The Beckoning Silence (18 page)

When Conrad Anker found George Mallory’s body frozen into the scree at 27,000 feet on Everest’s north face on 1 May 1999 it was an extraordinary discovery. The search expedition had hoped to solve the mystery of Mallory and Irvine. Had they reached the summit? Was there photographic proof frozen within the Kodak vestpocket camera that Mallory or Irvine had been carrying? It must have been an intensely moving moment to be sitting there beside the body of one of the most famous mountaineers in history, on the verge of solving one of the great mysteries of mountaineering.

A careful and respectful search of the body was all that was required. Unfortunately, there was no camera. From the position of the body, the injuries revealed and the snapped rope at Mallory’s waist it was now pretty safe to conclude that the two men didn’t reach the summit but died in a fall while retreating in the dark. That was all we needed to know. We didn’t need the photographs or the tasteless descriptions of what the birds had done to his body. I wondered if the searchers had ever stopped to think for a moment about what they were actually doing as they went through his belongings and then buried the body under a cairn of rocks and read a prayer over the fresh grave.

Conrad Anker had lost close friends in the mountains, as we all have. Some could fairly be regarded as the finest climbers of their generation, modern Mallorys in effect. I imagine Conrad Anker would be appalled if, in years to come, the frozen, battered bodies of his friends were found and picked over, photographed, and had their possessions removed.

In 1997 Paul Nunn was part of a British expedition to the west face of Latok II in the Karakoram. One of their team, Don Morrison, was killed falling un-roped into a crevasse. Some ten years later Paul Nunn returned to the region on another expedition to Latok. At the edge of the glacier expedition members were surprised to find the remains of their friend, Don Morrison, extruded from the glacier. They were confident that the shattered body parts were those of their friend because they had managed to identify his harness. Carefully collecting as much as they could, they chose a site safe from further movements of the glacier and buried him with a sense of sadness at renewed memories and pleasure that they had been able to do this last dignified service for their friend. They didn’t take photographs of him.

An Ecuadorian friend of mine lost his brother in an avalanche on Antisana. He knew the glacier was fast-moving and when his estimated time elapsed he returned repeatedly and searched the glacier edge for several years until at last he found his brother. They collected the pitiful remains and buried them in a poignant, dignified service. I came across this man’s carefully tended grave site on the high open paramo near the edge of the glacier. White stones formed a star shape around the grave, wild plants flowered beautifully around the simple headstone, and looming into the sky above the grave were the striking ice-laced slopes of Antisana. It was a moment for quiet reflection and respect; a time for a private admonishment that it could so very easily have been me.

I glanced at the book on my desk. There was a photograph on the back cover of Mallory in army uniform, no doubt on leave from the trenches of the Western Front. He had a thin pencil moustache contrasting oddly with his smooth, child-like skin. His eyes stared directly from the photograph, clear, bright, questing. In the background his wife, Ruth, looked out from the page with the same startlingly open gaze as her beloved husband.

I looked at the photograph and all I could see was that awful image of his body, with the alabaster white back, and the broken leg and hob-nail boot. I thought of what the goraks, the Nepalese ravens, had done to him and wished the expedition had never published the cursed photograph. It hadn’t just been offensive and tasteless. It had ruined a memory.

I looked again at the photograph of Mallory’s face staring out from the past. Thom Pollard and Andy Politz had come back for a second look armed with a metal detector to see what artefacts they had missed. They set to digging him out of the grave of stones that had been placed over his body, disregarding the prayers that had already been uttered in reverential farewell. A scan with the metal detector revealed a broken wrist watch in his trouser pocket. They then pulled free a loose section of the weathered rope tied around his waist, snapping it with ease. They promptly removed the hob-nailed boot from Mallory’s broken right leg, thus adding three more artefacts from the body that they could claim would be of significant research value. No doubt these will be a great help in solving the mystery of whether the two men actually reached the summit.

