Last Hours on Everest: The gripping story of Mallory and Irvine’s fatal ascent. Graham Hoyland

      The very next day the expedition caught the first sight of the summit of Mount Everest, although it was still over 100 miles and many days march away. George Mallory’s description of that first view enchanted me as a schoolboy:

      It may seem an irony of fate that actually on the day after the distressing event of Dr. Kellas’s death we experienced the strange elation of seeing Everest for the first time … It was a prodigious white fang excrescent from the jaw of the world. We saw Mount Everest not quite sharply defined on account of a slight haze in that direction; this circumstance added a touch of mystery and grandeur; we were satisfied that the highest of mountains would not disappoint us.5

      Now Raeburn was not feeling too well either, after contracting dysentery, and then twice being rolled on by his mule, and then twice kicked in the head. The doctor Wollaston, no doubt made anxious by Kellas’s death, advised that he should return to Sikkim. I suspect Howard-Bury was privately relieved, but now the expedition had lost the only two climbers who knew anything about Himalayan mountaineering. After a long, gruelling trek across the Tibetan plateau the men of the 1921 reconnaissance were at last rewarded with their first view of the Rongbuk valley.

      I have spent many long months there and to me it now feels like a home from home, although at first the air seems thin and the sun painfully bright. The sky is electric blue and the surrounding hills are rusty brown. At the head of the valley stands the great three-sided pyramid of their quest. Now they were closer and the whole mountain was going to be revealed. Mallory’s description reads like a monstrous strip-tease:

      We caught a gleam of snow behind the grey mists. A whole group of mountains began to appear in gigantic fragments. Mountain shapes are often fantastic seen through a mist; these were like the wildest creation of a dream. A preposterous triangular lump rose out of the depths; its edge came leaping up at an angle of about 70 degrees and ended nowhere. To the left a black serrated crest was hanging in the sky incredibly. Gradually, very gradually, we saw the great mountain sides and glaciers and arêtes, now one fragment and now another through the floating rifts, until far higher in the sky than imagination had dared to suggest the white summit of Everest appeared. And in this series of partial glimpses we had seen a whole; we were able to piece together the fragments, to interpret the dream.6

      Wheeler, a tenacious and highly skilled surveyor, was using a new photographic survey technique and he did a remarkable job. He would eventually become Surveyor-General of India and be knighted for his cartographical work in the Second World War. Along with Morshead he filled in a huge blank on the map around the mountain. Meanwhile, Mallory and Bullock undertook a close-up reconnaissance of the peak. They covered hundreds of miles and took scores of photographs from minor peaks around Everest. However, Mallory had put the glass plates in the camera the wrong way around and had to repeat many of his shots. He clearly had little mechanical aptitude.

      Mallory and Bullock climbed up to the watershed between Tibet and Nepal, and peered down on to a vast icefall tumbling down a great, silent, icy valley. Mallory named it the ‘Western Cwm’, an echo of the Pen-y-Pass days in Snowdonia. This would be the way that the successful British expedition of 1953 would eventually go, but to him Nepal was still a forbidden country. It must have been so exciting, with the feeling of elation one has when going well in the mountains. Bullock, however, was beginning to feel unhappy about Mallory’s attitude to safety. His widow, writing many years later, reported:

      My husband considered Mallory ready to take unwarranted risks with still untrained porters in traversing dangerous ice. At least on one occasion he refused to take his rope of porters over the route proposed by Mallory. Mallory was not pleased. He did not support a critical difference of opinion readily.7

      This is a foretaste of the dreadful accident of 1922, when seven inexperienced porters were killed, and of the accident in 1924, when the novice Irvine was involved. As a climber I would suggest that Mallory perhaps did not know how good he was, and it should be noted that as a schoolmaster his manner of teaching was to assume equality with his pupils. This might have led to a climbing style that did not take the ability of the novices into consideration, an important point that bears on the solution to our mystery.

      On the plus side theirs was a good effort, considering the climbing party had lost Raeburn and Kellas. It might have gone down in climbing history as the most effective mountain reconnaissance ever undertaken, but Mallory and Bullock have been criticised by historians for their failure to spot that the outlet of the East Rongbuk glacier would provide a direct route up to the foot of the North Col. This is a swooping saddle that connects the North Ridge to Changtse, Everest’s neighbour to the north, and seemed to be the key to their attempts to climb the mountain from the north.

      In Into the Silence Wade Davis levels a serious accusation at George Mallory. He points out that the surveyor Wheeler had already found the crucial East Rongbuk glacier, and had sent a rough map to Howard-Bury. But Mallory suggests in the official account that it was he who found the key to the mountain by his approach from the Kharta valley, and even ‘spun the story’ to his wife Ruth in his letters home. At the very least Mallory did not give a fair acknowledgement of Wheeler’s contribution, and if Davis is right it certainly is a black mark against his name.

      From personal experience I know that people are very quick to claim all the credit on Everest expeditions. The stakes are high, and one’s better instincts are sometimes overcome by competition and bitterness. However, the historians are wrong if they think the East Rongbuk route is obvious. I was with a young climber in 2004 who had read the literature and attended the briefing at Base Camp given by the leader, who carefully explained the route the team should follow the next day. The next day I hiked up the Rongbuk valley and turned left as usual up the small glacial outflow of the East Rongbuk valley, which is a small breach in the great east wall of the main valley. I rested that evening at an interim camp. There was no sign of our youngster and we all became worried. As night fell we mounted a search party, and retraced our steps. Then came the radio call from a group of Russian climbers camped below the North Face: ‘Have you lost a climber? We have him here.’

      He