First on Everest?

While Mallory and Irvine were still high on the mountain, Noel Odell was descending, as Mallory had instructed him to do. He began his descent from Camp VI sometime after 4:00 P.M., when the snow squall ended, and arrived at the North Col camp at 6:45 P.M. From time to time during his solitary descent, he turned to scan the summit ridge, but saw no sign of the climbers. Later, after he reached the North Col at 6:45 P.M., Odell and Hazard (who had been manning Camp IV) kept a watch on the mountain in the gathering twilight, but by that time it is likely that Mallory and Irvine's descent would have been obscured by the curvature of the slope between the base of the Third Step and the Second Step. Odell would later write,"The evening was a clear one, and we watched till late that night for some signs of Mallory and Irvine's return, or even an indication by flare of distress. The feeble glow that after sunset pervaded the great dark mountain face above us was later lost in filtered moonlight reflected from the high summits of the West Rongbuk." Soon, however, even this faint light was gone.

And somewhere in the dark they fell.

They did not fall far. They did not fall from the dangerous Northeast Ridge, as had the many badly twisted bodies frozen in agonized death in the great catch-basin of the "snow terrace." George Leigh Mallory has told us that himself, by the way in which he died and the repose in which he lay when the 1999 research expedition climbers found him. And, as Jochen Hemmleb had suspected all along, his fall was unrelated to the ice ax that Percy Wyn-Harris found sixty-six years ago on a rock slab atop the ridge. The two have nothing to do with each other.

George Mallory fell to his death from a spot well down the face of the Yellow Band, tantalizingly close to Camp VI and safety; his injuries are too mild, his body too unmarred, for there to be any other explanation. And he did not fall alone; at the critical moment, he appears to have been roped to his partner, Andrew Irvine. That Irvine fell too and was injured, though not as profoundly as Mallory, is suggested by the fact that the body found by Wang Hongbao, clearly Irvine's and not Mallory's, was within perhaps a half hour from the 1924 Camp VI.