‘I feel strong for the battle, but I know every ounce of strength will be wanted.’
GEORGE MALLORY
THE NEPALESE CALL Mount Everest Sagarmāthā – the Goddess of the Sky. The Tibetans call her Chomolungma – Mother Goddess of the Universe. But whatever name she goes by, the reality is that her faces are a living graveyard.
It’s no surprise. High above sea level, where the oxygen is thin, the air freezing and your muscles and mind are exhausted, death can feel strangely attractive. The final stretch of the climb is known as the ‘Death Zone’. Here, your body enters a state of necrosis. It is, quite literally, starting to die.
The choice of whether to turn back or continue is down to the climber – and so half the battle of conquering the world’s highest peak happens in your oxygen-starved brain. It is why the way to the top is littered with the bodies of those who didn’t make it.
Near the very top is the body of David Sharp. In 2005 he nearly made it. Just short of the summit he stopped to rest. But the subzero temperatures were working their icy ways on him. His body started to freeze where he sat. Several other climbers passed him by – struggling to move themselves, let alone able to carry another.
Although Sharp’s limbs were frozen stiff, he was gently moaning. The other climbers moved him out into the sun. There was little else they could do.
David Sharp still sits there today. An iced corpse, fully clothed in mountain gear. His hands on his knees. A gruesome landmark for anyone heading to the summit.
Most of the bodies are well preserved by the cold. Some aren’t. There are corpses lower down on the slopes of Everest that have rotted away into skeletons. Their skulls protrude from their clothes with hideous rictus grins, snow settling on the rims of their empty eye sockets.
Some corpses have been mummified by the wind and the sun drying out their skin. Others lie face down, recognizable only by their clothes. One of them is nicknamed ‘Green Boots’. He’s an Indian climber who died in 1996, only identifiable now by the colour of his footwear.
More than two hundred people have died in their attempts to climb Everest. Nepalese law states that the bodies should be collected and properly buried, but that isn’t always possible. Maybe it is somehow fitting that those who didn’t make it remain on the mountain. Their own memorial to a dream they had.
In 1999, at 26,670 feet on the North Face of the mountain, one such corpse was discovered. Its well-preserved flesh was frozen as hard as rock. The skin was bleached almost white by the sun. It was lying on its front, pointing up towards the mountain. Its arms – still muscular – stretched out above its head. Its torso was frozen to the ground.
Two bones in the right leg were broken. The elbow dislocated. Several ribs were fractured. There was a hole in the skull, probably the result of a blow with an ice axe. Imagine how that one must have bled.
And inside the body’s clothing was a name tag. It said: G. Leigh Mallory.
The frozen body of George Mallory was a revolutionary find. Not only was Mallory’s attempt to reach the summit – nearly thirty years before Edmund Hillary set foot on the mountain – a truly inspiring moment in the history of human endeavour, it also led to one of the Goddess of the Sky’s most tantalizing mysteries.
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The young George Mallory came from a family of clergymen. As a child he displayed a flair for mathematics, and won a scholarship to Winchester College. There, a teacher introduced him to the sport of mountaineering, and took him on a trip to the Alps. The seeds of his future fate had been sown.
In 1905 he went to Magdalene College, Cambridge, to study history. He was clearly a talented, intelligent and fun young man. He fell in with the likes of Rupert Brooke, John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey. And when he graduated he joined Charterhouse school as a teacher. One of his students was the young Robert Graves. Graves’s recollection of his teacher tells us a lot about the kind of man Mallory was: ‘He was wasted at Charterhouse. He tried to treat his class in a friendly way, which puzzled and offended.’
Graves was not the only man to speak of him with admiration. Lytton Strachey wrote that he had the ‘mystery of Botticelli, the refinement and delicacy of a Chinese print, the youth and piquancy of an unimaginable English boy’.
The poet-mountaineer Geoffrey Winthrop Young gave him the nickname ‘Galahad’ after Sir Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte d’Arthur. He was becoming a romantic figure even before he stepped foot on the foothills of Everest.