They now wanted to see his face. They managed to overcome whatever restraint the initial searchers experienced and started chipping away at the ice locking Mallory’s head into the stones of the mountain. Eventually they prised his face free from the hard grasp of the ice and they could turn him over and look directly at it. It was ‘in perfect condition … His eyes were closed. I could still see whiskers on his chin.’ They found a head wound sustained in his violent fall that may or may not have caused his death. At least it presented them with an excuse for so heartlessly prising him from the ice. They then buried him a second time so that he wouldn’t be disturbed and one of them read Psalm 103. I wonder whether that was for the benefit of Mallory’s soul or theirs?

Whether the immense potential financial value of these pathetic remains ever occurred to them I do not know. Maybe it was done purely in the interests of historic research. Otherwise they might as well have stripped him naked. The aim of the expedition was to find either Mallory or Irvine and solve the mystery of whether either or both of them had reached the summit or not. In my opinion they plundered a corpse.

When I interviewed Sir Edmund Hillary in front of a thousand-strong audience at the Hay Literary Festival in 1999 the question of Mallory inevitably arose. Somewhat wearily, since he must have been asked it countless times, Hillary explained his view of recent events surrounding the discovery of Mallory’s body. It had not solved anything, he said, and without photographic proof, it never would.

‘I may say,’ he added, ‘that I was absolutely disgusted when in all the media they had these photographs of Mallory lying there on the rocks. To me Mallory had been an heroic figure. He was the man who had inspired my interest in Mount Everest … and for this heroic figure to have all these terrible photographs of him there on the rock, bare back, broken-legged … I thought was appalling.’ The applause was thunderous, sustained and heartfelt.

Photographs, like paintings, of people from the past have an ethereal connective effect on the viewer. I looked again at the portrait of Mallory staring out from the back cover of the book. He was a handsome man in the prime of his life and his eyes seemed to fix on mine, leading me on through this window into his life.

In his biography of George Mallory David Robertson described him as an ‘ever-young and singularly lovable’ man. He is ‘Mallory of Everest’ now, but we should never forget that he was also a father, a husband, a loyal friend, a man of honour and elegance. I would far rather think of him as Wilfrid Noyce did on the successful 1953 Everest expedition. Looking up at where Mallory had been the first person to discover the Western Cwm route in July 1921, Noyce wrote that ‘… the Western Cwm conjured up for us the figure of Mallory, peering from the col between Lingtrem and Pumori’ – an heroic figure from the past looking down in ghostly approval of that then successful expedition.

His grief-stricken friends
‘…
could hardly bring themselves to understand that George would not again be seen moving with ineffable grace on the mountains, or heard speaking in his unforgettable voice about beautiful things and right actions’. The great alpinist Geoffrey Winthrop Young described Mallory as
‘
the magical and adventurous spirit of youth personified … Neither time nor his own disregard could age or alter the impression which the presence of his flame-like vitality produced. There are natures whose best expression is movement. Mallory could make no movement that was not in itself beautiful. Inevitably he was a mountaineer, since climbing is the supreme opportunity for perfect motion
…’
Today some fellow climbers have no such considerations: to some he is simply a commodity.

The discovery of his body generated a frisson of excitement – and not only within the mountaineering world. The mystery of what happened to Mallory and Irvine has gripped the imagination of people all over the world. What we have learned from these recent findings has solved little of the mystery. Yet there is an ethical dilemma thrown up by how the discoverers have behaved.

The two climbers may have reached the summit 29 years before Hillary and Tenzing but unless a camera is found and photographs produced we will never know. Does it matter? They died. They failed. Most mountaineers would say that one cannot claim a successful ascent if one has died on the descent. Sir Edmund Hillary said as much, as have Mallory’s son and grandson. Clare Millikan, Mallory’s daughter, has said that she has changed her mind now that her father’s body has been discovered and believes he did reach the summit. She adds, however, ‘I don’t think it really counts unless you come back alive.’ From the outset there was never any real risk that Hillary’s and Tenzing’s success in 1953 was going to be usurped by revealed history.

