"When a person dies, sooner or later you may search for the details or meaning of their life (…) And in that search you may come to glimpse not that person but yourself now that they are gone. That’s their last gift to you, the one they give through being dead."
(after Andrew Greig, In Another Light)
Mount Everest, Northeast Ridge, 8450 m, June 9, 1924
He had wanted to become the first to climb the world’s highest mountain: George Mallory, a 37-year-old teacher from Cambridge. Together with his partner, 22-year-old Oxford student Andrew Irvine, he had climbed higher and higher on this June 8, 1924, until they disappeared in the afternoon clouds.
Now, on the morning after, an icy silence shrouded Mount Everest’s upper slopes. Snow crystals were clinging to the rocks, glinting like millions of stars in a sunlight that possessed little warmth at these altitudes. The scraping of the nailed boots and rhythmic hissing of the oxygen apparatus had died away. Only the sound of the wind between the crags remained. Slowly it erased the lonely track of footprints leading down the snow-covered ledges of the Northeast Ridge. A couple of hundred meters below, fierce gusts battered the windswept slope, tearing like claws on Mallory’s frozen body...
For a long time the mountain didn’t yield the secrets surrounding Mallory’s last climb. The riddle captured the imagination of generations of mountaineers. Finally 10 years ago, an Anglo-American search expedition I instigated and participated in resulted in the ultimate encounter with the past: high on the north face of Mount Everest, our team discovered George Mallory’s remains. Yet his partner, Andrew Irvine, remained missing – and with him the camera that could possibly answer the mystery: Did Mallory and Irvine reach the summit back in 1924?
The search for a solution to the riddle of Mallory and Irvine is a threefold journey. First, there is Mallory and Irvine’s own climb up the mountain and the traces that tell its story. Then there are the experiences of later expeditions, giving insights into what Mallory and Irvine might have done. And finally my own formative experiences during the years of detective work.
In my new book I am telling the stories of all three of the journeys.
- Including exclusive interviews with the man who probably found Irvine
- Including all findings of the Mallory & Irvine Research Expeditions 1999, 2001, and 2004
- Including the most detailed chronicle of the British and Chinese expeditions to the north side of Everest 1921-1979
- Including previously unpublished photographs and documents
- With a foreword by Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner and Ralf Dujmovits
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