But all that poetic stuff hid the fact that Mallory also had grit in abundance. His interest in climbing continued and he became an accomplished Alpinist. The Alpine peaks are not to be taken lightly. Mallory conquered many of them, including Mont Blanc. But then the Great War got in the way.
When the war started he wanted to join up. The headmaster – following an edict from the Minister of War Lord Kitchener, stating that school teachers should not be allowed to leave their posts – did not grant him permission. So Mallory was forced to sit in the comfort of Godalming while his friends (such as Rupert Brooke) and pupils (such as Robert Graves) went to war. He met, and married, Ruth Turner, who lived near Charterhouse. But the bliss of those first few months of married life was marred by what was happening in Europe.
Many of Mallory’s friends and acquaintances died in the foul, brutal misery of the trenches. By 1916 he couldn’t take it any more. He defied Kitchener’s edict, joined up and was sent to the Western Front.
The horrors of trench warfare on the front line are another story for another day. But, given his ultimate fate, one letter home jumps out: ‘I don’t object to corpses so long as they are fresh. With the wounded it is different. It always distresses me to see them.’
Mallory survived the war and returned to continue his teaching. His love of the mountains, however, had not diminished. Nor had his sense of adventure. When, in 1921, the Mount Everest Committee financed the British Reconnaissance expedition’s attempt on the summit of the world’s highest peak, Mallory was an eager participant.
The expedition failed to reach the summit. So, the following year, he tried again, this time as part of a group led by Brigadier-General Charles Bruce. And although this attempt also failed, Mallory reached a record-breaking altitude of 26,980 feet without oxygen.
A third attempt in the same year also failed but, by now, Mallory was a celebrity. When a reporter from the New York Times asked him why he wanted to climb Everest, he replied with the three most famous words in mountaineering. Three words that are the beating heart behind why many explorers or adventurers do what they do.
‘Because it’s there.’
And it was still there, of course, in 1924, when George Mallory made his fourth and final attempt. He knew that, at the age of 37, this might well be his last opportunity. And he promised his wife Ruth that, if he made it to the summit, he would leave a photograph of her there.
Then he set out for glory.
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The omens were good. On 7 June, Mallory wrote in a letter from Base Camp that it was ‘perfect weather for the job’.
It needed to be.
The mountaineers of the day were not clad in lightweight modern clothing or equipment to protect them from the elements. Rather, a mixture of tweed and cotton. No modern mountaineer would consider the boots c. 1924 up to the job. This time, though, Mallory at least agreed to trial some early oxygen apparatus. It was heavy, but experience told him he couldn’t manage without it.
Charles Bruce led the 1924 expedition, as he had in 1922. Mallory’s partner was Andrew Irvine. One of their colleagues, a geologist by the name of Noel Odell, followed at some distance behind them in a support role.
Little is known about what happened next. Mallory and Irvine had no means of communicating with other members of the expedition. All we know for certain is that they never made it back. But I can tell you, from my own time on Everest, something of what they would have experienced.
The upper faces of Everest are treacherous. Crevasses – giant cracks in the ice – can open up beneath your feet with no warning. It happened to me. If I hadn’t been attached to a rope, I’d be another statistic of the mountain. It took two companions to help drag me out. One wouldn’t have been enough.
If your oxygen runs out in the Death Zone, you can expect immediate delirium, lethargy and, finally, death. The weight of the oxygen canisters, which are keeping you alive, feel like a constant and cumbersome burden. Yet the benefits of the oxygen narrowly outweigh the weight of the bottles. In 1924 the weight was far, far greater still.
Frostnip is run of the mill up there – even today I still feel its effects in cold weather from my time on Everest. Numbness followed by intense pain as blood floods into the weakened capillaries.
And at that height your body also loses the ability to process food. It starts to deteriorate. Entering the Death Zone is like setting off a time bomb. Stay up there too long, and you will die, no matter who you are.
The weather can be wildly unpredictable – even with modern forecasting. In 1924 there were no forecasts. And the winds on Everest can be easily strong enough to blow a man off his feet – and then the only way is down.
