death on the Western Front was a frail
barrier that men crossed smiling and
gallant every day they had seen so much
of death that life mattered less than
the moments of being alive in the wake
of the war the quest forevers became a
mission of regeneration for people in a
nation led by everything you know of
your life every sense you have of the
modern every intuition every doubt
you’ve ever experienced was actually
born in the mud and blood of Flanders a
single bullet fired in the summer of
1914 to the breast of a prince in
Sarajevo shattered a universe for a
century Europe had being a peace even as
industrial miracles created wealth and
power beyond anything that had ever been
known and like children at a birthday
party anticipating cake the European
powers sliced into pieces and consumed
the confection of a planet each took
what it could until the boundaries of
imperial ambitions tightened like a
noose around the neck of civilisation
and then a single shot fired in Sarajevo
sparked the greatest Cataclysm in the
history of humanity the Second World War
more familiar to Americans was but the
child of the first Winston Churchill
famously fused two conflicts in what he
referred to as the 30 Years War never
was there a war less necessary to fight
he said in the first were more essential
to win than the second
so everything begins with a great war of
1914 to 1918 including this story
tonight for the war formed the
melancholic backdrop to the first
attempts to climb Mount Everest for the
entire generator
of men who had been through the
nightmare of the war death held no
mysteries they had seen so much of it
that had nothing left to teach them and
I had the sense that for these men of
Flanders life mattered less than the
moments of being alive and so on Everest
they were prepared to accept a level of
risk that would have been unimaginable
before the war so I set out with that
idea in mind to find out if these men
how these men had encountered the war
the British zone of operations was
surprisingly small roughly the size of
the English county of Lincolnshire the
British War front was never longer than
125 miles for much of the war it was
only 85 miles long but behind that front
the British built 6,000 miles of
trenches 6,000 miles of railroad and
because the zone of operations was so
small and because so many millions of
men moved through it because in the wake
of the war ten years after famously a
tsunami of books were published you
could literally go into the archives as
I did over the course of 10 years 60
different archives around the world
mostly of course in Britain and find out
where every single man had been every
day of the great war just consider this
at the beginning of the war you had to
stand five foot eight to be able to
enlist within two months that had
dropped the five foot three and any man
who could walk was eagerly recruited
into the British Army each month the
British Army required 10,000 new junior
officers just to replace the numbers of
the dead the Royal Army Medical Corps
during the war needed of course 108
million battle dressings but it also
needed 20 2386 artificial eyes the
impact on Britain was so severe a
million dead 2.5 million wounded in the
wake of the war 40,000 amputees 60,000
men without sight 65,000 soldiers who
never returned from the twilight memory
of hell that was shell-shocked
sociologically the agony of the war even
such that when the first year of peace
half of British land changed hands more
than it ever changed hands since the
Norman Conquest and so if the quest for
Mount Everest before the war began as a
kind of a gesture of redemption for an
empire of explorers who had lost the
race to the North and South Poles and
had embraced this coveted third pole
that lay within the domain of the Raj in
the wake of the war the quest forever us
became a mission of regeneration for
people in a nation bled white by war 26
men attempted Everest in 1921 22 and 24
some had missed the war but 20 most
assuredly hadn’t seen the war the very
worst of it
John Noel who went to his death speaking
incessantly about his contributions to
the Western Front when in fact he
quivered in suicidal despair through
most of the war in a hospital shattered
by shell-shocked
Howard Somerville I have his medical
documents he would perform in any one
given day 10 to 12 major surgeries as he
raised to tried to save the dine
Geoffrey Winthrop young arguably the
greatest climber of his era the mentor
of course of Mallory had been at yeep in
april of 1915 when the Germans attacked
for the first time using poison gas and
this is what he wrote in his journal
this horror was too monstrous to believe
at first but when it came far as we had
traveled from our civilized world of a
few months back the savagery of it of
the sight of men choking to death with
yellow frost lying on the floor and out
on the fields made me rage with an anger
that no later cruelty of man not even
the degradation of our kind by the
hideous concentration camps in later
Germany ever quite rekindled for then we
still thought all men were human
when it came time to actually equip the
Everest expeditions the great climber
Tom Longstaff laconically remarked the
supply of young climbers is not exactly
what it was before the war so if the war
informed and haunted the lives of all
these men the expeditions themselves in
21 22 and 24 were not isolated
adventurers but rather Imperial gestures
woven from the start into the fabric of
the Raj you know India was a British
creation 1300 Englishmen in the Indian
Civil Service not a single Indian
because Lord Curzon famously said there
