Fallen E-Book

Mick Conefrey

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 512

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'Mick Conefrey's Fallen is a marvellously researched and written story about the enigma of George Mallory and the fulfilment of his "Because it's there!"' Peter Hillary 'Mick Conefrey's gripping account explores the 1924 expedition and the enigma of the man who nearly made it to the summit.' Financial Times 'Mick Conefrey has become one of our finest gazetteers of the Himalaya.' The Spectator On 6 June, 1924 George Mallory donned an oxygen set and set off for the summit of Everest with his young partner Andrew Irvine. Two days later they were glimpsed through clouds heading upwards, but after that they were never seen again. Whether they died on the way up or on the way down no one knows. In the years following his disappearance, Mallory was elevated into an all-British hero. Dubbed by his friends the 'Galahad' of Everest, he was lionised in the press as the greatest mountaineer of his generation who had died while taking on the ultimate challenge. Handsome, charismatic, daring, he was a skilled public speaker, an athletic and technically gifted climber, a committed Socialist and a supremely attractive figure to both men and women. His friends ranged from the gay artists and writers of the Bloomsbury group to the best mountaineers of his era. But that was only one side to him. Mallory was also a risk taker who according to his friend and biographer David Pye, could never get behind the wheel of a car without overtaking the vehicle in front, a climber who pushed himself and those around him to the limits, a chaotic technophobe who was forever losing equipment or mishandling it, the man who led his porters to their deaths in 1922 and his young partner to his uncertain end in 1924. So who was the real Mallory and what were the forces that made him and ultimately destroyed him? Why did the man who denounced oxygen sets as 'damnable heresy' in 1922 perish on an oxygen-powered summit attempt two years later? And above all, what made him go back to Everest for the third time? Based on diaries, letters, memoirs and thousands of contemporary documents, Fallen is both a forensic account of Mallory's last expedition to Everest in 1924 and an attempt to get under his skin and separate the man from the myth.

Leseprobe

Mick Conefrey is an award-winning writer and documentary maker. He made the landmark BBC series Mountain Men and Icemen and The Race for Everest to mark the 60th anniversary of the first ascent. His previous books include Everest 1922, Everest 1953, the winner of a LeggiMontagna award, The Last Great Mountain, the winner of the Premio Itas in 2023, and The Ghosts of K2, which won a US National Outdoor Book award in 2017.

First published in hardback and trade paperback in Great Britain in 2024 by Allen & Unwin, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in 2025 by Allen & Unwin

Copyright © Mick Conefrey, 2024

The moral right of Mick Conefrey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Maps by Adam T. Burton

The picture acknowledgements on p. 331–33 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 980 7

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Contents

Prologue

1   About a Boy

2   Go West

3   The Two Georges

4   To Go or Not to Go

5   The Long March

6   Cold Comfort

7   Trapped

8   There

9   The Boys from Birkenhead

10   Your Ever Loving George

11   The Searchers

12   A Tale of Two Photos

13   About a Man

Epilogue to the Paperback Edition

Bibliography and Sources

Acknowledgements

Index

Prologue

They fanned out across the slope, taking their time to survey the terrain. The wind was no longer so ferocious, but it was still cold and gusty. Back home, the experts referred to this as a natural ‘terrace’, but it was far from flat – a thirty-degree slope with steep cliffs at the bottom, the terrain a mixture of scree-covered rock and patches of snow. Just one slip could send you tumbling down the mountain, to be smashed to pieces on the glaciers below.

They were at 27,000 feet on the North Face of Everest, the lower edge of the ‘death zone’. Five American climbers and mountain guides: average age thirty-two, two previous summiters, all eager and willing. At Base Camp, 10,000 feet below – near the tip of the Rongbuk glacier – other members of their team were attempting to follow the action through a powerful telescope.

It was 1 May 1999, day one of their search for Everest’s Holy Grail: a camera that had gone missing seventy-five years earlier when George Mallory made his final, fateful attempt on Everest. No one expected to find anything straight away – it was all about assessing the lie of the land, getting used to the oxygen sets and radios, figuring out how to work together as a team for a mission that was expected to take a week.

And then, fifteen minutes in, Jake Norton, one of the youngest climbers on the team, spotted something: a blue oxygen cylinder, much bigger and heavier than their own, possibly a remnant of a Chinese camp set up in 1975. If it was, they were in the right area, so they carried on going, spreading out until eventually they were so far apart they needed their radios to communicate.

Each of the climbers had been given a small, spiral-bound notepad with instructions on how and where to look, but the search zone was vast – the size of about twelve American football fields – so they followed their hunches and intuition. If a body had fallen from a ridge high above, where would it have landed? Were there any obvious funnels or collection points?

Then at 11.00 a.m., about half an hour in, Conrad Anker spotted the first corpse, a twisted set of badly dislocated limbs wrapped in a washed-out purple suit. One arm stuck out rigidly, almost as if it were waving. Getting closer, he realized that the ravens had been there first, pecking off much of the skin from the dead climber’s face. It was a gruesome sight, but it wasn’t what he was looking for, the corpse clearly too recent.

‘What are you doing way out there?’ one of his teammates crackled over the radio. ‘We need to be more systematic.’ Anker ignored him and carried on going westwards. This was sacred ground, the North Face of Everest – mountaineering’s most elevated and celebrated peak. All around were features named by previous expeditions; it was a privilege just to be here, heading for the Great Couloir that Edward Norton had attempted in 1924 and Reinhold Messner had conquered in 1980.

Then Anker saw a second body, this time in a blue-grey suit; again it was a confusion of broken limbs, the torso facing downhill. But like the first, the clothing was too modern for the expedition they were interested in. So Anker moved on, keeping a wary eye on the line of cliffs below until he stopped to take off his crampons. They weren’t much help on steep downward-facing slabs covered in unstable scree.

A few minutes later, he spotted a piece of fabric fluttering in the wind and began climbing upwards to investigate. Blue and yellow, it too was probably modern but he needed to get closer to check.

And then he noticed it: a patch of white. Not snow, not rock; something that didn’t quite fit. He moved closer and was stopped in his tracks. It was the powerful shoulders of a climber, his arms stretched upwards as if to arrest a fall, his partly clothed body seemingly fused into Everest itself.

