The great enemy, George Mallory told his wife, Ruth, was the wind. The men of the 1921 Everest expedition had met it as soon as they reached the great Tibetan plateau, a desolate and barren place, bordered by rolling hills, with snow peaks towering on the distant horizon. Usually at daybreak, as they struck camp and prepared to move off on their ponies and mules, the air was blessedly still. But the wind would soon build up, gathering strength in the hills, scything across the gray plain: a dry, incessant wind, George wrote, cutting through their clothes, driving sand and dust into their eyes and noses. Each evening they would hasten to pitch their tents to provide shelter. Even so, the nights were bitterly cold, bringing fifteen degrees of frost, the streams frozen hard by morning. And still Everest was at least a month’s march away.
George had already been traveling for two months. He had sailed from England on April 8, 1921, arriving in Calcutta five weeks later, followed by a twenty-fourhour train ride to Darjeeling. There he and his eight colleagues—four climbers, three surveyors, and a doctor—had embarked on their trek to Everest. With them were forty porters, cooks, and interpreters, together with a hundred mules to carry their six tons of equipment and supplies. Ahead lay a 250-mile trek that would take them in a great arc through Sikkim and Tibet, crossing the plain to the north of Everest and then striking south towards the mountain from there. At first they would follow the road to Lhasa but would then head into unmapped territory, intersected by wild mountain ranges and turbulent river gorges, where no Europeans had ever been. Not until the end of June would they be able to begin their task of finding a route onto, perhaps even to the top of, the highest mountain in the world.
They met problems from the start. There were not enough mules in Darjeeling to carry all their equipment and so they were compelled to leave half of it behind in the hope of sending for it later. The mules they did hire were unfit for the task, some collapsing and dying on the trail. The humidity in Sikkim was intense, and torrential rain reduced long stretches of the mountain paths to mud. Leeches were a constant menace, dropping onto both men and mules from the shrubs beside the path. When they crossed the 14,000-foot Jelep Pass into Tibet they suffered from pounding headaches and nausea, the symptoms of high-altitude sickness caused by their exertions in the oxygen-depleted air.
Once in Tibet they passed through lush valleys with white clematis and roses, purple irises, great white and yellow rhododendrons, and groves of juniper, birch, and mountain ash. At times George went on foot, at times he rode on a mule that seemed dwarfed by his powerful, muscular frame, his legs reaching almost to the ground. In the space of a few hours, as the great line of men and animals climbed up to the Tibetan plateau, everything changed. George called it a new world. Beside the vastness of the landscape, and the relentless wind, there was the sun, scorching their skin, and clouds of midges that forced their way into noses and ears. There was trouble with the porters: their leader, the sirdar, was found to be embezzling the expedition’s supplies, and the cooks were often drunk. The food was abysmal—“nasty, dirty messes that are most unappetising,” George wrote—and every member of the expedition bar him succumbed to diarrhea.
Throughout the journey he compiled an account of the expedition’s progress, which was contained in a series of letters that he sent home to Ruth. They had always written to each other when they were apart, particularly during the war, when he was an artillery officer on the western front, and they exchanged affectionate and intimate accounts of the passage of events and their own hopes and fears. They carried photographs of each other, including one for which they had posed together in the war. George, staring intently at the camera, wore his officer’s uniform, with a wisp of mustache and a severe hairstyle, which he grew long as soon as he left the army; Ruth sat beside him, the wistful look on her gentle Pre-Raphaelite face framed by her fine center-parted hair.
Now, writing in ink, in an elegant semi-italic script, on notepaper headed “Mount Everest Expedition,” he would compose his letters when and wherever he could. On the SS Sardinia, when he had time on his hands, he described his fellow passengers, the heat of the Red Sea, the great swells of the Indian Ocean, his determination to stay fit by running around the deck (thirteen circuits equaled a mile). During the trek through Tibet he would grab a few moments to write before setting off on the day’s march and would complete his letter in the evening. Once, at the Tibetan village of Phari, he told Ruth that he was writing from the middle of a dusty plain with the giant peak of Chomulhari towering above him—as isolated and dominant, he said, as the Matterhorn at Zermatt.
George was quick to form instinctive judgments of the people he met, although he often revised his views once he knew them better. He provided Ruth with pen sketches of his companions. There was the surveyor Henry Morshead, strong and energetic, “an attractive man.” A second surveyor, Edward Wheeler, was “a bore in the colonial fashion.” “Kellas I love already,” he said of the Scottish climber Alexander Kellas, who was “full of humor.” By contrast the senior climber, Harold Raeburn, had “a total lack of calm or sense of humor.” George reserved his most critical remarks for the expedition leader, Lt. Col. Charles Howard-Bury: “He is well-informed and opinionated and doesn’t at all like anyone else to know things he doesn’t know.” He was particularly irked by Howard-Bury’s political views. He was “too much the landlord,” and displayed “not only tory prejudice but a very highly developed sense of hate and contempt for other sorts of people than his own.”