was not one in the entire subcontinent
up to the job 1,300 Englishmen
dominating fully a fifth of humanity and
the British had indeed transformed the
face of India but India itself is a
British invention and Majan place
brought into reality by the by the
mathematicians and the technicians of
the Survey of India maps were the very
key to the notion of India they codified
the features of a subcontinent even as
they created the rationale for
occupation and so it was not by chance
that the greatest scientific experiment
of the 19th century was a literal
measurement of India and it was through
that process of the great trigonometry
that the greatest mountain of the world
would be found but the British at that
point in the immediate wake of the
Indian Mutiny were not concerned with
mountaineering but they were concerned
with the unknown lands that lay beyond
the Himalaya knowledge was the key to
British power and it was intolerable to
a man like Lord Curzon that he had no
way of communicating with the capital of
Tibet that lay but 250 miles north of
Darjeeling an agricultural Enclave that
exported key to every Hamlet in the
British Empire and so this idea of
finding out what was beyond a slipped
into paranoia and the fear that the
great enemy of Britain in the 19th
century which was not France and not
Germany but was Russia the Russian
Empire throughout the 19th century
expanded by an average of 55 square
miles every day
the 19th century bringing it to the very
gates of the Raj so the fear of the
British was not that they should be
taking Tibet but rather the Russians
might take it from them and this
provoked a series of incursions led
eventually by Sir Francis Younghusband
worthy the virginity of the mystic
center of of Tibet the capital of Lhasa
was finally broken by this imperial
force that invaded in 1904 it
disappointed the British in so many ways
and as the expedition retreated to
Darjeeling young husband who was both
Saint mystic visionary and spy had to
find another place to fire the British
imagination the imperial venture and he
saw from compose on this extraordinary
mountain hovering over the universe and
this was Everest and so even as the
British are beginning this sort of
mission towards Everest
it is never separate from Imperial
thrust and parry within a month of the
end of the war young husband was
scheming to get British boys to the base
of Everest and then the question became
who’s gonna go on this expedition these
are the men who went to Everest in 1921
now it’s hard to believe from the rather
mousy appearance who these men are
sandy Williston left George Mallory guy
Bullock the diplomat the governor of
Bengal this remarkable Charles Howard
brewery in the irascible Scott Herald
Rayburn let’s take Charles Howard
brewery over there this is an incredible
guy who led the 1921 expedition he was
not really a man designed for war but he
saw the war from start to finish
he was always drawn to the sacred he
read the works of Krishnamurti he was
enamored of Kahili Gibran he was a
brilliant writer a great naturalist he
spoke twenty-seven agen and European
languages he was not a man prepared for
war but when war broke out he fought in
every engagement he was a ward of Lord
land stone he finally almost went mad on
one night in the shadow of the song when
he was given the order to dig a
communication trench to a place the
British so
is called the devil’s would as the
artillery flashed the very lights he
suddenly found that all of them were
literally digging not through soil but
through rotten flesh six and eight feet
deep what you forget about their war is
two things and this is why the books
called into the silence the noise
Napoleon fired twenty thousand shells at
Waterloo at the psalm the British had
sixteen hundred artillery pieces which
could fire a thousand shells a day
the sound was palpable it was visible
you could feel it in the air so it was
Howard burry who eventually led the 1921
expedition so what they did is they
followed and again in this sort of
spirit that I suggested that the efforts
on Everest had everything to do about
the Imperial desire it was not a
coincidence the first expeditions to the
heart of Everest literally followed in
the wake of the of the military invasion
of young husband in fact this is a
deeper thing when we use that language
as the early expeditions neveress did we
attack a mountain we assault a mountain
the language of war that wasn’t really
accidental because of course these
climbers were literally advancing into
the Karakoram the Hindukush
or the himalaya in the wake of
pacification expeditions of the British
Army
so the expedition you know began in
Darjeeling going up the river up to jela
and of course Henry Moore’s head in 1921
the surveyor went strictly to the
Seppala to rendezvous at Camp Azam the
main thrust of the expedition went up
the shouldn’t be in the gel apply into
the chumby valley there’s a verdant
tongue of tibet that drops down up to
the miserable town of fairy cross the
tangler and then instead of continuing
on to jian c and the Royal route to
Lhasa they went off the map turning to
the west on this great arc that took
from the campus on and eventually to the
shining crystal monastry of shigar and
on to Tengri that became their base now
on that approach march something really
strange happened
Arthur kelas the legendary high-altitude
physiologist the man who knew more about
the Himalaya than anyone engaged in the
event
sir simply died of exhaustion and was
buried at camp a song this is his
gravesite within the shadow of three
peaks that he was the first to climb now
1921 was less a mountaineering
