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Contents
2 Getting the Measure of the Mountain
7 1922, and the First Attempt to Climb Mount Everest
8 ‘No trace can be found, given up hope …’
10 John Hoyland and a New Clue
11 I First Set Eyes on Mount Everest
13 The Finding of Mallory’s Body
14 When Did Everest Get So Easy?
16 What Does Mount Everest Mean?
17 The Theorists and Their Theories
19 Perfect Weather for the Job
Postscript: Goodbye to Everest
Mount Everest has been my arena. I have spent over two years of my life on the mountain, returning there again and again. I am drawn back because I see there the extremes of human experience played out in the most dramatic surroundings: greed and betrayal, loyalty and courage, endurance and defeat. It is a moral crucible in which we are tested, and usually found wanting. It has cost me my marriage, my home and half my possessions. Twice Everest has nearly killed me. But I find it utterly addictive. And so did George Mallory.
This volume is going to add to the vast pile of books about Mount Everest, a pile that must now must be higher than the mountain. I make no apology for this, for I think I have finally solved the mystery of what happened there on 8 June 1924, when Mallory and his young companion Sandy Irvine disappeared into clouds, climbing strongly towards the top.
My family had a unique relationship with Everest, and this helped me to climb the mountain and to find clues to what happened to Mallory, its most famous opponent. I spent a long time looking for his body, and then I spent a long time trying to prove that he climbed his nemesis before it killed him.
This is going to be a personal story, a detective thriller, a biography and a history book.
I hope it will set the record straight about how Mallory was found. It is about other things, too, such as why we believe in gods and mountains.
Most of all, though, it is about my life-long hunt for an answer to the greatest mystery in mountaineering: who first climbed Mount Everest?
Dawn broke fine on that fatal day. A couple of thousand feet above the tiny canvas tent the summit of the world’s highest mountain stood impassively, waiting for someone to have the courage to approach.
Inside the ice-crusted shelter, two forms lay as still as death. Then there was a