Moments later, Conrad Anker took out his radio and called his teammates, but it was another twenty minutes before they all assembled, staring down at the mummified but clearly defined body. No one could quite take it in. On the first day of their search, Anker had discovered something totally remarkable, the solution to a mystery which had gripped the climbing world for the last seventy-five years. He’d found the remains of one of the great heroes of twentieth-century exploration: George Herbert Leigh Mallory.

In the now almost a century since he disappeared into the clouds with his young partner Andrew Irvine, George Mallory has become a legendary figure. Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay may have been the first men to reach the summit of Everest, but their expedition has never quite roused the same devotion in Europe and America. Mallory has inspired biographies, epic poems, documentaries, works of fiction as well as works of fact, and countless magazine articles and other commentaries. His answer to the question ‘Why climb Everest?’ – ‘Because it’s there’ – is probably the most famous quotation in the history of exploration, on a par with Henry Morton Stanley’s ‘Dr Livingstone I presume’ and Neil Armstrong’s ‘A small step for Man’.

Everything about Mallory, from his looks to his skill with words to his athletic abilities, made him the ideal, quintessentially English hero. Even his name seemed to imply his destiny: George the dragon-slayer; Mallory an imperfect echo of Thomas Malory, the great chronicler of Arthurian legends. It’s no wonder that his friend Geoffrey Winthrop Young dubbed him ‘Galahad’, after the legendary knight.

In general, most biographers and commentators have been very positive about him: he’s portrayed as a Romantic hero, the incarnation of adventure, an idealist and a visionary. The only real exception to this hagiographic tendency comes in Walt Unsworth’s monumental history, Everest, in which he described Mallory as someone ‘who had greatness thrust upon him. The pity of it was that he had so little actual talent.’ I suspect that Unsworth was being deliberately provocative, but a century after Mallory’s disappearance how should we assess him? Was he the ‘greatest antagonist that Everest has had – or is likely to have’, as Edward Norton dubbed him in the official account of the 1924 expedition, or was he ‘a very good stout-hearted baby’, as Tom Longstaff, his teammate on a previous Everest expedition, memorably described him in a private letter?

Is there any fresh evidence that might help answer this question? The unexpected truth is that over the last decades a surprising amount of new material has become available – Mallory’s letters to his penfriend Marjorie Holmes, John Noel’s private archive, George Finch’s papers, an enormous number of documents from the Mount Everest Foundation archive that have now been scanned and digitized – that enables Mallory’s story to be told more fully. The picture that emerges is complex and nuanced: a fascinating individual, loved by his friends and family; idealistic, chaotic, narcissistic, generous, impulsive, indecisive, driven by the demons of risk and ambition, and continually reassessed and reappropriated by successive generations of climbers and adventurers of all kinds.

This book is not an attempt to tell the complete story of Mallory’s life. Rather, the aim is to do two things: first, to look in detail at the events of 1923 and 1924 and understand the forces that drove Mallory and the third British Everest expedition, and second, to separate the man from the mythology that grew up after his disappearance and which continues to evolve, especially after his body was discovered in 1999.

It begins though, not on the slopes of the world’s highest mountain, but on a small spit of rock by the seaside…

Pen-y-Pass, Snowdonia, December 1913. Siegfried Herford, a highly regarded rock climber, and George Mallory, photographed by Geoffrey Winthrop Young.

1

About a Boy

St Bees on the Cumbrian coast, the summer of 1895. Mary Jebb was getting more and more worked up, watching her grandson, George, sitting on a rock far from the shoreline, the waves inexorably rolling in, soon to drag him out into the Irish Sea.

As with a lot of good ideas at the time, the nine-year-old George had been so confident that the water wouldn’t rise higher than his rocky perch that he’d gone out dressed in his new school blazer, hoping to watch the sea swirl around him and then recede, before he returned to his family. He hadn’t accounted for the high tides which still to this day can be deadly for unwitting tourists and locals alike.

Eventually, with no sign of George moving by himself, Mary raised the alarm and a local man waded out into the water to rescue him. It wasn’t easy though, and took several attempts before the preternaturally calm and confident George was carried back to the shore. As his sister Avie told an interviewer many years later, he ‘had no sense of fear’ and the ‘knack of making things exciting and often rather dangerous’.

George Herbert Leigh Mallory was born in 1886 in Mobberley, a small but prosperous village in Cheshire in the north of England. His seaside drama was a typical adventure for a young daredevil who loved shinning up trees and church roofs, climbing whatever was in the vicinity, whether a pier or a humble drainpipe.

His father, the Reverend Herbert Leigh Mallory, was the tenth child of another vicar father, also called George, and there were hopes that as the eldest son, young George might go in to the church and maybe even take over his father’s parish one day. George’s mother, Annie, was the daughter of another Anglican vicar but by contrast an only child. Unlike her more straight-laced husband, she had a free-spirited and unconventional side and was known for her sense of fun and her laughter, and the licence she gave her children to cavort and roam.

George had two sisters: Mary, the eldest, born a year earlier than him in 1885; and Annie Victoria, known as Avie, born a year after – a tomboy and occasional partner in George’s childhood adventures. Trafford, his only brother, was six years younger, but he too was soon roped into the fun.

When it came to schooling, George had a conventional middle-class start, attending first a ‘prep’ school in Eastbourne and then Winchester College, the ancient public school, where he arrived aged fourteen in 1900 as a mathematical scholar. It was a prestigious award, which to his father’s undoubted relief paid for most of the fees.

George enjoyed himself tremendously at Winchester. Though he clearly enjoyed the academic side, his time there was notable for his sporting achievements. He took part in the college’s eccentric version of soccer, the complexity of whose rules was matched only by the ferocity with which it was played. He excelled particularly at gymnastics, and was very proud to be part of the school’s successful shooting team. More importantly for his future career, it was at Winchester that Mallory first discovered mountaineering, when he encountered Graham Irving, a senior master and keen aficionado of the sport.

Climbing was by the end of the nineteenth century firmly established among the middle and upper classes. Its ‘Golden Age’ had been the 1850s and 1860s, when most of the high peaks of the Alps were climbed, many of the first ascents achieved by British climbers and their guides. Before long, Britain boasted the world’s first climbing association, the Alpine Club, its first mountaineering periodical, the Alpine Journal, and by the end of the nineteenth century, a small but active community who regularly spent their holidays climbing in France, Switzerland and Italy.