expedition than a geographical
expedition the the purpose of the
expedition was to map the landscape to
find the chink in the armor of the
mountain so that a mountaineering
expedition the subsequent year could
find its way to the top and meanwhile do
geological surveys botanical collections
basically the old-time Natural History
exploration of a landscape and of course
with the surveyors seconded to the
expedition from the survey of India to
map the land and fill in the blanks on
the map in this part of Tibet that the
Europeans had never been to so as they
finally found their way to tingri their
mission was not simply to find a route
up the mountain but to explore all the
country including the mystic realm of
lop che homeland of milarepa the mystic
saint of tibet of the nan Paulo the
pasture beaches over here into Nepal so
they got to the rhombic monastery and in
everest slower people always say that
this monastery has been there for
thousands of years it was actually built
in the early 1900s by a remarkable lama
zopa rinpoche and one of the things that
I did in this book was tell the stories
from the tibetan side and one of the
ways that i did it was to go and live
months in the monastery of his spiritual
heir
Tosa rinpoche at the controlling
monastery in Nepal but I also got hold
of the spiritual autobiography of Zafar
Rinpoche the namtar and had it
translated in its entirety for the first
time by monks in Kathmandu and this is
Malory’s camp in the heart of the gamla
Valley in the heart of the buddhafield
now Mallory
foolishly twice missed the key to the
mountain the key to the mountain was the
North Col they couldn’t approach it from
the West they had to get there from the
other side and he missed the opening to
these roombook glacier
wheeler did not he mapped it he sent the
map to Howard burry saying this is
exactly how to get there unfortunately
in 1921 by then it was too late the
entire momentum of the expedition had
moved to the eastern face and there they
began a series of thrusts up the Carter
Valley up the Gamma Valley eventually
getting to this extraordinary place the
Loch Bala Windy Gap where they
established a camp and finally could see
the Kohl of their desires this was the
North Col seen from the east rhombic
glacier this side could be climbed and
if you simply went up here you avoided
all this carnage of the Northeast Ridge
and you came out on the height of the
North East Ridge with only two apparent
obstacles which famously became known as
the first and second steps Mallory who
disdained Canadians and that every
opportunity was disparaging to wheeler
and he never even acknowledged that
wheeler had found the key to the
mountain in fact he famously lied twice
in a letter to his beloved Ruth saying
that as he stood on Windy Gap if only we
knew where the east wrong book ended up
well of course he did know because
wheelers map a week before had told him
precisely but when it did come time to
climb the North Col when in doubt who do
you turn to a Canadian and so who are
the three men who braved the North Col
by Bullock George Mallory and Oliver
wheeler when they got up they both
estimated their time from their base
camp to be hours apart and it was no
wonder for what they found out the cold
shattered their senses neither had ever
experienced a wind like that
wheeler thought he was going to die the
only way he survived he said was to shut
his mind and remember how he had
survived the artillery barrage is at the
front by breathing deeply and bringing
himself into another reality even as the
world fell apart around him and that’s
how they encountered what would in time
become
but a first step in the ladder to the
summit so having discovered – the key to
the mountain they retreated to England
and then in 1922 they went out again all
of these expeditions had the members
shifting around and every expedition had
men more remarkable than the last here’s
John Morris a transport officer 1922 he
was a delicate boy never wanted to fight
in the war he was a lover of music when
he went off to the front he tried to
lose his virginity to a Nottingham
prostitute he fled from her room having
not shed his trousers but nevertheless
was certain that he contracted some foul
disease
he was almost blind with those bifocals
but in the trenches he never failed to
kill what finally saved him
was his ability three years into the
fighting to join the Indian army that
led him to the Northwest Frontier and
not two months before he joined the
expedition in 1922 his party was
ambushed he fought his way through most
of his men were killed one month later
he was at the everest hotel alone
contemplating the upcoming expedition
when this man like a bull blasted into
the room almost unhinging the doors and
this was of course the legendary Charles
Bruce the Mad Mountain maniac who would
lead the 1922 expedition an
extraordinary figure his favorite party
trick was to Tarapaca cards and earth at
Gallipoli machine gun fire had literally
severed his legs and he was told after
those two dreadful wounds to retire to
England and above all have a relaxed
life and never walk uphill instead he
set off for Everest they found their way
to shake our song the shining crystal
monastery the extraordinary 1922
expedition and now of course we do have
the two great climbers George Mallory
and George Finch he couldn’t be denied
and George Finch had a secret up his
sleeve and that of course was oxygen he
was a fantastic chemist a scientist and
he was a master of this unknown art of
the oxygen technology they moved their
way toward the mountain here they are
and then a dreadful thing happened just