Being up that high, in those conditions, hurts.
Man, it hurts.
Your muscles cry for relief.
Your lungs burn.
Your extremities ache with the extreme cold.
Your head throbs, and your mouth and throat grow raw with the thin air.
It’s a kind of torture. You feel like you’d do anything to make it stop. It’s like the mountain itself is willing you to quit. And, as the air grows thinner and the temperature colder, she makes you feel like you just don’t care any more.
Everest makes death seem like an attractive option.
And you have to fight that. You have to fight it with all your might.
When I climbed the mountain, I had advantages that Mallory and Irvine never had. Proper footwear and mountain gear. Communication with other climbers on the mountain. A deeper understanding of how the body reacts in extreme environments. Proper weather reports. The ability to receive messages from my family at home. For me, all that makes the attempts of those early pioneers all the more awesome.
I can see Mallory and Irvine, their teeth gritted, their minds locked in battle with the mountain as she sucks the life, the energy and the will to win, out of them. And doing all this alone.
History and science tell us that Mallory and Irvine, although they may have made it very close, probably never reached the top. The world would have to wait another twenty-nine years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay finally conquered the world’s highest peak.
There’s no doubt that Mallory and Irvine died on the vicious slopes of Everest. Nor is there any doubt that back in England their brave attempt turned them into national heroes. They even had a memorial service at St Paul’s Cathedral attended by the Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and King George V.
But are history and science telling us everything? Or is there more to the story of George Mallory than meets the eye?
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Noel Odell, their support climber who was following behind them, reached a height of 26,000 feet on 8 June. As he was gazing up towards the summit, the cloud cover cleared for a moment. He later recorded what he saw: ‘One tiny black spot silhouetted on a small snow-crest beneath a rock-step in the ridge; the black spot moved. Another black spot became apparent and moved up the snow to join the other on the crest …’
On the high faces of Everest, there are three distinct rock and ice outcrops: the First, Second and Third Steps. Many people think Odell was describing an area between the Second and Third Steps, which means Mallory and Irvine were very close to the summit.
Close enough to reach it, before perishing on the descent?
We know from the story of Edward Whymper that a mountain will as happily kill you on the way down as the way up.
And we know that Mallory had the guts to go for it. He was all in. Glory or bust.
With the discovery of Mallory’s body, we know some other things too.
It was just before one o’clock in the afternoon that Odell saw Mallory and Irvine striking out towards the summit. There’s little doubt that, at this time of day, they would have been wearing their goggles to protect them from snow blindness. But Mallory’s goggles were not fixed to his corpse. Nor were they found nearby.
They were in his pocket.
Does that suggest that he was making an evening descent, at a time of day when the goggles weren’t necessary? Many people think so.
And what of Mallory’s promise to his wife, that if he made the summit he would leave a photograph of her up there. That would surely mean that he’d have had the photograph on him when he left camp. And it should have still been on him when his body was discovered.
Only it wasn’t.
Is it too romantic to imagine that Mallory did indeed make it to the summit of Everest?
That there, for a short while, the image of his wife lay in that lonely, desolate, beautiful place before the winds blew it away or the snow covered it.
Before her husband died on the descent.
No one knows. But perhaps one day Irvine’s body will be found, with the camera they took with them. It will either show pictures of them on the summit, or it won’t.
For now, only Everest holds the key to the mystery. And the Goddess of the Sky does not willingly give up her secrets.
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One thing’s for sure: Hillary and Tenzing were the first to climb Everest and return safely. The glory of that achievement is theirs for ever. But whether Mallory reached the top or not, his assault on the mountain – just like that of all those who try – is no less awesome or epic. It was a goal he had set himself. Maybe he succeeded, maybe he didn’t. But what’s important is that he got out there and gave it his best shot.
We all have our own Everests to climb. And just like there’s no shame in being defeated by the real one, there’s no shame in being defeated by our own personal mountains.
It is all about never giving up, and acting with courage and dignity in the big moments.
The only real shame lies in refusing to try.