The Lost Explorer (25 page)

They headed up using oxygen, probably two bottles per man, maybe at a flow of about two liters per minute. They climbed through the Yellow Band, which in itself is trying, difficult terrain. Tom Holzel argues that a bottle would have lasted them a little more than four hours, but I don’t think you can be that precise, so many things can go wrong at altitude. In any event, they discarded a bottle between the top of the Yellow Band and the First Step, where Tap and Jake found it this year.

Even with oxygen, altitude confuses your sense of time.
You think you’ve been doing something for fifteen minutes, but you’ve been doing it for an hour. A metaphor occurred to me after my experience this year on Everest. At altitude, it’s as if there’s a house burning, and the house that’s burning is you, but everything’s happening at such a dragged-out pace you can’t do anything about it. You just watch the house burn down.

Mallory and Irvine may have been taking four or five breaths for each step. Or they may have taken as many as fourteen or fifteen—that’s not uncommon among modern climbers, even with oxygen. No matter what, I’m sure their pace was slower than Mallory had hoped. They made the long diagonal traverse from the top of the Yellow Band to the First Step. I’m convinced they climbed the First Step, and that somewhere near there is where Odell saw them at 12:50. But then they faced the tricky traverse from the First Step to the Second. It would have been amazing to have climbed this in 1924, and it would mean that they’d gotten about a hundred feet higher than Norton had four days before. That in turn means that nobody got higher on the surface of the earth for the next twenty-eight years.

But somewhere on that traverse, they recognized that it wasn’t in the cards, that they weren’t going to make it to the top. If they’d had an exceptional climbing day, and everything had gone right, they might have reached the foot of the Second Step. But they turned back. Now the snow squall that Odell reported blew in. The new snow would have filled their tracks, meaning that they had to try to find the route all over again on the way down. The tricky part even today is finding the exit cracks at the top of the Yellow Band.

My guess is that Mallory was going first: he wouldn’t have left the route-finding up to Irvine. And just as I started to do with Dave, he started down the Yellow Band too early, too far west. At some point in the afternoon, the weather cleared up again, and Odell looked for his friends, but if they were in the rocks of the Yellow Band as opposed to outlined against the sky, there was little chance he could spot them.

We know that Mallory and Irvine were roped together. At the time, a common practice on moderate mixed ground was to travel roped together, with the second man carrying coils. It turns out to be an incredibly dangerous practice—the very chore of managing the rope and maintaining a steady distance between
climbers can cause accidents, and the chance of one man’s belaying and stopping the other’s fall is slim at best. Yet as late as the 1960s, mountaineers were still teaching this technique.

There are many places where you can climb through the Yellow Band. Much of it lies at that tricky angle where you’re torn between down-climbing and rappelling. The rocks are all downsloping and loose. Mallory would have been intensely focused here. And I’d guess that either it was approaching dusk or the men were descending in the squall, so he took off his goggles to see the rock better. They would have been moving together on the easier parts, maybe stopping to give a little belay on the harder stretches—the rope hooked over a prong or corner, like the “nick” Geoffrey Winthrop Young used to belay Mallory on the Nesthorn.

Since May 1, I’ve thought a lot about Mallory’s hands. Why wasn’t he wearing gloves? He had the spare pair of fingerless knit gloves in his pocket, but they looked as though they’d never been used. The other thing that struck me at once is that the hands showed no signs of frostbite.

A number of people, especially those who would like to believe Mallory and Irvine made the summit, have hypothesized that they spent the night of June 8 in an open bivouac, then fell descending on the ninth. But with their clothing, there would have been no way to spend a night out above 27,000 feet and not suffer serious frostbite. When your fingers freeze, they develop “blebs,” puffy blisters, although it takes them from twenty-four to forty-eight hours to swell up. Mallory’s fingers showed no sign of blebs. On May 16 this year, during the second search, Thom Pollard had dug up Mallory’s face. I asked him if there was any sign of frostbite; he said no. Unlike the fingers, the nose and cheeks react right away to frostbite, turning first white and gray, then black.

The absence of frostbite on Mallory’s mummified body proves to me that he died on June 8, not the next day. As the blood ceases to flow upon death, a deceased person doesn’t develop frostbite.