As the first ‘risk sport’, mountaineering was not however universally approved of. In 1865, following the famous accident in Switzerland in which a French guide and three British climbers died after making the first ascent of the Matterhorn, with the casualties including a peer of the realm, Queen Victoria was moved to ask her prime minister Gladstone if there was any way to ban it. He advised her that there wasn’t and mountaineering continued to grow in popularity, but the question of why it was worth taking such risks for the sake of nothing more than sport never went away.

For devotees like Irving, the answer was obvious: as he wrote in his classic book The Romance of Mountaineering, from an early age he knew that ‘happiness… would be found in climbing mountains’. Like Mallory, Irving was a northerner, a childhood maths prodigy, and a technophobe whose ‘ways with the old-fashioned collapsible candle lantern’, as his obituary in the Alpine Journal stated, ‘suggest that he would not have been good at repairing oxygen apparatus on Everest’. Mallory first came to his attention when Irving was recruiting boys for what he would later call the ‘Winchester Ice Club’. George already had a reputation for climbing school buildings – including at one point, the front of the college where Irving, a house tutor, had his office.

Though sometimes criticized for exposing novices to excessive risks, Irving was unrepentant and the boys were undoubtedly keen. In August 1904, he took the eighteen-year-old Mallory and his friend Harry Gibson to the Alps for their first climbing season. It didn’t all go perfectly – their first challenge, an attempt on Mont Vélan on the border of Italy and Switzerland, ended with bad weather bringing a premature halt to proceedings and Mallory and Gibson both vomiting with mountain sickness, but the rest of their Alpine holiday was much more successful. After less than a month, Mallory was able to return to Britain a veteran of three of the most famous mountains in the Alps – Mont Blanc, the Grand Combin and Monte Rosa – as well as several high Alpine passes. As Irving wrote in his account of their hard-fought ascent of Mont Blanc: ‘It is impossible to make any who have never experienced it, realise what that thrill means. It proceeds partly from a legitimate joy and pride in life.’

Mallory was smitten, and though over the next year the only opportunities he would have to hone his climbing skills would come scaling nearby school buildings and the vicarage roof, the following summer he returned to the Alps with Irving and two more school friends, Guy Bullock and Harry Tyndale, to climb several mountains in the Arolla valley and the Dent Blanche – ‘the one peak we had set our hearts on’, as he told his mother.

Back home in Cheshire, family life was not quite as stable as it might have seemed. Though they both came from relatively wealthy backgrounds, his parents had tastes above their means and regularly were chased for unpaid bills. In 1904 the Mallorys left their large house in leafy Mobberley for the rather more urban setting of St John’s in Birkenhead. Herbert tried to make the best of it, telling George that they were going to ‘an exceedingly important parish’, but the move came amid a swirl of rumours of affairs and murky ecclesiastical politics.

Mallory never really warmed to Birkenhead but nor was he often there. In 1905 he sat the Cambridge entrance exam, and again to his father’s delight won a scholarship – to study not mathematics but history at Magdalene College. Winchester, whose old boys have included Hugh Gaitskell and Geoffrey Howe, had changed him from a budding scientist into someone who was more interested in politics and social debate. As his friend David Pye later wrote, in his first year at Cambridge Mallory became known as ‘a very contentious, a most persistent and even derisive arguer’ who would sometimes let his passionate opinions get the better of his sense of humour.

After three years studying history, he was awarded a second-class degree with merit, a slight disappointment after his previous academic success. Nevertheless, he decided to stay on for another year to write an essay on the Scottish writer James Boswell for an academic competition. He didn’t win the prize, but he turned the essay into a short book, and a few years later managed to get it published.

Cambridge introduced Mallory to a very different artistic and cultural world than anything he’d ever previously encountered. He continued to excel at sport, rowing for Magdalene and eventually captaining their team, but by his second year he had assumed a distinctly Bohemian air, allowing his hair to grow longer and wearing bright colourful clothing. He joined the university’s Fabian Society, the left-leaning political club, as well as the Women’s Suffrage Association, and made friends with future writers and poets, some of whom would become part of the fabled ‘Bloomsbury Group’ of writers, artists and intellectuals.

The first decade of the twentieth century was a time of artistic experimentation all over Europe. In art, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Manet were leading the post-Impressionist charge; closer to home, Henry James, E. M. Forster and Joseph Conrad were pushing the novel in new directions. In music there was Mahler, Stravinsky and Richard Strauss; in dance the Ballets Russes; in poetry the first Modernists. Mallory and his friends lapped it all up and argued well into the night about all the new movements in art.

In truth, Mallory was never a full member of the Bloomsbury set – their intellectual snobbery ruled him out as not being quite ‘brilliant’ enough, according to John Maynard Keynes – but their values and interests stayed with him throughout his life. Whenever he sailed off to India for an expedition, he would carry with him the latest books and would spend long hours in his tent reading intensely. On a lighter note, he was photographed several times naked or semi-naked after skinny-dipping in a nearby stream in Sikkim or Tibet, following the practice of the ‘Neo-Pagans’, a subset of the Bloomsbury Group who loved to bare it all.

Edwardian Cambridge was a place where same-sex relationships were commonplace, and it wasn’t long before the strikingly handsome Mallory became the focus of a lot of attention. He met closeted older men, like his history tutor Arthur Benson, who had crushes on him which they were never likely to consummate, as well as younger students and alumni such as Lytton and Richard Strachey and the poet Rupert Brooke, who were much more open about their sexuality. When the future economist Maynard Keynes, the brother of Mallory’s lifelong friend Geoffrey Keynes, returned to Cambridge in 1908 after a couple of years working in India, he wrote to his friend, the painter Duncan Grant, that ‘practically everyone in Cambridge, except me, is an open and avowed sodomite’.

In those days, Cambridge was virtually an all-male domain. It wasn’t until 1869, with the founding of Girton College, that the university had accepted female students, and even then Girton wasn’t allowed to award degrees until 1948. Apart from sisters and occasionally friends, Mallory and his social circle did not encounter women very often, but nor did they want to be confined by traditional values or social mores, being as radical and experimental in their sexuality as they were in their politics.

