EVEREST 1999

WE HAD FOUND GEORGE MALLORY

Conrad Anker

When Mallory and Irvine quit their tent on 8 June 1924 for Everest’s summit they climbed into myth. No mystery has possessed mountaineering more than that concerning their disappearance and the tantalizing possibility that they reached the top. In 1999 a Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition set forth to Everest to discover the climbers’ fate. Their primary search area was high on the North Face where in 1975 a Chinese climber, Wang Hong-bao, had seen what he thought was the body of an Englishman. The American high altitude climber Conrad Anker was one of the searchers for Mallory and Irvine.

I had just sat down to take off my crampons, because the traverse across the rock band ahead would be easier without them. I drank some fluid – a carbohydrate drink I keep in my water bottle – and sucked a cough drop. At that altitude, it’s essential to keep your throat lubricated.

I looked out over this vast expanse. To the south and west, I could see into Nepal, with jagged peaks ranging toward the horizon. In front of me on the north stretched the great Tibetan plateau, brown and corrugated as it dwindled into the distance. The wind was picking up, and small clouds were forming below, on the lee side of some of the smaller peaks.

All of a sudden, a strong feeling came over me that something was going to happen. Something good. I usually feel content when the climb I’m on is going well, but this was different. I felt positive, happy. I was in a good place.

It was 11:45 a.m. on 1 May. We were just below 27,000 feet on the north face of Mount Everest. The other four guys were fanned out above me and to the east. They were in sight, but too far away to holler to. We had to use our radios to communicate.

I attached my crampons to my pack, stood up, put the pack on, and started hiking up a small corner. Then, to my left, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of a piece of blue and yellow fabric flapping in the wind, tucked behind a boulder. I thought, I’d better go look at this. Anything that wasn’t part of the natural landscape was worth looking at.

When I got to the site, I could see that the fabric was probably a piece of tent that had been ripped loose by the wind and blown down here, where it came to rest in the hollow behind the boulder. It was modern stuff, nylon. I wasn’t surprised – there are a lot of abandoned tents on Everest, and the wind just shreds them.

But as I stood there, I carefully scanned the mountain right and left. I was wearing my prescription dark glasses, so I could see really well. As I scanned right, I saw a patch of white, about a hundred feet away. I knew at once there was something unusual about it, because of the colour. It wasn’t the gleaming white of snow reflecting the sun. It wasn’t the white of the chunks of quartzite and calcite that crop up here and there on the north side of Everest. It had a kind of matte look – a light-absorbing quality, like marble.

I walked closer. I immediately saw a bare foot, sticking into the air, heel up, toes pointed downward. At that moment, I knew I had found a human body.

Then, when I got even closer, I could see from the tattered clothing that this wasn’t the body of a modern climber. This was somebody very old.

It didn’t really sink in at first. It was as if everything was in slow motion. Is this a dream? I wondered. Am I really here? But I also thought, This is what we came here to do. This is who we’re looking for. This is Sandy Irvine.

We’d agreed beforehand on a series of coded messages for the search. Everybody on the mountain could listen in on our radio conversations. If we found something, we didn’t want some other expedition breaking the news to the world.

“Boulder” was the code word for “body”. So I sat down on my pack, got out my radio, and broadcast a message: “Last time I went bouldering in my hobnails, I fell off.” It was the first thing that came to mind. I just threw in “hobnails”, because an old hobnailed boot – the kind that went out of style way back in the 1940s – was still laced onto the man’s right foot. That was another reason I knew he was very old.

We all had our radios stuffed inside our down suits, so it wasn’t easy to hear them. Of the other four guys out searching, only Jake Norton caught any part of my message, and all he heard was “hobnails”. I could see him, some fifty yards above me and a ways to the east. Jake sat down, ripped out his radio, and broadcast back, “What was that, Conrad?”

“Come on down,” I answered. He was looking at me now, so I started waving the ski stick I always carry at altitude. “Let’s get together for Snickers and tea.”