as Finch was about to climb he fell ill
and in a kind of foolish spontaneous
gesture Colonel strut the two I see on
the expedition authorized Mallory
Colonel Norton Morshead
and Summerville to climb for the best
climbers a single shot without oxygen
they of course failed miserably returned
you can see Moore’s had lost his fingers
Norton his ear Mallory was injured only
Somerville emerged unscathed leaving
George Finch with only one man to climb
with the cousin of General Bruce who had
never been on a mountain before but
using oxygen George Fincher set a height
record of twenty-seven thousand three
hundred feet and had he not hesitated to
save the life of Geoffrey Bruce it’s
quite possible that in 1922 Finch would
have reached the top of Everest and of
course when he had to retreat having
saved Bruce the expedition should have
slipped away from the mountain but
Mallory by now was a man possessed he
insisted on a final assault and this is
when tragedy struck this photograph was
taken an hour before these seven men
would be swept away to their death by
the Avalanche that colored the end of
the second expedition 1924 a new team
and at this point a desperate team they
have of course added to the expedition
two remarkable men no Odell who would be
the last to see Mallory and Irvine alive
and Sandy Ervin himself this remarkable
young athlete of 22 from Oxford and the
inclusion of Irvin given the fate that
awaited him has always provoked
controversy but in fact he was a perfect
choice he was a mechanical soval who
could replace Finch who for various
reasons had been excluded from this
expedition he was ferociously strong he
had in fact climbed mountains and
Spitsbergen with O’Dell strength counted
for more than technical prowess on
Everest and this is no Adele the last to
see
malory alive and the question as to what
happened on that fateful day of June 8th
is something that probably will never
know and maybe we shouldn’t ever know
the quest to find the camera to prove
that these guys got up at the top of the
mountain has taken on a kind of carnival
atmosphere that to my mind seems almost
unseen ly when they did know that
Mallory had died general kornél Norton
famously wrote we were sad little party
but from the first we accepted the loss
of our comrades in that rational spirit
which all of our generation had learned
in the great war and there was never any
tendency to a morbid harping on the
irrevocable but the tragedy was very
near and so as constantly in the war so
too in our mimic campaign death had
taken his toll from the very best on the
very night that they retreated from the
mountain certain now that Mallory and
Irvin were dead one of the men camped
out high above the Zakhar to the last
glimpse back at the theatrical canvas of
the North Face of Everest and had so
captured their imagination this is what
he wrote in his diary I could see the
whole of the historic ground the scene
of the protracted adventure spread out
like a map and bathed in soft full
moonlight that night and with that scene
in front of me it was quite easy to
realize that the price of life is death
and that so long as a payment be made
promptly it matters little to the
individual when the payment is made some
were up there in that vast wilderness of
ice and rock were two still forms
yesterday with all the vigor and will of
perfect manhood they were playing a
great game their life’s desire today it
is over and they had gone without their
ever knowing the beginnings
kay could any man desire a better end
did he reached it or not if you read the
ocular testimony of Conrad Anker this
remarkable climber who both found
Mallory’s body and then retraced the
route up the North Col examining the
possibility the first step in the second
step it seems quite unlikely for any
number of reasons that George Mallory
reached the top simply if only because
of the severity of the second step but
there was always that one possibility
that keeps the story alive had the snows
that so buffeted the North Col and and
and the head of the East runbook lacier
force in Colonel Norton to retreat not
once but three times from his assault on
the mountain had those snows accumulated
in Northeast Ridge with the same depth
that they accumulated at the head of the
glacier it’s quite possible that a cone
of snow formed on the base of the second
step essentially eliminating it as a
hazard as indeed did occur in the fall
of 1985 had that happened Mallory and
Irvine could have walked up the second
step with the same speed and ease with
which Noelle Adele famously reported
that they appeared to be doing and had
he surmounted the second step absolutely
nothing would have kept George Mallory
from walking to the summit of Everest
because for all of these men life had
become something new Billy Grenville who
tried to explain the reality the Western
Front to his father Billy who would die
his brother too would die but before he
died he wrote to his father and he said
death on the Western Front was a frail
barrier that men crossed smiling and
gallant every day they had seen so much
of death that life mattered less than
the moments of being alive and had
Mallory overcome the impediment of the
second step there was nothing that would
have kept him from reaching the heights
of Everest and in many ways whether he
did or not
in my mind everest will always be George
Mallory George Mallory was a man that
Nolan could keep up with on the mountain
Mallory was a man who created the legend
of Everest and Everest created the
legend of Maori and the story will be an
epic one for all time thank you very
much
you