Lytton Strachey, the future author of Eminent Victorians – perhaps the most ‘out’ of his circle and a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group – was enraptured by Mallory when they met in 1909, describing his body as ‘vast, pale, unbelievable… a thing to melt into and die’ and noting how his face possessed ‘the mystery of Botticelli, the refinement and delicacy of a Chinese print, the youth and piquancy of an unimaginable English boy’. Lytton lusted after him, but to his frustration Mallory was more interested in his younger brother, James Strachey. Mallory declared his love and pursued him with characteristic relentlessness, until they ended up ‘copulating’ in a friend’s bed. According to a letter from James to Rupert Brooke, it was no fun for either party – James confessed to having being bored by the whole thing, while Mallory, he wrote, seemed ‘shocked [and] shewed no desire to repeat the business’.

With homosexuality a taboo subject, not least because homosexual acts between men were illegal in Britain until 1967, Mallory’s first biographers stayed clear of any mention of this aspect of his time at Cambridge, but it was clearly a crucial period for him. Many of the friends that he made, both gay and straight, stayed with him for the rest of his life.

Undoubtedly one of the most important of these was Geoffrey Winthrop Young, a significant figure in the development of British mountaineering and someone who would play a key role in Mallory’s life. They met in 1909 at a dinner organized by Charles Sayle, a writer and poet who worked at Cambridge University Library. Sayle was known for the salons where he would bring together beautiful young men, or ‘swans’ as he called them, to discuss literature and art. He was also a founder member of the English Climbers’ Club, set up to promote mountaineering in Britain – as opposed to the Alpine Club, who as their name suggests tended to focus on the Alps and the so-called Greater Ranges.

Young was a flamboyant, camp figure, distinctively dressed in bright colours and sharply tailored clothes, his upper lip invariably crowned with a well-trimmed walrus moustache. His background was wealthy and cultured, allowing him to regularly climb in the Alps. In the 1900s and 1910s he took part in several notable first ascents of difficult routes and like Mallory, he’d had a youthful penchant for climbing in urban as well as natural settings. His first book, The Roof-Climber’s Guide to Trinity, both poked fun at Swiss guidebooks and provided hints and tips for anyone who wanted to tackle the high towers of Trinity College.

Aged thirty-two, and almost ten years his senior, Young was instantly taken by Mallory. There were soon rumours that the two men had become lovers, but their relationship was much more that of mentor and confidant. Young took Mallory to the Alps and then regularly invited him to the climbing parties that he organized in Snowdonia in North Wales, where he brought together friends and Britain’s leading mountaineers to enjoy the challenging rock climbing of the local peaks and crags.

Modern mountaineers have a whole range of protection devices to mitigate the risks – cams, nuts, pitons and slings, to name but a few – but the pioneering rock climbers of Mallory’s era had nothing more than flimsy ropes to make their ascents a little safer. To modern eyes they might look quaint, photographed in their hobnail boots and tweed knickerbockers, but they tackled difficult routes and took risks that many of today’s climbers would find unacceptable.

Mallory learned fast, garnering a reputation as one of the most gifted climbers of his generation. Some of his climbs in North Wales have rarely been repeated. His impulsiveness occasionally came to the fore, with stories of forgetting to rope up in the Alps and a legendary incident in Wales when he left his pipe on a ledge high up on a cliff face and made a daring solo climb to rescue it over very difficult ground. More than anything else though, Mallory’s friends were struck by the elegance and ease with which he climbed. Young was particularly impressed: ‘His movement in climbing was entirely his own. It contradicted all theory… a continuous undulating movement so rapid and so powerful that one felt the rock must either yield, or disintegrate.’

Today it’s possible for a few gifted individuals to become ‘professional’ climbers, aided by sponsorship from equipment manufacturers and money from lecturing and books, but until recently this simply wasn’t an option. Climbing was a leisure activity that had to be supported by professional jobs or considerable family money. Mallory had neither.

When he arrived in Cambridge, he still harboured the vague plan that one day he might become a vicar or a country parson, but his questioning nature inevitably led him down a different path. He encountered too many priests whose sense of goodness seemed ‘sometimes to displace their reason’. Instead he decided that education, and perhaps writing, would be his vocation.

When in the autumn of 1909 he finally left the gilded cloisters of Cambridge, Mallory headed for Europe, hoping to live off a small legacy while improving his linguistic skills to make himself more employable. His dream of returning to Winchester as a master proved to be just that, but eventually he did get a job as an assistant master at Charterhouse, a slightly less grand public school in Surrey. There he gained a reputation as a devoted but rather scatty teacher, who in addition to history lessons would lecture his boys on art – and like Graham Irving, occasionally take them on climbing expeditions. Robert Graves was one pupil who became a good friend. As he wrote in his memoir, Goodbye to All That, Mallory was an inspirational figure particularly to the boys who felt like outsiders. He introduced Graves both to the greats of English literature and to the pleasures of mountaineering, and most importantly treated him as an equal.

Mallory was throughout his life passionately interested in education, but he didn’t like the prevailing culture of British public schools, with its emphasis on exams, games and corporal punishment. He disliked what he called the ‘mechanical atmosphere’ of Charterhouse, and when the traditionalist and disciplinarian Frank Fletcher was appointed headmaster, he grew increasingly disenchanted.

Mountaineering was his ‘Great Escape’, the sport he excelled at and which brought together the pleasures of physical activity, companionship and the sheer joy of being outdoors. Apart from a brief lull during his first couple of years at university, Mallory spent virtually every holiday climbing in the Alps or the Lake District or North Wales.

He joined the Alpine Club and the Climbers’ Club and eventually began contributing to their journals. Unlike the previous generation of Victorian ‘peak-baggers’ whose articles tended to be very descriptive, Mallory took what he called a ‘high line’ on mountaineering. In his famous essay ‘The Mountaineer as Artist’, he explored the multiple levels of experience it offered – from the physical to aesthetic to spiritual – in the kind of language used to describe art rather than sport. ‘A day well spent in the Alps,’ he declared, ‘is like some great symphony… The spirit goes on a journey just as does the body.’ With all its intensity and variety, mountaineering could only be appreciated, he maintained, as a unified whole. Like all great art, it was a way of experiencing the sublime, allowing a climber to come ‘to a finer realisation of himself than ever before’.

