Chapter One - Switzerland 1909

The first time I ever saw George Mallory he was reclined on an iron bench outside the Monte Rosa Hotel in Zermatt. The Monte Rosa was the climber’s hotel in Zermatt, where everyone who was in the Alpine Club met to trade stories of their climbs, in triumph or tragedy. My brother Jack and I were returning from our morning’s climb when I spied an extraordinary figure. He sat easily with legs outstretched, an open volume of the latest John Galsworthy novel balanced on his chest. His climbing partner Geoffrey Winthrop Young sat beside him less indolently, leaning forward in the sunshine, observing the scene. It was late afternoon and tea was just concluded, and the remains of this alfresco repast littered table between them. Their rucksacks were perched nearby from a slack day’s ramble; they had just come from climbing in the Oberland that morning. They were tall, dark-haired, well-made men, instantly recognisable as Englishmen in this foreign scene. Geoffrey we knew from previous summers in the Alps, but George was a revelation. He looked up, his deep eyes wide and unguarded and I was taken aback.

I had never seen a young man so beautiful. At my gasp of surprise, he coloured deeply, which charmed me all the more. He and Geoffrey were the great celebrities of the moment in Zermatt, for their exploits on the Finsteraarhorn, the Nesthorn, and Mont Blanc had preceded them. I had to meet him. Inventing an excuse to Jack, I ducked into the hotel for a pen at the desk; to find when I turned round that Geoffrey was behind me in the lobby greeting a group of climbers. I waited impatiently until I could decently interrupt him, and then launched myself on him with all the charm I could muster.

‘Geoffrey, how lovely to see you!’
‘Miss Sanders!’ He extricated himself from his companions and came to take my hands. ‘It’s always good to see old friends. How do you do?’
‘Very well, thank you. I’m here with my family. I’ve brought my little brother this time. Helen is still detained at Oxford. But she’ll be coming along to Wales.’ My sister was an undergraduate.
‘Good,’ Geoffrey sparkled. He was a devilishly handsome man, with great pale eyes, curling long dark hair, and an impressive moustache, he was given to rather unique and picturesque dress verging on the aesthetic; soulful as a poet, and the best Alpine climber I had ever met. He was thirty-three then, and the great impresario of the climbing world. He had taken the lead in guideless climbing, which until a few years ago was unthinkable, and was now traversing the Alps with various companions, George Mallory being the latest.
‘You shall have to introduce us,’ he said, giving me my entrée. ‘Are you staying long?’
‘Until the end of next month,’ I assured him, though that was by no means certain. Then I plunged in: ‘Geoffrey, would you please introduce me to your friend? I saw him just now and was struck.’ I tried not to put too great an emphasis on the last word, but failed.
Geoffrey smiled. ‘Lovely, isn’t he? Certainly I will.’
‘Oh, but please,’ I hastened, ‘don’t make it look as though I asked, it would be an awful embarrassment.’
‘Oh, George is used to admiration,’ Geoffrey said easily, but at my look continued, ‘as you wish, my dear. Come along in a little and I’ll fix it.’

So it happened. After a few minutes I went out of the hotel and to my brother, saying I wanted to go up to the chemist’s and would he come along? It was in the right direction. Jack, obliging as ever, agreed. We turned and Geoffrey, with every evidence of surprise cried,
‘Ah Miss Sanders, how do you do? Jack!’
George rose hastily in concert with Geoffrey, but not without grace. He was picturesque and untidy, in loose grey flannels and with a bright handkerchief round his neck; but the things which chiefly aroused the attention were his good looks and his complexion, and the arresting quality of his pale gaze when he looked at one. He seemed nothing so much as a creature out of Greek myth, for this young man’s skin was as clear and fair as a girl’s, whereas everyone else about sported raw or peeling skin from sunburn; for there had been a fresh snowfall followed by days of bright sunshine. Introductions were made hastily and I found myself face to face with the paragon.

