The Lost Explorer Read Free Page A

fibula. With the boot still on, the leg lay at a grotesque angle. They weren’t compound fractures—the bones hadn’t broken the skin—but they were very bad breaks. My conclusion was that in the fall, the right side of the man’s body had taken the worst of the impact. It looked as though perhaps in his last moments, the man had laid his good left leg over his broken right, as if to protect it from further harm. The left boot may have been whipped off inthe fall, or it may have eroded and fallen apart. Only the tongue of the boot was present, pinched between the bare toes of his left foot and the heel of his right boot.
    Goraks—the big black ravens that haunt the high Himalaya—had pecked away at the right buttock and gouged out a pretty extensive hole, big enough for a gorak to enter. From that orifice, they had eaten out most of the internal organs, simply hollowed out the body.
    The muscles of the left lower leg and the thighs had become stringy and desiccated. It’s what happens, apparently, to muscles exposed for seventy-five years. The skin had split and opened up, but for some reason the goraks hadn’t eaten it.
    After fifteen or twenty minutes, Jake Norton arrived. Then the others, one by one: first Tap Richards, then Andy Politz, then Dave Hahn. They didn’t say much: just, “Wow, good job, Conrad,” or, “This has to be Sandy Irvine.” Later Dave said, “I started blinking in awe,” and Tap remembered, “I was pretty blown away. It was obviously a body, but it looked like a Greek or Roman marble statue.”
    The guys took photos, shot some video, and discussed the nuances of the scene. There seemed to be a kind of taboo about touching him. Probably half an hour passed before we got up the nerve to touch him. But we had agreed that if we found Mallory or Irvine, we would perform as professional an excavation as we could under the circumstances, to see if what we found might cast any light on the mystery of their fate. We had even received permission from John Mallory (George’s son) to take a small DNA sample.
    Tap and Jake did most of the excavating work. We’d planned to cut small squares out of the clothing to take down to Base Camp and analyze. Almost at once, on the collar of one of the shirts, Jake found a name tag. It read, “G. Mallory.” Jake looked at us and said, “That’s weird. Why would Irvine be wearing Mallory’s shirt?”
    DR
    S OMETIME ON THE MORNING of June 8, 1924, George Mallory and Sandy Irvine set out from Camp VI, at 26,800 feet on the northeast ridge. The day before, the porters who had carried gear and food up to the camp in support of the summit bid brought down a note from Mallory, addressed to the expedition cinematographer, John Noel, who was ensconced at Camp III, more than 5,000 feet below.
    Dear Noel,
    We’ll probably start early to-morrow (8 th ) in order to have clear weather. It won’t be too early to start looking for us either crossing the rock band under the pyramid or going up skyline at 8.0 p.m.
    Yours ever,
    G. Mallory
    Noel had a 600 millimeter lens that the expedition members used like a telescope to track their teammates’ movements high on Everest. All subsequent commentators have assumed, as Odell did on reading the note, that Mallory’s “8:0 p.m.” was a slip of the pen, that he meant to write “8:00 A.M. ” In that case, Mallory’s estimate of where he would be was exceedingly optimistic, for it was rare in the era of early Himalayan campaigns for a pair of climbers to get off from any high camp before 6:30 in the morning.
    The 1924 expedition was the third of three attempts—all British—on the world’s highest mountain; it followed a thoroughgoing reconnaissance in 1921 and a nervy assault the year after. Only Mallory had been a member of all three expeditions. Yet the weather in May 1924 had proved atrocious, defeating a very strong team’s best efforts even to put themselves in position for a summit thrust. Later the tea