The Lost Explorer (6 page)

One day George went out and perched atop a rough rock, meaning to stay until the incoming tide had surrounded it; he felt quite confident that the tide would turn before the waves touched his feet. On hearing what George was up to, the family hastened to the shore; they could see him very easily, clad in the bright blazer of his first preparatory school. The high spring tide had already cut him off and would soon cover the rock. Grandmother Jebb begged someone to bring the boy in, and with considerable difficulty a young bystander did so. George himself remained quite confident and calm.

Obviously, such a penchant for self-testing was useful in developing the daring apprentice climber George became at eighteen. Some years later, after Mallory had led a very experienced Austrian mountaineer up a difficult route in Wales, the visitor marveled at Mallory’s “mastery of the hardest pitches,” but inveighed, “That young man will not be alive for long.”

The other characteristic was a congenital absentmindedness. There is a famous route on Lliwedd, the great peak in Wales,
of which legend has it Mallory made the first ascent, solo at dusk, to recover a pipe he had left on a high ledge that he had reached earlier in the day by a more conventional but less direct itinerary. Even in 1922, on Everest, the expedition leader, General Charles Bruce, in a confidential summary, described Mallory as “a great dear but forgets his boots on all occasions.” According to mountain historian Audrey Salkeld, “Forgetting to tie on [to the climbing rope] was a clear demonstration of Mallory’s chronic absent-mindedness, a fault he never managed to overcome.” On top of his forgetfulness, Mallory had a mechanical ineptitude so extreme he had trouble making his camp stove work.

From adolescence on, Mallory was possessed of an extraordinary beauty. Irving, his first mountain mentor, remembered him at eighteen as “extremely good-looking, with a gentleness about the features, and a smoothness of skin that might suggest effeminacy to a stranger; it never did to a friend.” The photos capture Mallory’s handsomeness, but no photo could convey the charm and magnetism that made both men and women fall in love with him, often at first sight.

In adulthood, Mallory stood five feet eleven and weighed 159 pounds. His “strikingly beautiful” face was likened by Irving to that of “a Botticelli Madonna.” At Cambridge, his tutor, Arthur Benson, twenty-five years Mallory’s elder, was hopelessly smitten with the student. In a diary published posthumously, Benson recorded his feelings after a walk with Mallory: “Why should I pretend that I do not love this young friend, and take deep pleasure in his company[?]” Earlier, he had written, “It is a pleasure to me to see him move, or do anything.”

At Cambridge, Mallory entered his social element. One of his first climbing companions, Cottie Sanders—better known by her novelist nom de plume, Ann Bridge—testified to the intensity of friendship that Mallory and some of his classmates practiced:

They held personal relationships as so important that they held only a few other things as being of any importance whatever…. They enjoyed each other furiously; delightedly, they examined and explored every means of knowing people better and liking them more…. They brought their whole intellectual energy to bear on their
relationships; they wanted to know not only that they loved people but how and why they loved them.

The climate of Cambridge (and of Oxford) in the first decade of our century was a far cry from what we think of as stuffy and Victorian. The whole university was suffused in an atmosphere of idealized love among men—even between men two or three decades apart in age—that owed much to Plato’s
Symposium
. There was a freedom within this ideal that few universities in the 1990s would tolerate. Arthur Benson could go for a long walk and picnic with his student, even bathing in the nude, without raising an administrative eyebrow.

To call this climate homosexual is to oversimplify it. Much of Mallory’s charisma derived from the fact that he bore the adulation and platonic love of his admirers with a kind of unaffected innocence. As Benson wrote after Mallory’s death:

This was, I think, the essence of his wonderful charm, that he was so unconscious of his great personal beauty, his gifts, and his achievements, while his sympathy with those with whom he came in contact, their tastes, their preferences, their opinions, was deep and genuine.

At Cambridge, though mountaineering was his abiding passion, Mallory threw himself into theater, music, and painting (he became a fervent partisan of the Postimpressionists); he even took, according to his first biographer, David Pye, who was a schoolmate, “to dressing rather peculiarly in black flannel shirts and coloured ties; and grew his hair long.”

Pye was also struck by Mallory’s contentiousness: “A most persistent and even derisive arguer, he was apt to express himself disdainfully and contemptuously, and to shift his ground, but more because he had not got the issue clear in his mind than from mental agility.”

Mallory’s impatience, which would become famous, went hand in hand with his apparent recklessness and his verve. According to Pye, “In conversation he was not always easy to follow; he talked so rapidly, and so many words got their wings clipped in the process, as to make him at times almost unintelligible.”

At Cambridge, and later in many a Welsh lake, Mallory indulged in a passion for nude bathing. One hot evening, out rowing with schoolmates on the Cam, he stripped down and dived in. When he refused to return to the boat, his friends, fearful of missing the 10:00
P.M.
curfew, rowed off and left him. Stark naked, Mallory slunk back to Magdalene College, hoping to climb in an open window, only to be apprehended by a dubious policeman.