My desire fulfilled, I was overwhelmed. There was a moment of sheer silence, that most terrible and revealing of social gaffes. My misadventure on the mountain today was nothing to this! I felt as gauche and puppyish as a young girl. Geoffrey took matters neatly in hand. He squinted at my brother and me impishly, and came out from behind George to offer his hand. ‘Fine climbing, had you? The weather’s for it.’
‘We’ve had a fine time!’ Jack laughed. ‘We were on the Gornergrat, with tremendous weather. Cottie nearly came a cropper on the descent at the couloir—’ my brother smiled at me ‘But we hauled to and she was none the worse.’ I blushed, for I only had the poorest of excuses; the lace of my boot had come unknotted and I trod on it. It was a hard lesson in habiliments; dangling at the end of a rope at 10,000 feet had been extremely harrowing.
‘I slipped,’ I offered, with a crooked smile. George was regarding me intently.
‘It happens to the best of us,’ Geoffrey said gallantly, with a merry glance at his young friend. ‘Eh, Mallory?’ To us Geoffrey said, ‘The day before yesterday we were on the south-east ridge of the Nesthorn, and George took a fall on the ascent that had the rope snapped would have put him at the bottom of the mountain. In the morning we found out from a man in Bern that it had a very low breaking point.’

George only smiled drolly. He gave no indication of nerves over what might have been a fatal fall on the mountain; he was quite nonchalant.
‘Never even dropped his ice axe,’ Geoffrey crowed.
‘I hadn’t time,’ George shook his head with a small disarming smile. ‘It was all in a flash.’
I could hardly contain my amazement. ‘You weren’t frightened?’
His glance was once again intent, disturbing in such a shy young fellow; he was used to saying more with looks than words, I suspected. ‘No, Miss Sanders,’ he murmured and lifted back his head with a glance at Geoffrey. ‘By then it was over, and we had to get on.’ The briefest smile flickered and I saw that he was twitting me. I laughed, and the sun broke out over his face in a beaming elfin smile that made the heart pound queerly.

‘We’re going up the Stockhorn in the morning,’ Geoffrey announced. ‘Care to come with us?’
‘Yes!’ cried my brother beside me. ‘Oh, jolly!’
The third fellow in their party was missing. Donald Robertson was nowhere in sight. ‘Robertson was rather fagged out by our adventure. We got back at three in the morning.’ Geoffrey offered at my inquiry. ‘He preferred to stay indoors today. Resting, you know. He seems to be suffering from altitude.’
‘Nerves,’ George said to me. ‘We didn’t tell him until this morning. He was round the corner, you see, and missed it in the event.’
If he were cowering in the bedclothes, I should not have blamed him. Such a near-miss on an untried route was enough to send all but die-hards scurrying.

We assembled at half-past five the next morning and walked up the narrow curving street of the village, which at this hour was void of townsfolk. My brother was ahead of us with Geoffrey and Robertson, animatedly disgorging the events of yesterday. George walked with me, his hands behind his back, his ice-axe tucked into the strap of his rucksack. It was very pleasantly warm here, with a light breeze and a brilliant blue sky, wisped in cloud – a picture postcard, with the morning sun lighting the steep streets athwart and dancing on the brilliantly painted buildings and shops. Up in the mountains it had been frightfully cold, and the breeze became a stiff wind strong enough to hamper one’s progress. I glanced at George’s silk neckerchief dubiously as he walked beside me, and found him looking at me.

‘If you don’t mind my asking,’ he said thoughtfully, ’What sort of name is Cottie? It’s puzzled me since your brother called you by it at the hotel.’ It was laughable. I was worrying about his braving the cold lofty air on such a day and he was pondering pet names!
‘It’s a nursery name!’ I laughed. ‘Nanny Patty used to call me it and it stuck. The genuine article is Mary Anne. Cracking, isn’t it?’ I grinned at him, but he was blushing vividly.
He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, it was an impertinent question.’
The colour slowly faded from his face and I realised how very shy he was indeed. ‘Oh no,’ I insisted, feeling very much the elder and wiser. ‘Not at all!’ I looked up the stretch of winding street, daring to tease him as he had me: ‘You’re not the first person to have asked, after all.’
The silence was so deafening at this sortie that I was almost afraid to look at him, afraid that I had shocked him beyond the power of speech. But he was only regarding me again with a piercing, arresting gaze.
‘I shouldn’t think so, Miss Sanders,’ he returned very seriously.

