaineers as a rule set aside as obviously impossible.” When he failed on a climb, Mallory was devastated—“‘I was heavy!’ he used to say in tones of deep disgust.”
Mallory was happy to climb in Wales once more with Young, despite his mentor’s artificial leg. To save his friend the agony of stumping along the approach trail, Mallory coaxed his little car up the Miner’s Track to the very foot of Lliwedd.
But for Everest, Mallory might have settled down to a life of schoolteaching, dabbling as a writer, and climbing summers in the Alps. As early as 1919, however, rumors of a British reconnaissance of the approaches to the world’s highest mountain were floating about. No Westerner had stood within forty miles of its flanks.
For a man of Mallory’s restless spirit, this siren call could not go unheeded. He was by now unquestionably the finest mountaineer in Britain. But he was also a father and a schoolteacher, and he hesitated when the invitation came. It was Young who, in twenty minutes during a visit, persuaded Mallory (in David Robertson’s words) “that Everest was an opportunity not to be missed: it would be an extraordinary adventure; and it would be something for George to be known by, in his future work as an educator or writer.”
Thus, in a decision more pragmatic than spiritual, George Mallory walked open-eyed into the obsession that would make him famous, and that would cost him his life.
3 Dissonance
CA
AFTER A NIGHT of wretched “sleep,” the five of us started down from Camp V on the morning of May 2. Above the North Col on the exposed snow ridge, I ran into Vladislav Terzeul, who goes by the name Slava, the strongest climber on a Ukrainian team that was preparing for its summit attempt. The first thing he said was, “Oh, you find Mallory?” I was taken aback, but I mumbled, “No, we haven’t.” Slava’s question didn’t mean the word was out. Everybody on the mountain knew what we had come for, so his was a natural question to ask.
At the North Col, I ran into Russell Brice. He’s a strong New Zealander who had climbed Everest before, and was guiding clients up the north side. A great guy. He asked, “Well, did you find him?” Once more I muttered a denial.
The day before, as soon as I’d broadcast my coded messages about hobnails, Snickers and tea, and a mandatory group meeting, our teammates down at Advance Base and Base Camp knew that we were on to something. Simo had come on shortly afterward to warn us that our broadcasts were being monitored all over the mountain. Russell Brice had a very good radio setup, and he was one of the more meticulous monitors. Maybe he’d picked up something. But after Simo’s warning, we’d shut down, maintaining virtual radio silence ever since.
We descended the icefall to ABC (Advance Base Camp) at 21,000 feet, to spend the night. There we met Simo and Thom Pollard, a videographer hired by NOVA. We came into camp hiking as a group so Thom could film our arrival. Dave Hahn and I always liked to joke about who walks in last, playing the humble role. Now the guys insisted that I walk in first. Simo had a huge grin on his face, and he was eager to hear the news, but we had to wait because there were all these folks from other expeditions milling around. Finally we hopped inside our dining tent, zipped it up, and that’s when Dave told Eric what we had found.
He had expected that we’d reveal that we’d found Sandy Irvine. When we told him it was Mallory we’d discovered, all Simo could say was, “Wow, this is something else!”
We celebrated with cookies and tea, then decided to share the news with Russell Brice. I’d been feeling bad about telling him we hadn’t found anything. Now Russell congratulated us warmly and agreed to keep the story under wraps.
That evening, Simo got on the satellite phone to call his girlfriend, Erin Copland, in Ashford, Washington, who was acting as expedition publicist. To his dismay, the first thing Erin said was, “The story’s already out. NOVA broke the story yesterday in their dispatch.”
At Base Camp, Liesl Clark, the producer of the NOVA film, had been sending reports almost daily to the PBS site on the Internet. MountainZone was also running dispatches. These were usually called in by satellite phone from the expedition members (mostly Simo) to a voice mailbox; the dispatches were then
edited in Seattle and posted on the Internet. Dave Hahn put a lot of extra energy into his dispatches. This was Dave’s second stint reporting for MountainZone on Everest. Instead of just calling in the first thing that came to mind, he’d stay up as late as 1:00 A.M. some nights typing well-crafted, very detailed reports onto a laptop, then sending them to Seattle.
So the expedition was being jointly covered on the Internet. When I got home, I read all the dispatches for the first time. Liesl’s a good writer: her dispatches were lucid, comprehensive, and informative; she also transcribed interviews with us climbers. The MountainZone dispatches, on the other hand, tended to be fragmented and casual—which is understandable, given that the guys were usually calling Seattle at the end of a hard day. Just as understandably, they didn’t take the broad view; even Dave’s well-written reports tended to reflect whatever he’d been doing that day.
On May 1, the day of the search, Simo was tuned in at ABC, while Liesl listened at Base Camp. Jochen Hemmleb was right beside her, peering through his 200-power telescope, commenting over the radio on everything we did. During the early stages of the search, we were reporting our progress to Simo and Jochen. The conversation between Jochen and Jake about the oxygen bottle with blue paint on the end, identifying it as from the Chinese ’75 expedition, was on the air. So was my discovery of the two modern bodies and the exchange between Andy Politz and me about where I was searching. It was only when I found Mallory and lapsed into the coded messages that we put up our guard.
The Lost Explorer Page 5