barrier that men crossed smiling and
gallant every day they had seen so much
of death that life mattered less than
the moments of being alive in the wake
of the war the quest forevers became a
mission of regeneration for people in a
nation led by everything you know of
your life every sense you have of the
modern every intuition every doubt
you’ve ever experienced was actually
born in the mud and blood of Flanders a
single bullet fired in the summer of
1914 to the breast of a prince in
Sarajevo shattered a universe for a
century Europe had being a peace even as
industrial miracles created wealth and
power beyond anything that had ever been
known and like children at a birthday
party anticipating cake the European
powers sliced into pieces and consumed
the confection of a planet each took
what it could until the boundaries of
imperial ambitions tightened like a
noose around the neck of civilisation
and then a single shot fired in Sarajevo
sparked the greatest Cataclysm in the
history of humanity the Second World War
more familiar to Americans was but the
child of the first Winston Churchill
famously fused two conflicts in what he
referred to as the 30 Years War never
was there a war less necessary to fight
he said in the first were more essential
to win than the second
so everything begins with a great war of
1914 to 1918 including this story
tonight for the war formed the
melancholic backdrop to the first
attempts to climb Mount Everest for the
entire generator
of men who had been through the
nightmare of the war death held no
mysteries they had seen so much of it
that had nothing left to teach them and
I had the sense that for these men of
Flanders life mattered less than the
moments of being alive and so on Everest
they were prepared to accept a level of
risk that would have been unimaginable
before the war so I set out with that
idea in mind to find out if these men
how these men had encountered the war
the British zone of operations was
surprisingly small roughly the size of
the English county of Lincolnshire the
British War front was never longer than
125 miles for much of the war it was
only 85 miles long but behind that front
the British built 6,000 miles of
trenches 6,000 miles of railroad and
because the zone of operations was so
small and because so many millions of
men moved through it because in the wake
of the war ten years after famously a
tsunami of books were published you
could literally go into the archives as
I did over the course of 10 years 60
different archives around the world
mostly of course in Britain and find out
where every single man had been every
day of the great war just consider this
at the beginning of the war you had to
stand five foot eight to be able to
enlist within two months that had
dropped the five foot three and any man
who could walk was eagerly recruited
into the British Army each month the
British Army required 10,000 new junior
officers just to replace the numbers of
the dead the Royal Army Medical Corps
during the war needed of course 108
million battle dressings but it also
needed 20 2386 artificial eyes the
impact on Britain was so severe a
million dead 2.5 million wounded in the
wake of the war 40,000 amputees 60,000
men without sight 65,000 soldiers who
never returned from the twilight memory
of hell that was shell-shocked
sociologically the agony of the war even
such that when the first year of peace
half of British land changed hands more
than it ever changed hands since the
Norman Conquest and so if the quest for
Mount Everest before the war began as a
kind of a gesture of redemption for an
empire of explorers who had lost the
race to the North and South Poles and
had embraced this coveted third pole
that lay within the domain of the Raj in
the wake of the war the quest forever us
became a mission of regeneration for
people in a nation bled white by war 26
men attempted Everest in 1921 22 and 24
some had missed the war but 20 most
assuredly hadn’t seen the war the very
worst of it
John Noel who went to his death speaking
incessantly about his contributions to
the Western Front when in fact he
quivered in suicidal despair through
most of the war in a hospital shattered
by shell-shocked
Howard Somerville I have his medical
documents he would perform in any one
given day 10 to 12 major surgeries as he
raised to tried to save the dine
Geoffrey Winthrop young arguably the
greatest climber of his era the mentor
of course of Mallory had been at yeep in
april of 1915 when the Germans attacked
for the first time using poison gas and
this is what he wrote in his journal
this horror was too monstrous to believe
at first but when it came far as we had
traveled from our civilized world of a
few months back the savagery of it of
the sight of men choking to death with
yellow frost lying on the floor and out
on the fields made me rage with an anger
that no later cruelty of man not even
the degradation of our kind by the
hideous concentration camps in later
Germany ever quite rekindled for then we
still thought all men were human
when it came time to actually equip the
Everest expeditions the great climber
Tom Longstaff laconically remarked the
supply of young climbers is not exactly
what it was before the war so if the war
informed and haunted the lives of all
these men the expeditions themselves in
21 22 and 24 were not isolated
adventurers but rather Imperial gestures
woven from the start into the fabric of
the Raj you know India was a British
creation 1300 Englishmen in the Indian
Civil Service not a single Indian
because Lord Curzon famously said there
was not one in the entire subcontinent