The Stockhorn was not particularly high as mountains went, but it was a challenge following George. He was leading on the ascent of a route he was inventing as he went along. Not a direct ascent, but a more interesting one, as he called it. We were roped, traversing to a narrow step of rock along the gendarme that topped the mountain; the holds were minute, vertical fissures only on a near-90 degree pitch. I had been watching his feet to know where to take my next step, but my attention had been diverted in gaining a secure handhold, and he had moved on; I knew a wild panic, for I could see no reliable footholds above me worthy of the name. The cracks broke opposite to the direction of our traverse, and I could not see how deep or shallow they were; I was relying on him utterly for every step.
‘George—’ I called shortly.
He was tugging the rope in his upward movement. It was that, more than my half-barked call that alerted him. He turned his head over his right shoulder.
‘Eh? What’s wrong?’ He said easily. ‘Are you caught up?’ With one easy graceful sweep, he secured a handhold and turned, holding out his right hand to me from some four or five feet above. It was a reach, but his fingers were strong, and soon I found myself on the very foothold I needed, with his hand wrapped around my wrist. I was pulled up lightly and stood shaking, as much from the contact as the relief from an uncertain perch. His eyes kindled, warm in their depths.
‘All right now,’ he murmured simply, ‘all safe.’ He flung the errant lock of hair from his eyes with an impatient jerk of the head. ‘Come on! We’re perhaps twenty minutes from the summit…’

We returned late in the evening, cold, with wind-whipped colour enlivening our faces, and after a brief repair in the saunas, Geoffrey’s party came to share a brandy us on our balcony. Our party that evening consisted of my brother and myself; his friends James Leigh and Trevor Smith-Bowen who had gone off to the Finsteraarhorn two days ago; our cousin Diana Day, who was not climbing; and Robertson, who had recovered from his bout of altitude sickness to make a splendid show. We made merry with the spirits, in the way that only people who have spent a day at hard physical exertion may. For Jack and me, this climbing habit was as liberating as a shock of wind, for long ago our father had taken the pledge in company of one of our tenants and so we grew up completely unfamiliar with drink of any kind.

Geoffrey was in amiable discourse with Bowen over Keats’ Hyperion, but I noticed that while George sat near them under the lamplight, he was studiously engrossed in a small volume and took no part in their debate. He could have been on the moon for the entire note taken of his surroundings, and the small quantity of brandy in the glass balanced on the rail before him lasted him a very long time. Our friend was not a Puritan, surely! Not with those eyes. After an hour of this observation, I got up from my place beside Diana and tottered over to where George sat, leaning on the rail of the balcony beside his glass.
‘What are you reading?’
He looked up quickly, startled. He really had been in a world of his own. ‘Ah, Boswell,’ he said, snapping the book shut. ‘I’m working on a paper for the Members Club Prize.’
‘You’re at Oxford, then?’
‘Cambridge. I took my last exams before coming out.’ Our eyes met and by my encouraging look he was thankfully persuaded in confidence to go on. ‘Boswell and Johnson are ever so fascinating! I read him as a second-year at the urging of my tutor and have been simply captivated ever since. The Journal and Life are only the beginning! They wrote some splendid letters along the way, absolutely inspired letters. This is the second volume. The first concerns their meeting, and this their preparations for the Tour—’

The words tumbled out in a passionate staccato, as if unleashed from a spring. His entire being was powerfully alive, positively quivering with vitality. What I had first seen was verily true: his shy diffidence covered a deep intelligence and fervent engagement with life. What lingered in my mind from the day was his perfectly thrilling grace on mountains, the way he moved so sinuously catlike, reaching with those long powerful arms from hold to hold, slender long fingers finding the way with a perfect economy of movement. He was quiescent now, but there was yet about him a vitality even in stillness, as if he might spring at any moment. He was so all-of a-piece, deep wells of activity and emotion veiled in seeming nonchalance, utterly compelling. I was drawn. I wanted so much to talk with him, to sit and listen to his beautiful voice, just to be in his presence.
‘Tell me,’ I entreated, coming to sit before him on the floorboards. It was bliss that he talked to me at length about James Boswell and Samuel Johnson, the latter’s famed dictionary, their friendship, their journey to the Hebrides, and something of the spirit that moved this adventure. Of the latter – the spirit of adventure – he spoke most earnestly of all, in an almost enraptured, mystical way that held me spellbound because I knew it too, in the mountains. Throughout I was nodding vigorously, hardly able to contain my excitement that someone else really understood, when at last he paused, brushing back the shock of hair that fell forward across his brow and inadvertently touched my shoulder – for by this time I had scooted near the better to hear – and every word of reply died in my throat with the electric shock of the contact. I was fizzing indeed. I could only stare at him in that strange state of excitement. He looked at me, truly and deeply, as shocked perhaps as I. A thousand wordless thoughts passed back and forth between us.
‘You understand,’ he said at last in a hush. It was not a question. I nodded dumbly. Later I would kick myself for being so artless, I who was used to having young men easily in thrall, but then I was spinning in a mysterious realm of spirit and George was my boatman.