We now know something of how Mallory and Irvine died. They were not separated. The theory that Mallory, the more experienced climber, may have gone on alone on a solo summit bid has been disabused. They probably fell whilst descending. Possibly the rope snapped and Irvine fell further down the mountain. It would appear that after a long fall Mallory survived, although with a double fracture of his leg. It seems from his body position that he may have attempted to crawl to a place of shelter and died in the process. It is enough for us to imagine what happened, and for a mountaineer the image is all too grim.

This is all we have learned. Finding Irvine’s body may or may not resolve the summit issue but no more.

Why did the expedition members feel that they had to publish photographs of the frozen flesh of Mallory’s corpse. We do not need to see the photographs to accept that Mallory has been found. We can take their word on the matter and the proof can remain in archives in case it is ever questioned.

In his book
The Lost Explorer
Conrad Anker gave a graphically tasteless description of how Mallory’s body ‘… had been hollowed out’, by the goraks, ‘almost like a pumpkin’. I wondered how this description furthered our knowledge of Mallory and Irvine’s attempt on the summit. He went on to describe how he cut a one and a half inch square of skin from Mallory’s right forearm. Apparently it was not easy. Using the serrated blade of a utility knife he described cutting into Malory’s flesh as ‘like cutting saddle leather, cured and hard’. Did we really need that?

Why on earth did they still feel it necessary to take a flesh sample from his forearm for DNA testing? If you find a corpse dressed in hob-nail boots and tweeds high on the slopes of Everest with G. Mallory tags stitched into his shirt collars and a letter from his wife in his breast pocket, who on earth do you think you might have found?

Some of the relatives may have approved DNA samples being taken but surely only in the event of the remains being unidentifiable? Both his son and grandson have said that they are appalled at the publication of the photographs. Julia Irvine, Andrew Irvine’s niece, has said that she hopes her Uncle ‘Sandy’ is never found for fear that he will, like Mallory, suffer the same fate. She was quoted in the
Sunday Times
saying, ‘Surely these two incredibly brave men deserve to be remembered for achieving so much with so little rather than as exhibits in a freak show?’

How long must you be dead before your body becomes no more than an archaeological relic? Some would say forever. Does the degree of fame attributed to you decide how much respect and dignity is shown to your remains?

If so, and if it were practicable, would it be acceptable, today, to go and find the frozen bodies of Captain Scott, Wilson and Bowers? Would the interest generated be excuse enough to photograph their remains, take as many artefacts thought suitable for a display, film the bodies freely for a full-blown documentary about their re-discovery, do whatever it takes to make it a sellable event? Of course not, but if this were done, despite the furore, everyone would look at the photographs and gawp at the film. We are helplessly curious. Responsibility for feeding that curiosity lies primarily with the photographers and secondly with the press and media.

On Everest there is already a grisly record of the many dead left unburied on the slopes of the mountain. As recently as 1996 climbers were routinely walking past the frozen and tattered remains of one of their own in the Western Cwm. Sadly. photographs in Anatoli Boukreev’s book
The Climb
show the remains to be no more than twenty yards from where hundreds of climbers trudged up the Cwm towards Camp III at the foot of the Lhotse face. For reasons I find quite inexplicable no one thought it might be common human decency to go over and bury the unfortunate souls in a nearby crevasse. The truth is they simply did not care enough. They had paid a lot of money to be guided up Everest and this wasn’t part of what they had paid for.

In 1996 during their summit bid two Japanese climbers passed three Indian climbers in varying stages of collapse high on the mountain. They made no effort to offer them succour, food, water, oxygen or simply a consoling hand. They avoided eye contact and went on to their eventual triumph on the summit. They passed the still-living Indians on their way down to the high camp. There was nothing that they could have done to rescue the Indians but they could have displayed a shred of compassion. On reaching base camp Eisuke Shiqekawa announced ‘… above 8000 metres is not a place where people can afford morality.’ If that were true, no-one should go there.

If climbers on Everest really ‘cannot afford morality’, and ethical behaviour becomes too expensive, then has the sport been prostituted? When did the means ever justify the end in mountaineering? We know beyond doubt that Shipton, Tilman or Whymper would never have behaved in this manner towards their fellow mountaineers.