The Lost Explorer Read online

  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?”

  DR

  SOMETIME ON THE MORNING of June 8, 1924, George Mallory and Sandy Irvine set out from Camp VI, at 26,800 feet on the northeast ridge. The day before, the porters who had carried gear and food up to the camp in support of the summit bid brought down a note from Mallory, addressed to the expedition cinematographer, John Noel, who was ensconced at Camp III, more than 5,000 feet below.

  Dear Noel,

  We’ll probably start early to-morrow (8th) in order to have clear weather. It won’t be too early to start looking for us either crossing the rock band under the pyramid or going up skyline at 8.0 p.m.

  Yours ever,

  G. Mallory

  Noel had a 600 millimeter lens that the expedition members used like a telescope to track their teammates’ movements high on Everest. All subsequent commentators have assumed, as Odell did on reading the note, that Mallory’s “8:0 p.m.” was a slip of the pen, that he meant to write “8:00 A.M.” In that case, Mallory’s estimate of where he would be was exceedingly optimistic, for it was rare in the era of early Himalayan campaigns for a pair of climbers to get off from any high camp before 6:30 in the morning.

  The 1924 expedition was the third of three attempts—all British—on the world’s highest mountain; it followed a thoroughgoing reconnaissance in 1921 and a nervy assault the year after. Only Mallory had been a member of all three expeditions. Yet the weather in May 1924 had proved atrocious, defeating a very strong team’s best efforts even to put themselves in position for a summit thrust. Later the tea planters in Darjeeling would aver that for at least the previous twenty years, “no such weather had been known at this season.”

  Then, with the climbers’ hopes all but extinguished, the mountain had laid a spell of grace upon them, giving them day after day of fine weather, although the men woke each morning dreading the onset of the inevitable monsoon, which, normally arriving around June 1, would enfold the Himalaya in a four-month miasma of heavy snow.

  As Mallory and Irvine closed their canvas tent and headed along the windswept ridge, they were full of a bursting anticipation. Only four days before, their teammate E. F. “Teddy” Norton, at the end of a gallant effort, had reached 28,126 feet—the highest anyone had ever climbed—before turning back a mere 900 feet below the summit. Norton had made his gutsy push without the aid of bottled oxygen. Mallory and Irvine were breathing gas, and though Mallory had initially been a skeptic about its efficacy, on the 1922 expedition he had learned firsthand that climbers aided by oxygen high on Everest could easily double
the climbing speed of those without.

  On the 1924 assault, as he had during the two previous expeditions, Mallory had proven himself the strongest and most ambitious climber. By now, his personal obsession with Everest had cranked as tight as it could be wound. In a letter to his wife, Ruth, written six weeks before from Chiblung, on the approach to Everest, he had predicted, “It is almost unthinkable … that I shan’t get to the top; I can’t see myself coming down defeated.”

  If his twenty-two-year-old companion was daunted by Mallory’s hubris, he gave no indication of it. In his diary only four days before his own attempt, awaiting the outcome of Teddy Norton’s bold summit bid with teammate Howard Somervell, Irvine had written, “I hope they’ve got to the top, but by God, I’d like to have a whack at it myself.”

  Ever since 1924, observers have wondered why Mallory chose Irvine as his partner for the second summit attempt, rather than the far more experienced Noel Odell, who had rounded into incomparable form at high altitude during the preceding week. Irvine had very little climbing experience, with only an exploratory outing in Spitsbergen under his belt. (In a letter to Ruth, Mallory had voiced a qualm, “I wish Irvine had had a season in the Alps.”) But on Everest, the Oxford undergraduate had proved to be tougher than several of his more seasoned comrades, an uncomplaining worker, and a delightful companion. He was also something of a mechanical genius, who had taken apart the oxygen apparatus in the field and rebuilt it in a lighter and more efficient form. And since oxygen would be the key to Mallory’s all-out dash for the summit, it made sense to have Irvine along.

