George Mallory was the obvious man: a schoolmaster of magnetic charm and pre-war climbing fame, veteran of all three British Everest expeditions — the mountain was in Tibet’s gift then, and Everest was, as the phrase went after the Poles were won, “the third pole,” the last great terrestrial prize. Pressed by a New York lecture audience in 1923 on why anyone would climb it, he gave exploration its most quoted three words: “Because it’s there.”
The 1924 expedition fought the mountain’s weather to its ration ends. After two summit attempts failed — one producing Norton’s oxygen-free altitude record of 8,570 metres — Mallory, at 37 sensing the last chance of his generation, chose for the final try not the experienced Odell but 22-year-old Sandy Irvine: Oxford oarsman, engineering improviser, and master of the temperamental oxygen apparatus on which Mallory had staked the attempt.
8 June 1924
At 12:50 on 8 June, the geologist Noel Odell, climbing in support, saw through a sudden clearing of the mist two black dots on a snowcrest high on the northeast ridge, moving “with considerable alacrity” toward the great rock step — “going strong for the top,” hours behind schedule but climbing. The clouds closed. No one ever saw them alive again. Odell twice climbed alone above 8,000 metres in the following days to search, found the camps empty, and laid the blankets on the North Col in the T-signal that told the watchers below: no trace, abandon hope. The news reached a Britain that mourned them like war dead; the King attended the memorial at St Paul’s.
Relics surfaced across decades like a slow-motion inquest: an ice axe on the ridge (1933); a Chinese climber’s 1975 account of “an English dead” at altitude, told the night before he himself died on the mountain; and on 1 May 1999, Conrad Anker of a search expedition found Mallory himself at 8,155 metres — bleach-white, preserved, frozen mid-self-arrest with a broken leg and rope-jerk injuries: he had fallen, roped, and not instantly. The pockets held letters, a broken altimeter — and two famous absences: the photograph of his wife Ruth he had promised to leave on the summit, and the expedition’s Kodak camera, whose film, if ever found and developable, could settle everything. In 2024 a National Geographic team found on the Central Rongbuk glacier a boot and foot with a sock name-tape: A.C. IRVINE — the century’s search narrowed to its last unfound object, the camera.
The question
Could they have made it? The believers hold Odell’s sighting, the pair’s speed, and Mallory’s do-or-die temperament; the sceptics, the Second Step — a 30-metre rock wall at 8,610 metres that stopped everyone until a Chinese team laddered it — and the oxygen arithmetic. The 1953 first ascent of Hillary and Tenzing is secure in the record books either way; what Mallory and Irvine own is the older thing, the question itself — and the mountain’s summit ledge, where no photograph of Ruth Mallory has ever been found, because, believers note, he may have left it there.