I sat dumb and dazzled, unable to squeak a word, but found to my relief that it wasn’t necessary; there was everything in his eyes: the mystery of the mountains, the call of adventure, older hushed mysteries unspoken – but painted, set in music, rhymed in verse, danced. I had as a young girl discovered another kindred spirit in an illicit volume of Swinburne in a small dirty inn on the Sussex downs, and treasured the palpable romance of nature evoked. The images I found there danced between George and me in this wordless eternity. He understood all my unspoken, half-formed yearnings. We were of a kind. Oh it was such perfect rapture! All the Gothic splendour of the soul in nature, freed from the constraints of dull tidy minds. Delight arose engulfing us like a wraith, wrapping us in a deeper intimacy than forbidden Swinburne ever dared to dream. I had fallen in love once – with an Italian cousin – but this was falling headlong into another world, utterly of the senses and of the moment. The emotion ebbed slowly – it could not have lasted nearly so long as it felt, for it passed unnoticed by the group – and George started, muttering,
‘Um, Boswell… smoothed the way for Johnson, opened up paths to him that he never could have
got to or enjoyed on his own, and he’s never been given the credit for it….’ He faltered. ‘ I… Miss Sanders?’ He was blushing deeply.
‘Yes?’
‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ He ran a hand through his hair, looked about in rather desperate fashion.

That startled me out of my enchantment, and I laughed to cover my embarrassment. ‘Only if you’ll share,’ I looked round Geoffrey to where my brother sat. ‘Only don’t let Jack see, or he’ll have me in for it with Father.’
George was fetching out a packet of French cigarettes, and looked up, smiling, his ease somewhat recovered. ‘Is it not allowed?’
‘I never have,’ I admitted, ‘but I shouldn’t think so. My sisters sneak about the garden.’
He nodded. ‘We’ll have to initiate you!’ He decided, handing over one of the slim black cigarettes. ‘Here you are!’
I watched him closely, but when I tried to follow his lead I had a nasty surprise in the heavy acrid bite of the tobacco. It was like smoking an old leather armchair, and I coughed and gagged and tears sprang to my eyes, while George laughed uproariously.

‘You are so very gallant!’ I remarked tartly in French when I could catch my breath, glowering at him. He guffawed again at that and then shook his head, putting a hand on my arm.
‘I am sorry. Oh dear. Miss Sanders,’ he was still tittering. ‘Let me show you the right way. Oh please, come now, don’t be offended! I’m sorry. Watch me now,’ he took a drag on his cigarette held between those long slender fingers. ‘Gently, slowly.’ His voice was melodious as a brook. ‘See, like that.’ He flicked the ash of my neglected cigarette and gave it to me. ‘You try.’ The atmosphere was intimate and gentle again, irresistible, and under his watchful gaze, I tried again, inhaling only slowly. My lungs were on fire. It felt like the heights of the mountains in January, like the asthma that had drawn me to Switzerland years before, and I wondered if I would faint or be sick.
‘Breathe,’ George insisted. I let it all out at once, and felt dizzy.
‘You must breathe,’ he said earnestly. ‘Don’t hold it in. Breathe deep and slow – there,’ he said to my efforts. ‘Very good.’ I looked at him. He was smiling now, far too close to me, and I blushed. ‘You’ll be on to cigars in no time.’ He said encouragingly. I was dizzy from more than the smoke. He evidently had no idea of his effect on one. I stared at him helplessly.
‘You did very well,’ he murmured. I didn’t know what to say. There was a long tense silence, and then he coloured too and looked away, took a drag on his cigarette.
‘Miss Sanders—’ He began.