  That day, June 8, 1924, among the rest of the team, only Odell, climbing solo up to Camp VI in support of the summit duo, was high on the mountain. A professional geologist, he had chosen the day to wander in zigzags up the north face, looking for unusual formations. By late morning, he was swimming in a private ecstasy, for there, in one of the most barren places on earth, he had discovered the first fossils ever found on Everest.

  At 12:50 in the afternoon, Odell mounted a small crag around 26,000 feet just as the clouds abruptly cleared. Squinting upward, he was treated to the brief vision that has beguiled and tantalized all Everest students since. As Odell later wrote:

  I saw the whole summit ridge and final peak of Everest unveiled. I noticed far away on a snow slope leading up to what seemed to me to be the last step but one from the base of the final pyramid, a tiny object moving and approaching the rock step. A second object followed, and then climbed to the top of the step…. I could see that they were moving expeditiously as if endeavouring to make up for lost time.

  Then the clouds closed over the scene. Odell climbed on to Camp VI, where he found, to his mild alarm, pieces of oxygen equipment strewn about the tent, suggesting that Irvine had perhaps made some desperate last-minute adjustment to the apparatus. And Odell was disturbed that he had seen his pair of friends still well below the summit pyramid at almost 1:00 P.M., or five hours after Mallory’s blithe prediction. An afternoon snow squall cleared, but now Odell could see no signs of human presence on the upper ridge, bathed in warm sunlight. He scrambled some 200 feet above the camp, whistling and yodeling in case Mallory and Irvine should be nearing it on their descent. Then, with a heavy heart, Odell headed down the mountain, as Mallory had ordered him to, for the small tent at Camp VI could not hold three climbers.

  During the next two days, in an astonishing performance, Odell climbed first to Camp V, then alone all the way back up to Camp VI. When he found the tent exactly as he had left it on June 8, he knew the worst. He laid two sleeping bags in the snow in a figure T—the prearranged signal to a teammate watching below that all hope was lost.

  DURING THE SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS after the 1924 expedition retreated from the mountain, only two further pieces of hard information cast any light on the mystery of Mallory and Irvine’s fate, but each was as tantalizing as Odell’s vision of the twin figures outlined against the sky. In 1933, on the first expedition to Everest after Mallory’s, Percy Wyn Harris found an ice axe lying on a rock slab, 250 yards short of what had come to be called the First Step—thus considerably below where the pair had been at the time of Odell’s 12:50 sighting. Plainly the axe belonged to either Mallory or Irvine, but as a piece of evidence, it was maddeningly ambiguous. Had one of the climbers dropped it during the ascent? Or had it been deliberately laid aside, as unnecessary on the mostly rocky terrain that stretched above? Or, more ominously, did it mark the site of a fatal accident on the descent, as one man dropped the axe to make a futile effort to belay his falling partner?

  From 1938, the year of the last British prewar expedition, to 1960, when a Chinese team claimed to make the first ascent of Everest from the north, the Tibetan side of the mountain went virtually unvisited. It was not until 1979 that China first granted permission to foreigners to approach the mountain through its “province” of Tibet. That year, the second tantalizing clue to Mallory and Irvine’s demise came to light.

  The climbing leader of a Sino-Japanese expedition, Ryoten Hasegawa, had a provocative conversation with one of its Chinese members, Wang Hongbao. Wang told Hasegawa that four years earlier, in 1975, during the second Chinese attack on Everest, he had gone out for a short walk from Camp VI, near 27,000 feet. Within twenty minutes of leaving his tent, he had come across the body of a fallen climber. It was, he insisted, “an old English dead.” The man’s clothes had turned to dust and blown away in the winds of the decades. He was lying on his side, and one of his cheeks had been pecked away by goraks.

  Between Hasegawa’s Japanese and Wang’s Chinese, the conversation took place in a linguistic muddle. Hasegawa wondered whether the dead man could have been a Russian from a long-rumored (and now debunked) secret 1952 attempt, on which six climbers were supposed to have died; but Wang vigorously demurred, repeating “English, English!”

