The Death Zone

Why have I dreamed of climbing Mt. Everest every two or three years for the past 40 years? I’m walking uphill in slow motion, my boots are slithering on tilted boilerplates of iced rock. Vertical cliffs fall away below me to my left. The sky is dark and blank: I’m dreaming in black-and-white. I’m thinned by the utter aloneness of the situation, warmed by a sense that the goal, the summit, invisible beyond the skyline, is in my reach. I never get there. . . .

All this is derived from photos in high-altitude books like those under review, blended with quite gentle experiences of my own. I have never been above 6,000 feet in the mountains (in the Italian Dolomites). The fact is that the supreme mountains--the likes of Everest and K2, Mont Blanc and Denali, Annapurna and the Towers of Paine--have fused into one of the charismatic myths of our time not a tall story, an amalgam of true stories that call out to our imaginations from far off.

George Mallory died on Everest eight years before I was born. I have followed his footsteps up one of the most enticing rock-climbs on the golden-crystalled granite of Cornwall in southwest England, and his grandson’s footsteps up the 1,300-foot sandstone face of the Blouberg in northwest Transvaal; George Mallory III is still climbing there and recently climbed Everest himself. Now his grandfather has been found on the north face of Everest, and many of us have looked in wonder at the photos showing the white porcelain of his lower back and left leg, lying face down on a gravel slope. The tangible lineaments of the myth have been returned to reality at last.

There are a great many corpses up there. On the expedition to find Mallory and Irvine Andrew Irvine narrated in “Ghosts of Everest,” three of the climbers “stumbled into a virtual graveyard of mangled, frozen bodies.” One of the climbers, Tap Richards, recalls “We found ourselves in a kind of collection zone for fallen climbers.” Another member, Conrad Anker, recalls in “The Lost Explorer”: “On the Plateau, we passed near the bodies of two Indian climbers who had died here in 1996 . . . the Indians whom members of the Japanese team had ignored, going for the summit themselves rather than trying to save their lives.” And again: “I came around a cliff and looked into a small cave next to me. There was a dead man lying in there, somebody who’d holed up there trying to bivouac and had frozen to death. I have no idea who he was.”

This charnel house is unsurprising given that out of seven people climbing Everest, one on average is likely to die. Above 25,000 feet on the world’s most formidable mountains, many fall, many are killed in avalanches, many succumb to the complex physiological effects of oxygen deprivation and suffer from swelling of the brain or the lungs, which can be fatal. One veteran said that a climber at that height above sea level is “a sick man walking in a dream.” Still they do it--the fanatical amateurs, the professional guides, the local people from Nepal and Tibet who carry loads for the sahibs and have begun to climb like Westerners, to experience the ferociously beautiful wilderness and for the personal fulfillment of achieving something remarkably difficult.

Several climbers could be seen as the chevaliers sans peur of the high ice: Hermann Buhl and Reinhold Messner from Austria, Eric Shipton and Doug Scott from England. To an extraordinary extent, given that he flourished before television, Mallory is the exemplar in the public eye. He died on Everest in June 1924, possibly just after becoming the first person to reach the summit. He coined one of the most laconic ripostes in the language when an American reporter asked him why he was trying to climb the mountain: “Because it is there,” he answered.

Ever since the ‘20s, Mallory has been an icon who embodies a laid-back heroism in the face of crushing elemental forces, which the hero grapples with for the sake of the contest itself. Exploration and mapping of remote borderlands, research into high-altitude physiology, the demonstration of national prowess or “the human spirit”--all these could be claimed as motives for the sport and are claimed by its high-minded publicists.

Mallory professed none of these, although he was an idealist with a commitment to working-class education, women’s suffrage and Irish home rule. “To refuse the adventure,” he said in one of his American lectures between expeditions, “is to run the risk of drying up like a pea in its shell.”

People who saw him climb in the Alps and on British cliffs just before and after the Great War marveled at how at home he was in the steep places. On ice, “[h]e cut a superb staircase, with inimitable ease and grace and a perfect economy of effort . . . so rhythmical and harmonious was his progress in any steep place, above all on slabs, that his movements appeared almost serpentine in their smoothness.” On rock, “[h]e would set his foot high against any angle of smooth surface, fold his shoulder to his knee, and flow upward and upright again on an impetuous curve . . . a continuous undulating movement so rapid and so powerful that one felt the rock either must yield, or disintegrate.” He was also beautiful and therefore doted on by highly influential members of the gay culture based in London’s Bloomsbury.

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Sheer inborn prowess and a steely determination to develop it at all costs will always enthrall and perhaps inspire us, whether the exemplar is discovering a law of nature or running a mile in less than four minutes. What makes the mountaineering form of achievement so difficult morally is the mortal risk run by the protagonists. Most mountaineers are also offspring, lovers, fathers-mothers, husbands-wives. As Mallory was about to make his third and, as it turned out, last attempt on Everest, he wrote to a Cambridge friend, “This is going to be more like war than mountaineering. I don’t expect to come back.” He did not say this to his wife. When he died, he left her a widow and his three children fatherless. They are still alive, and their testimony in the case of their father’s death is a poignant running motif in “Ghosts of Everest,” “The Lost Explorer,” “Last Climb” and “Lost on Everest.”

