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Airdale Terrier: $300
    ELLA HOLMES WHITE

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    HARRY ANDERSON

    One chow-chow: $50

 
    4
    A Corpse on Everest
    The corpse was frozen and bleached by the sun. It lay face down in the snow, fully extended and pointing uphill. The upper body was welded to the scree with ice. The arms, still muscular, were outstretched above the head.
    Mountaineer George Mallory had last been sighted on 8 June 1924, when he and Andrew Irvine went missing while attempting to become the first men to reach the summit of Everest. Whether or not they achieved this goal has been the subject of intense speculation for ninety years.
    In the spring of 1999, an American named Eric Simonson set up the Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition. Five experienced mountaineers were sent high onto Everest with the aim of finding the bodies of one or both climbers.
    They had a few clues to help them in their search. In 1975, a Chinese climber named Wang Hung-bao had stumbled across ‘an English dead’ at 26,570 feet (8,100 metres). Wang reported the find to his climbing partner shortly before being swept away by an avalanche. The precise location of the ‘English dead’ was never fixed.
    Eric Simonson’s five-strong team of experienced mountaineers were undeterred. Conrad Anker, Dave Hahn, Jake Norton, Andy Politz, and Tap Richards were determined to succeed, even though the odds were stacked against them.
    Their search was concentrated on a wide snow-terrace the size of twelve football pitches. Tilted at a crazy angle, the terrace lay above 26,000 feet. The men knew that if they lost their balance, the thirty degree slope would carry them down a 7,000-foot drop to the Rongbuk Glacier.
    On 1 May, Conrad Anker was combing the slope when he raised a cry. He had spotted a corpse, white as alabaster, sticking out of the ice. The rest of the team made their way towards him and began chipping the corpse from its frozen resting place. As they dug, they studied the body with care. The tibia and fibula of the right leg were broken, the right elbow was dislocated and the right side also badly damaged. The climbing rope had wrapped itself tightly around the ribcage.
    It didn’t take long to identify the body. When Tap Richards looked inside the clothing, he found a name-tag: G Mallory .
    â€˜Maybe it was the altitude and the fact that we’d all put aside our oxygen gear,’ said Dave Hahn, ‘but it took a while for reality to sink in. We were in the presence of George Mallory himself.’
    The question that remained unanswered was whether or not Mallory and Irvine had made it to the summit. Did they die on their way up? Or on their way down?
    The team hoped they might find Mallory’s camera: experts at Kodak had said that the film, though old, might yet be developed. But when the men reached inside the pouch around Mallory’s neck, they found only a metal tin of stock cubes: ‘Brand & Co. Savoury Meat Lozenges’.
    There was other evidence as well: a brass altimeter, a pocketknife, a monogrammed handkerchief and a pair of undamaged sun goggles in an inside pocket.
    The goggles were potentially an important clue as to what had happened on that day in 1924. Just a few days before his attempt on the summit, Mallory’s second climbing partner, Edward Norton, had suffered serious snow-blindness because he’d neglected to wear his goggles.
    Mallory would not have dispensed with his goggles if climbing in daylight. The fact they were in his pocket suggested that the two men had completed their push for the summit in sunlight and were making their descent after dark.
    No less interesting was an envelope found on Mallory’s body. It was covered in numbers: pressure readings of the oxygen bottles they were carrying. It had long been believed that the climbers didn’t have enough oxygen to get them to the summit. But the numbers showed that the two climbers were carrying five, perhaps six