The Keats debate was still going on beside us. Geoffrey leaned over asking,
‘George, give us the mountaineer in Endymion, won’t you?’
‘Oh, yes!’ George cried in relief. He smiled in delight, leaning back his head. With eyes closed he recited in tones of savouring,

‘The mountaineer thus strove by fancies vain and crude to clear, his briar'd path to some tranquillity… but when I came to feel how far above all fancy, pride, and fickle maidenhood,
all earthly pleasure, all imagin'd good, was the warm tremble of a devout kiss – Why, there was not a slope up which he had not fear'd the antelope; and not a tree, beneath whose rooty shade he had not with his tamed leopards play'd. nor could an arrow light, or javelin, fly in the air where his had never been – and yet he knew it not’.

I was transfixed by the timbre of his voice, the perfect phrasing, and sensitive intonation. He should have been an actor instead of a student of History. The entire company was listening to this performance by now, enrapt, which embarrassed him when he opened his eyes again.
‘See, what did I tell you?’ Geoffrey beamed to Bowen. He gave George his twinkling smile. ‘Thank you, old man,’ he said warmly, to assuage George’s chagrin.

Well past midnight I saw him to the door of our suite with Geoffrey and Robertson. For all the late hour and our long climb of nearly six-thousand feet, George did not appear tired at all. He smiled warmly with a speaking glance.
‘Goodnight, Miss Sanders.’
‘O Goodnight! Goodnight everyone!’ I had never meant any good wish more. He was the first friend I had ever made all on my own account, not being the child of my parents’ friends, friends of my brothers and sisters, or their sweethearts. This was a keen accomplishment to me.

I wrote up my diary for the day, Our climb on the Stockhorn today was thrilling. GM leading a traverse to the gendarme, putting up a new route. He is agile as a chamois, the perfect mountain creature, although daunting rather to mere mortals when it comes to following him. I lost my way on the holds, but he was very patient in securing one’s perch. I must remember to tell Helen about the cigarettes: George gave me one of his black French ones and tried to teach me to smoke it, to disastrous effect. I was rather cross with him laughing but he made it up in reciting Keats beautifully for the company. He is writing a paper on James Boswell for his college, and has asked to look at some of my poems when we return home. Won’t Helen be jealous! He told me too about the Greek writer Aeschylus, whom he said I would like, and promised to loan me his copy tomorrow.

I fell into bed for a few hours’ sleep very happy indeed.

Geoffrey, it transpired, had a climbing appointment with another friend, Percy Smith, for the next few days, during which they brought off their famous climb on the Weisshorn; and to my delight George was happy to spend the slack time with me on rambles about the town and the lower slopes round about; we managed to invent our own hill-walks that were off the tourist tracks, so I got to know him somewhat better than I might have done in those public areas. He was not very much in evidence in the climbers’ social whirl of Zermatt, for his taste for his kind had not yet perhaps developed as it would do later, for climbers are infamous gossips, and he was frightfully shy then. He had taken a good deal of chaffing about where had he got a pair of cocoa coloured corduroys which so much shocked the sense of propriety in dress of the old gentlemen. I had thought that he was simply taking a leaf from Geoffrey’s book in matters of aesthetic dress, but I was to discover that George was long unconventional in social conventions all on his own account. He was a member of the Fabian Society at Cambridge, and drawn to the philosophies of the Post-Impressionist painters and symbolist writers. He adored Shaw, which shocked and secretly delighted me, for I had listen to my father loudly denounce this ‘Irish muckraker’ at Sunday afternoon tea. When we were not on our rambles or sitting chatting in the lounge of the hotel, George spent his time looking at books at the Wega. When forced to socialise with the rest of us, he was apt to look and behave rather like a beautiful wild creature that had been trapped and was putting up with confinement as well as it could, but looking round with a desperate and rather startled air for a way of escape. But he was, as I had learned, not wholly unsociable and not in the least difficult to make friends with.

He was, I discovered, not eighteen – which was what he looked – but twenty-three, and his great ambition of the moment was to spend the winter in France and Italy, working on his languages, so to obtain a teaching post promised him at Rugby; it was mostly Maths, which was his scholarship subject at Winchester, but they had need of a French tutor as well. His inexperience was against him, of course, but the head was willing to give him the chance if he could improve himself over the winter. My impulsive offer to help his French by writing to him was met with a scalding blush and a mumbled reply about not wishing to inconvenience me.

