The frozen graveyard

The moonscape steeps above 25,000 feet on Mount Everest are a death zone. Most of the 130 climbers who have succumbed in the attempt on the summit lie there in various states of exposure to the elements, in an open graveyard.

Earlier this month, the well-organized, American "Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition," led by Eric Simonson, stepped over a couple of more recent human remains in the pinpointed search area before they found those of George Mallory, half buried in scree and ice at 27,000 feet for 75 years.

The ambitious English climber, participating in his third Everest expedition in three years, had apparently broken a leg in falling and then sliding down a snow slope to a terrace. There, he arrested his fall, clutching at the ice with outstretched arms. Crossing his broken leg over the good one, face down, unable to move, he awaited death. It came soon.

The body was found with skin on the back exposed, frozen, bleached white as marble, wrapped with tattered remains of his tweed climbing suit, several layers of woolen and cotton underclothing, leather hobnailed boots, and a hemp rope round his waist. Some important questions – how and where did Mallory die? – had been answered. It’s still not known whether, as some believe, Mallory reached the peak of Everest twenty-nine years prior to those who first did and lived to tell about it, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.

The myth of Mallory

The shock and wonder of this news rattled me, for Mallory figures romantically in my personal myth from childhood. As a ten-year-old in the fifties, I discovered among my clergyman father’s books a set of three blue, cloth-bound volumes describing the 1924 English assault on Everest, led by Edward Norton.

I can still feel the weight of those books and the smoothness of their covers, as though I were fingering my way again to the photo plate included near the end of volume three – capturing the snowy ridge up which Mallory and his younger, stronger climbing partner, Andrew Irvine, disappeared into a descending cloud, shortly after noon on June 8, 1924.

That scene and the mystery associated with it – did they reach the summit or not before they paid the ultimate price in attempting that ultimate goal? – seeded my imagination.

Had I not been affected by this story as a youth, I might not have climbed the peaks along the Long Trail in Vermont, then Mt. Washington, then Kilimanjaro, where I discovered what oxygen deprivation feels like, and then Olympus just last year. My life, at fifty-five, might not have included as much adventure and travel as it has.

With shabby equipment by today’s standards, Mallory (38) and Irvine (22, a Cambridge double Blue in rowing and squash) disappeared not only into the cloud but into the myth they became for the rest of us. Perhaps the still missing Kodak will provide evidence that they reached the top. Perhaps it will remain lost.

I prefer not to know. I have spent most of my life not knowing. It’s a happier state of mind than one reduced by conclusive proof of their success or failure.

Mallory attacked Everest "because it was there." Does anyone not know this phrase and where it came from? The simplicity of this response, apparently brushing off a pesky journalist, compounded the magic of Mallory for me as a youth. Joining others before and after me, I have read into it an appealing expression of the freedom of the human spirit, and of the uncanny in human aspiration.

The cult of Mallory

Like well-educated, socially privileged Englishmen of earlier generations, Mallory inherited an aristocratic tradition of sprezzatura and noblesse oblige (inspired amateurism and underplayed heroic derring-do, shaped by a certain obligation of nobility). This disinterested aspiration to heights and accomplishments unknown closely resembles the Olympic ideal of citius, altius, fortius (faster, higher, stronger).

Mallory came from a long line of clergymen in Mobberley, Cheshire, and claimed descent from Thomas Malory, author of the fifteenth-century Le Morte d’Arthur. At Magdalene College, Cambridge, from 1905 to 1909, the literati (later to become known as the Bloomsbury group) idolized Mallory for his good looks. For his physique, his athletic interest in mountain-climbing, his literary interests, and his family background, he was dubbed "Galahad."

A stained-glass window dedicated by family and friends to "George Herbert Leigh Leigh-Mallory" in the 750-year-old St. Wilfrid’s in Mobberley depicts the figures of King Arthur, St. George (patron saint of England), and Sir Galahad, collectively symbolizing qualities in Mallory. The peaks of Everest are cast behind a scene of King Arthur’s demise. In death, Mallory lived up to a high romantic legacy.

At Cambridge in the first decade of the century, worship of Mallory’s physical beauty occasionally found overheated expression. In 1909, Lytton Strachey, corresponding with Clive Bell, wrote: "Mon dieu – George Mallory! – When that’s been written, what more need be said? My hand trembles, my heart palpitates, my whole being swoons away at the words – oh heavens! heavens! ... he’s six foot high – the mystery of Botticelli, the refinement and delicacy of a Chinese print, the youth and piquancy of an unimaginable English boy." Mallory’s "profound respect" for Strachey’s intellect was returned by a different kind of feeling stirred in the writer six years his elder. Leonard Woolf remembered Strachey’s gushing, "His body – vast, pale, unbelievable – is a thing to melt into and die." Before Mallory married at twenty-eight and went on to produce three children whom he adored, he posed nude for paintings and photographs by another gay friend, Duncan Grant. (See Richard Shone’s Bloomsbury Portraits.)

For me, knowledge of Mallory’s immersion, perhaps over his head, as an undergraduate in a liminal atmosphere of ambiguous sexuality subtracts nothing from his legend. If anything, I appreciate the ironies as I peer first into a photo of him then, aesthetically posed naked at age twenty-seven, another of him with his wife Ruth, and this latest of his partially-clad preserved remains eighty-six years later. The body has been re-interred under a cairn of rock by the Simonson Expedition.

A Mallory moment

I thought of Mallory last September on the second day of a two-day attempt on Mt. Olympus in Greece. The wind blew a gale from the west over the brow of a shoulder in the massif, above which I hoped I might glimpse the final summit heights. My wife had thought better of it and stopped an hour before to wait for me below. The wind was steady and immense. The going was impossibly slow, and dangerous for me alone on a bare slope. A climber descending told me a party of Germans ahead had already packed it in for the day.

Crouching out of the wind behind the only boulder along the path, I decided to retreat. To get both my wife and me off the mountain before dark, to live to climb again another day.