Twenty-Four

In 1909, the Pennsylvanian Robert Peary assured the world that he had managed to reach the North Pole. An unverifiable statement, almost certainly fictitious, but one that – at the time – was taken very seriously. In fact, it was the news that led Roald Amundsen to cancel a series of complicated plans that would have taken him into the Arctic and instead announce that the goal of his next expedition would be the South Pole. On 14 December 1911, then, Amundsen raised the blue and red flag of his homeland at the southernmost point on the planet, where all meridians meet. An American in the North; a Norwegian in Antarctica.

And England? Nothing. Or worse than nothing: the tragic epic of Robert Scott, who arrived at the South Pole five weeks late and proceeded to freeze to death with four other Englishmen in the midst of that Antarctic nullity. ‘These rough notes and our corpses should tell the story,’ Scott wrote in the last entry of his logbook. It is as if the Anglican god abandoned the islands with the death of Queen Victoria.

At least until the aristocrat Francis Younghusband proclaimed that there was still a portion of the world to deflower with the imperial flag: the umpteenth home of the Union Jack ought to be Mount Everest. This notion became a matter of State. In 1921, a first expedition was launched. The mountaineer George Mallory was a member of the team. They studied the terrain, noted its challenges, decided to go home and get better prepared. The following year, they made a second attempt. One group made it to 8,300 metres. Monsoon season was just about to begin. An avalanche occurred. For a few hours, chaos reigned. The expedition sent a brief message to Base Camp to reassure their companions: ‘All the whites are safe,’ it says. Seven Sherpas died buried in the snow.

Ninety-three years later: 18 April, 2014. Another avalanche. Fourteen thousand tons of ice; sixteen dead. All Sherpas.