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Smitten by the Mallory mystery

When the body of the legendary British mountaineer George Mallory was found atop Mount Everest this year -- frozen almost to alabaster and still attached to a climbing rope -- it seemed a chilling reminder to one of the mountain's earliest tragedies.

One of the earliest Westerners to attempt the world's highest mountain, Mallory disappeared with climbing companion Andrew Irvine on June 8, 1924, vanishing into the mists on a final ascent toward the 8,850-metre peak.

For filmmaker and mountaineer David Breashears, the grim discovery of one of the world's most-sought-after bodies was testimony not to Everest's terrible toll but to the amazing spirit of adventure that drove Mallory and the other early Himalayan climbers.

Breashears, who has climbed to the top of Everest four times and directed a popular Everest movie, has now published a book with historian Audrey Salkeld exploring the career of Mallory, who scaled Olympian heights clad in a tweed jacket. He was the first mountaineer to declare that Everest needed to be conquered ''because it's there.''

''He has come to represent Everest and our collective urge to explore our planet,'' Breashears said on a visit to San Francisco to promote the book, Last Climb: The Legendary Everest Expeditions of George Mallory (publishers: National Geographic Society). ''We all share his fascination with what's possible, and a need to look around the corner.''

For modern mountaineering experts, the mystery of Mallory and his fatal final trip to Everest boils down to one simple question: did he and Irvine beat Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay to the top?

Hillary and Norgay, who made it in 1953, have long been credited in the record books as the first to reach the peak. But the possibility that Mallory and Irvine -- last spotted by their companions somewhere above 8,540 metres and moving rapidly higher -- made it almost three decades earlier has continued to feed doubts.

It was partly this mystery that drove Breashears' long fascination with Mallory, which began in 1981 when the Boston-based filmmaker made his first trek to Everest's forbidding Kangshung face.

''On the approach we found ourselves marching in Mallory's footsteps, literally,'' he wrote. ''Suddenly, he became much more real to me. I began to wonder: what had pushed him?''

Mallory represented a certain kind of British adventurer who set out to explore the empire at the zenith of Britain's power. Born in 1885 to a country vicar and his gregarious wife, he was as good at gymnastics as he was at geography and found himself on a track to success via Cambridge University.

His early climbing was done in Wales and on school holidays in Switzerland. He retained his thirst for nature after graduating, marrying and settling into life as a provincial school master -- a life interrupted soon enough by the first world war, where he volunteered to fight in 1916.

Mallory came through the war with an urge to undertake something more adventurous and more inspiring than instructing schoolboys. In 1921, the chance came in the form of an invitation from an old mountaineering friend to become part of an exploratory party headed to Everest.

Rising high above the Tibetan plateau, Everest was known to locals as Chomolungma, ''goddess mother of the land.'' British surveyors triangulated its height in 1856 and declared it ''most probably'' the highest in the world. They gave it the name Everest after a former director of the Survey of India.

What Mallory and his team found when they arrived at their base camp clearly moved the 36-year-old climber: ''Everest rises not so much as a peak as a prodigious mountain mass,'' Mallory wrote. ''The highest of the world's great mountains, it seems, has to make but a single gesture of magnificence to be lord of all, vast in unchallenged and isolated supremacy.''

The book by Breashears and Salkeld follows the failed 1921 assault on Everest and another Mallory and others mounted the next year. Full of photographs and citations from the climbers' diaries and letters, it gives vivid details of expeditions into a realm of thin atmosphere, blinding sun and freezing winds -- for their time, as unreal as a trip to the moon in the 1960s.

Mallory returned to Everest with yet another party in 1924, this one including 21-year-old Andrew Irvine, an engineering student from Oxford who had no climbing experience but a reputation as a rugged and resourceful trekker from an earlier expedition to Spitsbergen.

Irvine was far younger than earlier Everest climbers, one reason he was chosen for the 1924 trip. After the long trip from England and an anxious month of waiting for good weather, he was itching to make the top as Mallory's partner on June 8.

Noel Odell, a member of the party, recorded his last view of the pair as ''black spots'' surmounting a ledge on the way to the top: ''the first then approached the great rock-step and shortly emerged ... The second did likewise. Then the whole fascinating vision vanished, enveloped in cloud once more.''

Reuters

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