Through all the difficulties, George conveyed his excitement at the great adventure he had undertaken. “Oh Ruth,” he declared, “this is a thrilling business.” At the age of thirty-four he had not lost his sense of wonder or his determination to live new experiences to the full. He described the villages he passed through, the people he encountered, the strange flowers he could not identify, the landscape that he came to savor despite the hardships it imposed. In the evening, he told Ruth, “the harshness becomes subdued, there is a blending of lines and folds until the last light so that one comes to bless the absolute bareness, feeling that here is a pure beauty of form, a kind of ultimate harmony.”
His letters, carried by runner to the nearest mailing post, took up to four weeks to reach Ruth at their home at Godalming in the Surrey hills, thirty miles south of London. She would sit and read them in their loggia, a covered terrace opening on to the lawn and overlooking a steep wooded bank. She replied, in her careful handwriting, on notepaper headed with the name of their house, the Holt. She told him about their garden, difficulties with the servants, the shortage of coal due to the miners’ strike, and most of all about their three children, Clare, Beridge, and John. George sympathized with her problems, passed on suggestions about the garden or the servants, mailed her a flower resembling a valerian that he had worn in his button hole, hoping its scent would last until it reached her, and sent lace and a necklace for the two girls, then aged five and three, and kisses for them all, including John, who was not yet one. He yearned to bridge the distance between them: if only he could talk to Ruth, rather than write. “You are very often in my thoughts and do seem at times very near,” he told her, “but so very much too far.” “Lord,” he ended another letter, “how I have wanted you to see all this with me.”
On June 6 George had more bad news to relate. The expedition had just reached Kampa Dzong, the fortress town that was the first staging point after leaving the Lhasa road. Kellas, who was fifty-three, had been weakened by dysentery to the point where his porters were carrying him on a stretcher. The previous day, just after they had crossed a 17,000-foot pass, Kellas had died, probably from heart failure brought about by his weakness and high-altitude sickness. He had been buried that morning at Kampa Dzong. It was, said George, a “tragic and distressing” business.
Then came another disaster. Harold Raeburn, at fifty-six the oldest man in the team, had also been stricken with dysentery and had returned to Sikkim. At a stroke the expedition had lost its only two climbers with Himalayan experience and, in Kellas, its expert on the problems of climbing at high altitude. As the senior mountaineer, George was appointed the new climbing leader. Their prospect of success, he told Ruth, seemed slim. “I suppose no one who could judge us fairly as a party would give much for our chances of getting up Mount Everest.”
As the expedition struggled to recover from these setbacks, there was a new preoccupation. Where was Everest? They had glimpsed it from Kampa Dzong as a snowy crest, towering above its neighbors some ninety miles to the southwest. Since then it had been obscured by clouds. George felt they still had a great barrier to surmount, a screen of mountains running from north to south, before they could come to grips with the mountain. His unease was compounded by his awareness, as he put it, that they were about to walk off the map. They had already gone beyond the furthest point reached by the Younghusband mission in 1904, when the British had sent a military force to secure Tibet’s allegiance in their fight for territorial supremacy with Russia and China. Such charts as the expedition possessed were misleading or simply wrong: rivers flowed in the wrong direction, mountains appeared where none were marked.
On June 11 George resolved to obtain a view of Everest. He was traveling with Guy Bullock, his only previous friend on the expedition. They had been at school together at Winchester and had climbed in the Alps: George called Bullock his “stable-companion,” a workhorse, solid and dependable. That morning, as the expedition traveled west along the valley of the Yaru River, he and Bullock climbed to a vantage point on the mountainside above. By the time they reached it they were nauseous with fatigue, only to find Everest still shrouded in cloud.
Two days later they tried again. George and Bullock went ahead of their colleagues and followed the Yaru through a gorge and out on to a broad alluvial plain. George had a sudden presentiment, a feeling that he and Bullock were “penetrating a secret,” like travelers passing a watershed both in the landscape and in their fortunes. They left their ponies to graze and set off to climb the cliffs at the exit from the gorge. After an hour they reached the crest of a stony peak where they lay down and peered through their field glasses in the direction of Everest. At first they could see nothing but the usual clouds; then they caught a glint of snow. Over the next hour, they watched transfixed as the clouds gradually lifted, revealing fragments of mountainsides and glaciers and ridges, then its snowcovered east face, and finally the triangle of rock and ice that was the summit. It was far higher than they had imagined, George told Ruth. But they were certain that it was Everest, not only because they had calculated its distance and height, but also because, in its grandeur, there was no other mountain it could be.