But mountains and literature weren’t the only distractions from Charterhouse.

In the autumn of 1913, Mallory met Ruth – the daughter of Hugh Thackeray Turner, a prosperous architect with a passion for preserving ancient buildings. Turner’s wife, Mary, had died unexpectedly six years earlier, leaving him to bring up his three daughters at Westbrook, a huge baronial mansion in Godalming in Surrey, close to Charterhouse.

All three women were very attractive, and they all seem initially to have been interested in the handsome schoolmaster their father invited into their lives, first to play billiards and then to accompany them on a family holiday to Italy in April 1914. George was as surprised as anyone with the way things were turning out. Apart from a brief encounter with Mary Ann ‘Cottie’ Sanders, whom he met first in the Alps and later at Geoffrey Winthrop Young’s climbing parties in Wales, he did not have a lot of experience with women. ‘I am to stay in Venice with a family consisting of one man and his three daughters,’ he wrote to Young in March 1914. ‘Did you ever hear the like of that?’

Over the course of the week, George gravitated towards Ruth, Turner’s middle daughter. In many ways they were ideally suited. She was very beautiful, with China-blue eyes and long Pre-Raphaelite hair – ‘Botticellian’ in his eyes, echoing Lytton Strachey’s famous description of George himself. Ruth too was interested in art and design, and though not such a great reader or letter-writer, she was cultured and literate and game to go climbing and hiking with him. She didn’t share George’s political interests, but as he said many times, she was utterly honest and true.

On May Day 1914, barely a month after their week in Venice, George wrote to his mother announcing their engagement. ‘What Bliss! And what a revolution! … she’s as good as gold, and brave and true and sweet.’ The whirlwinds continued to blow until 29 July, when they were married, with Geoffrey Winthrop Young acting as his best man and George’s father officiating over a service at a local church in Godalming.

George wanted to go to the Alps for their honeymoon, but with Europe on the brink of war, they were forced to settle for a camping trip to the Sussex coast. In a moment of absurdity-cum-wartime-paranoia, they were briefly detained on suspicion of being German spies.

Back home in Godalming, with the help of Ruth’s father they bought a house nearby, The Holt, but inevitably the First World War ruptured any thoughts of a family idyll. As a teacher, Mallory was in a protected occupation and not required to enlist. His headmaster at Charterhouse, Frank Fletcher, repeatedly refused him permission, leaving Mallory feeling guilty and frustrated. On the day he heard the news that Rupert Brooke had died with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, he wrote to A. C. Benson, his former Cambridge tutor, that ‘there’s something indecent, when so many friends have been enduring so many horrors, in just going on at one’s job, quite happy and prosperous’.

Eventually, in December 1915, Fletcher let him go, and he was commissioned as an artillery officer, arriving in France five months later to be assigned to the 40th Siege Battery. The first six months were the worst, with Mallory’s unit involved in the Battle of the Somme, which saw 300,000 killed and over a million wounded. Mallory himself escaped unscathed, but several men under his command died. Eventually, like everyone, he became hardened to the sight of dead bodies, but as he told Ruth, it always distressed him to see the wounded.

In between bouts of action, which occasionally reminded him of Alpine expeditions in their camaraderie and ‘code of conduct’, Mallory found himself enduring the tedium of military life and the misery of the trenches, with all the mud, filth, vermin and parasites that involved. The only compensation was that he had the time to read, but inevitably it led to him examining his values. ‘I wonder if you’ll find me different,’ he wrote to Ruth in August 1916. ‘My mind is in a state of constant rebellion. I believe that always will be so.’

He started on a new project, The Book of Geoffrey, a novel about a father trying to teach his son what is ‘good’, but before he could really get going, he was pulled away from the trenches to see a very different side of the war, as a liaison officer between the British and French forces. He briefly returned to combat before being sent back to England in 1917 for an operation on his left ankle, after being told that an old climbing injury was much more serious than he had thought.

After some time to convalesce, Mallory was sent for artillery training near Winchester, a town he knew well from his schooldays. Life became much more domestic. He was able to see Ruth regularly, and that summer even went on a climbing holiday to Scotland with his friend David Pye. The pattern continued for most of the following year, with Mallory being sent on training courses, but never returning to the front line. ‘I seem to be frittering away days and weeks in England,’ he wrote to Ruth, ‘as one only can do in the Army.’

At the beginning of 1918 he was best man at Robert Graves’s wedding, and in July he managed to get away to Skye with Ruth and two friends. By the time he returned to active service in September, it was obvious that the war was coming to an end. On 10 November, Mallory and his Cambridge friend Geoffrey Keynes, who had spent the last four years as a military doctor, were reunited at Cambrai, a once beautiful city reduced to rubble by continual bombardment. Anticipating the armistice that would be declared the following day, the troops set off thousands of flares in an impromptu fireworks show. ‘Engines whistled and hooted,’ as Keynes later wrote. ‘Discipline had temporarily vanished.’

The next day, Mallory was whisked off by his younger brother, Trafford – who had been a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps for the last three years – to a rather more sedate celebration at the officers’ club. ‘It was a good evening altogether, of the kind one would expect from the public-school type of British officer,’ he wrote, ‘with much hilarity and no drunkenness.’

Mallory finished the war feeling introspective. He had lost four years and some dear friends. Rupert Brooke and Hugh Wilson, both fellow swans from Cambridge, were never coming back. Geoffrey Winthrop Young’s left leg had been blown off, requiring an above-the-knee amputation, and several other members of the Alpine Club had been killed or maimed. In a letter to Ruth, written on 12 November, the day after the Armistice, Mallory looked forward to the future with their daughters Clare and Beridge: ‘What a wonderful life we will have together! What a lovely thing we must make of such a gift! I want to lose all harshness of jagged nerves, to be above all gentle.’ When he followed this with a letter to his father a few days later, he was in a rather more sombre mood: ‘If I haven’t escaped so many chances of death as plenty of others, still it is surprising to find myself a survivor, and it’s not a lot I have always wanted.’

Back in ‘civvy street’, Mallory returned to Charterhouse in early 1919, but he was increasingly restless and disenchanted with the status quo. He corresponded and held meetings with Geoffrey Winthrop Young and his Cambridge friend David Pye, coming up with ideas for a more progressive type of public school in which there would be less emphasis on games and a much greater attempt to get boys to think for themselves and enjoy intellectual effort. Parents would be encouraged to play a more active role in their children’s education and there would be opportunities to learn craft skills and encounter people outside their social class.

