The Lost Explorer (7 page)

From such episodes, one might conclude that Mallory was a daredevil, supremely convinced of his own invulnerability, harboring perhaps a self-destructive demon. Yet David Pye, Mallory’s climbing companion as well as his first biographer, insists that his friend was “very careful of unskilled performers, and very down on any clumsiness or carelessness.” Reflecting on a climbing accident that befell a party tackling a route beyond their powers, he said—“in tones of angry grief”—“They had no
business
to be there!”

A month after the Nesthorn accident, Mallory suffered a more trivial fall that was to have far more important consequences. He was out walking with his sisters and friends near his parents’ home in Birkenhead, when he came to a small
sandstone cliff in a disused quarry. As biographer David Robertson puts it, “There was no need whatever to climb it, but George naturally made for it and started up.”

Near the top of the short pitch he was soloing, Mallory ran into a troublesome sequence. One of the friends scrambled around to the top and lowered a rope, which George tried to grab just as he slipped, only to have it slide through his hands. With his feline agility, Mallory tried to spring outward and backward and land on his feet in the grass, but he came down hard with his right foot on a hidden stone.

Mallory assumed he had sprained the ankle, but for months it refused to heal. Writing Young in December, he reported, “Indeed it is still in a poor state and though I can walk well enough for a short distance, it is no good for the mountains.” Mallory blamed only himself: “The whole affair is almost too disgusting to think of, the result chiefly of my obstinacy.”

It was only eight years later, when the ankle caused him so much trouble on the Western Front during the Great War that he had to be invalided home, that Mallory learned he had broken the ankle in the 1909 fall; it had never properly healed. He underwent an operation that seemed to fix the problem, but seven years later, on his last expedition to Everest, he was still plagued by the injury. From Darjeeling in May 1924, full of optimism about the team’s chances, he wrote Ruth: “The only doubts I have are whether the old ankle one way or another will cause me trouble.”

After Cambridge, Mallory hoped to become a writer, and managed to publish a critical work called
Boswell the Biographer
, unread today. In his articles for the climbing journals, he went far beyond the dry recitations of passes gained and ridges traversed that were the norm of the day, striving for a lyrical flight to match the exaltation he felt in the mountains. In an ambitious 1914 essay he titled “The Mountaineer as Artist,” Mallory spun out an elaborate conceit comparing a day in the Alps with a symphony. Here, as in the overearnest pages of many another young mountaineer-writer, a note of preciousness could creep in:

And so throughout the day successive moods induce the symphonic whole—allegro while you break the back of
an expedition and the issue is still in doubt; scherzo, perhaps, as you leap up the final rocks of the arête or cut steps in a last short slope, with the ice-chips dancing and swimming and bubbling and bounding with magic gaiety over the crisp surface in their mad glissade.

Yet as he matured, the loose lyricism of Mallory’s prose acquired a certain backbone, as he learned that he really had something to say. He had a true gift for the aphoristic formula; had he lived longer, Mallory might have become, as did Geoffrey Winthrop Young, one of the century’s finest writers about mountaineering. His most famous passage appears in an account of a difficult route on Mont Blanc, published in 1918 in the
Alpine Journal:
“Have we vanquished an enemy? None but ourselves. Have we gained success? That word means nothing here.”

There is perhaps a rueful irony in the fact that the single phrase for which Mallory will forever be remembered was a spontaneous retort, in the midst of a tiring American lecture tour, to a journalist who asked him why he wanted to climb Everest. “Because it is there,” snapped Mallory, passing on to posterity an apothegm as pithy as any Confucian riddle. Some of Mallory’s closest friends insisted that the response was meant as an off-putting non sequitur, from a man weary in his bones of being asked the same unanswerable question mountaineers have always been scolded with.

In the chapters he contributed to the official 1921 and 1922 Everest books, Mallory writes vividly and well; but so do most of his teammates, so high were the standards of English education of the day. Noel Odell’s and Teddy Norton’s chapters in the 1924 book are the equal of Mallory’s.

In 1910, at age twenty-four, to eke out a living, Mallory took a teaching job at a public school called Charterhouse. He poured himself into the job, on holiday taking students climbing in Wales and the Alps, just as R. L. G. Irving had taken him. Some, such as Robert Graves, remained indebted to him the rest of their days. But Mallory was too disorganized to be a really effective teacher, too creative to be happy in his drudgerous and sedentary post. As Graves put it, “George was wasted at Charterhouse.”

Even so, he must have been a stimulating teacher. David Pye relates a stray remark that hints at the impishly subversive role Mallory played with his Charterhouse charges: “Imagine me to-morrow morning teaching the smallest boys about the fall of man! what the devil is one to say? It was such a wholly admirable business and God behaved so badly; mere petty jealousy!”

Politically, Mallory was a liberal on the far left, despite being a parson’s son. He considered himself a Fabian, and championed such causes as women’s suffrage and Irish home rule, traveling to the country in 1920 to witness for himself the barbarity of the English suppression. One night in Dublin, he was cross-examined in the glare of a flashlight by an official with a revolver in his hand, who apparently suspected him of being a rabid Sinn Feiner.

Starting in the spring of 1916, Mallory served on the French front during World War I, where he suffered his share of close calls—a whizzing bullet that passed between him and a nearby soldier, two friends blown apart by a shell as they ran a few paces behind him. At first, in letters home, he kept up the jaunty pretense that war was like some schoolboy sport: “Personally, I get some fun out of this sort of performance.” “I played the game, on my way to the O.P., of shell-dodging for the first time. Quite an amusing game.”

But the suffering and horror he saw on the front knocked much of that schoolboy preciousness out of George Mallory. There was no jauntiness left in the plain account of his discovery of the bodies of his two friends killed by the shell that exploded just behind him:

I had not gone many paces when I saw that they were both lying face downwards. They seemed to be dead when we got to them…. They were very nice fellows—one of them quite particularly so. He had been with me up in the front line all day and proved the most agreeable of companions.