To set out to find the bodies of Mallory and his companion Irvine on that huge wind-swept pyramid was an extreme quest. To find one of them among the ice-seamed crags demanded the brilliant mountaineer’s intuition of terrain and snow behavior, which was brought to the project by Anker, probably the strongest member of the 1999 expedition led by Eric Simonson. Jochen Hemmleb, a researcher-climber with a consuming absorption in the least detail of the Mallory affair, had pinpointed the likeliest resting place for the bodies and expected the climbing team to systematically comb an area the size of four football pitches. The snow-dusted shale slabs were precarious, and a fall would have dropped the climbers 7,000 feet to the Rongbuk glacier.

First Anker found a body with broken legs, the right arm sticking out as though waving, the face eaten off by ravens. It was wearing up-to-date equipment. So he went on contouring to the right, beyond the search zone, guided by his sense of the “rock snags and outcroppings . . . like a river, with eddies downstream from boulders”--a sense which “has to be intuitive. The more experience you have, the more you absorb on a subconscious level.” Then he saw the corpse face-down in frozen acres, made visible by the whiteness of that naked back. When his teammates joined him, they all thought that this must be Irvine’s body. As stones were carefully pried away, the evidence became clear. The tag on the collar said “G. Mallory.” The pockets of his clothing contained, among other things, a letter from a friend, some bills, a beautifully vivid red and blue handkerchief with his monogram, a box of matches, a fingerless mitten, a rusted knife and scissors, an altimeter, a pair of tinted goggles, notes with checklists of food and oxygen cylinders and a tin of Brand & Co.’s Savoury Meat Lozenges.

All this is poignant enough, and the fine color photos of these things in “Ghosts of Everest” re-create in perfect detail the climber’s means of staying alive. The most potent image, of course, is the body itself, and here is where the moral difficulties arise. The close-ups of the body taken by Richards and Jake Norton show the ragged jersey and breeches and the broken climbing rope sticking out of the broken stones; the bared back, left upper arm, left buttock and left leg, all white and sheer as china, the very picture of the dead. It’s impossible to keep from one’s mind the look of a Michelangelo--the dead hero, his marble torso sagging, his arms outstretched, pinned at the wrists. The excess in this seeing of a likeness between Mallory and Jesus is a measure of the cult that has grown up since the climber’s death three generations ago.

The expedition climbers were wholly respectful. They investigated and photographed the body--finding that ravens had eaten into the stomach and exposed its contents, which included “seeds and some other food.” Then they buried it completely, a hard job at that height among slippery, freezing stone. Finally they spoke over it a funeral service prepared by the bishop of Bristol, England.

“Ghosts of Everest,” written with scholarly scruple and with a foreword by Mallory’s daughter, has now been ruled ineligible (though originally short-listed) for the United Kingdom’s prestigious Boardman-Tasker Prize for mountain writing, on the ground that the photos of the dead man are in bad taste. When the photos were the object of feverish bidding among tabloids, Websites and the like, and were finally sold to Newsweek for thousands of dollars, a furor sizzled through the media--narrated in Anker and Roberts’ chapter “Dissonance”--and authoritative people such as Sir Christian Barrington and Sir Edmund Hillary condemned the commercialism of the affair. We are all entitled to our opinions--provided we attend to the evidence and give ourselves time to weigh it.

It seems to me that it is Mallory’s family who have the best moral claim to a view, and here these books are ambiguous, unavoidably so. According to Anker, Mallory’s elder son, John, had agreed to the taking of a tissue sample for DNA analysis. He therefore cut a 1 1/2-inch square of skin from the right forearm: It was “like cutting saddle leather, all cured and hard.” The British Broadcasting Corp.’s man on the expedition, Peter Firstbrook, says he spoke to “the families of both Mallory and Irvine and received their support for the search and for photographing what was found” as well as for the tissue-sampling. Ruth Mallory is now recorded as saying, “But all in all, I wish they hadn’t found him. I wish they’d left him in peace.” George Mallory III is furious at the photo sale: “Frankly, it makes me bloody angry. . . . It’s like digging for diamonds, without having to do any of the digging.”

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This painful mix of feelings must have its root in a lifetime of seeing your father turning into an icon while you yourself were feeling robbed of a parent--by the parent’s own volition. George, I remember, said a year or two ago that it was all very well his father having climbed Everest, if he did: “The thing is to get down again.” Clare used to dream, in the weeks after losing her father, that he was getting down from a train and walking toward her. John, in his foreword to David Breashears and Audrey Salkeld’s book, writes bluntly: “I do not believe that reaching the summit of a mountain, even Mount Everest, is worth losing one’s life for. . . . I would so much rather have known my father than to have grown up in the shadow of a legend, a hero, as some people perceive him to be.”