Mallory remained interested in politics, both in Britain and abroad. In the summer of 1920 he contacted Gilbert Murray – an Oxford academic heavily involved in the League of Nations, the forerunner of the UN – offering his services to the ‘cause’. ‘Perhaps the most important thing about me’, he wrote, ‘which I ought to tell you is that I think and feel passionately about international politics.’ Later that year, he travelled to Ireland to get a first-hand view of the War of Independence and the ‘Terror’ the country was gripped by. Mallory saw fault on both sides, but admired the idealism of the men and women fighting for self-determination, and was shocked by the ransacked rooms and lorryloads of soldiers driving around Dublin, and the stories of ‘secret and sinister chambers’ in Dublin Castle. Back in England he wrote an article entitled ‘An Englishman’s Conversion’, detailing his observations, but before it could be published, another much bigger project intervened: Everest.

Though Everest lay on the border of Nepal and Tibet, two countries outside the British Empire, from the moment it was measured from a survey station in northern India, Britain had a proprietorial interest in the world’s highest mountain. Contrary to the usual practice of retaining local names, it was christened ‘Everest’ after George Everest, a Welshman and previous Surveyor General of India, who ironically pronounced his name ‘Ee-verest’ and was not happy with the act of cartographic piracy. It wasn’t long before British climbers were planning expeditions to climb it, however the main challenge was not the altitude but the obtaining of permission from either Nepal or Tibet, countries who jealously guarded their borders and refused to let outsiders in.

In 1920, after many years of diplomatic approaches and rebuffs, the Tibetan government finally agreed to two British expeditions. The first, in 1921, was billed as a reconnaissance and survey; the second, a year later, a full-blown attempt. The problem for the organizers, the Everest Committee, was finding a suitable team. The First World War had robbed Britain of a generation of Alpine climbers, who had been either maimed like Geoffrey Winthrop Young or killed, and there were only a handful of mountaineers with any Himalayan experience.

Impressed by his reputation as a ferociously talented rock climber, John Percy Farrar, a former president of the Alpine Club and a member of the Everest Committee, approached Mallory to enquire if he had ‘any aspirations’ to take part in the first expedition. Initially he wasn’t at all sure. By the spring of 1921 he’d had enough of his job at Charterhouse, but with three children to support did not see the value of disappearing off for six months on an expenses-only expedition to the other side of the world. In the end it took Young’s intervention to persuade him to go, arguing not only that it would be a great climbing adventure but also that, if Mallory succeeded, the fame that would follow would enable him to fulfil his literary and educational ambitions.

Though in theory he was a junior member, Mallory became the de facto leader of the climbing team when the Committee’s choice, the fifty-five-year-old Harold Raeburn, fell ill during the crossing of Tibet and had to be sent back to convalesce. Mallory and his partner Guy Bullock, a school friend who had also been part of the Winchester Ice Club, were charged with exploring the glaciers around Everest and finding a viable route up the mountain.

Like most of the pioneers of Himalayan climbing, Mallory and the other members of the British team underestimated Everest, occasionally even imagining that on their very first acquaintance they might reach the summit. They were not unique. Initially, European climbers, from the Duke of the Abruzzi to Aleister Crowley and Jules Jacot-Guillarmod, treated the giants of the Himalayas and the Karakoram as if they were taller versions of what they had climbed in the Alps, and did not really take into account issues like altitude sickness and the much more extreme weather and topography.

Mallory and Bullock initially focused on the glaciers and northern approaches to Everest, before moving over the east side of the mountain. Apart from a quick peek over the West Ridge into Nepal, they did not cross the border. Then, after almost five months in the field, Mallory led a party of climbers and Sherpas to the North Col, the windswept pass at 23,000 feet that he had identified as the jumping-off point for the summit, 6,000 feet higher up.

As the wind roared across the desolate strip of icy, snow-covered ground, Mallory eyed the summit. Before he left, he’d been told in London, on the basis of minimal photographic evidence, that an ‘easy slope’ led to the top, but it was anything but. Later Bullock would estimate that the odds of reaching the summit were fifty to one against. Nevertheless, Mallory had done amazingly well, and though he never got on with the expedition leader, Charles Howard-Bury, it was his drive and determination that kept the party going when things got difficult. In the expedition book, he penned one of the great descriptions of Everest, calling it a ‘prodigious white fang excrescent from the jaw of the world’, and christened one of nearby mountains Clare Peak (later Pumori, or ‘Mountain Daughter’ in Sherpa), in honour of one of his daughters.

Mallory’s first trip to Everest also showed up some of his less helpful characteristics. In his hurry to do the work as quickly as possible, he made a significant mapping error, missing the entrance to the East Rongbuk glacier, which later proved to be the best route to the North Col; and to his disgust, he flunked his photographic duties by exposing the wrong side of his camera’s photographic plates, losing a week of work. These were ‘rookie’ errors, subsequently rectified by the team’s official surveyor Oliver Wheeler and Mallory himself, who retook a lot of the images, but impatience and ‘techno-phobia’ and a slight sense of chaos would become recurrent themes in future expeditions.

Back in Britain, with the reconnaissance seen as a major success, the Everest Committee immediately set about organizing the main attempt in 1922. Mallory was top of their list to return, though they gave the climbing leader role to another older climber, Edward Strutt. Again, initially Mallory was diffident, telling his sister Avie that he had little faith that the Committee would find enough climbers to make it a viable attempt, and that if they didn’t, ‘I wouldn’t go again next year, as the saying is, for all the gold in Arabia’. In the end, however, the organizers were able to put together a strong team, and it didn’t take too much persuasion to get Mallory to sign up for a second time.

Led by General Charles Bruce and supported by a team of Sherpa and Bhotia porters, they swiftly crossed the Tibetan plain and set about laying ‘siege’ to Everest, setting up a series of supply camps up the East Rongbuk glacier before climbing back up to the North Col and then, for the first time, heading up the North Ridge towards the summit.