Jake knew I’d found something important, but the other three were still oblivious. He tried to wave and yell and get their attention, but it wasn’t working. At 27,000 feet, because of oxygen deprivation, you retreat into a kind of personal shell; the rest of the world doesn’t seem quite real. So I got back on the radio and put some urgency into my third message: “I’m calling a mandatory group meeting right now!”

Where we were searching was fairly tricky terrain, downsloping shale slabs, some of them covered with a dusting of snow. If you fell in the wrong place, you’d go all the way, 7,000 feet to the Rongbuk Glacier. So it took the other guys a little while to work their way down and over to me.

I rooted through my pack to get out my camera. That morning, at Camp V, I thought I’d stuck it in my pack, but I had two nearly identical stuff sacks, and it turns out I’d grabbed my radio batteries instead. I realized I’d forgotten my camera. I thought, Oh, well, if I had had the camera, I might not have found the body. That’s just the way things work.

When I told a friend about this, he asked if I’d read Faulkner’s novella The Bear. I hadn’t. On reading that story, I saw the analogy. The best hunters in the deep Mississippi woods can’t even catch a glimpse of Old Ben, the huge, half-mythic bear that has ravaged their livestock for years. It’s only when Ike McCaslin gives up everything he’s relied on – lays down not only his rifle, but his compass and watch – that, lost in the forest, he’s graced with the sudden presence of Old Ben in a clearing: “It did not emerge, appear: it was just there, immobile, fixed in the green and windless noon’s hot dappling.”

As I sat on my pack waiting for the others, a feeling of awe and respect for the dead man sprawled in front of me started to fill me. He lay face down, head uphill, frozen into the slope. A tuft of hair stuck out from the leather pilot’s cap he had on his head. His arms were raised, and his fingers were planted in the scree, as if he’d tried to self-arrest with them. It seemed likely that he was still alive when he had come to rest in this position. There were no gloves on his hands; later I’d think long and hard about the implications of that fact. I took off my own gloves to compare my hands to his. I’ve got short, thick fingers; his were long and thin, and deeply tanned, probably from the weeks of having walked the track all the way from Darjeeling over the crest of the Himalaya to the north face of Everest.

The winds of the decades had torn most of the clothing away from his back and lower torso. He was naturally mummified – that patch of alabaster I’d spotted from a hundred feet away was the bare, perfectly preserved skin of his back. What was incredible was that I could still see the powerful, well-defined muscles in his shoulders and back, and the blue discoloration of bruises.

Around his shoulders and upper arms, the remnants of seven or eight layers of clothing still covered him – shirts and sweaters and jackets made of wool, cotton, and silk. There was a white, braided cotton rope tied to his waist, about three eighths of an inch in diameter – many times weaker than any rope we’d use today. The rope was tangled around his left shoulder. About ten feet from his waist, I could see the frayed end where the rope had broken. So I knew at once that he’d been tied to his partner, and that he’d taken a long fall. The rope had either broken in the fall, or when his partner tried to belay him over a rock edge.

The right elbow looked as if it was dislocated or broken. It lay imbedded in the scree, bent in an unnatural position. The right scapula was a little disfigured. And above his waist on a right rib, I could see the blue contusion from an upward pull of the rope as it took the shock of the fall.

His right leg was badly broken, both tibia and fibula. With the boot still on, the leg lay at a grotesque angle. They weren’t compound fractures – the bones hadn’t broken the skin – but they were very bad breaks. My conclusion was that in the fall, the right side of the man’s body had taken the worst of the impact. It looked as though perhaps in his last moments, the man had laid his good left leg over his broken right, as if to protect it from further harm. The left boot may have been whipped off in the fall, or it may have eroded and fallen apart. Only the tongue of the boot was present, pinched between the bare toes of his left foot and the heel of his right boot.

Goraks – the big black ravens that haunt the high Himalaya – had pecked away at the right buttock and gouged out a pretty extensive hole, big enough for a gorak to enter. From that orifice, they had eaten out most of the internal organs, simply hollowed out the body.