Those, I am fairly sure, would have been my own feelings in their place. I also think that I would have wanted my dead father to be photographed, in that exact posture of his dying, or else I would have ended my own days with a gnawing sense of incompleteness that he was not quite gone, that a visible last resting place must be discovered for the sake of my own groundedness in the real world.

This kind of perplexity must always dog the survivors of accidents when there is a mystery about the victims. It crops up acutely toward the close of McKay Jenkins’ eloquent study of avalanches, “The White Death,” which is built around the story of five young climbers attempting a midwinter climb of the unknown north face of Mt. Cleveland, near the Montana-Canada border. When they failed to come back, an exhaustive and dangerous search on the ground and from the air found nothing but inconclusive footprints. It was assumed they had been killed by an avalanche. Their bodies turned up in late spring, to the relief of their parents, who knew their sons were dead and were tormented by their inability to bury them. The core experience of the book--these climbers grappling with the mountain--is necessarily absent. In a sense this is true to the lives of all those people who are lost for good without being able to send messages from the climax of their lives.

In any case, Jenkins is interested in avalanches as such--the behavior of snow on slopes too steep for it to settle, how we behave in the teeth of those giant slides and roaring maelstroms. As he describes the crystalline structures of snow and the weird forms of its instability, his clean-cut journalist’s prose borders on the creative in the luxuriance of its imagery: “As they [snow-crystals] evolve, the six points of the hexagonal plates gradually grow or lose their spindly arms, or dendrites; high winds can break these arms, sending smaller fragments forth to begin evolving in their own right. . . . Graupel, the homeliest crystal, is formed when water droplets float through regions of fog or cloud and become bonded to hardened pellets; by the time it reaches the ground, graupel looks like frozen blobs of brain tissue.” As spurring to the imagination is his glimpse of a man killed in an avalanche and found in a running posture with an expression of “complete astonishment.”

The fact is that the mountain environment--its physique, its cultures and its dramas--is so engrossing that numerous forms of knowledge come swarming from it, the fruits of numerous projects to grasp its unfamiliarity and its extremity. Sherry Ortner’s “Life and Death on Mt. Everest” is a first-rate study of a people, the Sherpas of Nepal, written by an anthropologist with more than 30 years’ experience among those people, who came to Western notice as coolies on exploring and surveying expeditions. She has set herself to understand them as people in their own right, with their own ways of making something of the “modernisation”--the airstrips, the wages, the schools, the tourism--which has flowed from the incoming of the climbing “sahibs.”

Quotation marks are a necessary tool of Ortner’s method. They surround words like “superstitious” and “real,” “fact” and “materialism,” to remind us that every value or meaning we take for granted has alternatives, that our accustomed ideas inhere in verbal habits grounded in the life we happen to lead. A different life begets quite different views of what is true or self-evident. Thus “modernisation” for the Sherpas of the Solu-Khumbu Valley, which is the southern highway to Everest, is different from our connotation of “clinics supplying antibiotics” or “Sherpas running their own trekking companies.” On the ground, it matters at least as much that the Sherpas have also modernized by moving from the more “primitive” religion of village shamans and married lamas to the “higher” religion of monasteries, built this century as centers of refined Buddhist discipline. Only one other recent book, Ed Douglas’ “Chomolungma Sings the Blues,” has offered me this close a focus on Nepal as a society for whom the mountaineering phenomenon is just one strand in the winning of livelihoods in those most high and icy ranges.

Ortner is not a climber; she is an intelligent and fair-minded scholar who has combed the mountain literature and fused it with what she has observed in the field. Seven Sherpas were killed in an avalanche while carrying for the British Everest expedition in 1922. When the next expedition, Mallory’s last, came through, they were shown a fresco in the monastery at Rumbu which the monks had painted: “This extraordinary picture shows the angered Deity of the mountain surrounded by weird, wildly dancing demons, white lions, barking dogs and hairy men, and at the foot, speared through and through, lies the naked body of the white man who dared to violate [Everest].” Whether you think that Mallory was killed by the angle of the slope and the freezing darkness as he tried to down climb after sunset or by dancing demons and white lions, you have to admire the monks’ prefiguring of those photos taken by Richards and Norton 76 years later.

GHOSTS OF EVEREST

The Search for Mallory and Irvine

by Jochen Hemmleb, Larry A. Johnson and Eric R. Simonson, as told to William E. Nothdurft

The Mountaineers Books: 206 pp., $29.95

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THE LOST EXPLORER

Finding Mallory on Mt. Everest

by Conrad Anker and David Roberts

Simon & Schuster: 192 pp., $22

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CHOMOLUNGMA SINGS THE BLUES

Travels Round Everest

By Ed Douglas

Constable & Co.: 226 pp., $40

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LIFE AND DEATH ON MT. EVEREST

Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering

by Sherry B. Ortner

Princeton University Press: 376 pp., $26.95

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THE WHITE DEATH

Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone

by McKay Jenkins

Random House: 220 pp., $23.95

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LOST ON EVEREST

The Search for Mallory and Irvine

By Peter Firstbrook

Contemporary Books: 224 pp., $24.95