The Lost Explorer

by Anker, Conrad

  Eric Simonson had maintained that all the expedition’s actions at the site, down to the taking of the DNA sample, had been approved beforehand by someone in the Mallory family. In Santa Rosa, California, however, Clare Millikan, at eighty-three the eldest of Mallory’s three children, was upset that nobody from the expedition had contacted her before the discovery.

  Had the team set forth last spring on a traditional expedition, all this public response would have emerged only after they had returned to the U.S. to report their great find. But now, thanks to the satellite phone and the Internet, even as they rested at Base Camp, with other important goals still to pursue, the party was plunged into the midst of the controversy. Here lay another peculiar twist to what might be called postmodern exploration: the reaction of a worldwide audience to an adventure still in the process of unfolding could determine crucial turns in the course of that adventure.

  Another by-product of this postmodern expedition’s self-narration in “real time” was a certain aesthetic loss, compared to the chronicles of earlier exploits on Everest. After each of the 1921, 1922, and 1924 expeditions, the members labored for months to compile monumental volumes recounting their journeys. Those books—Mount Everest: The Reconnaissance, 1921;The Assault on Mount Everest, 1922; and The Fight for Everest—have become classics. Chapters by Mallory, Noel Odell, and Teddy Norton contain some of the canonic passages in the rich literature of mountaineering.

  By contrast, in the flurry of MountainZone dispatches in which the teammates struggled to express their feelings on May 1, 1999, they managed to produce only inarticulate outbursts of enthusiasm. “We just came down from the search area,” reported Jake Norton, “and it was a pretty interesting time.” “I’m still blown away by yesterday,” offered Dave Hahn: “we found George Mallory and it was an incredible day.” “It was really neat to be there with George Mallory,” gushed Tap Richards. The usually thoughtful Conrad Anker came up with the lame aperçu, “He had been there quite a while, and there was something very, very subtle about his being there, not really scary and violent.” (Compare Odell’s musing on Mallory going all-out for the summit, in The Fight for Everest: “And who of us that has wrestled with some Alpine giant in the teeth of a gale, or in a race with the darkness, could hold back when such a victory, such a triumph of human endeavour, was within our grasp?”)

  No doubt the 1999 team’s blatherings were merely the detritus of the age of the sound bite. But the lack of opportunity to reflect on a powerful experience, along with the fact that, thanks to the Internet, everything the team did and blurted out was at once available for public consumption, helped power the emotional roller coaster the expedition now rode.

  It had simply never occurred to Simonson and his partners that photographing and filming the corpse, or rifling through its pockets, might provoke disapproval. Now the angry and critical reaction from mountaineering heroes such as Bonington and Hillary deeply dismayed the team. Eric Simonson called a group meeting to discuss what Anker had dubbed the “dissonance.” One upshot of that conference surfaced when Simonson announced, in a post-expedition press conference, that all profits from the sale of Mallory photos would go not into the pockets of team members, but to “Himalayan charities to be determined later.”

  The members were only beginning to recognize the fact that extremely knotty legal tangles might well hang over the “artifacts” and the letters, which they hoped to carry back to the States. To whom did the stuff ultimately belong? Was it a case of finders keepers; were the team members, in Anker’s pithy phrase, “the Mel Fishers of high-altitude climbing,” treating Mallory like a long-lost Spanish galleon? Or did Mallory’s estate have a prior claim? Someone in England had come forth to argue that the gear found with Mallory belonged to the companies that had originally sponsored the 1924 expedition. As for the letters and notes and the right to publish their contents, which copyright laws applied? The Chinese or Tibetan regulations of today, or Britain’s in 1924?

  Through the Internet, the team learned about the debacle of the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by NATO planes, and about the rabid anti-American protests that act had provoked in China. The fear grew among the members that, as they made their way out of Tibet, Chinese authorities might confiscate the artifacts. For that reason, Simonson did not at first tell the team’s Han Chinese liaison officer about finding Mallory. (The man learned of the discovery only by listening to Chinese radio.) And when trekker Shellene Scott left Base Camp to go home to the States on May 9, she carried some of the objects in her baggage.