  Hasegawa realized that the body might well have been that of Mallory or Irvine. But before he could question Wang further, only a day after sharing his startling confidence, the Chinese climber died when he was avalanched into a crevasse, leaving a profound enigma in his wake.

  During the last two decades, scores of expeditions have attacked Everest from the north. All of them have kept their eyes peeled for any further sign of the lost climbers, to no avail. An American mountaineer-historian, Tom Holzel, became obsessed with the puzzle, and after extensive research and inquiry, narrowed down the area of search to a large quadrangle on the north face, below the ridge route Mallory and Irvine had essayed. In 1986, Holzel organized the first expedition with the goal of systematically searching for the vanished pair. The team included such first-rate climbers as David Breashears, Sue Giller, and Dave Cheesmond, but terrible weather thwarted their efforts to go higher than 26,100 feet—nearly a thousand feet below Holzel’s search zone. (In retrospect, it would become clear that a search in the autumn season, such as the 1986 team conducted, was doomed to failure because of the vast quantities of snow the summer-long monsoon inevitably dumps.)

  Before the expedition, Holzel had synthesized all his research in a house-of-cards hypothesis that he laid out in the concluding chapter of First on Everest: The Mystery of Mallory& Irvine (co-authored with Audrey Salkeld). According to Holzel, Mallory and Irvine faced the realization that they would run out of bottled oxygen well below the summit. Mallory was, in Holzel’s view, the stronger climber, Irvine perhaps intimidated by a challenge well beyond any he had previously faced. In any event, Irvine gave his remaining gas to his partner, then descended as Mallory headed solo for the summit.

  Carried away by his own theorizing, Holzel wrote as if recording solid history, not educated guess:

  Splitting up at 1 P.M., Mallory quickly raced up the final pyramid of Everest’s summit. Irvine returned past the First Step and started his descending traverse of the North Face slabs…. Perhaps after numerous small slips, each caught in time, Irvine lost control as both his feet shot out from under him. Turning to catch himself with his ice axe, it wr
enched out of his exhausted grip. He tumbled 1,000 feet to the snow terrace below.

  Holzel was further convinced that Mallory reached the summit, only to die of hypothermia in the bivouac he could not have avoided, or in a fall, perhaps all the way to the Rongbuk Glacier.

  In the years after 1986, most informed observers questioned Holzel’s assertion that Mallory had made the summit. But the notion of the two climbers splitting up, with Irvine dropping his axe and slipping to his death on the north face, came to be a kind of received wisdom. The body that Wang Hongbao had found near Camp VI, then, had to be Irvine’s. It was for this reason that all five searchers last May, as they stared at the “marble statue” lying frozen face down in the scree, assumed they were looking at Sandy Irvine.

  To settle for good the all-important question of whether Mallory and/or Irvine reached the summit in 1924, only two possibilities loom. The first is that some relic—a piece of gear, a keepsake, or a note unmistakably belonging to one of the men—might be found on or near the top. But the hundreds of successful summitteers over the last forty-six years have never found anything of that kind. (Looking for traces of predecessors in 1953, Edmund Hillary peered down the north ridge and declared it unclimbable.)

  The other possibility touches on the kind of wild surmise normally found only in the pages of Conan Doyle. We know that Mallory carried a Kodak Vestpocket camera. If the camera could be found, and the film, deep-frozen since 1924, could be developed, a photo clearly taken from the summit—an image of such mountains as Ama Dablam or Lhotse, for instance, invisible from anywhere on Everest’s north face—would clinch the case. (In 1897, a three-man Swedish expedition led by Salomon Andrée, attempting to balloon to the North Pole, vanished in the Arctic. Thirty-three years later, the men’s bodies were found on remote White Island. The pictures in the men’s camera, perfectly preserved, delivered a vivid testament to the trio’s last days and to the mishaps that doomed them.)