up to the job 1,300 Englishmen
dominating fully a fifth of humanity and
the British had indeed transformed the
face of India but India itself is a
British invention and Majan place
brought into reality by the by the
mathematicians and the technicians of
the Survey of India maps were the very
key to the notion of India they codified
the features of a subcontinent even as
they created the rationale for
occupation and so it was not by chance
that the greatest scientific experiment
of the 19th century was a literal
measurement of India and it was through
that process of the great trigonometry
that the greatest mountain of the world
would be found but the British at that
point in the immediate wake of the
Indian Mutiny were not concerned with
mountaineering but they were concerned
with the unknown lands that lay beyond
the Himalaya knowledge was the key to
British power and it was intolerable to
a man like Lord Curzon that he had no
way of communicating with the capital of
Tibet that lay but 250 miles north of
Darjeeling an agricultural Enclave that
exported key to every Hamlet in the
British Empire and so this idea of
finding out what was beyond a slipped
into paranoia and the fear that the
great enemy of Britain in the 19th
century which was not France and not
Germany but was Russia the Russian
Empire throughout the 19th century
expanded by an average of 55 square
miles every day
the 19th century bringing it to the very
gates of the Raj so the fear of the
British was not that they should be
taking Tibet but rather the Russians
might take it from them and this
provoked a series of incursions led
eventually by Sir Francis Younghusband
worthy the virginity of the mystic
center of of Tibet the capital of Lhasa
was finally broken by this imperial
force that invaded in 1904 it
disappointed the British in so many ways
and as the expedition retreated to
Darjeeling young husband who was both
Saint mystic visionary and spy had to
find another place to fire the British
imagination the imperial venture and he
saw from compose on this extraordinary
mountain hovering over the universe and
this was Everest and so even as the
British are beginning this sort of
mission towards Everest
it is never separate from Imperial
thrust and parry within a month of the
end of the war young husband was
scheming to get British boys to the base
of Everest and then the question became
who’s gonna go on this expedition these
are the men who went to Everest in 1921
now it’s hard to believe from the rather
mousy appearance who these men are
sandy Williston left George Mallory guy
Bullock the diplomat the governor of
Bengal this remarkable Charles Howard
brewery in the irascible Scott Herald
Rayburn let’s take Charles Howard
brewery over there this is an incredible
guy who led the 1921 expedition he was
not really a man designed for war but he
saw the war from start to finish
he was always drawn to the sacred he
read the works of Krishnamurti he was
enamored of Kahili Gibran he was a
brilliant writer a great naturalist he
spoke twenty-seven agen and European
languages he was not a man prepared for
war but when war broke out he fought in
every engagement he was a ward of Lord
land stone he finally almost went mad on
one night in the shadow of the song when
he was given the order to dig a
communication trench to a place the
British so
is called the devil’s would as the
artillery flashed the very lights he
suddenly found that all of them were
literally digging not through soil but
through rotten flesh six and eight feet
deep what you forget about their war is
two things and this is why the books
called into the silence the noise
Napoleon fired twenty thousand shells at
Waterloo at the psalm the British had
sixteen hundred artillery pieces which
could fire a thousand shells a day
the sound was palpable it was visible
you could feel it in the air so it was
Howard burry who eventually led the 1921
expedition so what they did is they
followed and again in this sort of
spirit that I suggested that the efforts
on Everest had everything to do about
the Imperial desire it was not a
coincidence the first expeditions to the
heart of Everest literally followed in
the wake of the of the military invasion
of young husband in fact this is a
deeper thing when we use that language
as the early expeditions neveress did we
attack a mountain we assault a mountain
the language of war that wasn’t really
accidental because of course these
climbers were literally advancing into
the Karakoram the Hindukush
or the himalaya in the wake of
pacification expeditions of the British
Army
so the expedition you know began in
Darjeeling going up the river up to jela
and of course Henry Moore’s head in 1921
the surveyor went strictly to the
Seppala to rendezvous at Camp Azam the
main thrust of the expedition went up
the shouldn’t be in the gel apply into
the chumby valley there’s a verdant
tongue of tibet that drops down up to
the miserable town of fairy cross the
tangler and then instead of continuing
on to jian c and the Royal route to
Lhasa they went off the map turning to
the west on this great arc that took
from the campus on and eventually to the
shining crystal monastry of shigar and
on to Tengri that became their base now
on that approach march something really
strange happened
Arthur kelas the legendary high-altitude
physiologist the man who knew more about
the Himalaya than anyone engaged in the
event
sir simply died of exhaustion and was
buried at camp a song this is his
gravesite within the shadow of three
peaks that he was the first to climb now
1921 was less a mountaineering
expedition than a geographical
