Free The Lost Explorer by Conrad Anker, David Roberts Page B

mummified body, but refused at first to pay for the picture, because
Time
had “bootlegged” the same image, running a picture of the cover of the Australian paper that had broken the story, complete with “exclusive” photo. Unfortunately, the British and Australian tabloids covered the discovery with all the sensitivity of a two-headed baby tale or Princess Di séance.
    At first, even among seasoned mountaineers, there was great excitement about the possibility that the find lent credence to the notion that Mallory and Irvine had reached the summit. Andy Politz’s insight—that Mallory’s having put hisgoggles in his pocket meant that the accident had come at dusk or after—got all too easily translated into a scenario in which the pair fell as they descended after reaching the top.
    Thus the German magazine
Stern
, running its own exclusive, titled its cover story, above a portrait of Mallory inset against a Himalayan ice scape, “War er der Erste?”—“Was he the first?”
Stern
also was at pains to portray its own country’s fair-haired boy, Jochen Hemmleb, as the genius behind the discovery: a call-out from the article read, “Directed by the German over the radio, the search-troop found the dead body.”
    By May 3, only two days after the find,
NOVA
had an interview with David Breashears up on its Web site. The director and cinematographer of the groundbreaking Everest IMAX film, as well as of a 1987 documentary called
Everest: The Mystery of Mallory and Irvine
, Breashears had been to the mountain on fourteen expeditions, summitting four times. He said, “I think it’s incredibly exciting that they’ve finally found George Mallory’s body.” Breashears went on to speculate that it was not surprising the camera wasn’t found with Mallory, for it would have made more sense that Irvine would be in charge of taking pictures of the leader—“the man of Everest … George Mallory.” Breashears held out hope that a subsequent search would come up not only with Irvine’s body, but with the camera that could solve the mystery for good. He closed with a tribute in the same vein as Conrad Anker’s awe-struck pensée as he had sat beside Mallory’s body: “All those years that I’ve been going to Everest … thinking about these incredible men trying for the summit of Everest in 1924, in cotton wind suits and tweed jackets, for me, I feel a bit reassured and a bit resolved that we know where George Mallory is.”
    Breashears later vividly took issue with the Hemmleb- as-director spin on the story: “All Hemmleb did was feed some data into the computer and think he’d reinvented information. Mallory wasn’t a dot on the ocean floor, and those guys weren’t submersibles. Conrad Anker was the only real climber on the team. The reason they found Mallory is because Conrad used his climber’s eye to figure out where to look.”
    At first, especially in England, the discovery was hailed as a splendid event, renewing the nation’s sense of pride in its Everest pioneers. “Admiration grows with hindsight,” editorializedthe
Times
of London. “Mallory was in a long tradition of English adventurers and sportsmen whose nonchalance and gentlemanly demeanor masked fierce ambition.”
    “There remains something wonderful about the spirit of play,” echoed the
Guardian
, “that carries people into contests where there is no material reward, no point but the thing itself.”
    With the publication of the photos—the one showing Mallory’s bare back, his fingers clawing at the scree, his face frozen into the ground, the other zooming in on the man’s vulnerable, naked left leg cradling the hopelessly fractured right one—another note emerged in the public response. Some viewers found an eerie fascination in the images, like Boris Johnson of the
Daily Telegraph
, who wrote, “Something about these pictures causes the nape to prickle. Not that they are gruesome: no, there is something about that bleached