My hunch is that when he fell, Mallory had taken off his gloves so that he could face inward and grasp the rocks better. Maybe it was dark by then, and down-climbing in the dark, with no flashlight, would have been all but impossible.

Everyone has wondered whether one man fell and pulled the other off, or if Irvine belayed Mallory’s fall and the rope broke over an edge. In the latter case, Irvine would have been left to try to descend alone in the dark. This scenario might fit well with Wang Hongbao’s “old English dead”—maybe the Chinese climber in 1975 found Irvine where he had tried to wait out the night and had frozen to death. But I doubt it, for one good reason. If Irvine had belayed Mallory and the rope had broken when Mallory’s weight came on it, the rope would have parted near Irvine’s end. Instead, we found it broken only some ten feet away from Mallory’s waist.

I think, then, that one man pulled the other off (it could have been Irvine, coming second, who fell), that both men plunged down the mountain together, and that the rope sawed over a rock edge. That’s happened often over the years, even with good nylon ropes. And if I’m right, the place to look for Irvine is not in Hemmleb’s search zone, which is up and left, or east, of where I found Mallory, but rather to the right or west of Mallory, because when the accident happened they would have been diagonaling down and eastward with Mallory in the lead.

In my scenario, as Mallory fell, the rope tangled around him. The initial impact came on his right side. It’s significant too that it was his right leg that was so badly broken. It was his right ankle that he’d broken in 1909, and on Everest in 1924, it was his right leg, from the ankle up to the hip, that was still giving him trouble. No doubt the initial break had permanently weakened the leg.

I’m also quite sure that Mallory didn’t fall from all the way up on the northeast ridge—say from where the ice axe was found in 1933. The two modern bodies I found just before I discovered Mallory—the Greeter, and the guy in the faded blue suit—were so much more broken up, their limbs sprawled every which way, their heads downhill. Those two had fallen from the ridge, I’d venture. But Mallory’s body wasn’t so contorted, and his head was uphill. I’d guess he fell only some 300 to 400 vertical feet, which would mean he came off near the bottom of the Yellow Band. Even in the dark, he might have been close to pulling off a successful retreat.

Was he still alive when he came to rest? It’s hard to say. The hole in his forehead that Thom discovered may have been
the injury that killed him. But the hands planted in the scree looked like those of a man still trying to self-arrest with his fingers. I think he was fighting to the very end.

The position of his legs suggests he set them that way to relieve the pain. If so, his synapses were still firing, and before he lapsed into unconsciousness he may have thought for a moment that he and Irvine could have made it to camp safely. Quickly and silently shock set in, as Mallory became one with the Mother Goddess of the Snows.

M
Y BELIFE
that Mallory could not have reached the summit does nothing to diminish my fascination with the man.

Last spring, I embarked on our expedition with summitting Everest as my primary goal. I felt that a grand opportunity had presented itself, even though many of my climbing peers and I were doubtful that we’d find anything. A high school friend had chuckled, “Sounds like you’ve landed a big fish.” A chance to go to Everest, he meant, with no costs attached. A bit defensively, I answered, “You never know what you might find, especially in a static environment like the high Himalaya.”

All my feelings changed on May 1. As I discovered the body of George Mallory, I realized we had reopened a chapter in our climbing heritage. Sitting next to Mallory gave me a deep appreciation for what he’d done and stood for.

Alone with Sandy Irvine, after the sun had set, on the immense north face of Everest, the nearest other teammate 4,000 feet below with no possible knowledge where the two men were, or that they needed help—that in itself was a remarkable place to have arrived. The whole journey had been an epic voyage: by steamer from Liverpool to Bombay, overland by train to Darjeeling, across the Himalayan crest on pony-back to the little-known regions of Tibet, over remote passes into unexplored valleys. Thus the climbers ventured to crack the puzzle of what had come to be called the Third Pole. With them they hauled vast stores of equipment—cutting-edge gear for the day, utterly rudimentary by our standards.