expedition the the purpose of the
expedition was to map the landscape to
find the chink in the armor of the
mountain so that a mountaineering
expedition the subsequent year could
find its way to the top and meanwhile do
geological surveys botanical collections
basically the old-time Natural History
exploration of a landscape and of course
with the surveyors seconded to the
expedition from the survey of India to
map the land and fill in the blanks on
the map in this part of Tibet that the
Europeans had never been to so as they
finally found their way to tingri their
mission was not simply to find a route
up the mountain but to explore all the
country including the mystic realm of
lop che homeland of milarepa the mystic
saint of tibet of the nan Paulo the
pasture beaches over here into Nepal so
they got to the rhombic monastery and in
everest slower people always say that
this monastery has been there for
thousands of years it was actually built
in the early 1900s by a remarkable lama
zopa rinpoche and one of the things that
I did in this book was tell the stories
from the tibetan side and one of the
ways that i did it was to go and live
months in the monastery of his spiritual
heir
Tosa rinpoche at the controlling
monastery in Nepal but I also got hold
of the spiritual autobiography of Zafar
Rinpoche the namtar and had it
translated in its entirety for the first
time by monks in Kathmandu and this is
Malory’s camp in the heart of the gamla
Valley in the heart of the buddhafield
now Mallory
foolishly twice missed the key to the
mountain the key to the mountain was the
North Col they couldn’t approach it from
the West they had to get there from the
other side and he missed the opening to
these roombook glacier
wheeler did not he mapped it he sent the
map to Howard burry saying this is
exactly how to get there unfortunately
in 1921 by then it was too late the
entire momentum of the expedition had
moved to the eastern face and there they
began a series of thrusts up the Carter
Valley up the Gamma Valley eventually
getting to this extraordinary place the
Loch Bala Windy Gap where they
established a camp and finally could see
the Kohl of their desires this was the
North Col seen from the east rhombic
glacier this side could be climbed and
if you simply went up here you avoided
all this carnage of the Northeast Ridge
and you came out on the height of the
North East Ridge with only two apparent
obstacles which famously became known as
the first and second steps Mallory who
disdained Canadians and that every
opportunity was disparaging to wheeler
and he never even acknowledged that
wheeler had found the key to the
mountain in fact he famously lied twice
in a letter to his beloved Ruth saying
that as he stood on Windy Gap if only we
knew where the east wrong book ended up
well of course he did know because
wheelers map a week before had told him
precisely but when it did come time to
climb the North Col when in doubt who do
you turn to a Canadian and so who are
the three men who braved the North Col
by Bullock George Mallory and Oliver
wheeler when they got up they both
estimated their time from their base
camp to be hours apart and it was no
wonder for what they found out the cold
shattered their senses neither had ever
experienced a wind like that
wheeler thought he was going to die the
only way he survived he said was to shut
his mind and remember how he had
survived the artillery barrage is at the
front by breathing deeply and bringing
himself into another reality even as the
world fell apart around him and that’s
how they encountered what would in time
become
but a first step in the ladder to the
summit so having discovered – the key to
the mountain they retreated to England
and then in 1922 they went out again all
of these expeditions had the members
shifting around and every expedition had
men more remarkable than the last here’s
John Morris a transport officer 1922 he
was a delicate boy never wanted to fight
in the war he was a lover of music when
he went off to the front he tried to
lose his virginity to a Nottingham
prostitute he fled from her room having
not shed his trousers but nevertheless
was certain that he contracted some foul
disease
he was almost blind with those bifocals
but in the trenches he never failed to
kill what finally saved him
was his ability three years into the
fighting to join the Indian army that
led him to the Northwest Frontier and
not two months before he joined the
expedition in 1922 his party was
ambushed he fought his way through most
of his men were killed one month later
he was at the everest hotel alone
contemplating the upcoming expedition
when this man like a bull blasted into
the room almost unhinging the doors and
this was of course the legendary Charles
Bruce the Mad Mountain maniac who would
lead the 1922 expedition an
extraordinary figure his favorite party
trick was to Tarapaca cards and earth at
Gallipoli machine gun fire had literally
severed his legs and he was told after
those two dreadful wounds to retire to
England and above all have a relaxed
life and never walk uphill instead he
set off for Everest they found their way
to shake our song the shining crystal
monastery the extraordinary 1922
expedition and now of course we do have
the two great climbers George Mallory
and George Finch he couldn’t be denied
and George Finch had a secret up his
sleeve and that of course was oxygen he
was a fantastic chemist a scientist and
he was a master of this unknown art of
the oxygen technology they moved their
way toward the mountain here they are
and then a dreadful thing happened just
as Finch was about to climb he fell ill