  As Anker had laid out the artifacts to dry at Base Camp, and Hemmleb had pored over them, making notes, it became increasingly clear that even such humble belongings as a box of matches and a tin of beef lozenges had both forensic and symbolic value. For many years now, Robert Falcon Scott’s diary, found by his teammates beside his dead body eight months after his demise on the return journey from the South Pole, has lain under glass in the reading room of the British Museum, turned open to its famous last page. Surely Mallory’s bent goggles, his monogrammed handkerchief, had a comparable numen.

  Higher on the mountain, Dave Hahn had cursorily glanced through the letters the team had found wrapped in the handkerchief. One was from Mallory’s sister Mary, another from his brother, Trafford; both were full of family news and holiday chat. A third, though also newsy, had a line indicating a deeper intimacy. Trying to make out the signature, Hahn concluded that it read “Sweetie,” and jumped to the obvious conclusion. As he wrote in his May 4 MountainZone dispatch: “There were some remarkable things that turned up … culminating in a perfectly preserved letter from his wife, worn on his chest, close to his heart.”

  Now, down at Base Camp, Anker, Hemmleb, and Liesl Clark read the letters more carefully, as Clark transcribed their contents onto her laptop. Studying the signature on the third letter, they realized that it read not “Sweetie” (by all odds an unlikely sobriquet for Ruth to have assumed), but “Stella.” Suddenly the unexplained third letter seemed a potential bombshell. The epistle had been posted from London S.W. 4, but had no return address; it had been written on the stationery of a posh English men’s club, with the letterhead scratched out.

  Who was Stella? Was this a love letter? Reading and rereading the sentences, Clark and Anker could not decide. The intimate phrase might just have sprung from the effusive vocabulary current among friends and relatives in the 1920s in Britain; yet what about the apparent efforts to conceal the writer’s identity and the letter’s provenience?

  The Stella letter became a closely guarded secret within the expedition. Clark could imagine what the English tabloids would do with this revelation (“Lost Mountaineer’s Secret Lover”)—with little more than the knowledge that such a letter existed and had been carried next to Mallory’s heart on his summit attempt. Yet, as so often happens with a confidence shared among too many independent souls, rumors about the Stella letter leaked out.

  Eric Simonson tried hard to control the gossip. On May 7, in a MountainZone dispatch, he corrected Hahn’s error, in as vague a fashion as he could manage:

  For the record, there were several different letters from various family members. The handwriting on some of them is a little tough to read, and it’s not entirely clear whether the letter from his wife was in fact from his wife, but we’re working on that.

  There is no doubt that, as late as 1924, Mallory was still deeply in love with his wife. His long letters to her from the expedition breathe that passion, and the pain of separation: “How I wish I had you with me! With so much leisure we should have enjoyed the time together…. Great love to you, dearest one.”

  Yet at the same time, those letters adumbrate certain recent problems the couple had faced: “I know I have rather often been cross and not nice, and I’m very sorry.” “We went through a difficult time together in the autumn.” Mallory’s biographers have always assumed that the troubles thus alluded to had to do with career and money,
and with the many months Mallory was away on Everest.

  Upon his return to the U.S., Simonson kept the letters under lock and key at the Washington State Historical Museum. In late July, he traveled to California to present the letters to Clare Millikan and her brother, John Mallory, who traveled to the U.S. from South Africa to retrieve them. Her memory prodded by the Stella letter, Clare remembered one Stella Mellersh, a woman who had married a cousin of Ruth Mallory’s. She had been a generation older than George Mallory.

  Rick Millikan, Clare’s son and Mallory’s grandson, carefully read the letter and decided that the apparently intimate phrase had been misread at Base Camp: all it really said, Millikan thought, was something like, “Much love to you, George.” Simonson pointed out some penciled scribblings on the envelope in Mallory’s hand, which he thought might be an inventory of oxygen bottles. It occurred to Simonson and Millikan that perhaps Mallory had carried the Stella letter so high mainly to use the envelope as a piece of note paper!