The muscles of the left lower leg and the thighs had become stringy and desiccated. It’s what happens, apparently, to muscles exposed for seventy-five years. The skin had split and opened up, but for some reason the goraks hadn’t eaten it.

After fifteen or twenty minutes, Jake Norton arrived. Then the others, one by one: first Tap Richards, then Andy Politz, then Dave Hahn. They didn’t say much: just, “Wow, good job, Conrad,” or, “This has to be Sandy Irvine.” Later Dave said, “I started blinking in awe,” and Tap remembered, “I was pretty blown away. It was obviously a body, but it looked like a Greek or Roman marble statue.”

The guys took photos, shot some video, and discussed the nuances of the scene. There seemed to be a kind of taboo about touching him. Probably half an hour passed before we got up the nerve to touch him. But we had agreed that if we found Mallory or Irvine, we would perform as professional an excavation as we could under the circumstances, to see if what we found might cast any light on the mystery of their fate. We had even received permission from John Mallory (George’s son) to take a small DNA sample.

Tap and Jake did most of the excavating work. We’d planned to cut small squares out of the clothing to take down to Base Camp and analyze. Almost at once, on the collar of one of the shirts, Jake found a name tag. It read, “G. Mallory”. Jake looked at us and said, “That’s weird. Why would Irvine be wearing Mallory’s shirt?”

We didn’t have all that much time to work. We’d agreed on a tentative turnaround hour of 2:00 p.m., to get back to Camp V while it was still daylight, and by the time we started excavating, it was past noon. There were clouds below us, but only a slight wind. As one can imagine, this was hard work at 26,700 feet (the altitude of the body, as I later calculated it). We had taken off our oxygen gear, because it was just too cumbersome to dig with it on.

Because the body was frozen into the scree, we had to chip away at the surrounding ice and rock with our ice axes. It took some vigorous swings even to dislodge little chunks, the ice was so dense. We were all experienced climbers, we were used to swinging tools, so we did the chipping pretty efficiently; only once did a pick glance off a rock and impale the man’s arm. As we got closer to the body, we put down our axes and started chipping with our pocketknives.

We were so sure this was Sandy Irvine that Jake actually sat down, took a smooth piece of shale in his lap, and started to scratch out a tombstone with Irvine’s name and dates, 1902–1924. But then we found the “G. Mallory” tag on the collar, and shortly after, Tap found another one on a seam under the arm. It read, “G. Leigh Mallory.” We just stared at each other, stunned, as we realized this wasn’t Irvine. We had found George Mallory.

As we excavated, Tap chipped away on his left side, Jake on his right. I did mostly lifting and prying. Dave and Andy took pictures and shot video.

It was good fortune that George was lying on his stomach, because most of the stuff you carry when you climb is in the front pockets, so it had been protected by his body for seventy-five years. It may seem funny, or even pretentious, but we referred to him as “George”, not as “Mallory”. All through the weeks before, we’d talked about Mallory and Irvine so much that it was as if we knew them, like old friends; they had become George and Sandy.

We left George’s face where it was, frozen into the scree, but once I could lift the lower part of his body, Tap and Jake could reach underneath him and go through the pockets. The body was like a frozen log. When I lifted it, it made that same creaky noise as when you pull up a log that’s been on the ground for years.

It was disconcerting to look into the hole in the right buttock that the goraks had chewed. His body had been hollowed out, almost like a pumpkin. You could see the remains of seeds and some other food – very possibly Mallory’s last meal.

We didn’t go near George’s head. We moved the loose rock away from it, but we didn’t try to dig it out. I think that was a sort of unspoken agreement, and at the time, none of us wanted to look at his face.

Of course we were most excited about the possibility of finding the camera. Jake even thought for a minute he’d found it. George had a small bag that was lodged under his right biceps. Jake reached in there, squeezed the bag, and felt a small, square object, just about the right size. We finally had to cut the bag to get the object out, and when we did, we found it wasn’t the camera after all, it was a tin of beef lozenges!

