The Lost Explorer by Conrad Anker, David Roberts

rather popular Austrian woven rope, since entirely condemned. Whenever, inlater years, I have looked back at the tabulated rope-tests, which show that this rope is warranted to snap like a straw under the jerk of a man’s weight falling from, I think, five feet, I have thought again of the transfigured second in which I realized that the rope had, miraculously, held.
    Mallory was unhurt, and so unfazed by the fall that he hadn’t even dropped his ice axe. Now he hooked his way up steep slabs back to his belayer. The two men continued up the Nesthorn, solving the pillar by another route, and Mallory led to the summit in the last light of the day. “He appeared, through the shadows,” wrote Young, “to float like a thistledown up the last abrupt steps: up and up, through always denser cold and closer darkness.”
    Whether indeed, as Ann Bridge insisted, Mallory had no experience of fear, he related the attack on the previously unclimbed ridge of the Nesthorn in a letter to his mother as though it were merely another jolly outing in the Alps, rather than a desperate ascent that could well have proved fatal:
    We were out twenty-one hours, and were altogether rather pleased with ourselves, as we started in bad weather which afterwards cleared up beautifully. The sunset from the Nesthorn was the most wonderful I have ever seen.
    From such episodes, one might conclude that Mallory was a daredevil, supremely convinced of his own invulnerability, harboring perhaps a self-destructive demon. Yet David Pye, Mallory’s climbing companion as well as his first biographer, insists that his friend was “very careful of unskilled performers, and very down on any clumsiness or carelessness.” Reflecting on a climbing accident that befell a party tackling a route beyond their powers, he said—“in tones of angry grief”—“They had no
business
to be there!”
    A month after the Nesthorn accident, Mallory suffered a more trivial fall that was to have far more important consequences. He was out walking with his sisters and friends near his parents’ home in Birkenhead, when he came to a smallsandstone cliff in a disused quarry. As biographer David Robertson puts it, “There was no need whatever to climb it, but George naturally made for it and started up.”
    Near the top of the short pitch he was soloing, Mallory ran into a troublesome sequence. One of the friends scrambled around to the top and lowered a rope, which George tried to grab just as he slipped, only to have it slide through his hands. With his feline agility, Mallory tried to spring outward and backward and land on his feet in the grass, but he came down hard with his right foot on a hidden stone.
    Mallory assumed he had sprained the ankle, but for months it refused to heal. Writing Young in December, he reported, “Indeed it is still in a poor state and though I can walk well enough for a short distance, it is no good for the mountains.” Mallory blamed only himself: “The whole affair is almost too disgusting to think of, the result chiefly of my obstinacy.”
    It was only eight years later, when the ankle caused him so much trouble on the Western Front during the Great War that he had to be invalided home, that Mallory learned he had broken the ankle in the 1909 fall; it had never properly healed. He underwent an operation that seemed to fix the problem, but seven years later, on his last expedition to Everest, he was still plagued by the injury. From Darjeeling in May 1924, full of optimism about the team’s chances, he wrote Ruth: “The only doubts I have are whether the old ankle one way or another will cause me trouble.”
    After Cambridge, Mallory hoped to become a writer, and managed to publish a critical work called
Boswell the Biographer
, unread today. In his articles for the climbing journals, he went far beyond the dry recitations of passes gained and ridges traversed that were the norm of the day, striving for a lyrical flight to match the exaltation