The Lost Explorer by Conrad Anker, David Roberts Page A

slapping a Welsh term for an alpine basin onto a Himalayan landscape. The Khumbu and the Western Cwm would prove the route by which Hillary and Tenzing would make the first ascent of Everest, thirty-two years later. From the Lho La, however, the 1,500-foot drop to the Khumbu unfolded as a “hopeless precipice.” The question was moot, in any event, for at the pass, the men stood on the border of Tibet and Nepal, and they were forbidden to enter the latter country.
    Always Mallory’s eye was fixed on the dotted line his imagination had already drawn from the North Col to the summit. “We saw the North Col quite clearly to-day,” he told his diary on July 15, “and again the way up from there does not look difficult.”
    Thus the immediate task of the reconnaissance was to see if the North Col could be gained from the opposite, or eastern side. Later Mallory, that geographical perfectionist, would castigate himself for not discovering in 1921 that the East Rongbuk Glacier, a tributary ice stream that enters the Rongbuk proper by a V-shaped side valley two and a half miles above the terminus, would prove the royal road to the North Col. (Virtually all modern expeditions to Everest’s north side, including Simonson’s in 1999, haul their loads up a succession of camps on the East Rongbuk, establishing Camp IV on the North Col.) But that narrow, V-shaped entry of the East Rongbuk into the main glacier is all too easy to miss; and the existing Royal Geographical Society maps Mallory was using argued an entirely different structure of ridges on the northeast side of Everest.
    To gain the North Col, then, Mallory and Bullock undertook a heroic end run to the north and east, skirting dozens of nameless subsidiary peaks, until they could find and ascend the Kharta Glacier. Before they could launch that effort—the second great prong of the reconnaissance—during a brief reunion with team leader Charles Howard-Bury, Mallory received some devastating information. The photographic plates he had labored for more than a month to expose, lugging a large camera to distant heights, were all blank, for he had been inserting them backwards. Once more, Mallory’s chronic mechanical ineptitude had taken its toll. This “hideous error,” as he called it in the expedition report, came as “an extremely depressing piece of news.”
    Mallory’s attitude toward the “coolies” who were his only support in the reconnaissance, and without whom it could not have been undertaken, was a mixture of sympathetic curiosity and the cultural condescension that was endemic in his day. Recognizing the importance of being able to speak the porters’ own language, he set himself to learning Tibetan. He shared with them the precious chocolates and nuts he received in the occasional parcel from England that made its way to Base Camp.Yet, as he watched the porters whom he had taught the basics of ice-craft apply their lessons for the first time, he wryly concluded, “It was not a convincing spectacle, as they made their way up with the ungainly movements of beginners.” The sirdar, or head porter, Mallory dismissed in exasperation as “a whey-faced treacherous knave, whose sly and calculated villainy” (a matter of selling food rations for personal profit) threatened to wreck the reconnaissance.
    The reunion with Howard-Bury and Raeburn, who had done little to help the expedition, only exasperated Mallory further. “I can’t get over my dislike of him,” he wrote Ruth of the team leader; and with regard to Raeburn, who had arrived grizzled and weak, “When he is not being a bore I feel moved to pity, but that is not often.” The high-strung Mallory had even grown irritated with Bullock, his faithful partner in the reconnaissance. “We had rather drifted into that common superficial attitude between two people who live alone together,” he wrote Ruth—“competitive and slightly quarrelsome, each looking out to see that he doesn’t get done