The Lost Explorer (9 page)

I felt we should aim for the publication with the highest credibility, in hopes that it would put the most positive spin on mountaineering. Climbers get maligned all too often. Every time some drunk falls off a road cut, the media call it a climbing accident. Or people see
Cliffhanger
, and they think that’s what climbing’s all about. I make my living at climbing, and I’m very sensitive about how our sport is portrayed. I didn’t want our expedition
to be seen as a bunch of thrill seekers or treasure hunters.

For the same reason, when the guys talked about what they’d do with the money, I said that I planned to give mine to some charity that would help out the people of Tibet. I was always mindful of how fortunate I was to be here climbing on this great mountain, which we couldn’t have done, for instance, without the help of our Tibetan yak herders. I’m comfortable with the living I make climbing. I saw the find as a way to generate goodness.

In the end, the photo went to the highest bidder. Newsweek won the auction in the U.S.; for a while, we were hearing numbers upward of $14,000, though in the end they may have paid a lot less. Unfortunately, in the U.K. and Australia tabloid newspapers won out.

For about a week, however, we were flying high—everybody seemed happy about our discovery, everyone showered us with congratulations. Then we began to hear the first notes of discord. They came principally out of Britain, and we were shocked when we learned that what we had done at 26,700 feet had elicited not only praise, but savage criticism.

DR

T
HE NEWS ABOUT
M
ALLORY
indeed galvanized the world.
Newsweek
ran a responsible story with its exclusive photo of the mummified body, but refused at first to pay for the picture, because
Time
had “bootlegged” the same image, running a picture of the cover of the Australian paper that had broken the story, complete with “exclusive” photo. Unfortunately, the British and Australian tabloids covered the discovery with all the sensitivity of a two-headed baby tale or Princess Di séance.

At first, even among seasoned mountaineers, there was great excitement about the possibility that the find lent credence to the notion that Mallory and Irvine had reached the summit. Andy Politz’s insight—that Mallory’s having put his
goggles in his pocket meant that the accident had come at dusk or after—got all too easily translated into a scenario in which the pair fell as they descended after reaching the top.

Thus the German magazine
Stern
, running its own exclusive, titled its cover story, above a portrait of Mallory inset against a Himalayan ice scape, “War er der Erste?”—“Was he the first?”
Stern
also was at pains to portray its own country’s fair-haired boy, Jochen Hemmleb, as the genius behind the discovery: a call-out from the article read, “Directed by the German over the radio, the search-troop found the dead body.”

By May 3, only two days after the find,
NOVA
had an interview with David Breashears up on its Web site. The director and cinematographer of the groundbreaking Everest IMAX film, as well as of a 1987 documentary called
Everest: The Mystery of Mallory and Irvine
, Breashears had been to the mountain on fourteen expeditions, summitting four times. He said, “I think it’s incredibly exciting that they’ve finally found George Mallory’s body.” Breashears went on to speculate that it was not surprising the camera wasn’t found with Mallory, for it would have made more sense that Irvine would be in charge of taking pictures of the leader—“the man of Everest … George Mallory.” Breashears held out hope that a subsequent search would come up not only with Irvine’s body, but with the camera that could solve the mystery for good. He closed with a tribute in the same vein as Conrad Anker’s awe-struck pensée as he had sat beside Mallory’s body: “All those years that I’ve been going to Everest … thinking about these incredible men trying for the summit of Everest in 1924, in cotton wind suits and tweed jackets, for me, I feel a bit reassured and a bit resolved that we know where George Mallory is.”

Breashears later vividly took issue with the Hemmleb- as-director spin on the story: “All Hemmleb did was feed some data into the computer and think he’d reinvented information. Mallory wasn’t a dot on the ocean floor, and those guys weren’t submersibles. Conrad Anker was the only real climber on the team. The reason they found Mallory is because Conrad used his climber’s eye to figure out where to look.”

At first, especially in England, the discovery was hailed as a splendid event, renewing the nation’s sense of pride in its Everest pioneers. “Admiration grows with hindsight,” editorialized
the
Times
of London. “Mallory was in a long tradition of English adventurers and sportsmen whose nonchalance and gentlemanly demeanor masked fierce ambition.”