George and Bullock watched for another hour, taking photographs of Everest and trying to identify its individual features, even working out possible lines of ascent. Far below they saw the rest of the expedition strung out across the plain like a desert caravan and knew it was time to descend. They caught up with their colleagues at a campsite beside a spring near a tiny settlement called Shiling. The wind was as relentless as ever, sweeping over the sand, George wrote, so that it rippled like a sea of watered silk. As usual the climbers took refuge in their tents but as dusk approached the wind dropped. George led his colleagues to a mound beside the Yaru where they could see Everest rising “absolutely clear and glorious” beyond the river to the southwest. George took another photograph with a telephoto lens showing the mountain in all its distant splendor. Later he gave a large print of the photograph to the Alpine Club. Captioned “Everest—the first sight,” it has hung in the club to this day.
For George, the vision from the mountaintop remained a transcendental moment. He described it in a letter to Ruth dated June 15, then reworked his account for the official book about the expedition. He held strong views about mountaineering writing, which he thought should convey the emotional truth of climbing, and was determined to capture the significance of his first full sight of Everest. “Mountain shapes are often fantastic seen through a mist,” he wrote; “these were like the wildest creation of a dream.” He told again how the rocky shapes, the mountain crests, the glaciers, and the ridges, came together to form a whole. “We were able to piece together the fragments, to interpret the dream.”
The image of the dream recurs throughout George’s writing. Some of his critics have used it against him, suggesting that he was an impractical person, a fantasist unable to put his dreams into effect. The image is in fact a key to understanding George, for his dreams represented ideals that he was determined to meet. That day, he told Ruth, had been a great landmark. Everest had become “more than a fantastic vision; one began to know it as a peak with its individual form; the problem of that great ridge and glacier began to take shape, and to haunt the mind.” Now he and his colleagues understood Everest and had “one whole clear meaning” with which they could plan their ascent. Although it would be several more weeks before they could come to grips with Everest, the hardships and disappointments were beginning to recede. “My job begins to show like a flower bud soon to open out,” he told Ruth. He could hardly wait for a closer view of Everest, enabling them to “unveil a little more of the great mystery” and resolve how to fulfill their dream.
Almost three years to the day after George’s vision of Everest, the clouds closed around him and his young partner Sandy Irvine as they made their final summit bid. It was George’s third visit to Everest, and the highest he ever went on the mountain, leaving a mystery that endured for the next seventy-five years. In that time he and Irvine attained the status of legends, two men of inspirational courage and determination who had gone forward together to meet their destiny. What had happened to them? Could they have reached the summit? How and where did they die?
In the pre-monsoon Himalayan season of 1999, a U.S. expedition at last found some of the answers. On May 1, during a spell when the north face of Everest was unusually free of snow, an American climber, Conrad Anker, caught a glimpse of something white lying among the rubble and scree at 26,760 feet on the mountain’s north face. As he approached he found it was a body, its clothes in tatters, its skin bleached like a marble statue, its arms extended above its head, one leg clearly fractured, a single boot lying nearby. The Americans had been convinced that if they found anyone it would be Irvine, and it was hard for them to break that preconception. When Anker and his colleagues uncovered a laundry label bearing the name G. Mallory, alongside the address of a clothing store in Godalming High Street, they wondered why Irvine would be wearing Mallory’s shirt.
Then the Americans, and soon the world, realized that George had been found at last. With the body was a collection of personal items that enhanced the poignancy of the discovery. They included a box of matches, a pair of nail scissors, a pencil, a wristwatch minus its hands, lists of stores and supplies, and three letters George had received shortly before setting off on his attempt. The find was followed by a flood of speculation over one principal issue: was it now possible to decide whether George and Sandy had reached the top? The issue was minutely debated, encompassing such matters as precisely where they had been last seen in 1924, their respective climbing abilities, the routes they might have followed, the flow rates of the oxygen cylinders they were carrying, and the interpretation of some notes about oxygen supplies that George had made on one of the envelopes in his pocket.
As the debate raged, we began to feel that the personality and character of the man himself was being overlooked. The Mallory legend was becoming a cipher, a focus for theories and arguments that were becoming as desiccated as George’s body. There was so much more we wanted to know. Since George was thirty-seven when he died, and Everest had occupied only the last four years of his life, we wanted to know about the other thirty-three years. What were his hopes and fears, his goals and aspirations, his friendships and his loves? And how had they shaped the ambitions of a man willing to stake his life on an attempt to climb the world’s highest mountain?