  From this California meeting, John Mallory carried the letters back to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where they were to be archived with the existing Mallory correspondence. Eventually scholars will be able to puzzle over the Stella letter to their hearts’ content, determining whether it really is an intimate message from a phantom lover or only a pleasant note from a distant older relative.

  As striking in its own way as the anomalous Stella letter was the absence of any missive from Ruth in that neatly folded handkerchief. On the journey from Darjeeling, and even at Base Camp, Mallory had received letters from his wife. Clare Millikan was told at age eight that her father carried a photo of Ruth, which he intended to leave on the summit. Among those who most wanted to believe Mallory could have made it to the top, here was another circumstantial argument: perhaps the great mountaineer had indeed left the most precious thing he could carry—a letter from or a photo of his wife—among the summit snows.

  CA

  ON MAY 8, WE DESCENDED from Base Camp to the Rongbuk Monastery—the highest monastery in the world, destroyed by the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution, but mostly rebuilt since. Liesl shot some film footage there, but the main idea was to bide our time, to fatten up and recharge prior to heading back up for the second and more demanding summit phase of the expedition.

  My method of recharging is to eat all the junk food I can, all day long. Candy bars, potato chips, little bits of cheese, sardines—anything with a high fat content. The downside of this day-long grazing was that when we were served dinner, I didn’t have much appetite for a plateful of rice with stewed cabbage, because I’d been eating a lot of chocolate. But calories are calories. It’s not so much a question of fattening up as of trying to keep weight on. I knew I had already lost weight on the expedition. My legs were getting thinner.

  At Bouddanath, in Kathmandu, at the beginning of the expedition, we had had a puja ceremony, a blessing for the expedition. Later, on April 1, the monks from the Rongbuk Monastery came up to Base Camp to give us a second puja. The high lama who led the ceremony at Bouddanath had tied a red prayer knot around my neck. Three months later, I haven’t taken it off: it’s a common Buddhist practice to leave it on until it disintegrates.

  At the puja at Base Camp, we had trucked in some juniper to burn, and we made offerings to the monks. I gave them a bunch of Skittles—a hard candy I sometimes eat when I’m rock-climbing—some turkey jerky, and a Coca-Cola. The monks tossed rice around, which all the birds came to feed on, and they smeared tsampa flour on our faces and gave us tsampa cake to eat.

  Some of the guys on our expedition didn’t take the puja very seriously. Peter Firstbrook, the BBC director, was washing his socks at the Rongbuk puja. You wouldn’t wash your socks during services at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Other Westerners just more or less tolerated the ceremony. You can see that in the way Dave Hahn wrote up the Base Camp puja on Mountain-Zone:

  We had our Puja yesterday. That is when we put the packing and planning on hold and get down to some serious begging. The Puja is a ceremony designed to get some good credit with the gods, seeing as how we are now going to get up to our eyeballs in this thing. Really, it is for the Sherpas and their brand of mountain Buddhism. We try to show our respect for them and their beliefs by allowing the ceremony.

  The puja is indeed a deeply serious ceremony for the Sherpas. And I take it very seriously too. At the Bouddanath puja, from a little tray of offerings the lamas passed around, I picked out a walnut that I intended to leave on the summit.

  I wouldn’t call myself a Buddhist, but I have a great admiration for the religion. The Dalai Lama says his religion is kindness. If you’re going to be kind to yourself, be kind to your friends, to your partner, your family, the animals, the trees. I believe in that. I also believe in karma. It’s not just a matter of the right actions; you have to have the right intentions as well.

  There was the same kind of range in response to the puja way back in the 1920s. Expedition member Bentley Beetham, in The Fight for Everest, the official book from 1924, describes coming upon a service in progress in the Rongbuk Monastery as the team left the mountain. “Hitherto we had felt nothing but revulsion for the lamas,” Beetham writes; after all, these Buddhist monks were idolaters, worshiping false gods. Yet as he watched, he got caught up in the ceremony, until he had to admit that it was “the most impressive, the most moving service I, for one, have ever attended.” Beetham was so moved that his cultural superiority was tempered: “These Tibetans may be wrong, they may be deceived, but they are obviously in earnest; an English congregation may not be deceived, but are they in earnest?”

