A Stream at the Base of the Mountain [excerpt]
by Jocelyn Richardson

This article originally appeared in print in Kill Your Darlings Issue 25, April 2016.

I recently found an image of the mountaineer George Mallory standing bare-arsed at the base of Mount Everest. He posed for the photo in 1923 wearing only a hat and rucksack, his arms crossed, one knee bent, and his bum angled at the camera.

A year after the photo was taken, while attempting to be the first to summit the mountain, he disappeared into the clouds during the final stage of the climb and never came back. To this day, no one knows whether or not he reached the peak. His body was discovered in a snowy catchment in 1999, seventy-six years after his disappearance, bleached and frozen with his arms outstretched as though he was clinging to the mountain.

George Mallory was a sensual man. He was close to many within the early twentieth-century London art scenes. Virginia Woolf once described him as ‘a divine undergraduate with a head like a Greek God’. He was known to flirt with Cambridge essayist Lytton Strachey who once wrote of George’s body as ‘vast, pink, unbelievable… a thing to melt into and die’. Letters from the time plot a romantic game of cat and mouse between George, Lytton and his younger brother, James Strachey. George sought James while Lytton sought George. When James spurned George, George spurned Lytton, leaving him loveless.

In 1912 Mallory posed for the artist Duncan Grant. He wrote of the experience: ‘I am profoundly interested in the nude me.’ I have to admit I find the portraits compelling, looking at him posed in the studio in a round-arsed stance, the light falling on ripples in the flesh of his back. He looks soft, affectionate and vast.

Mallory had some ambition to become a writer. In the chapters he contributed to the public accounts of the 1921 trip, Mallory romanced Everest from afar:

Gradually, very gradually, we saw the great mountainsides and glaciers and arêtes, now one fragment and now another through the floating rifts, until far higher in the sky than imagination had dared to suggest the white summit of Everest appeared. And in this series of partial glimpses we had seen a whole; we were able to piece together the fragments, to interpret the dream. However much might remain to be understood, the centre had a clear meaning as one mountain shape, the shape of Everest.

– Mallory, Mount Everest, The Reconnaissance, 1921.

The way he pieced together this shape is the exact opposite of how my perception changed as I lay watching the glacier in New Zealand. Instead of perceiving fragments of unknowably detailed rock, mist and ice, he gradually united them all into one human symbol: Everest, with its pleasing pyramidal geometry, imbued with the significance of being the highest place in the world.

Mallory was known to be a man who liked to swim nude at every chance. I wonder what he felt in 1923 standing naked in such close proximity to the mountain, whether he began to feel closer to it, whether he felt he was exploring the sensuality he’d discovered in the artist’s studio.

In his writing Mallory interrogated the reasons for mountaineering, and he rarely seemed satisfied with the answers. He wasn’t always ambitious. He wrote about moments of stillness that tempted him. He was introspective. I recognise his desire for privacy in this (apocryphal) quote, often attributed to him:

Why do we travel to remote locations? To prove our adventurous spirit or to tell stories about incredible things? We do it to be alone amongst friends and to find ourselves in a land without man.

Later in his career, when the pressure to complete the mission was building, Mallory clung to the rhetoric that highest is best and that the mountain existed to be climbed. When asked in an interview why he wanted to summit Everest, he responded like a teenager: ‘Because it’s there.’

It’s a statement that reveals a flash of arrogance and nihilism. He was describing a relationship devoid of feeling, as though he had begun to objectify what he once desired. Perhaps he began to sense the mission’s recklessness, to trace its imperialistic roots, to feel the weight of death and the responsibility he had for others’ lives. He became emblematic of the obsession with climbing, but even he sensed its uselessness.

Today the routes on Everest are crowded with international expeditions. As a result, the climb is more dangerous than in Mallory’s time. In the 2014 and 2015 climbing seasons, the two highest death tolls were recorded, each after avalanches hit porters and climbers on their way to the summit. The camps are so full of rubbish and human waste they’ve become unsanitary and authorities are enforcing visitors to carry at least eight kilograms off the mountain with every trip. Bodies lie trapped in gullies and ravines. Untrained climbers can buy places on expeditions and local guides are still employed to make the dangerous climb carrying gear and preparing routes for customers, and for what? Why is the highest place still considered the most desirable?

Rob Roy Glacier, NZ. By Max Turner. 2014.

Andrew Irvine, unamed Sherpa, George Mallory (from the left). Everest Base Camp. c1923.

George Mallory photographed by Duncan Grant. 1912.

George Mallory photographed by Duncan Grant. 1912.

Justine. Melancholia. Film by Lars von Trier. 2011.