Mons Invictus

A monstrous, imperturbable tooth of granite, nearly six miles high, encased in everlasting ice, seneschaled by all the elements, Everest has again taken its revenge on the puny mortals who ceaselessly aspire to scale it. Two more sturdy Anglo-Saxons have tasted the displeasure of the ancient mountain. And the third Mt. Everest expedition, like the second and the first, has ended in failure.

Only a fragmentary dispatch to Sir Francis Younghusband, President of the Royal Geographical Society, was received. It recorded that George Leigh Mallory, one of the greatest and most experienced of all Alpine and Himalayan mountain-climbers, and A. C. Irvine, young Oxford graduate and one of the novices of the expedition, had perished on the last attempt. How or where was not known, except that they came a few hundred feet nearer the summit than the record of the 1922 expedition (27,250 feet).* There was no official communique from Colonel Norton, but his last one, written on May 26 in collaboration with Mallory himself, said: "The issue will shortly be decided. The third time we walk up East Rongbuk glacier will be the last, for better or worse." All other members of the party were reported safe. But the 1924 expedition was over.

The cause of the disaster was not clear. The party were two weeks behind their schedule. The period of favorable weather was nearing its end. The time of violent monsoons was at hand. The North Col was encircled by ice cliffs that break off suddenly and plunge into the abyss. A gale or an avalanche? Failing lungs? Or freezing cold? The world waited breathless for the final word.

Will they try again another year? Yes, for, in Mallory's own words, Everest "is there"--a challenge to the human race.

*Everest towers 29,141 feet.