‘It’s no inconvenience!’ I blurted heedlessly. ‘Should you go to Italy, I could help there as well, for I have relatives in Friuli—’ This brought him up short, painfully.
‘Miss Sanders, I couldn’t impose. But, oh could you? It would be ever so fine, and it would spare expense as well—’ He stopped, shoved his hands into his pockets and looked out over the meadow. ‘I am a bit caught out there,’ he admitted to the wind.
‘Not to worry,’ I decided emphatically, ‘The de Brazzas would love you! But you mustn’t let me over-run your holiday! I will you know, if you let me…’ This produced a shy smile, and so the awkward matter was settled. I had no idea at that time how poor he actually was. I’m ashamed to admit that I thought it merely being low on allowance for a bit; it was only later when he was in France and spoke of café meals of bread and coffee that I began to see the truth.

He was dead keen on art, and ran on at great length about the Post-Impressionists after a cursory query if I knew anything about them – for which answer he did not wait. He knew some of the current British artists from university – Simon Bussy and Duncan Grant – and while I listened rapt to the sound of his voice as he extolled the delights of raw colour and symbolism and other mysteries of the painter’s repertoire, I bit my tongue to keep from attesting my unfortunately ignorant and ‘British abroad’ opinion that it was all a lot of rubbish. George had obviously a deep and rather mystical connection to these garish works, as I thought of them, and I was unwilling to offend him at that juncture with my true views, so kept them to myself; perhaps the first time I had ever done so in my life.

His favourite painting of the moment of one of Müller’s wife or mistress, done in deep greys and golds, with the woman pale and haunted in an indistinct landscape; his description sounded rather stark and weird to me, and this was a confusing window onto his soul. There was a darkness about him sometimes in those days, a brooding moodiness which was puzzling to me, for my family were forthright in our rows, with pranks and storms, but no lurking resentments nursed for days unspoken. This habit of George’s which he retained until after the first Everest journey, was a curiosity and took some getting used to. There were places in his mind, I suspected, that no-one could ever go.

But mostly he was cheerful, astonishingly cheerful. We had a good deal of talk, generally about mountains and the quality of their beauty, and he made one feel at once that here, in him, was the authentic thing, the real flame and passion. His talk, in his beautiful voice, with the very careful choice of words and this quality stood out extraordinarily from the ordinary run of conversation at the Monte Rosa. He was the first person who had ever understood how I felt about mountains without endless explanation and quizzical glances, even among climbers, and this was our great joy. For mountains had done for us what they do for everyone who really begins to surrender to them: they had transformed our whole set of values. Mountaineering had become a sort of religion, which indeed it is. It demands the exercise of moral qualities – patience and self-control and fortitude, and the subordination of everything else in striving towards an end greater than oneself. It has, like other religions, its moments of ecstasy, of worship, and of abasement. For us it went further than that; it seemed essential to carry back into everyday life the illumination found, as it were, before the altar: to live all the time in the spirit in which one set out for and carried through a climb, not to be found unworthy of the mountains, which had given so much, in anything. We found ourselves often in our rambles going back to Shelley, and one or the other of us would quote from Mont Blanc as one would inspired holy verse.

‘Look at that!’ He said to me one afternoon after a long silence as we strolled to our picnic meadow above the town for an alfresco repast. He had been looking across to the Weisshorn, where – the news had it – Geoffrey and Smith had made their ascent the day before. ‘All the people down there in the town, all the people in offices and railway stations and universities and vicarages, all the people who have never climbed or dreamt of far-off places shall never know—’ he broke off, shaking his head, his face a study in an exquisite sort of agony – ‘it pains me that they shall never know! The rare and intemperate beauty of one moment aloft the starry carriage of Artemis’ train that is mountaineering.’ He looked over at me, his pale eyes full of feeling. ‘I feel a kind of blessing in this small circle we have – you and I and Geoffrey – as if we were the solitary bearers of some forgotten rite, and that it is our charge to bring it to the world again.’

