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turning. It was miserable.
    In my sleeplessness, I kept reviewing the day. Despite the broken leg and the gorak damage, at George’s side I had experienceda powerful feeling that he was at peace with himself. As I had sat next to him, I thought, This man was a fellow climber. We shared the same goals and aspirations, the same joys and sorrows. Our lives were motivated by the same elemental force. When I thought of what a valiant effort George had made, to climb this high on the north side of Everest in 1924, given the equipment and clothing of his day, I was flooded with a sense of awe.
    And already, my mind was turning over the implications of what we had found. It seemed unlikely that it was Mallory whose body Wang Hongbao had discovered in 1975. His description—of a man lying on his side, with one cheek pecked out by goraks—was too different from what we had seen. So if Wang had found Irvine, where was he? Did the broken rope mean that the two men had fallen together? In that case, was Irvine’s body nearby? And what were the chances that the camera lay with Irvine? Already I was anticipating our second search.
    I knew we’d made a major find, but the full impact of it didn’t hit me until we went on down the mountain. Despite our radio silence and our cryptic coded messages to each other, by the time we reached Base Camp two days later, the whole world was buzzing with the news that we’d discovered George Mallory.

2 Mon Dieu!—George Mallory!

    DR
    I T MIGHT BE ARGUED that in disappearing into the clouds that June day seventy-five years ago, Mallory and Irvine performed the most perfect vanishing act in exploring history. The question of what went wrong to cause their deaths is, in the long run, secondary. Even in the 1990s, it is all too easy to fall off those loose, downward-sloping slabs—like roof tiles, in the words of Teddy Norton—on the north face of Everest, and just as easy to freeze to death in an unplanned bivouac on one of its high, storm-swept ledges. Nor is it particularly surprising that the two men’s bodies should have been lost for so many years. Over the decades, any number of stellar mountaineers have disappeared on Everest—among them the British climbers Mick Burke, Pete Boardman, and Joe Tasker, as well as four stalwart Czechs in 1988 who, having made a daring, fast ascent of the southwest face, were never seen or heard from again after making an exhausted last radio call. Despite all the climbers who yearly swarm onto Everest, the mountain is huge enough to hide many secrets, and the glaciers that carry away everything that falls from its slopes have sealed many a hapless mountaineer in an icy tomb.
    The conundrum that elevates Mallory and Irvine’s vanishing to the realm of the mythic is the possibility that the pair could have reached the summit before they died. Over the years, pressed to pin down exactly where he had seen his friends moving fast along the ridge at 12:50 on June 8, NoelOdell vacillated. A skeptical man by nature, he allowed other skeptics to convince him that in all likelihood he had seen Mallory and Irvine climbing up the relatively easy First Step, more than 1,000 feet below the top. Yet in his original diary entry, which presumably noted his fresh first perception, Odell wrote, “At 12:50 saw M & I on ridge nearing base of final pyramid”—in other words, less than 500 feet below the summit.
    None of the fourteen peaks in the world surpassing 8,000 meters (about 26,240 feet) would be climbed for another twenty-six years, until the French ascent of Annapurna in 1950. This, despite a dozen bold attacks on K2, Kangchenjunga, Nanga Parbat, and Everest in the 1930s, by teams loaded with topnotch American, English, and German mountaineers. If Mallory and Irvine summitted in 1924, their deed stands unique in mountaineering history.
    Beyond all this, Mallory himself was one of the most talented, charismatic, and at the same time enigmatic figures ever to cross the