The Good Company of the Dead
The discovery of George Mallory's broken body on the north face of Everest inspires a reexploration of the brilliant climber's poetic soul

By Mark Jenkins

So George Mallory, perhaps the most famous mountaineer in history, has been found. Lost on Mount Everest on June 8, 1924, his body was discovered at 27,000 feet by the Mallory & Irvine Research Expedition in early May.

By now everyone has seen the at once macabre and glorious photograph of Mallory's corpse high on the north face: his fingers still clenched in a death grip with the mountain, head bent in determination, right leg broken, clothes ripped off his torso, exposing his back to a lashing from the wind. Oddly, Mallory's bare back is unmarked, as milky and muscled as Michelangelo's David. With faith and hubris, woefully underequipped for a battle at high altitude, armed with little more than a length of rope, a straight-picked ax, and hobnailed boots, Mallory—the Brit who, for better or worse, gave climbing its most famous koan, "Because it is there"—had set out to scale the highest peak on Earth, and perished in the attempt.

Did he, with or without his climbing partner, Andrew Irvine, reach the 29,028- foot summit of Everest 29 years before Hillary and Tenzing? Or did he die trying? In mountaineering circles these have been the great imponderables for three generations, and we still don't know the answers. Definitive evidence—film from a Kodak Vest Pocket camera that Mallory was said to be carrying, or a notebook—was not found. Betting on a long shot, this spring's Mallory & Irvine Research Expedition successfully added large pieces to the puzzle, but the mystery remains.

When the news broke, my first response was surprise. I'd spoken to expedition leader Eric Simonson before his departure, and he'd been cautiously optimistic about its goals. Having attempted the north face of Everest, I'd been hopeful but skeptical about their chances of finding much.

My second response was dread: Once again, mountaineering and its beleaguered poster child Everest would be shoved into the limelight. Others also felt this fear and loathing. For some, the photograph alone was a measure of how low the press would stoop to entertain the ghoulish voyeurism of the public. "I'm absolutely appalled by this," said the great 65-year-old British mountaineer Sir Chris Bonington. "Words can't express how disgusted I am." Audrey Salkeld, coauthor of First On Everest: The Mystery of Mallory & Irvine, said, "I'm horrified it's got to this stage." Such responses struck me as unconsidered but understandable—a visceral disgust in the face of what appeared to be the sensationalizing and thus trivializing of Mallory's accomplishments and fate.

Expecting the worst, I fired up my computer to read the real-time reports on MountainZone, one of the sponsors of the Mallory & Irvine Research Expedition. "Our expedition was formed to pay homage to these great British climbers," wrote Simonson, "and I can only say again that I have always revered the world's brave explorers, and that I am humbled and honored." Conrad Anker, the climber who found the body, declared that Mallory seemed "at peace with himself.... There was something very, very subtle about his being there, not really scary and violent." Andy Politz, another expedition member, wrote, "The image that'll stick in my mind forever is of a man fighting for his life right to the very end."

I was taken aback by these expressions of respect. The team members seemed moved, uplifted by their experience—and visitors to the Web site's online forum reacted in kind.

"I usually think of the mountains I've climbed as 'tests,'" one climber wrote. "Tests of my resolve. Tests of my physical conditioning. Tests of my spirit. And there's usually been a test of my morality and integrity and depth of friendship that pops up on every outing. These are all things that deserve periodic testing, and climbing is a great way to do that. One doesn't pass any of the above tests without keeping his or her ego reined in pretty tight."

One writer blasted climbing Everest, and by implication climbing in general, as just an ego trip. Two opposite but equally powerful online rebuttals: "Ego shmeego, people do it because it's fun and rewarding." And "I'm no expert, but I think it's a bit short-sighted to say that it's done for ego.... Explaining why someone dares the difficult is similar to trying to explain why you fall in love or why your heart aches when a loved one leaves...just not an easy thing to explain. I also believe that by climbing high mountains or by doing anything adventurous, people contribute to the human experience."

A few of the messages were adolescent, a few asinine, but many were as plain and poignant as those above. Somehow, even in the aftermath of the 1996 Everest debacle and its never-ending exploitation, most people still believe that trying to climb Everest is a noble pursuit: "Because it is there." After 75 years, Everest remains a kind of metaphor for itself. But is that what Mallory believed?

From his earliest childhood in the 1890s, George Mallory was a preternatural climber. Growing up in the Cheshire countryside, the minister's son "climbed everything that it was at all possible to climb," recalled his sister, Avie. "I learnt very early that it was fatal to tell him that any tree was impossible for him to get up."

