The Black Spot

This book will not put George Mallory on the summit of Everest, because nothing in the record can put him there. Noel Odell, climbing alone in support, had stopped to look at the rock when the cloud opened. He saw one tiny black spot move on a snow crest beneath a rock step, and a second follow it, and the cloud closed. That interval, which nobody timed, is the whole of the evidence for what Mallory and Andrew Comyn Irvine did on the last day either was seen. After it there is no note, no photograph, no witness, no artefact with a timestamp. Odell was certain at first that the step was the Second Step, then allowed within a year that it might have been the First. He was asked about it for sixty-three years and never resolved it.

The argument is that the mystery was manufactured, and the manufacture can be dated. The Mount Everest Committee raised the money, selected the men and sold the lecture and film rights before anyone climbed anything. Nobody claimed the summit. What was produced instead was a permanent open question, and it has replaced the man it was asked about.

The man was a schoolmaster. He taught English, history and French at Charterhouse to boys who mostly did not want them, married Ruth Turner six days before Britain declared war, had three children under nine in 1924, and did not want to go back that year. He said so in writing. Fifteen of the twenty-two chapters come before the final expedition, because the argument requires that the machine be watched assembling.

One of them is the North Col in 1922, where Mallory took fourteen porters onto fresh snow on the direct line, the slope avalanched and seven died. It is the one occasion on which his judgement is known to have killed anybody, and it is not consoled. Set against it is Edward Norton, who climbed to 8,572.8 metres without oxygen and came down snowblind. Almost nobody knows his name, and the single reason is that he came back.