His words went leaping fast and he skipped as he went, powerfully alive with scalding emotion.
‘Oh! You know it, you know it! Even as Shelley said, I look on high; has some unknown omnipotence unfurled the veil of life and death? or do I lie in dream, and does the mightier world of sleep spread far and round and inaccessibly its circles? For the very spirit fails, driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep that vanishes among the viewless gales!’
He was turning round and round ahead of me in a passion, and, smiling, catching the emanation of his intense feeling, I continued the verse,

‘Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky, Mont Blanc appears – still snowy and serene –
its subject mountains their unearthly forms pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between
of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps, blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread
and wind among the accumulated steeps;’

He clasped my hand, snatching at it, beaming, and tumbled out the rest, skipping and stammering joyously,

‘The wilderness has a mysterious tongue which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,
so solemn, so serene, that man may be, but for such faith, with nature reconciled;
thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal large codes of fraud and woe; not understood
by all, but which the wise, and great, and good interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel…
and to the infinite dome of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!’

We had reached our place on the hillside in this way, and with this proclamation, George plunked himself down happily where he landed, radiant and spent as some priest in old rites, heart visibly beating under his shirt, as gloriously riven as I had ever seen anyone before or since. I wondered at him as I sat. Here indeed was the real thing. This young man, with all his peculiarities, was the essence, the true spirit of mountaineering embodied, quite unlike any of the old crowd down in the Monte Rosa with their clubs and their whiskeys and their ‘bagging’ of summits. George was glorious and disturbing at once, and I was speechless for some moments while he recovered himself. What was this extraordinary force, George Leigh-Mallory? I wondered, and however had he come to be? But I had no answer that day, for he opened his eyes in a moment, quite his ordinary impish self again, and enquired lazily if I were going to sit dumbly clutching the rucksack like a goose all afternoon. All was as normal then, which was to say, extraordinary indeed. We talked about painting again and politics, arguing until we were late for dinner at the hotel, with George trying to educate ignorant me about the social forces of art, and Fabianism.

One of George’s peculiarities, curious especially as he was so very clever at maths, was that he was very vague and ramshackly about everything practical. Jack, Helen, and I travelled up to Visp with him and Robertson and Geoffrey when they left, and on the train derived a great deal of amusement from Geoffrey’s tale of his efforts to get George packed and breakfasted and off in time. They had galloped up in the bus at the last second. Then, when we got to Visp, George was sent to buy food while Geoffrey saw to the luggage. I met him in the restaurant, on the same errand for my group. Something made him notice my alarm watch; he had never seen one before. Immediately, his impish enthusiasm for new things was aroused. ‘Work it!’ he said in his eager way. So, to my later chagrin, we sat down at a table to make it work, heads together, whispering and giggling, going over the mechanism endlessly. Food and time were at once forgotten and when the Express came roaring in nothing had been bought but a packet of Baseler Leckerli chocolate biscuits which I had got before I met him. I pressed them on him, and he took them reluctantly, only due to my urgency. We went out to the train, but even then he was still chiefly concerned to impress on me the importance of my going to Geoffrey’s gathering at Pen-y-Pass in Wales in September, and the value of Peck’s Hardening Lotion for the feet. He gave us Peck’s address – by which we guessed that he was, or had been, living at Cambridge – but not his own, though there was the loan of books and maps to be returned to him.
‘And,’ he quizzed at the hurried last, ‘should you be at Zermatt next year? Because—’

But the train was leaving the station and he made a rushing leap on to it before anxious Geoffrey standing despairing in the passage door, to appear again in the carriage window, but whatever he said was lost to us in the noise of the engine and the whistle sounding. The train bore them off and the last we saw of him was his vivid face framed in the darkness of the carriage window, calling out something about a mountain. We knew nothing else of him but his name. I hoped, of course – immensely – to meet him again. I dearly remembered that our lovely walk along the Rhone Valley and up to Ried was gilded, and was comforted by the thought that there were such delightful people in the world, and that sooner or later, among mountains, one was bound to find them again.

‘Good were the days when we wandered the hill-side together
Seeking a path that would take us we did not know where,
Climbing, achieving, light-hearted and ever untiring
Drinking new life with the wine of that wonderful air.

‘Ah, when we rested at last on the top of the mountain
High above men, above cattle, and limit of trees,
Only the peaks, and the sky, and the light, and the silence –
These – how can earth come much nearer to Heaven than these?’

(Mary Anne, 1907)