When there were no trees, Mallory climbed buildings. As an adolescent he would slip out of windows and traverse tight-mortared British brick—"buildering," three generations before the word was coined. He free-climbed the tower of the Abbey of Romsey and the tower of the Chamber Court of Winchester. Years later, on a trip to America, he was photographed climbing the fire escape of a New York skyscraper upside down.

Born into an upper-middle-class family in 1886, Mallory attended Winchester School, then Magdalene College, Cambridge. He was a good student but an outstanding athlete who excelled in gymnastics. At Cambridge he grew his hair long, read poetry, studied literature, and escaped to the mountains at every opportunity. He was as handsome as a Greek god and painfully idealistic; among the Cambridge circle of climbers he was called Sir Galahad. He made his first trip to the Swiss Alps at the age of 18 and climbed for a month. At the time, climbing without a guide was considered reckless. Mallory paid no heed, and in the years to come he would return to the Alps again and again. Even after he became a dedicated teacher at Charterhouse, a public school in Godalming, England, climbing trips remained a way of life. "How to get the best of it all?" Mallory wrote in his journal after summiting Mont Blanc in 1911. "One must conquer, achieve, get to the top; one must know the end to be convinced that one can win the end—to know there's no dream that mustn't be dared."

Even if his words strained toward the transcendental, Mallory's innate mastery of movement on rock came effortlessly. "He was prudent, according to his own standards," said one female admirer, "but his standards were not those of the ordinary medium-good rock-climber. The fact was that difficult rocks had become to him a perfectly normal element; his prodigious reach, his great strength, and his admirable technique, joined in a sort of cat-like agility, made him feel completely secure on rocks so difficult as to fill less competent climbers with a sense of hazardous enterprise."

"Watching George at work," wrote a friend who climbed with Mallory in Switzerland, "one was conscious not so much of physical strength as of suppleness and balance; so rhythmical and harmonious was his progress in any steep place, above all on slabs, that his movements appeared almost serpentine in their smoothness."

His grace and fluidity are peculiarly telling, for climbing to Mallory was the physical counterbalance to a vigorous intellectual life. Mallory could become intoxicated by the beauty of a collection of Chinese paintings, or debate the merits of Gauguin or Cezanne straight through the night. Mountaineering, too, was essentially an aesthetic experience. Climbers "notoriously endanger their lives," he wrote in the Climber's Club Journal in March 1914. "With what object? If only for some physical pleasure, to enjoy certain movements of the body and to experience the zest of emulation, then it is not worthwhile.... The only defense for mountaineering puts it on a higher plane than mere physical sensation.... Sunrises and sunsets and clouds and thunder are not incidental to mountaineering, but a vital and inseparable part of it; they are not ornamental, but structural."

That same year, after just four months of intense epistolary courtship, Mallory married Ruth Turner, a woman of Botticellian beauty. This daughter of an architect who lived across the valley from Charterhouse "saw with great clarity the things that mattered and spoke with sometimes startling honesty," according to Mallory's best biographer, David Robertson. Their first child, a girl, was born a year later. When she was six months old, Mallory went to war.

Mallory was a gunner in the trenches north of Armentieres, France. Men were blown apart all around him; men died of tuberculosis and gangrene. As they would throughout the brief decade of their marriage, Ruth wrote letters to George, and George wrote letters to Ruth: "I had a horrible experience yesterday: two of my party killed by a shell on the way back from the trenches... I had no clear idea where the shell exploded, but looked back to see if the two were all right and saw the reel of wire by the side of the trench." Ruth wrote back long letters describing the everyday goings-on of the family. Their clarity comforted George.

Purely by luck, Mallory survived World War I. "Life presents itself very much as a gift," he wrote to his father from France at the end of 1918. "If I haven't escaped so many chances of death as plenty of others, still it is surprising to find myself a survivor, and it's not a lot I have always wanted. There has been so much to be said for being in the good company of the dead."

Mallory came home in 1919 and resumed teaching literature at Charterhouse. It was inevitable, after he found his feet again, that he would return to climbing. He put up new routes in Wales and Switzerland; after one ascent he described how he used the pick of his ax in a thin crack to surmount a difficulty—in other words, "dry tooling." Such virtuosity made him an obvious choice for the first two-part Everest expedition.

Mountaineering was still in its infancy in the 1920s. The tools and techniques of the sport were primitive, courage paramount. Mountaineers climbed on short lengths of weak rope without protection. Falls were frequently fatal. Little had changed since British climber Edward Whymper led his successful but ill-starred expedition to the top of the "unclimbable" Matterhorn in 1865—the most famous climbing disaster until Mallory died on Everest. (Four members of Whymper's seven-man team died on the descent.) Though most of the relatively easy peaks in the Alps had been climbed by 1920—and Kilimanjaro, Aconcagua, and McKinley had been summited via their least intimidating slopes—the vast majority of the world's summits were still untested. For an alpinist, the biggest blank on the map was the Himalayas. Only a few of the range's hundreds of high mountains had been climbed, and none of its 14 peaks over 8,000 meters had ever been seriously attempted.

