The Lost Explorer

by Anker, Conrad

  In my scenario, as Mallory fell, the rope tangled around him. The initial impact came on his right side. It’s significant too that it was his right leg that was so badly broken. It was his right ankle that he’d broken in 1909, and on Everest in 1924, it was his right leg, from the ankle up to the hip, that was still giving him trouble. No doubt the initial break had permanently weakened the leg.

  I’m also quite sure that Mallory didn’t fall from all the way up on the northeast ridge—say from where the ice axe was found in 1933. The two modern bodies I found just before I discovered Mallory—the Greeter, and the guy in the faded blue suit—were so much more broken up, their limbs sprawled every which way, their heads downhill. Those two had fallen from the ridge, I’d venture. But Mallory’s body wasn’t so contorted, and his head was uphill. I’d guess he fell only some 300 to 400 vertical feet, which would mean he came off near the bottom of the Yellow Band. Even in the dark, he might have been close to pulling off a successful retreat.

  Was he still alive when he came to rest? It’s hard to say. The hole in his forehead that Thom discovered may have been the injury that killed him. But the hands planted in the scree looked like those of a man still trying to self-arrest with his fingers. I think he was fighting to the very end.

  The position of his legs suggests he set them that way to relieve the pain. If so, his synapses were still firing, and before he lapsed into unconsciousness he may have thought for a moment that he and Irvine could have made it to camp safely. Quickly and silently shock set in, as Mallory became one with the Mother Goddess of the Snows.

  MY BELIFE that Mallory could not have reached the summit does nothing to diminish my fascination with the man.

  Last spring, I embarked on our expedition with summitting Everest as my primary goal. I felt that a grand opportunity had presented itself, even though many of my climbing peers and I were doubtful that we’d find anything. A high school friend had chuckled, “Sounds like you’ve landed a big fish.” A chance to go to Everest, he meant, with no costs attached. A bit defensively, I answered, “You never know what you might find, especially in a static environment like the high Himalaya.”

  All my feelings changed on May 1. As I discovered the body of George Mallory, I realized we had reopened a chapter in our climbing heritage. Sitting next to Mallory gave me a deep appreciation for what he’d done and stood for.

  Alone with Sandy Irvine, after the sun had set, on the immense north face of Everest, the nearest other teammate 4,000 feet below with no possible knowledge where the two men were, or that they needed help—that in itself was a remarkable place to have arrived. The whole journey had been an epic voyage: by steamer from Liverpool to Bombay, overland by train to Darjeeling, across the Himalayan crest on pony-back to the little-known regions of Tibet, over remote passes into unexplored valleys. Thus the climbers ventured to crack the puzzle of what had come to be called the Third Pole. With them they hauled vast stores of equipment—cutting-edge gear for the day, utterly rudimentary by our standards.

  The mystery of altitude itself had scarcely been probed. To know, as we do today, that Everest has been climbed solo and without bottled oxygen makes the challenge less intimidating. Even with the knowledge Mallory had gained about altitude in 1921 and ’22, it remained an unsolved question whether it was humanly possible to climb to 29,000 feet and survive. Each step the climbers took above Camp VI in 1924 was a step into the terra incognita of the mind.

  Sitting beside Mallory on May 1, I looked east toward the descent route he and Irvine would have taken had they summitted that June 8. I imagined Mallory’s awareness even in extremis: no radio to communicate with others, no chain of fixed ropes to guide him down the mountain, no teams of rested climbers ready to enact a rescue, no way of telling the world what really happened.

  I can only guess what Mallory’s and Irvine’s last moments were like, but what I do know is how their achievement has affected our climbing legacy. The boldness of their last climb formed a stepping-stone to the future. The debate over oxygen and its ultimate acceptance made it possible for their successors—including Hillary and Tenzing—to visit high places with a reasonable safety margin.

  Sometimes late at night I wonder whether by discovering Mallory I’ve aided in the destruction of a mystery. The possibility haunts me. Has my find somehow taken some of the enigmatic glory away from the 1924 expedition?