and in a kind of foolish spontaneous
gesture Colonel strut the two I see on
the expedition authorized Mallory
Colonel Norton Morshead
and Summerville to climb for the best
climbers a single shot without oxygen
they of course failed miserably returned
you can see Moore’s had lost his fingers
Norton his ear Mallory was injured only
Somerville emerged unscathed leaving
George Finch with only one man to climb
with the cousin of General Bruce who had
never been on a mountain before but
using oxygen George Fincher set a height
record of twenty-seven thousand three
hundred feet and had he not hesitated to
save the life of Geoffrey Bruce it’s
quite possible that in 1922 Finch would
have reached the top of Everest and of
course when he had to retreat having
saved Bruce the expedition should have
slipped away from the mountain but
Mallory by now was a man possessed he
insisted on a final assault and this is
when tragedy struck this photograph was
taken an hour before these seven men
would be swept away to their death by
the Avalanche that colored the end of
the second expedition 1924 a new team
and at this point a desperate team they
have of course added to the expedition
two remarkable men no Odell who would be
the last to see Mallory and Irvine alive
and Sandy Ervin himself this remarkable
young athlete of 22 from Oxford and the
inclusion of Irvin given the fate that
awaited him has always provoked
controversy but in fact he was a perfect
choice he was a mechanical soval who
could replace Finch who for various
reasons had been excluded from this
expedition he was ferociously strong he
had in fact climbed mountains and
Spitsbergen with O’Dell strength counted
for more than technical prowess on
Everest and this is no Adele the last to
see
malory alive and the question as to what
happened on that fateful day of June 8th
is something that probably will never
know and maybe we shouldn’t ever know
the quest to find the camera to prove
that these guys got up at the top of the
mountain has taken on a kind of carnival
atmosphere that to my mind seems almost
unseen ly when they did know that
Mallory had died general kornél Norton
famously wrote we were sad little party
but from the first we accepted the loss
of our comrades in that rational spirit
which all of our generation had learned
in the great war and there was never any
tendency to a morbid harping on the
irrevocable but the tragedy was very
near and so as constantly in the war so
too in our mimic campaign death had
taken his toll from the very best on the
very night that they retreated from the
mountain certain now that Mallory and
Irvin were dead one of the men camped
out high above the Zakhar to the last
glimpse back at the theatrical canvas of
the North Face of Everest and had so
captured their imagination this is what
he wrote in his diary I could see the
whole of the historic ground the scene
of the protracted adventure spread out
like a map and bathed in soft full
moonlight that night and with that scene
in front of me it was quite easy to
realize that the price of life is death
and that so long as a payment be made
promptly it matters little to the
individual when the payment is made some
were up there in that vast wilderness of
ice and rock were two still forms
yesterday with all the vigor and will of
perfect manhood they were playing a
great game their life’s desire today it
is over and they had gone without their
ever knowing the beginnings
kay could any man desire a better end
did he reached it or not if you read the
ocular testimony of Conrad Anker this
remarkable climber who both found
Mallory’s body and then retraced the
route up the North Col examining the
possibility the first step in the second
step it seems quite unlikely for any
number of reasons that George Mallory
reached the top simply if only because
of the severity of the second step but
there was always that one possibility
that keeps the story alive had the snows
that so buffeted the North Col and and
and the head of the East runbook lacier
force in Colonel Norton to retreat not
once but three times from his assault on
the mountain had those snows accumulated
in Northeast Ridge with the same depth
that they accumulated at the head of the
glacier it’s quite possible that a cone
of snow formed on the base of the second
step essentially eliminating it as a
hazard as indeed did occur in the fall
of 1985 had that happened Mallory and
Irvine could have walked up the second
step with the same speed and ease with
which Noelle Adele famously reported
that they appeared to be doing and had
he surmounted the second step absolutely
nothing would have kept George Mallory
from walking to the summit of Everest
because for all of these men life had
become something new Billy Grenville who
tried to explain the reality the Western
Front to his father Billy who would die
his brother too would die but before he
died he wrote to his father and he said
death on the Western Front was a frail
barrier that men crossed smiling and
gallant every day they had seen so much
of death that life mattered less than
the moments of being alive and had
Mallory overcome the impediment of the
second step there was nothing that would
have kept him from reaching the heights
of Everest and in many ways whether he
did or not
in my mind everest will always be George
Mallory George Mallory was a man that
Nolan could keep up with on the mountain
Mallory was a man who created the legend
of Everest and Everest created the
legend of Maori and the story will be an
epic one for all time thank you very
much
you
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