“We’ll find our way, thank you, James.” The wide hallways with their highly varnished floors and glass-cased displays make me want to whisper as if I’m in a church, but the Deacon’s tone remains the same as it had been outside.
The Map Room is beautiful—mezzanines with leather-bound books, long tables with maps set on wooden display wedges, a globe large enough that an acrobat could have balanced on it while rolling it down Kensington Boulevard—but it is not as huge a space as my imagination has been drawing. To one side of the main room is one of the 1875 building’s many-windowed porch annexes, a lighted fireplace set into one wall. Hingston, Noel, Norton, Somervell, and Odell stand as we approach, the Deacon introduces J.C. and me, and the three of us take the last deep leather chairs in the arc of eight chairs facing the fireplace. Through the windows behind us, the sunset light has mellowed into a general golden glow.
During the Deacon’s introductions and our handshakes, I realize that while I’ve met none of these men in person before, I thought I knew what they looked like through published photos of their various expeditions. But almost all of them had been sporting beards—or at least rampant whiskers—in those photographs, and now most are clean-shaven except for a couple of well-trimmed mustaches, so I probably would have walked right past them on the street without recognizing them.
Colonel Edward Felix “Teddy” Norton is exceedingly tall—at least an inch or two taller than my 6 foot 2, I realize—and everything about him, from his quiet, competent demeanor to his cool stare, reflects a military man who has long been comfortable in positions of command. Dr. Richard Hingston, 37 years old, is a slim man—not a climber (he’d served as both physician and expedition naturalist on last spring’s ’24 expedition)—but I knew that he’d pushed himself as high as Camp IV on the North Col to take care of snow-blinded Norton and other ailing patients stuck there. He’d served as a doctor in France, Mesopotamia, and East Africa during the Great War, and had been awarded the Military Cross for his courage under fire. Hingston may not be a climber, but I look at him with great respect.
Theodore Howard Somervell—called Howard by his friends and introduced as such to us by the Deacon—is also a surgeon as well as a former missionary, but looks as rugged as a stevedore. The Deacon has told us that Somervell never really returned to England after the 1922 Everest expedition and has chosen to live and work at a medical mission in Neyyoor in southern India ever since. Somervell is in London now only for the Mallory-Irvine memorial tribute and this round of Alpine Club and RGS meetings and banquets.
Somervell’s a handsome man, even without the thick dark beard he’d sported in photographs from Tibet, and his curly hair, deeply tanned face, expressive dark brows, and sudden white flash of a grin make him appear almost rakish. But that’s not his nature. The Deacon almost never spoke about his own experiences during the War, but he had mentioned one night while we were bivouacking high on an alpine peak last year that Somervell—a particular friend of his—had been turned into a deeply religious pacifist while serving in a surgical tent as one of only four doctors trying to deal with the thousands of wounded soldiers, many mortally wounded and knowing it, on the first morning of the Battle of the Somme. The Deacon said that Somervell had spoken with many of the hundreds of men lying outside the tent on their bloody stretchers or rain ponchos, each man undoubtedly knowing that waiting even moments longer for medical treatment might well cost him his life, but not one injured man had asked to be treated before the others. Not one.
As I shake Somervell’s hand—calloused for a surgeon—and look into his clear eyes, I consider the probability that such an experience might turn any sensitive soul into a pacifist overnight. The Deacon also has told us that while Somervell was a devout Christian, he certainly wasn’t a dogmatic one. “The only problem with Christianity,” Somervell had told the Deacon as they shared a two-man tent high on a snowy pass during the ’22 expedition, “is that it’s never really been tried.”
Captain John Noel is a thin man with a lined face and deep-set eyes that seem filled with worry. There may be reason for that: Noel had paid £8,000, the full cost of the 1924 expedition, in exchange for all film and photo rights—had brought specially devised still and cine cameras as high as the North Col to get long shots of the summiteers, presumably Mallory and Irvine, reaching the top of Everest—and had even brought a full darkroom tent to Everest Base Camp with him the previous spring. He’d paid for a series of runners to carry his developed photographs from Everest to Darjeeling for mailing to the major London papers. Now he is putting out his motion picture The Epic of Everest—but because clouds had obscured any last views of Mallory and Irvine, at least from the North Col, it was being whispered that Captain Noel had no satisfactory ending to his film. He somehow had managed to bring to London with him a troupe of dancing lamas from a Tibetan monastery—not the Rongbuk Monastery near Mount Everest—to liven up his showings, but that, along with “objectionable scenes showing Tibetans eating head lice” in his proposed film, seems already to be causing diplomatic problems. Unless Noel’s motion picture turns out to be a huge hit here in England and in America, the poor man is looking at losing the majority of his £8,000 investment.
As I stare at Odell, I realize that he has good reason to look worried and distracted this autumn evening in 1924.
Captain John Noel had been the last man to receive a note from George Mallory, but it is the last man we greet this night, the geologist and climber and the Deacon’s particular friend Noel E. Odell, who always will be known as the last man to see Mallory and Irvine alive.
Odell had been alone at Camp V the night before Mallory and Irvine made their attempt from the precarious tent higher at Camp VI, and as he ascended alone to Camp VI that day—what should have been the auspicious summit day—it was Odell who’d clambered up a 100-foot crag at about 26,000 feet at 12:50 p.m. and, as he recorded in his journal that night, “saw M & I on ridge, nearing base of final pyramide.”
But had he?
Already, only days after the memorial service for Mallory and Irvine and the jam-packed Alpine Club meeting which had set all of England abuzz, climbers—even other members of the same expedition—were casting doubts on what Odell said he’d seen. Could Mallory and Irvine possibly have been surmounting the so-called Third Step and silhouetting themselves against the final snowy Summit Pyramid, as Odell claimed, as early as 12:50 p.m.? It was possible, but seemed doubtful. Their climbing rate, even with oxygen, would have been very impressive indeed. No, argue some, it must have been the Second Step which Odell had seen them climbing. No, no, argue other experts who weren’t within 5,000 miles of the mountain at the time, it could only have been the First Step that Mallory and Irvine were passing that early in the day. Odell must be wrong, even though he’d pointed out via photographs and terrain maps that the rise of ridges and the bulk of the mountain blocked his view of the First Step from his particular vantage point on that crag. But the clouds had parted for only a minute, granting him just a glimpse of the two climbing human figures—if human figures they were (“mere rocks in a snowfield,” argued many alpinists)—before closing in to obscure his view.
We were all seated and another servant in white tie and tails had taken our orders for whiskeys when Colonel Norton broke the silence.
“It’s good to see you, Richard. I’m sorry we have only twenty minutes or so before the formal Alpine Club dinner begins. Since you’re a fellow in the RGS and former expedition member, we could always find room for you…”