  Others may think so, yet for me, the discovery only increases my admiration for these pioneer climbers, whose story—which will never be told in its entirety—has always lain wrapped in the secrets of Chomolungma, Mother Goddess of the Snows. I feel privileged to have participated in casting new light onto this mystery. Ultimately, Mallory and Irvine’s greatest achievement was an inspirational one, for even in failure, their magnificent attempt showed us what the human spirit is capable of.

  DR

  AS THE SURVIVING MEMBERS of the 1924 expedition retreated from the mountain, they engaged in long conversations about what must have happened to their vanished friends. Even before they had left Base Camp, Teddy Norton convened a conference to discuss the matter. Every member but Odell concurred in thinking that the most likely course of events had been what indeed we now know happened: “a simple mountaineering accident—a slip and sudden death.” Odell adamantly held out for the view that the two men had delayed their return until it was too late, then had “wandered about in the darkness looking for [Camp VI] until they finally succumbed to exhaustion and exposure.”

  Odell simply could not believe that Mallory would have fallen. As he wrote in The Fight for Everest, “It is difficult for any who knew the skill and experience of George Mallory on all kinds and conditions of mountain ground to believe that he fell, and where the difficulties to him would be so insignificant.” As for Irvine, he was “a natural adept”; in Spitsbergen, he had proven “able to move safely and easily on rock and ice.”

  Their teammates puzzled incessantly over why they had seen no beam from a flashlight the night of June 8, but not until 1933 would they learn that Mallory had left his flashlight in the tent at Camp VI. Sir Francis Younghusband, in The Epic of Mount Everest, went so far as to surmise that, in a hopeless predicament, Mallory and Irvine might have refused to shine their flashlight out of a sense of “chivalry,” lest they draw their teammates into unnecessary danger trying to rescue them.

  Norton claimed that he and Mallory had agreed on a turn-around deadline of 4:00 P.M. Odell found it hard to reconcile his theory of benightment with this evidence of Mallory’s prudence, but concluded that his friend’s “craving for victory” had become an obsession that “may have been too strong for him.” John Noel likewise speculated, in his memoir, The Story ofEverest:

  You can imagine how Mallory’s energy of nerve, brain and muscle must have risen to the supreme effort of his life…. The goal was in their grasp. Should they turn back and lose it? … Might they not indeed throw every other thought to the wind to win such a prize?

  On a moraine heap near Base Camp, Somervell and several porters built a ten-foot-high cairn memorializing the dead of all three Everest expeditions, with their names carved into smooth slabs. From Base, Norton sent a runner off with a coded message to be cabled to London: “MALLORY IRVINE NOVE REMAINDER ALCEDO.”

  This message, which has never been publicly explicated, appears to have used code words linked to possible events—just like the 1999 team’s “gorak” for “camera” and “boulder” for “body.” In 1924, the code words may have had Latin associations. “Nove” means “new” or “fresh”; in the superlative, “novissime” means “in the last place.” “Alcedo” refers to the kingfisher and, more specifically, to “the fourteen days in winter, when the kingfisher lays its eggs and the sea is calm.”

  On the original telegram, received in London on June 19, someone has penciled “killed in last engagement” next to “NOVE,” and “arrived base all in good order” next to “ALCEDO.”

  According to biographer D
avid Robertson, “Ruth received the news in Cambridge from a representative of the press. She went out for a long walk with old friends.”

  At eighty-three, Clare Millikan remembers precisely how she learned of her father’s death when she was eight. “It was getting-up time,” she says. “Mother took us into her bedroom. We all lay in bed together, with her arms around us. Then she told us. There was nothing confusing about it. He wasn’t ‘missing’—he was quite definitely dead. He wasn’t coming back.”

  The whole country went into mourning. Fifty-nine years earlier, in the most famous mountaineering accident before Mallory and Irvine’s, when four men, including the aristocrat Lord Francis Douglas, lost their lives in a long fall coming down from the first ascent of the Matterhorn, Queen Victoria had condemned the pastime. But in the interim, England had turned its lost explorers Robert Falcon Scott and his four companions, who had died in 1912 on their return from the South Pole, into martyr-heroes. Now King George V sent his deepest sympathies to the families of Mallory and Irvine. Endorsing the nation’s pride in its brave dead, the Morning Post editorialized, “The spirit which animated the attacks on Everest is the same as that which prompted arctic and other expeditions, and in earlier times led to the formation of the Empire itself.”