  As the international fuss about our discovery started to calm down a bit, we planned the second stage of our expedition. We’d hoped to make a second search for Sandy Irvine and the camera. But it had snowed a fair amount since May 1, and we weren’t so sanguine about our chances of making a second find.

  And four of us—Dave Hahn, Tap Richards, Jake Norton, and I—wanted to have a shot at the summit. In addition, I had a personal aspiration, which Simo and I had discussed even before we left the States. I wanted to try to free-climb the Second Step. That, for me, was the crucial test of the likelihood that Mallory and Irvine could have made the summit.

  To free-climb a pitch is to scale it using only one’s hands and feet, without relying on artificial objects—pitons, machined nuts, even ladders—to gain upward progress.

  Some background is in order. On June 4, 1924, Teddy Norton had reached a height calculated as 28,126 feet by traversing west across the north face and entering the Great Couloir. In 1933, Frank Smythe exactly matched that high point, which stood, in the absence of any sure knowledge of Mallory and Irvine’s achievement, as the world altitude record until 1952, when the Swiss Raymond Lambert and the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay turned back on the South Col route only 800 feet below the summit.

  The Great Couloir would prove a feasible route up the north side of Everest, as Reinhold Messner demonstrated in making his amazing oxygenless solo ascent in 1980. But we know this was not the route followed by Mallory and Irvine, because Odell saw them high on the skyline of the north ridge.

  The Second Step is a ninety-foot-high, nearly vertical cliff that interrupts the north ridge at 28,230 feet. There’s no way of skirting it: you have to tackle it head-on. Unless Mallory and Irvine climbed it, the first men to grapple with this formidable obstacle were the Chinese team in 1960. By their own account, which appeared in a propaganda organ called China Reconstructs, after an all-out effort in which one climber took off his boots and gloves and tried the cliff in stocking feet, a partner solved the climb by standing on another teammate’s shoulders. Three men then went on to the top in the dark.

  Or so the article claims. I’ve always had my doubts about that purported ascent, and so have others.

  The first well-documented ascent of the north ridge, also by Chinese, came in 1975, during the expedition on which Wang Hongbao found his “old English dead.” Aware of the diffic
ulty of the Second Step, the team hauled a ladder up to the crux and tied it to pitons they pounded in place. All subsequent ascents of the north ridge have used the ladder and/or the myriad fixed ropes now in place on the Step.

  Mallory and Irvine, of course, had had no ladder. So if I could free-climb the Second Step and judge its difficulty, that would tell us a lot about whether Mallory and Irvine could have pulled it off in 1924, in hobnailed boots and tweed jackets, holding a thin cotton rope in an anchorless gentleman’s belay.

  We were just getting organized to head back up the mountain when something happened that put all our plans on hold. That spring, among the several expeditions on the north side of Everest, we’d been the first to get up high, to fix ropes and pitch Camps IV and V. Following right after us was the strong Ukrainian team, who, despite the language barrier, had become our friends.

  They’d decided early on that May 8 was to be their summit day. Unfortunately, May 8 turned out to be the worst day of our forty so far on the mountain. Even down at the Rongbuk Monastery, it was snowing on us. I could see that the weather wasn’t just the usual afternoon buildup of clouds. There were squalls and flurries developing into a major storm.

  We decided to head back up to Base Camp. The weather got worse and worse. By 9:00 P.M., we knew the Ukrainians were in serious trouble. Instead of climbing the mountain ourselves, we were going to have to go out and try to rescue them.

  4 Mallory of Everest

  DR

  THE 1921 RECONNAISSANCE OF EVEREST, pursued through the monsoon summer and into the autumn season, was in many respects a colossal mess. The party’s talents were wildly uneven, with several over-the-hill, out-of-shape veterans in leadership positions. Entrusted with choosing a team, the Everest Committee—a national board of exploratory experts formed for the express purpose of claiming the “Third Pole” for the Empire—valued years of hill-walking and Himalayan rambling over technical mountaineering skills.