On their first attempt, on 19 May 1922, Mallory and two companions, Edward Norton and Howard Somervell, reached almost 27,000 feet, smashing the world altitude record by more than 2,000 feet. It was a significant achievement and a monument to their grit and determination, but they were still 2,000 feet short of the summit. As Mallory later wrote, their decision to turn back was all down to ‘time and speed’. They could have gone further, but if they had done so, it would have meant abandoning all thoughts of sticking to a safe turnaround time. ‘We were prepared to leave it to braver men to climb Mount Everest by night,’ as he wrote in the expedition book.

A few days later, their record was broken by another few hundred feet, by Mallory’s great rival on the British team, George Finch, an Imperial College London scientist climbing with the aid of artificial oxygen. Mallory persuaded Finch to join him for an oxygen-powered third attempt, but it was a disaster, with the whole team of three ‘sahibs’ (the Sherpas’ term for foreign climbers) and fourteen porters swept away by an avalanche. By a stroke of luck, all the British climbers and seven of the porters survived, but the other seven were killed. Mallory was distraught, blaming himself for the accident. ‘The consequences of my mistake are so terrible,’ he wrote to Ruth, ‘it seems almost impossible to believe that it has happened for ever and that I can do nothing to make good.’ By the autumn, when the team held a homecoming meeting in London, the episode had faded from public memory and a new expedition was in the offing.

The Everest Committee had successfully petitioned the Dalai Lama for permission to stage a third and what they hoped would be final expedition, but there wasn’t enough time to organize everything in just a few months, so instead of returning in 1923 they decided to defer for a year and use the time to raise money and recruit what they hoped would be an even stronger party.

Mallory was central to their plans, both as climber and ambassador. He delivered public lectures all over Britain, and when a New York agent, Lee Keedick, contacted the Committee, offering to arrange an American tour, there was no question of who they would choose to represent and tell the story of the British team – George Mallory, ‘a gentleman of the highest character’, as Arthur Hinks, the Everest Committee’s honorary secretary, told the US visa office. ‘His health is sufficiently guaranteed,’ he added, ‘by the fact that he climbed last May to 27,000ft.’ Few could argue.

Mallory, for his part, was excited to go on his first trip to the United States, hoping to enjoy the sights and, as he told Hinks, earn some ‘£.s.d’.

America, however, would not be the cakewalk they had both hoped.

2 March 1923. George Mallory on Dartmouth Street Bridge in Boston towards the end of his US tour. The photographer was Helen Messinger Murdoch.

2

Go West

Lee Keedick thought he had a nose for a winner. Square-jawed and determined-looking, he was a former college baseball player from Iowa who set up a public speaking and press agency in New York in 1907 and kept it going until he was well into his seventies, billing himself as the ‘Manager of the World’s Most Celebrated Lecturers’. In the early 1900s, when the cinema was just getting going and television was a mere pixel in John Logie Baird’s eye, there was a thriving lecture circuit all over the US, and audiences would come in their thousands to hear the famous men and women of their day tell their stories.

Initially Keedick’s clients included American union leaders, magicians and big game hunters, but gradually he built up two specialisms: first, explorers such as his friend Roald Amundsen, the first man to reach the South Pole; and second, British personalities, ranging from the aristocratic Countess of Warwick, who lectured America on ‘British Traits’ in 1912, to famous writers such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells and G. K. Chesterton, who visited America in the early 1920s.

In the autumn of 1922, Keedick tried to bring those two specialisms together when he contacted the Everest Committee in London, inviting them to send a member of the recent expedition over for what he promised would be a lucrative lecture tour. It would be a big hit, he assured them, as long as the British chose someone who could tell the story ‘in popular style to arouse public interest’.

The Everest Committee had no doubt that George Mallory was the right man for the job and he readily agreed. Honorary secretary Arthur Hinks didn’t like the fact that Keedick wanted to take 10 per cent more in commission than his British counterpart, Gerald Christy, but he was keen to raise money and the next expedition’s international profile.

So, in January 1923, Mallory set out for New York on the RMS Olympic, the pride of the White Star shipping line. It was Keedick’s idea that he should travel in style, taking the Olympic rather than one of the cheaper ships Hinks would have preferred. If America was going to embrace Mallory as a star, Keedick maintained, he would have to play his part and behave like one. Mallory did not object. After spending much of the previous two years sleeping in a tent on the windswept plains and slopes of Tibet, the five-day voyage was a no-holds-barred immersion into the world of luxury.

The Olympic was a sister ship of the Titanic and at one time the largest passenger ship in the world. It had a swimming pool, gymnasium, Turkish baths, and several restaurants and bars. Initially, however, Mallory preferred to keep himself to himself, spending much of his time in his cabin, reading and writing. It would be his first visit to the United States and he was eager to see New York, visit Niagara Falls, and if everything went well, go as far west as California. The only downside was the people.

Like Charles Dickens, who had visited the US in 1842, initially Mallory was rather a snob about his transatlantic cousins. The first Americans he got to know were his nightly dinner companions on the Olympic, a family of tourists returning home after spending time in Europe. As he wrote to his wife Ruth, they were kind-hearted but naive. The husband in particular had ‘disgusting’ table manners and an accent that verged on caricature. At first Mallory could barely understand them, or they he, but gradually he tuned into their way of speaking and began practising his American accent, hoping that it would be of use when dealing with porters and ‘such’.

Mallory’s main preoccupation was to get as much writing as possible done for the official account of the 1922 expedition. His target was 2,000 words a day, but though he was happy to immerse himself in the details of his recent expedition on paper, he was not so keen on being recognized by other passengers. He kept off the subject of Everest with the American family, and managed to stay incognito until he bumped into a British general and his wife, who as luck would have it, had been on the SS Narkunda, the P&O ship that Mallory had taken back from India five months earlier. Fortunately, General Hughes was the soul of discretion and kept Mallory’s secret safe. A few days later, on 17 January, the Olympic reached New York.

It was a bright, blue-sky morning but, fittingly, freezing cold with a vicious wind that reminded Mallory of Tibet. The Olympic anchored for a few hours just off the Hudson River while passports were checked, and then steamed past the Statue of Liberty into the New York docks. Like many before him, Mallory was immediately struck by Manhattan’s skyscrapers, but he was probably the first to view them with a mountaineer’s eye, describing the spearhead of tall buildings at the tip of the island as ‘one of the most wonderful effects of piled up mass I have ever seen’.