Though Everest had been determined to be the highest mountain on Earth in 1852 by the Survey of India, geopolitical problems had prevented close inspection for over half a century. The Tibetans called the immense massif of the Greater Himalayas Chomolungma, "Goddess Mother of the World." The Survey had labeled it Peak XV, but it was officially named Everest in 1865, the year of Appomattox and of the Matterhorn tragedy, in honor of Sir George Everest, the Surveyor General of India.

In the aftermath of World War I, Everest was "the third Pole," the still unattained zenith of adventure in a world where the North and South Poles had at last been conquered. Sponsored by the Royal Geographic Society and the Alpine Club, the plan was for two expeditions, one in 1921 as a reconnaissance, one in 1922 to attempt an ascent. Mallory considered turning down the opportunity. By now, he had two young daughters and a five-month-old son. Everest was an enormous commitment. Each expedition would take six months, three times longer than the average Himalayan expedition of today: two months sailing to and from, two months trekking in and out, two months on or near the mountain. Even so, Mallory and Ruth concluded that he had to go.

On the 1921 expedition, one of the four climbers died of exhaustion on the trek in, and a second, also suffering from exhaustion, was ordered back. Mallory explored, climbed minor peaks, and helped map the northern approach to Everest. The mountain, he wrote, had "the most stupendous ridges and appalling precipices that I have ever seen." In 1922, Mallory made it to 26,800 feet without oxygen and two other climbers went to 27,235 with oxygen, both records. But these feats came at a horrible cost: Seven porters died in an avalanche, and half the climbing team became severely frostbitten.

"It's an infernal mountain," Mallory wrote from base camp at the end of the second expedition, "cold and treacherous. Frankly the game is not good enough; the risks of getting caught are too great; the margin of strength when men are at great height is too small."

Back home, Mallory set out on a five-month lecture tour through England and North America, where he spoke in New York, Washington, Montreal, Philadelphia, Toledo, Buffalo, Chicago, and Iowa City. He made friends among American climbers but was exasperated with the press. One reporter, he wrote to Ruth, "wanted me to say that the great mountaineers of the expedition were all men of scientific training, or that mental training had more to do with the matter than physique. Can you imagine anything more childish? But I expect that is just what Americans are."

In March 1923, near the end of his American tour, a weary Mallory was questioned by a New York Times reporter, who, like so many others, wanted a simple answer: Why climb Everest? "Because it is there." And thus the most famous statement in mountaineering history was probably little more than a throwaway remark Mallory contrived for a press unwilling to take the time to listen to more complicated explanations.

In 1924, for the third time in four years, Mallory left for Everest. "How thrilled you must be to be going out again!" an admirer exclaimed. Mallory's response: "You know I am leaving my wife and young children behind me."

"I don't expect to come back," he confided to an old friend from Cambridge. The trip would be "more like war than mountaineering."

He knew what was in store for him—the cold, the fatigue, the wind. So why did he go? For Mallory it was not simply about being the first. "I have not been on these two expeditions to witness the spectacle of myself breaking a record," he said in one of his lectures. "In the whole scale of values, clearly, I think, records of this sort can't weigh in the balance against the serious work of everyday life."

Mallory's truest answer is one that is neither cryptic nor wholly explicable: Climbing had become his art. Like any artist who gradually moves toward greater and greater challenges, and through this process defines himself and interprets the world around him, Mallory had reached Everest through a lifelong love of mountaineering—from the first thrill of climbing to the slow accretion of acumen and insight through hundreds of nights on the ground and days on the snow. Mallory could no more have abandoned climbing than Picasso could have abandoned painting.

"I suppose we go to Mount Everest, granted the opportunity, because—in a word—we can't help it," he told an audience in America. "Or, to state the matter rather differently, because we are mountaineers.... To refuse the adventure is to run the risk of drying up like a pea in its shell."

Not long after Mallory was lost on Everest, his wife wrote to a friend of the family, "I know George did not mean to be killed; he meant not to be so hard.... I don't think I do feel that his death makes me the least more proud of him. It is his life that I loved and love. I know so absolutely that he could not have failed in courage or self-sacrifice. Whether he got to the top of the mountain or did not, whether he lived or died, makes no difference to my admiration for him."