Mallory was lucky to be sent home, in May 1917, because of his bad ankle. Some of his closest friends were not so fortunate, such as his Cambridge classmate the poet Rupert Brooke,
who died of blood poisoning; or Robert Graves, grievously wounded in the trenches; or Geoffrey Winthrop Young, who lost a leg above the knee, but would go on in his forties to climb at a high standard with an artificial limb.

In 1914, on a jaunt to Venice with friends, Mallory had met and fallen in love with Ruth Turner. She too was beautiful—“Botticellian” was his own word for her—and as he got to know her he formed a true union of souls with this quiet, loyal, well-educated woman. They were married only four months after meeting, just as Mallory had turned twenty-eight. He at once taught his bride to climb, hauling her along on far from trivial routes in Wales. Nor did he coddle or protect her. In the middle of a December gale on Snowdon, George, Ruth, and David Pye faced a “precipitously steep and terrifying” descent. When Ruth balked at plunging off the ridge, George took her by the shoulders and “simply pushed her forcibly over the edge! … Next he jumped over also and soon we were all gasping in comparative peace while the wind still roared overhead.”

Despite her brave apprenticeship in climbing, despite an aesthetic compatibility between herself and her husband, Ruth’s temperament was utterly different from George’s. According to Pye, Ruth was “a person of the wisest simplicity and a transcendent practicalness.” Her stability seemed to give Mallory an anchor in life. “A total stranger meeting both for the first time at some climbing centre, soon after their marriage,” wrote Pye, “spoke of the shock of delight and astonishment which they produced. ‘They seem too good to be true.’”

By the time he was fighting in the trenches in France, Mallory was the father of two infant girls—Clare, born in 1915, and Beridge, the year after. A third child, John, would be born in 1920. After being invalided home, Mallory had returned to the Western Front for the very last weeks of the war. When the Armistice came, he wrote Ruth, “What a wonderful life we will have together! What a lovely thing we
must
make of such a gift!”

So far as his biographers can ascertain, Ruth was the only important woman in Mallory’s life. After a decade of marriage, their passion for each other seemed utterly undimmed, as their letters, collected in the archives of Magdalene College, testify.

In the summer of 1919, Mallory returned to the Alps for
the first time in seven years. Despite bad weather and companions far less bold or able than he, George pursued a joyous campaign of ascents. After an epic traverse of Mont Blanc in a storm, Mallory wrote Young a long letter, one phrase of which leaps out, in the retrospect of Everest 1924: “How incompetent tired men can become, going down!”

In the Alps, according to David Pye, Mallory demonstrated an uncanny eye for route-finding. “He was always drawn to the big and the unexplored—the great walls that mountaineers as a rule set aside as obviously impossible.” When he failed on a climb, Mallory was devastated—“‘I was
heavy!’
he used to say in tones of deep disgust.”

Mallory was happy to climb in Wales once more with Young, despite his mentor’s artificial leg. To save his friend the agony of stumping along the approach trail, Mallory coaxed his little car up the Miner’s Track to the very foot of Lliwedd.

But for Everest, Mallory might have settled down to a life of schoolteaching, dabbling as a writer, and climbing summers in the Alps. As early as 1919, however, rumors of a British reconnaissance of the approaches to the world’s highest mountain were floating about. No Westerner had stood within forty miles of its flanks.

For a man of Mallory’s restless spirit, this siren call could not go unheeded. He was by now unquestionably the finest mountaineer in Britain. But he was also a father and a schoolteacher, and he hesitated when the invitation came. It was Young who, in twenty minutes during a visit, persuaded Mallory (in David Robertson’s words) “that Everest was an opportunity not to be missed: it would be an extraordinary adventure; and it would be something for George to be known by, in his future work as an educator or writer.”

Thus, in a decision more pragmatic than spiritual, George Mallory walked open-eyed into the obsession that would make him famous, and that would cost him his life.

CA

A
FTER A NIGHT
of wretched “sleep,” the five of us started down from Camp V on the morning of May 2. Above the North Col on the exposed snow ridge, I ran into Vladislav Terzeul, who goes by the name Slava, the strongest climber on a Ukrainian team that was preparing for its summit attempt. The first thing he said was, “Oh, you find Mallory?” I was taken aback, but I mumbled, “No, we haven’t.” Slava’s question didn’t mean the word was out. Everybody on the mountain knew what we had come for, so his was a natural question to ask.

At the North Col, I ran into Russell Brice. He’s a strong New Zealander who had climbed Everest before, and was guiding clients up the north side. A great guy. He asked, “Well, did you find him?” Once more I muttered a denial.

The day before, as soon as I’d broadcast my coded messages about hobnails, Snickers and tea, and a mandatory group meeting, our teammates down at Advance Base and Base Camp knew that we were on to something. Simo had come on shortly afterward to warn us that our broadcasts were being monitored all over the mountain. Russell Brice had a very good radio setup, and he was one of the more meticulous monitors. Maybe he’d picked up something. But after Simo’s warning, we’d shut down, maintaining virtual radio silence ever since.

We descended the icefall to ABC (Advance Base Camp) at 21,000 feet, to spend the night. There we met Simo and Thom Pollard, a videographer hired by
NOVA
. We came into camp hiking
as a group so Thom could film our arrival. Dave Hahn and I always liked to joke about who walks in last, playing the humble role. Now the guys insisted that I walk in first. Simo had a huge grin on his face, and he was eager to hear the news, but we had to wait because there were all these folks from other expeditions milling around. Finally we hopped inside our dining tent, zipped it up, and that’s when Dave told Eric what we had found.