The clincher that it was Mallory came when Jake pulled out a neatly folded, new-looking silk handkerchief in which several letters had been carefully wrapped. They were addressed to Mallory. On the envelope of one of them, for instance, we read, “George Leigh Mallory Esq., c/o British Trade Agent, Yalung Tibet.”

Besides the letters, we found a few penciled notes in other pockets. As we found out later, they were all about logistics, about bringing so many loads to Camp VI, and so on. We read them carefully, hoping Mallory might have jotted down a note about reaching the summit or turning back, but there was nothing of the sort.

One by one, Jake and Tap produced what we started calling “the artifacts”. It seemed an odd collection of items to carry to the summit of Everest. There was a small penknife; a tiny pencil, about two and a half inches long, onto which some kind of mint cake had congealed (we could still smell the mint); a needle and thread; a small pair of scissors with a file built into one blade; a second handkerchief, well used (the one he blew his nose on), woven in a red and yellow floral pattern on a blue background, with the monogram G.L.M. in yellow; a box of special matches, Swan Vestas, with extra phosphorus on the tips; a little piece of leather with a hose clamp on it that might have been a mouthpiece for the oxygen apparatus; a tube of zinc oxide, rolled partway up; a spare pair of fingerless mittens that looked like they hadn’t been used.

Two other artifacts seemed particularly intriguing. Jake found a smashed altimeter in one pocket. The hand was missing from the dial, but you could see that the instrument had been specially calibrated for Everest, with a range from 20,000 feet to 30,000 feet. Inscribed on the back, in fine script, was “M.E.E. II” – for Mount Everest Expedition II. And in the vest pocket, we found a pair of goggles. The frames were bent, but the green glass was unbroken. It was Andy who came up with the possible significance of the goggles being in the pocket. To him, it argued that George had fallen after dusk. If it had been in the daytime, he would have been wearing the goggles, even on rock. He’d just had a vivid lesson in the consequences of taking them off during the day, when Teddy Norton got a terrible attack of snow blindness the night after his summit push on 4 June.

As we removed each artifact, we put it carefully in a Ziploc bag. Andy volunteered to carry the objects down to Camp V. To some people, it may seem that taking George’s belongings with us was a violation. We even had a certain sense that we were disturbing the dead – I think that’s why we had hesitated to begin the excavation. But this was the explicit purpose of the expedition: to find Mallory and Irvine and to retrieve the artifacts and try to solve the mystery of what had happened on 8 June, 1924. I think we did the right thing.

As interesting as what we found was what we didn’t find. George had no backpack on, nor any trace of the frame that held the twin oxygen bottles. His only carrying sack was the little bag we found under his right biceps. He didn’t have any water bottle, or Thermos flask, which was what they used in ’24. He didn’t have a flashlight, because he’d forgotten to take it with him. We know this not from Odell, but from the 1933 party, who found the flashlight in the tent at the 1924 Camp VI.

And we didn’t find the camera. That was the great disappointment.

It was getting late – we’d already well overstayed our 2:00 p.m. turnaround. The last thing we gathered was a DNA sample, to analyse for absolute proof of the identity of the man we’d found. Simonson had received approval for this procedure beforehand from John Mallory, George’s only son, who’s seventy-nine and living in South Africa. I had agreed to do this job.

I cut an inch-and-a-half-square patch of skin off the right forearm. It wasn’t easy. I had to use the serrated blade on Dave’s utility knife. Cutting George’s skin was like cutting saddle leather, cured and hard.

Since the expedition, I’ve often wondered whether taking the tissue was a sacrilegious act. In Base Camp, I had volunteered for the task. On the mountain, I had no time to reflect whether or not this was the right thing to do.

We wanted to bury George, or at least to cover him up. There were rocks lying around, but not a lot that weren’t frozen in place. We formed a kind of bucket brigade, passing rocks down to the site.

Then Andy read, as a prayer of committal, Psalm 103: “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. /For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone . . .”

We finally left at 4:00 p.m. I lingered a bit after the other four. The last thing I did was to leave a small Butterfinger candy bar in the rocks nearby, like a Buddhist offering. I said a sort of prayer for him, several times over.