  On October 17, a memorial service for the two men was held in St. Paul’s Cathedral. That evening, at a joint meeting of the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society, Norton said of Mallory, “A fire burnt in him…. He was absolutely determined to conquer the mountain…. His death leaves us poorer by a loyal friend, a great mountaineer, and a gallant gentleman.” Mallory’s mentor, Geoffrey Winthrop Young, spoke in his obituary of the man’s “burning spirit of chivalrous, youthful adventure, flaming at the close.” In Young’s recollection, Mallory had been “‘Sir Galahad’ always to his early friends.” In the expedition book, Geoffrey Bruce called him “the Bayard of the Mountains—‘sans peur et sans reproche’ [fearless and beyond reproach].” Wrote Howard Somervell in After Everest:

  Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori; and surely death in battle against a mountain is a finer and nobler thing than death whilst attempting to kill someone else. The loss of these splendid men is part of the price that has been paid to keep alive the spirit of adventure. Without this spirit life would be a poor thing, and progress impossible.

  Hand in hand with this apotheosis of Mallory and Irvine came the sentiment that Everest was a fitting place to die, “the finest cenotaph in the world,” in Somervell’s phrase. Sir Francis Younghusband made the observation, in The Epic of MountEverest, that “there in the arms of Mount Everest they lie for ever—lie 10,000 feet above where any man has lain in death before.” Younghusband’s altitude was exaggerated—the Sherpas killed below the North Col in 1922 lay at that moment entombed in ice only 4,000 feet below Mallory’s body—but the thought was at once a startling and an enthralling one.

  From the moment the news broke in England, the great question of whether Mallory and Irvine had reached the summit preoccupied all who took notice of the tragedy. Noel Odell believed that his friends had climbed Everest: as he wrote in the London Times on July 10, “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.” General Charles Bruce agreed, as did Tom Longstaff and Geoffrey Winthrop Young. Wrote the latter, “After nearly 20 years’ knowledge of Mallory as a mountaineer, I can say … that 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.”

  These men, of course, were swayed by their friendship with Mallory and admiration of his drive. The members of the 1933 expedition—perhaps for the opposite reason, for they had not ventured to Tibet to make the second ascent of Everest—were convinced to a man that Mallory and Irvine had not reached the top.

  Beneath the public outpouring of admiration and sorrow, Mallory’s closest friends sorely missed him. Trying to strike a bluff tone, Robert Graves wrote Ruth: “My only consolation is that he once told me on Snowdon that he’d hoped to die like that, climbing…. So like George to choose the highest and most dangerous mountain in the world! I did love him.”

  A month after she had learned the news, still beside herself with grief, Ruth wrote to Geoffrey Winthrop Young,

  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. I think I have got the pain separate. There is so much of it, and it will go on so long, that I must do that….

  Oh Geoffrey, if only it hadn’t happened! It so easily might not have.

  Sometime in the first weeks after losing her father, Clare Millikan had a vivid dream. “When I was young,” she recalls, “during the war, he’d always come and gone a lot from the front in France. I would look over an embankment, see his train, see him coming toward us.

  “In my dream, I looked over the embankment, saw the train, saw him get out and walk toward us. It was a very painful awakening.”

  Seventy-five years after his fatal fall, the legend of George Leigh Mallory shows no signs of dimming. Whether or not he reached the summit, there is no denying that the man was a genius of ascent, and that Everest brought out the finest in him. The friends who knew him best kept coming back to that talismanic fact. For Geoffrey Winthrop Young, grieving the loss of his protégé, the summit must have been reached, in the final analysis, simply “because Mallory was Mallory.” And a quarter-century after his disappearance, Young remembered a blithe route the pair had climbed in Wales: “The laughing hours chased each other unnoticed…. On a day like this, and in movement, Mallory was wholly in harmony within himself, and with the world, and nothing could give him pause.”