Once the ship had docked, Mallory was whisked way to the Waldorf-Astoria, then New York’s most prestigious hotel, and installed in a large room on the tenth floor with its own telephone and a luxurious bathroom. Keedick didn’t give him much time to settle in: almost immediately he was introduced to a press agent, who briefed him on what to say and then hustled him into a room full of journalists.

American newspapers had followed the story of the British reconnaissance of 1921 and the second expedition a year later, but though Mallory was the best-known member of the British team, he was not nearly so well known as Amundsen or Shackleton. Arthur Hinks and the Everest Committee had always been uncomfortable with publicity, viewing newspapers as a necessary evil. Hinks trusted The Times, considering it a ‘newspaper of record’, but was very sniffy about other publications and was always uncomfortable with personalizing the expedition or creating any heroes.

The next day, the New York Times carried the first of several articles it would run on Mallory over the next three months. Under the headline ‘Says Energy Faded on Everest Climb’, it told how he had reached 27,235 feet (an exaggeration that would be repeated many times in the US press) but had turned back fourteen hours from the top when he and his party felt their physical and mental strength giving out. ‘Would Everest ever be climbed?’ the reporters had asked. ‘It’s a gamble,’ said Mallory, tight-lipped.

Three years into Prohibition, American journalists were particularly keen to hear whether the climbing party had taken any ‘alcoholic stimulants’ and Mallory duly obliged, admitting that though the medical advice was against it, he and his partners had swigged back a little brandy at high altitude ‘with good results’. The New York Times underestimated Mallory’s age by six years and elevated his schoolmaster role at Charterhouse to that of a full-blown professor, but it was a positive start and the article mentioned his forthcoming lecture tour twice. There was less good news, though, from Keedick.

Despite his bullishness the previous autumn, it turned out that very few lectures had been booked. There had been many enquiries but hardly anything had been firmed up. Everything, Keedick said, depended on Mallory’s first New York lecture, at the Broadhurst Theatre in early February. If he did well and got good reviews, the bookings would come in. If not… Keedick didn’t elaborate. Prior to the Broadhurst, Mallory was engaged for some warm-up lectures in Philadelphia and Washington, but until then, Keedick advised, he was free to enjoy the Waldorf and two private New York clubs where he had been given temporary membership.

It was disappointing and slightly surprising, but Mallory was glad to be in America, and though he worried that he didn’t know many people, in fact it turned out that he had several relatives and acquaintances on the East Coast. He still hadn’t finished the chapters for the Everest book, and was keen to rework the British lectures that he had recently given to American tastes. He even hoped that he might have time to find an American publisher for his book on James Boswell.

A week after his arrival, Mallory left New York for the first of two lectures for the National Geographic Society in Washington. The venue was the Masonic temple, a large Neoclassical building that was a distinctly grander stage than the provincial British theatres Mallory was used to. Keedick resented the fact that the administrator at the National Geographic Society wanted Mallory to deliver both an afternoon and an evening lecture but was only willing to pay a single fee, but it was a good platform, especially as Mallory was going to be introduced by Robert Griggs, the famous American explorer and botanist who had made a daring visit to the volcanoes of Alaska.

Once enough hands had been shaken and publicity photographs snapped, Mallory began his lecture with a simple but provocative question: ‘What is the use of climbing Everest?’ His answer was succinct: ‘It is of no use.’ Reaching the summit of the world’s highest peak, he declared, had no ostensible scientific value but was a product of the ‘spirit of adventure and of pitting human intelligence against natural objects’.

Over the next hour, Mallory told the story of the 1922 expedition and the previous year’s reconnaissance, illustrating the various stages of the journey and the two main attempts with black-and-white slides. He focused on the climbing difficulties but, mindful of contemporary America’s obsession with alcohol, made sure to mention again the slug of brandy that he and the others knocked back at the end of their attempt. Having delivered many lectures in Britain, Mallory was a seasoned pro who enjoyed performing and working an audience, but he was nervous about his first foray into the American market. As he wrote to Ruth a few days later, the results were mixed.

‘This afternoon they were the most unresponsive crowd I ever talked to,’ he moaned, ‘never a clap when I meant them to applaud, and almost never a laugh. They weren’t comfortable with me, I don’t know why.’ The second, identical lecture – delivered that evening – got an utterly different response. ‘From the first word to the last,’ he continued, ‘I did what I liked with them; they took all my points; it was technically better than any lecture I’ve ever given, either year, and had any amount of spontaneity, too.’

America was not going to be swept off its feet by Mallory in the way that Keedick or the members of the Everest Committee had anticipated, but there was some more positive press after Washington, and a few days later he delivered another lecture to a packed house of 2,000 in Philadelphia. Keedick’s agency, however, saw no sudden rush of bookings. Everything, as he continued to insist, depended on what happened in New York on 4 February.

Back at the Waldorf, Mallory carried on working on his chapters for the 1922 expedition book in between social engagements and meetings with journalists and press agents. Some doctors took him for lunch and then persuaded him to come back to their laboratory, where they subjected him to breathing tests before pronouncing that his lungs had twice the ‘vital capacity’ of a normal individual. Another admirer, a wealthy stockbroker who’d had a good day at the Cotton Exchange, took him out for an expensive lunch at a penthouse restaurant, forty storeys up in an express elevator.

Mallory loved the energy of the city streets at night. At the University Club, he caught up on the latest books and devoured the weekly edition of the Manchester Guardian for political news. He arranged to visit the Pierpont Morgan Library, where he was thrilled to find a collection of original letters from James Boswell and unexpectedly met an old friend from Cambridge, the actor Reginald Pole, who was then in New York playing Hamlet’s ghost on Broadway. Pole promised to be there when Mallory lectured at the Broadhurst.

As 4 February drew closer, Mallory was invited out by the American Alpine Club to a gala dinner. Forty members turned up, and after speeches were made and extracts read out from his account of the 1921 reconnaissance, Mallory was bombarded with questions about the problems and challenges of Everest. ‘It went well enough,’ he wrote to Ruth, but ‘there was not much fun or fizz in it’, and they served nothing all evening but water. An unexpected highlight came a few hours later, when Henry Schwab, an experienced Alpine climber and future president of the AAC, took him to the ‘swellest of New York’ clubs.