Through fellow students James Strachey and Geoffrey Keynes, Mallory drifted within the orbit of that brilliant collection of eccentric bohemian artists and writers known as Bloomsbury. On first beholding this “Greek god,” the more unabashed flouters of convention within that circle could hardly contain their rapture. Wrote Lytton Strachey (James’s older brother), the mordant biographer of Queen Victoria and other eminent Victorians, to Clive and Vanessa Bell, after his first meeting with Mallory:

Mon dieu!—George Mallory!—When that’s been written, what more need be said? My hand trembles, my heart palpitates, my whole being swoons at the words—oh heavens! heavens! … [H]e’s six foot high, with the body of an athlete by Praxiteles, and a face—oh incredible—the mystery of Botticelli, the refinement and delicacy of a Chinese print, the youth and piquancy of an unimaginable English boy.

Strachey raved on, in this manner, about spending “hours every day lost in a trance of adoration, innocence, and bliss” after meeting Mallory; stunned by the vision of such youthful beauty, he could, he claimed, “curl up within its shadow, and sleep.” Perhaps to mitigate his crush, he added, “For the rest, he’s going to be a schoolmaster, and his intelligence is not remarkable. What’s the need?”

Strachey’s friend the openly homosexual painter Duncan Grant several times persuaded Mallory to pose for him in the nude, and Grant later told Strachey that he would have paid the young man £100 a year to have him as his “mistress.” Grant and Strachey regularly compared notes about their young idol.
Strachey insisted that “I’m not in love with him,” yet in the next breath gushed,

But, oh heavens! his body!—the supreme beauty of the face has I’m afraid gone—that wonderful bloom—but it’s still intensely attractive, with the eyes, and the colour, and the charming expression, and the strange divine ears, so large and lascivious—oh!!

Just as he sneered at Mallory’s interest in schoolteaching, the bookish, ungainly Strachey had no use for what he called “imbecile mountains.” After an uncharacteristic jaunt among the Black Cuillins on the Isle of Skye—prime training ground for several generations of British climbers—Strachey dismissed the mountains in a withering phrase delivered emphatically to a climbing friend: “I think them …
sim
ply … ab
surd
.”

There is little evidence that Mallory was bisexual; late in life, Duncan Grant answered Everest historian Walt Unsworth’s blunt inquiry about the matter, “No, certainly he was not.” Yet James Strachey, Mallory’s Cambridge classmate, testified in the affirmative. In any case, Mallory was so comfortable in the Cambridge-Bloomsbury milieu of platonized love and the cult of beauty that, years later, from the front in World War I, without a hint of embarrassment, he could write his wife, Ruth: “I had quite a thrill in the trenches yesterday on seeing a really beautiful face…. He had beautiful visionary eyes which looked at me thoughtfully before he answered my remarks.”

During seasons in Wales and summers in the Alps, Mallory perfected his mountain craft. In his prime, his technique seems to have been as striking as his beauty, for colleague after colleague marveled at it. Ann Bridge remembered:

He was never a showy climber; he did not go in for the minute precisions of style at all. On the contrary, he seemed to move on rocks with a sort of large, casual ease which was very deceptive when one came to try and follow him. When he was confronted with a pitch which taxed his powers, he would fling himself at it with a sort of angry energy, appearing to worry it as a terrier worries a rat, till he had mastered it.

Fear, added Bridge, was “something he had no experience of whatever.”

Geoffrey Winthrop Young, the finest British climber of the generation before Mallory’s, who would become the true mentor of his life, wrote, “He swung up rock with a long thigh, a lifted knee, and a ripple of irresistible movement.” Robert Graves, later to become the great novelist, poet, and scholar, was taken climbing by Mallory as a schoolboy.
In Good-bye to All That
, Graves recalled that his tutor “used to go drunk with excitement at the end of his climbs.” A fellow tutee testified, “He was quite the finest rock-climber I have ever seen, with a wonderful sense of balance.”

On forays in the Alps, Mallory seemed completely at home on mountains that had severely intimidated many a British cragsman. Harry Tyndale captured Mallory’s aplomb leading a steep ice pitch:

He cut a superb staircase, with inimitable ease and grace and a perfect economy of effort. In watching George at work one was conscious not so much of physical strength as of suppleness and balance; so rhythmical and harmonious was his progress in any steep place, above all on slabs, that his movements appeared almost serpentine in their smoothness.

“Grace” and “balance”—those were the words repeated over and over by Mallory’s companions to conjure up his alpine skills. “His movement in climbing was entirely his own,” wrote Geoffrey Winthrop Young—himself well known for grace and balance.

It contradicted all theory. He would set his foot high against any angle of smooth surface, fold his shoulder to his knee, and flow upward and upright again on an impetuous curve….[T]he look, and indeed the result, were always the same—a continuous undulating movement so rapid and so powerful that one felt the rock either must yield, or disintegrate.

Mallory, Young added, “could make no movement that was not in itself beautiful. Inevitably he was a mountaineer, since climbing is the supreme opportunity for perfect motion.”

Climbing with Young along the untrodden southeast ridge of the Nesthorn in the Alps in 1909, Mallory suffered the one serious fall of his alpine apprenticeship. Late in the afternoon, the men stood at the base of a vertical pillar, the last obstacle below the summit. Mallory took the lead and traversed out of sight around the corner. For his belay, Young simply stood on the ridge and laid the rope across a small “nick” in the corner of a slab. Unable to solve the pillar, Mallory appeared in sight, traversing back toward his partner, then, at the last minute, headed straight up toward an overhanging bulge, using his axe, as was the practice of the day, to hook small holds.

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.