“There remains something wonderful about the spirit of play,” echoed the
Guardian
, “that carries people into contests where there is no material reward, no point but the thing itself.”

With the publication of the photos—the one showing Mallory’s bare back, his fingers clawing at the scree, his face frozen into the ground, the other zooming in on the man’s vulnerable, naked left leg cradling the hopelessly fractured right one—another note emerged in the public response. Some viewers found an eerie fascination in the images, like Boris Johnson of the
Daily Telegraph
, who wrote, “Something about these pictures causes the nape to prickle. Not that they are gruesome: no, there is something about that bleached torso which is already sculptural, at one remove.”

Yet other commentators, including some of the most famous climbers in the world, were outraged by the publication of the photos. “I’m absolutely appalled by this. Words can’t express how disgusted I am…. These people don’t deserve to be called climbers,” Sir Chris Bonington told the London
Observer
. Bonington had led the landmark 1975 first ascent of the southwest face of Everest, then, ten years later, had become at fifty the oldest man to summit (though his record stood for only nine days). Sir Edmund Hillary, whose first response had been positive, changed his mind, deploring the notion that “the expedition members should flog off the photograph of this heroic figure.”

Mallory’s grandson George Mallory II, who had climbed Everest by the north ridge in 1995, weighed in: “Frankly, it makes me bloody angry…. It’s like digging for diamonds, without having to do any of the digging.”

Even Audrey Salkeld, who had spent years becoming the leading expert on Mallory, and who was serving as a consultant on the
NOVA
film, was disturbed: “I’m horrified it’s got to this stage,” she told the
Observer
. “I feel very uncomfortable about it.”

Eric Simonson had maintained that all the expedition’s actions at the site, down to the taking of the DNA sample, had
been approved beforehand by someone in the Mallory family. In Santa Rosa, California, however, Clare Millikan, at eighty-three the eldest of Mallory’s three children, was upset that nobody from the expedition had contacted her before the discovery.

Had the team set forth last spring on a traditional expedition, all this public response would have emerged only after they had returned to the U.S. to report their great find. But now, thanks to the satellite phone and the Internet, even as they rested at Base Camp, with other important goals still to pursue, the party was plunged into the midst of the controversy. Here lay another peculiar twist to what might be called postmodern exploration: the reaction of a worldwide audience to an adventure still in the process of unfolding could determine crucial turns in the course of that adventure.

Another by-product of this postmodern expedition’s self-narration in “real time” was a certain aesthetic loss, compared to the chronicles of earlier exploits on Everest. After each of the 1921, 1922, and 1924 expeditions, the members labored for months to compile monumental volumes recounting their journeys. Those books—
Mount Everest: The Reconnaissance, 1921;The Assault on Mount Everest, 1922;
and
The Fight for Everest
—have become classics. Chapters by Mallory, Noel Odell, and Teddy Norton contain some of the canonic passages in the rich literature of mountaineering.

By contrast, in the flurry of MountainZone dispatches in which the teammates struggled to express their feelings on May 1, 1999, they managed to produce only inarticulate outbursts of enthusiasm. “We just came down from the search area,” reported Jake Norton, “and it was a pretty interesting time.” “I’m still blown away by yesterday,” offered Dave Hahn: “we found George Mallory and it was an incredible day.” “It was really neat to be there with George Mallory,” gushed Tap Richards. The usually thoughtful Conrad Anker came up with the lame aperçu, “He had been there quite a while, and there was something very, very subtle about his being there, not really scary and violent.” (Compare Odell’s musing on Mallory going all-out for the summit, in The
Fight for Everest:
“And who of us that has wrestled with some Alpine giant in the teeth of a gale, or in a race with the darkness, could hold back when
such a victory, such a triumph of human endeavour, was within our grasp?”)

No doubt the 1999 team’s blatherings were merely the detritus of the age of the sound bite. But the lack of opportunity to reflect on a powerful experience, along with the fact that, thanks to the Internet, everything the team did and blurted out was at once available for public consumption, helped power the emotional roller coaster the expedition now rode.

