Travel: Because it might be out there
Independent, The (London), Sep 26, 1998 by Graham Hoyland

Anyone who has seen the recent Imax film about Mount Everest will have experienced the nearest thing to actually standing on the summit themselves. Somehow a team of Sherpas and Western climbers managed to drag a forty-pound camera to the top, assemble it and run it for long enough to provide the most stunning pictures yet taken from the top of the world. The Imax picture is several times bigger than conventional cinema film and so when it is projected onto the seven-story high screen it fills the observer's field of vision completely. The result makes the Titanic look like a rowing boat, and Kate Winslet look like Kate Moss.

The only alternative is to go there yourself, and I suppose the ultimate package holiday on offer at the end of the twentieth century is the £25,000 trip up Mount Everest offered by several commercial expedition companies. Given a high degree of physical fitness, some experience of high altitude mountaineering and the need to expose yourself to the one-in-six death rate risked by those climbing to the summit, you too can buy into one of these trips. I've worked on two of these expeditions on Mount Everest, and the clients are fascinating people. Very often they are successful businessmen who are seeking still more success in another arena. Some are builders or plumbers. They usually have more climbing experience than is credited to them by the media, but often one feels they are buying a cocktail-party trophy. And most of them just love being in front of the camera.

It might seem that Everest is trodden to death by all these people, but there's a mystery up there in the snows of the jetstream which I would like to solve, and it involves another, much smaller camera.

Everybody knows that the first men to climb the world's highest mountain were Hillary and Tenzing- don't they? But years before, in June 1924, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappeared into clouds near the summit of Mount Everest, never to be seen again. They started a controversy that has run ever since. Did they reach the top nearly 30 years before Hillary and Tenzing?

Over the years a few clues have emerged from the heights. An ice axe was found in 1933, possibly marking the site of an accident. An oxygen-frame was found in a place that suggests that one of the men was very near the top. And in 1975 a Chinese high-altitude porter, Wang Hung-boa found the body of an "English dead", whose clothes crumbled in the thin cold air when touched. He told his story to a Japanese climber, using a few words they had in common. He scrawled the figures "8200 metres" in the snow, and plucked at his clothing and crumbled the imaginary dust between his fingers. This must have been the body of either Mallory or Irvine, but tantalizingly it has never been seen again. Wang himself was killed on the North Col the day after he had told his astonishing story. But was there a camera next to the body?

In his knapsack Mallory was carrying a Vest-Pocket Kodak camera lent to him by T.H. Somervell, who had returned to the North Col after his own very nearly successful attempt on the summit a few days previously. Mallory would be expected to take a picture of the highest point reached. Kodak say that a printable image could in theory be obtained, should the camera ever be retrieved. This photograph could solve the mystery.

Somervell, who was my great-uncle, told me the Mallory story when I was 14 and I became fascinated by the story of those early English expeditions through pre-communist Tibet. I became determined to climb Everest for myself, and I tried in 1990, following the Mallory route. In the course of shooting a film for BBC 2 I only got to 25,500 feet- about five hundred feet short of the terrace where I believe the body lies.

However I did succeed in climbing the mountain in 1993, becoming the fifteenth Briton to stand on that extraordinary summit. Little larger than a dining-room table, it seemed a strange reason for so many deaths.

Never believe anyone who tells you that climbing Everest is easy. I passed four corpses in the snow on the way up, dead from cold and exhaustion, and a Spanish climber I passed on the way down slipped and was killed in a 3000 feet fall. Physically, mentally and spiritually it was certainly the hardest thing I have ever had to do, and for a long time afterwards it left a strange rage and emptiness which I don't want to speculate about. All I can tell you is what it felt like.

Leaving the tents of the highest camp at two o'clock in the morning we stumbled out into the darkness of a blizzard at 26,000 feet. We were sucking on oxygen masks, but my valve kept freezing up from saliva. The leader Steve Bell shouted "Lead off, Graham!" but I had to confess that I didn't know the way. Following his boots in a pool of head-torch light we plodded on in our own private nightmares. A couple of figures- Sherpa or Westerner, we couldn't see who- dropped back and gave up during the night. Looking left down into Nepal I saw one tiny glimmer of light from the monastery at Thangboche down in the real world. My torch was just giving up when I noticed a faint glow on my right, away towards Tibet. It was the dawn, the most welcome dawn of my life. I sat down and tried to pull my oxygen mask off for repairs, but it was stuck to my beard. I had to get it off, though, and so had to pull off mask, beard and a large patch of skin. I then tried to have a drink, but to my astonishment and dismay the boiling water I had poured into the insulated bottle in my rucksack had somehow frozen into a block of ice. On we climbed, and I was surprised at just how steep it became. Eventually we reached the South Summit and plodded around it to see the final obstacles- the Summit ridge, the infamous Hillary Step and then in the far distance the summit itself. The step is a thirty-foot rocky hiccough in the narrow summit ridge, first climbed, to his eternal credit, by Edmond Hillary. It is a very scary place, and I had been worrying about it since I was a boy.

Just as I reached the bottom of it my oxygen valve blocked totally and I actually lost consciousness for a few moments. But I got the mask off again and managed to gasp my way up the ropes that weren't hanging there when Hillary climbed his step. I wasn't to know that three years later an acquaintance of mine was to die on that very spot, and hung from those very ropes for months.

Once above the step I just kept teetering along that narrow icy summit ridge between Nepal and Tibet, between life and death. The sun was intensely bright and the sky was that inky black of very high altitudes. All around were the icy fins of the world's highest mountains. And somewhere along that ridge I experienced one of those existential moments that is the reason why you risk your life. The intensity of the now, the sharp savour of living wholly in the present moment, no past, no worries. The chop of the ice axe, the crunch of the crampons, the hiss of breath- this is the very stuff of life. Eventually I saw a couple of figures just above me, stepped up, and I was there.

I can't remember much. Now it all seems some sort of dream; bright sunlight, a tearing wind, a long flag of ice particles flying downwind of us. A vast drop of two miles into Tibet. We could see across a hundred miles of tightly-packed peaks, and we could see the curvature of the earth. Contorted faces shouting soundlessly, lips blue with oxygen starvation.

Doctors prove with blood samples that climbers are actually in the process of dying up there on the summit, but I should say that is where I started to live. Soon we had to turn back, and face the most dangerous part of our climb- the descent.

But all of this was from the south, Nepali side of the mountain so I was unable to search the terrace where it is believed Mallory lies, although from the summit I could see it from above. The grandson of Mallory, another George Mallory, has also climbed the mountain to settle family business, but did not have time to search the area for signs of his famous grandfather.

I would like to have another attempt to find the camera, and am in the process of setting up an expedition to Everest's North Face. As all the members have climbed the mountain, its summit holds no pressing fascination for us. Most climbers at 26,000 feet on Everest have no time or interest in searching for remains- their sights are fixed on the top. Using a new form of radar-imaging device tuned to an identical V.P.K. camera I think we have the best chance yet of finding a vital clue.

As it can be imagined, I would respect the dead should I ever find them. What I want to find out is the answer to a seventy-five year old question: was Mount Everest climbed in 1924?


Graham Hoyland
Around the World in 80 Faiths