  Acknowledgments

  DR

  THE WORK of previous scholars on Mallory and Everest has been invaluable to us in researching The Lost Explorer. In particular, Audrey Salkeld and Tom Holzel’s First on Everest: The Mystery of Mallory & Irvine offers a deft synthesis of character and climbing deeds; David Pye’s George Leigh Mallory: A Memoir benefits from Pye’s friendship with his subject; David Robertson’s definitive biography, George Mallory, is rich in quotations from the private letters; Herbert Carr’s The Irvine Diaries affords a closer look at Mallory’s partner, so often relegated to the shadows; and Walt Unsworth’s comprehensive Everest is a gold mine of information for all the expeditions to the mountain between 1921 and 1988. The three massive official expedition books from the 1920s—Mount Everest: The Reconnaissance, 1921; The Assault on Mount Everest, 1922; and The Fight for Everest—are irreplaceable. The library of the American Alpine Club in Golden, Colorado, lent me these classic tomes, and served as a welcome repository for other scholarly materials I would have been hard put to find elsewhere.

  To the members of the 1999 Mallory & Irvine Research Expedition, as well as to Liesl Clark of PBS/NOVA and Peter Potterfield of MountainZone, we owe a special debt for sharing their knowledge and their experiences on the mountain last spring. Kathmandu mountaineering historian Elizabeth Hawley filled in details no one else seemed to have at hand.

  I feel a lasting gratitude to my editor and longtime friend John Rasmus, who assigned me a story about finding Mallory for National Geographic Adventure, which led indirectly to this book. Rasmus’s colleagues at the magazine were a great help throughout. Jon Krakauer read each chapter in draft and gave us superb advice and constant encouragement. David Breashears and Galen Rowell lent their support and expertise, based on their own vast experience on Everest. Agent John Ware shepherded the project from start to finish with consummate skill. And my editor at Simon & Schuster, Bob Bender—my loyal cicerone through four books now—made The Lost Explorer happen, not without the perspicacious aid of his assistant, Johanna Li.

  Finally, I feel a warm appreciation for Clare, Rick, and George Millikan, friends and climbing partners since the early 1960s, through whose unique connection to
the hero of this book I first began to know George Mallory.

  CA

  I WOULD LIKE TO THANK my parents for their many years of support for and encouragement of this life I lead; Becky Hall, for her love and understanding; and Alex Lowe, for his continued friendship.

  Index

  Aconcagua, 142

  After Everest (Somervell), 178

  Alaska, 13-14, 97, 98, 99-101

  Alf Wear, 98

  Alpine Club, 83, 178

  Alpine Journal, 50

  Alps, 24, 45, 47-48, 50, 52-53, 77, 80, 83, 86, 109

  altimeter, of Mallory, 36

  altitude records, 24, 40, 71-72, 83, 87, 88, 124-25, 126, 171

  Ama Dablam, 28

  American Alpine Club, 97

  American Alpine Journal, 15, 97, 151

  André, Salomon, 28

  Ang Pasang, 140, 141, 143-44, 147, 148, 158

  Ang Rita, 140

  Angtarkay, 111

  Anker, Conrad, 63, 65, 66, 67

  background of, 96-103

  Buddhism and, 15, 70-71, 102, 103

  endurance limit of, 159

  on fate of Mallory and Irvine, 170-75

  first ascents by, 15, 29, 96-97, 98

  mountaineering ability of, 15, 96, 97, 98-99

  mountaineering writings of, 15, 97

  and plan of book, 16

  previous highest climb of, 31, 96

  as sponsored climber, 96-97, 102

  on whether Mallory and Irvine reached the summit, 163-70

  Anker, Helga, 97

  Anker, Wally, 97

  Annapurna, 40, 80

  Annapurna IV, 31, 167

  Antarctica, 30, 31, 57, 67, 98, 146, 157, 177

  ascenders, 141, 144, 148