It had simply never occurred to Simonson and his partners that photographing and filming the corpse, or rifling through its pockets, might provoke disapproval. Now the angry and critical reaction from mountaineering heroes such as Bonington and Hillary deeply dismayed the team. Eric Simonson called a group meeting to discuss what Anker had dubbed the “dissonance.” One upshot of that conference surfaced when Simonson announced, in a post-expedition press conference, that all profits from the sale of Mallory photos would go not into the pockets of team members, but to “Himalayan charities to be determined later.”

The members were only beginning to recognize the fact that extremely knotty legal tangles might well hang over the “artifacts” and the letters, which they hoped to carry back to the States. To whom did the stuff ultimately belong? Was it a case of finders keepers; were the team members, in Anker’s pithy phrase, “the Mel Fishers of high-altitude climbing,” treating Mallory like a long-lost Spanish galleon? Or did Mallory’s estate have a prior claim? Someone in England had come forth to argue that the gear found with Mallory belonged to the companies that had originally sponsored the 1924 expedition. As for the letters and notes and the right to publish their contents, which copyright laws applied? The Chinese or Tibetan regulations of today, or Britain’s in 1924?

Through the Internet, the team learned about the debacle of the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by NATO planes, and about the rabid anti-American protests that act had provoked in China. The fear grew among the members that, as they made their way out of Tibet, Chinese authorities might confiscate the artifacts. For that reason, Simonson did not at first tell the team’s Han Chinese liaison officer about finding Mallory. (The man learned of the discovery only by listening
to Chinese radio.) And when trekker Shellene Scott left Base Camp to go home to the States on May 9, she carried some of the objects in her baggage.

As Anker had laid out the artifacts to dry at Base Camp, and Hemmleb had pored over them, making notes, it became increasingly clear that even such humble belongings as a box of matches and a tin of beef lozenges had both forensic and symbolic value. For many years now, Robert Falcon Scott’s diary, found by his teammates beside his dead body eight months after his demise on the return journey from the South Pole, has lain under glass in the reading room of the British Museum, turned open to its famous last page. Surely Mallory’s bent goggles, his monogrammed handkerchief, had a comparable numen.

Higher on the mountain, Dave Hahn had cursorily glanced through the letters the team had found wrapped in the handkerchief. One was from Mallory’s sister Mary, another from his brother, Trafford; both were full of family news and holiday chat. A third, though also newsy, had a line indicating a deeper intimacy. Trying to make out the signature, Hahn concluded that it read “Sweetie,” and jumped to the obvious conclusion. As he wrote in his May 4 MountainZone dispatch: “There were some remarkable things that turned up … culminating in a perfectly preserved letter from his wife, worn on his chest, close to his heart.”

Now, down at Base Camp, Anker, Hemmleb, and Liesl Clark read the letters more carefully, as Clark transcribed their contents onto her laptop. Studying the signature on the third letter, they realized that it read not “Sweetie” (by all odds an unlikely sobriquet for Ruth to have assumed), but “Stella.” Suddenly the unexplained third letter seemed a potential bombshell. The epistle had been posted from London S.W. 4, but had no return address; it had been written on the stationery of a posh English men’s club, with the letterhead scratched out.

Who was Stella? Was this a love letter? Reading and rereading the sentences, Clark and Anker could not decide. The intimate phrase might just have sprung from the effusive vocabulary current among friends and relatives in the 1920s in Britain; yet what about the apparent efforts to conceal the writer’s identity and the letter’s provenience?

The Stella letter became a closely guarded secret within the expedition. Clark could imagine what the English tabloids would do with this revelation (“Lost Mountaineer’s Secret Lover”)—with little more than the knowledge that such a letter existed and had been carried next to Mallory’s heart on his summit attempt. Yet, as so often happens with a confidence shared among too many independent souls, rumors about the Stella letter leaked out.

Eric Simonson tried hard to control the gossip. On May 7, in a MountainZone dispatch, he corrected Hahn’s error, in as vague a fashion as he could manage: