Read The Lost Explorer for Free Online

with a range from 20,000 feet to 30,000 feet. Inscribed on the back, in fine script, was “M.E.E. II”—for Mount Everest Expedition II. And in the vest pocket, we found a pair of goggles. The frames were bent, but the green glass was unbroken. It was Andy who came up with the possible significance of the goggles being in the pocket. To him, it argued that George had fallen after dusk. If it had been in the daytime, he would have been wearing the goggles, even on rock. He’d just had a vivid lesson in the consequences of taking them off during the day, when Teddy Norton got a terrible attack of snow blindness the night after his summit push on June 4.
    As we removed each artifact, we put it carefully in a Ziploc bag. Andy volunteered to carry the objects down to Camp V. To some people, it may seem that taking George’s belongings with us was a violation. We even had a certain sense that we were disturbing the dead—I think that’s why we had hesitated to begin the excavation. But this was the explicit purpose of the expedition: to find Mallory and Irvine and to retrieve the artifacts and try to solve the mystery of what had happened on June 8, 1924. I think we did the right thing.
    As interesting as what we found was what we didn’t find. George had no backpack on, nor any trace of the frame that held the twin oxygen bottles. His only carrying sack was the little bag we found under his right biceps. He didn’t have any water bottle, or Thermos flask, which was what they used in ’24. He didn’t have a flashlight, because he’d forgotten to take it with him. We know this not from Odell, but from the 1933 party, who found the flashlight in the tent at the 1924 Camp VI.
    And we didn’t find the camera. That was the great disappointment.
    It was getting late—we’d already well overstayed our 2:00 P.M. turnaround. The last thing we gathered was a DNA sample, to analyze for absolute proof of the identity of the man we’d found. Simonson had received approval for this procedure beforehand from John Mallory, George’s only son, who’s seventy-nine and living in South Africa. I had agreed to do this job.
    I cut an inch-and-a-half-square patch of skin off the right forearm. It wasn’t easy. I had to use the serrated blade on Dave’s utility knife. Cutting George’s skin was like cutting saddle leather, cured and hard.
    Since the expedition, I’ve often wondered whether taking the tissue was a sacrilegious act. In Base Camp, I had volunteered for the task. On the mountain, I had no time to reflect whether or not this was the right thing to do.
    We wanted to bury George, or at least to cover him up. There were rocks lying around, but not a lot that weren’t frozen in place. We formed a kind of bucket brigade, passing rocks down to the site.
    Then Andy read, as a prayer of committal, Psalm 103: “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth./For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone …”
    We finally left at 4:00 P.M. I lingered a bit after the other four. The last thing I did was to leave a small Butterfinger candy bar in the rocks nearby, like a Buddhist offering. I said a sort of prayer for him, several times over.
    The other guys traversed back to Camp VI to rejoin the normal route down to V, but I saw that I could take a shortcut and go straight to V. I got there at 5:00 P.M. , the others forty-five minutes to an hour later.
    Dave and Andy were in one tent, Tap, Jake, and I in the other. Dave said later that it was only back in Camp V that what we’d done really began to sink in, that his emotions spilled out, that he was filled with satisfaction and amazement.
    We had some food and tried to sleep. I was pretty tired—it had been a twelve-hour day. I slept soundly for a couple of hours, then I woke up. I was on the downhill side of the tent, getting forced out of the good spot. The wind kept blowing. The rest of the night, I couldn’t sleep. Just kept tossing and