The Lost Explorer (26 page)

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 David 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.”

DR

T
HE 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.

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

Assault on Mount Everest, 1922, The
, 65, 84-85, 86-87, 88, 90

Australia, 62, 162

avalanches, 89-90

bacteria, 155

“ball of knowledge,” 99

balloon expedition, to North Pole, 28

Bass, Dick, 99

Bass, John, 99

BBC, 29, 60, 70

Bear, The
(Faulkner), 20

Beetham, Bentley, 71, 109, 111, 118

Belgrade, 66

Bell, Clive and Vanessa, 44

Benson, Arthur, 42, 43

Berkeley, Calif., 13

Bhotias, 110

Big Oak Flat, Calif., 97

“Big Three” Patagonian towers, 98

Birkenhead, 48-49, 112

Black Cuillins, 45

Blanc, Mont, 41, 50, 53, 80

blebs, 172

Bloomsbury, 44, 45, 75, 92

Boardman, Pete, 39

Bonington, Sir Chris, 64, 66

boots:

hobnailed, 19, 72, 139, 164

old vs. modern, 85, 164

whipped off feet in fall, 32
see also
crampons

Boswell the Biographer
(Mallory), 49

Bouddanath, 70, 71, 156

Breashears, David, 27, 63

Brice, Russell, 54, 55, 95, 104-5, 154

Bridge, Ann (Cottie Sanders), 42, 45-46, 48

Bridges, Robert, 112

British Empire, 74

British Museum, 67

Brontë, Emily, 112

Brooke, Rupert, 51-52

Bruce, Charles, 42, 83, 108, 109, 111, 178

Bruce, Geoffrey, 83, 88-89, 109, 114, 117, 118, 119-21, 122, 123, 124, 127, 178

Buddhism, 15, 30, 70-71, 102, 103, 142

Bullock, Guy, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84

Burke, Mick, 39

Cambridge University, 40, 41, 42-44, 45, 51, 69, 91, 92, 112, 114, 163

Canada, 12, 97

“carbo loading,” 142

Carr, Herbert, 112, 113

Carter, H. Adams, 151