The mystery of altitude itself had scarcely been probed. To know, as we do today, that Everest has been climbed solo and without bottled oxygen makes the challenge less intimidating. Even with the knowledge Mallory had gained about altitude in
1921 and ’22, it remained an unsolved question whether it was humanly possible to climb to 29,000 feet and survive. Each step the climbers took above Camp VI in 1924 was a step into the terra incognita of the mind.

Sitting beside Mallory on May 1, I looked east toward the descent route he and Irvine would have taken had they summitted that June 8. I imagined Mallory’s awareness even in extremis: no radio to communicate with others, no chain of fixed ropes to guide him down the mountain, no teams of rested climbers ready to enact a rescue, no way of telling the world what really happened.

I can only guess what Mallory’s and Irvine’s last moments were like, but what I do know is how their achievement has affected our climbing legacy. The boldness of their last climb formed a stepping-stone to the future. The debate over oxygen and its ultimate acceptance made it possible for their successors—including Hillary and Tenzing—to visit high places with a reasonable safety margin.

Sometimes late at night I wonder whether by discovering Mallory I’ve aided in the destruction of a mystery. The possibility haunts me. Has my find somehow taken some of the enigmatic glory away from the 1924 expedition?

Others may think so, yet for me, the discovery only increases my admiration for these pioneer climbers, whose story—which will never be told in its entirety—has always lain wrapped in the secrets of Chomolungma, Mother Goddess of the Snows. I feel privileged to have participated in casting new light onto this mystery. Ultimately, Mallory and Irvine’s greatest achievement was an inspirational one, for even in failure, their magnificent attempt showed us what the human spirit is capable of.

DR

A
S THE SURVIVING MEMBERS
of the 1924 expedition retreated from the mountain, they engaged in long conversations about what
must have happened to their vanished friends. Even before they had left Base Camp, Teddy Norton convened a conference to discuss the matter. Every member but Odell concurred in thinking that the most likely course of events had been what indeed we now know happened: “a simple mountaineering accident—a slip and sudden death.” Odell adamantly held out for the view that the two men had delayed their return until it was too late, then had “wandered about in the darkness looking for [Camp VI] until they finally succumbed to exhaustion and exposure.”

Odell simply could not believe that Mallory would have fallen. As he wrote in
The Fight for Everest
, “It is difficult for any who knew the skill and experience of George Mallory on all kinds and conditions of mountain ground to believe that he fell, and where the difficulties to him would be so insignificant.” As for Irvine, he was “a natural adept”; in Spitsbergen, he had proven “able to move safely and easily on rock and ice.”

Their teammates puzzled incessantly over why they had seen no beam from a flashlight the night of June 8, but not until 1933 would they learn that Mallory had left his flashlight in the tent at Camp VI. Sir Francis Younghusband, in
The Epic of Mount Everest
, went so far as to surmise that, in a hopeless predicament, Mallory and Irvine might have refused to shine their flashlight out of a sense of “chivalry,” lest they draw their teammates into unnecessary danger trying to rescue them.

Norton claimed that he and Mallory had agreed on a turn-around deadline of 4:00
P.M.
Odell found it hard to reconcile his theory of benightment with this evidence of Mallory’s prudence, but concluded that his friend’s “craving for victory” had become an obsession that “may have been too strong for him.” John Noel likewise speculated, in his memoir,
The Story ofEverest:

You can imagine how Mallory’s energy of nerve, brain and muscle must have risen to the supreme effort of his life…. The goal was in their grasp. Should they turn back and lose it? … Might they not indeed throw every other thought to the wind to win such a prize?

On a moraine heap near Base Camp, Somervell and several porters built a ten-foot-high cairn memorializing the dead of all
three Everest expeditions, with their names carved into smooth slabs. From Base, Norton sent a runner off with a coded message to be cabled to London: “MALLORY IRVINE NOVE REMAINDER ALCEDO.”

This message, which has never been publicly explicated, appears to have used code words linked to possible events—just like the 1999 team’s “gorak” for “camera” and “boulder” for “body.” In 1924, the code words may have had Latin associations. “Nove” means “new” or “fresh”; in the superlative, “novissime” means “in the last place.” “Alcedo” refers to the kingfisher and, more specifically, to “the fourteen days in winter, when the kingfisher lays its eggs and the sea is calm.”