The Lost Explorer by Conrad Anker, David Roberts Page B

amusing game.”
    But the suffering and horror he saw on the front knocked much of that schoolboy preciousness out of George Mallory. There was no jauntiness left in the plain account of his discovery of the bodies of his two friends killed by the shell that exploded just behind him:
    I had not gone many paces when I saw that they were both lying face downwards. They seemed to be dead when we got to them…. They were very nice fellows—one of them quite particularly so. He had been with me up in the front line all day and proved the most agreeable of companions.
    Mallory was lucky to be sent home, in May 1917, because of his bad ankle. Some of his closest friends were not so fortunate, such as his Cambridge classmate the poet Rupert Brooke,who died of blood poisoning; or Robert Graves, grievously wounded in the trenches; or Geoffrey Winthrop Young, who lost a leg above the knee, but would go on in his forties to climb at a high standard with an artificial limb.
    In 1914, on a jaunt to Venice with friends, Mallory had met and fallen in love with Ruth Turner. She too was beautiful—“Botticellian” was his own word for her—and as he got to know her he formed a true union of souls with this quiet, loyal, well-educated woman. They were married only four months after meeting, just as Mallory had turned twenty-eight. He at once taught his bride to climb, hauling her along on far from trivial routes in Wales. Nor did he coddle or protect her. In the middle of a December gale on Snowdon, George, Ruth, and David Pye faced a “precipitously steep and terrifying” descent. When Ruth balked at plunging off the ridge, George took her by the shoulders and “simply pushed her forcibly over the edge! … Next he jumped over also and soon we were all gasping in comparative peace while the wind still roared overhead.”
    Despite her brave apprenticeship in climbing, despite an aesthetic compatibility between herself and her husband, Ruth’s temperament was utterly different from George’s. According to Pye, Ruth was “a person of the wisest simplicity and a transcendent practicalness.” Her stability seemed to give Mallory an anchor in life. “A total stranger meeting both for the first time at some climbing centre, soon after their marriage,” wrote Pye, “spoke of the shock of delight and astonishment which they produced. ‘They seem too good to be true.’”
    By the time he was fighting in the trenches in France, Mallory was the father of two infant girls—Clare, born in 1915, and Beridge, the year after. A third child, John, would be born in 1920. After being invalided home, Mallory had returned to the Western Front for the very last weeks of the war. When the Armistice came, he wrote Ruth, “What a wonderful life we will have together! What a lovely thing we
must
make of such a gift!”
    So far as his biographers can ascertain, Ruth was the only important woman in Mallory’s life. After a decade of marriage, their passion for each other seemed utterly undimmed, as their letters, collected in the archives of Magdalene College, testify.
    In the summer of 1919, Mallory returned to the Alps forthe first time in seven years. Despite bad weather and companions far less bold or able than he, George pursued a joyous campaign of ascents. After an epic traverse of Mont Blanc in a storm, Mallory wrote Young a long letter, one phrase of which leaps out, in the retrospect of Everest 1924: “How incompetent tired men can become, going down!”
    In the Alps, according to David Pye, Mallory demonstrated an uncanny eye for route-finding. “He was always drawn to the big and the unexplored—the great walls that mountaineers as a rule set aside as obviously impossible.” When he failed on a climb, Mallory was devastated—“‘I was
heavy!’
he used to say in tones of deep disgust.”
    Mallory was happy to climb in Wales once more with Young, despite his mentor’s artificial leg. To save his friend the agony of stumping along the