As we began our search, we felt to some extent on familiar ground. George had been part of our lives ever since we knew about mountaineering, which began with the headlines about the ascent of Everest—“Everest: the Crowning Glory,” “All this and Everest too”—which appeared in the British newspapers on Coronation Day, June 1953. Later that year we were in the lines of schoolchildren taken to see The Conquest of Everest, transfixed by cameraman Tom Stobart’s endless panning shot from the glacier floor to the corniced crest of the summit ridge. Our parents told us of the prewar efforts to climb the mountain, made during their own lifetimes, which had helped to motivate the 1953 attempt. We learned that Ed Hillary had been inspired by George, who epitomized all that was most valiant about the 1920s expeditions, and remained for Hillary the most heroic figure in the mountain’s history. Later we went to Cambridge to interview Noel Odell, the last person to see George and Irvine before they disappeared into the clouds. We visited John Noel at his home in Kent, marveling at the photographs he took on the 1922 and 1924 expeditions, wondering at his tales of developing his pictures in his improvised darkroom at the foot of the Rongbuk Glacier.
We felt we knew George’s landscapes too. It was more than thirty years since we first went climbing in Snowdonia, scrambling over the same ridges he had followed, fingering the granite he had grasped as he helped push rock climbing to new standards not so long after the sport was born. We knew his haunts: the Pen y Gwryd Hotel, the Snowdon Ranger, and the Gorphwysfa Inn at Pen y Pass (the latter two now youth hostels). We climbed in the Lake District, and on the Cuillin Ridge in Skye. We went to Tibet, traversing that same barren gray landscape, staying in towns used as stopping places by the 1921 expedition, witnessing Everest rising from the plain, the historic landmarks of the northeast ridge sharp and clear.
We also knew his England: the home counties, public school (which are really private schools*), Oxbridge, the army, and the Alpine Club, where relics and photographs from his days are on display, and whose ambiance still has echoes of the Mallory era. As we continued our researches, and were received with unfailing kindness and hospitality by his descendants and relatives, we sensed traces of his world. These included the welcoming of strangers into their homes; the mealtime etiquette; the deep knowledge of plants and flowers; and the unmistakable tones of those, like him, who were educated at public school—the “upper-crust” accent, as one niece put it, in which George himself spoke.
We knew the previous biographies, of course, of which the most important were David Pye’s, published in 1927, David Robertson’s, published in 1969, and the writings of the tireless Everest researcher, Audrey Salkeld. While all contained invaluable material, we felt that none presented a full perspective on Mallory’s life or motivations. We also wanted to address some surprisingly strong criticism of George made during the postdiscovery debate. It was alleged that he was a poor climber, unintelligent, given to rash decisions, obsessed with Everest, and irresponsible in taking Irvine on a near-suicidal dash for the summit. Some of these criticisms echoed the arguments of the Everest historian Walt Unsworth, who wrote that George was “a drifter, uncommitted and indecisive,” a second-rate climber who had even drifted into attempting Everest.
Certainly we became aware of George’s flaws: he was forgetful, sometimes impractical, and could be strident and dogmatic, particularly as a young man. But writers who described these faults often ignored his counterbalancing virtues, which were revealed to us as our research progressed. He was as courageous in his political and social ideas as much as in his climbing, an idealist who maintained his integrity and his belief in honesty and emotional truth. Ironically, that handed his critics a weapon, for in his writing he admitted to his inner struggles, and his attempts to reconcile his personal objectives with those of his expeditions, the conflict between selfishness and altruism that all of us know.
The greatest conflict of George’s life concerned Ruth. They were passionately in love when they married in July 1914, on the eve of the First World War. During the war, when he spent sixteen months on the western front, Ruth gave birth to their two daughters, and their son was born shortly after the war. Ruth had spent much of the war trying to contain her anxiety over his safety and her longing for his return: feelings that were replicated during his three expeditions to Everest. Yet George too had to contend with his own feelings of separation and loss, and his knowledge of the pain he was causing Ruth. As we became aware of this ourselves, we sensed more and more strongly that the most significant questions about George’s life and death did not concern whether he reached the summit of Everest. Far more important, we felt, was to understand what had led him to make the two most momentous decisions of his life. Why did he depart for Everest for the third time in 1924? And why, when the expedition was in desperate straits from illness and exhaustion, its supply lines dangerously extended, did George and Irvine make their final attempt?
The answers are to be found in a life as rich, diverse, and exciting as any this century. The quest starts in the village of Mobberley in Cheshire, where Mallory was born in 1886: an unimaginable world away from the barren plateau of Tibet.
*In Britain, the term “public school” refers to schools whose students to pay for their tuition, as opposed to state schools, funded by the national government and local councils, where there is no direct charge for tuition. The public schools are also known as “private schools,” which is in fact a more accurate description. Their role has generally been to provide a privileged education for an elite of the British middle and upper classes, and they have usually had far more money to spend on their students than the hard-pressed state schools.