“And if they find the bodies?”
“Well, I think they’re planning to take them down and ship them to London and bury them in Winchester Cathedral.”
The Brits stared at him. “You mean Westminster Abbey?” Trevor ventured.
“Oh that’s right, I always get those two mixed up. Anyway that’s what they’re going to do, and they’re going to make a movie out of it.”
I groaned at the thought. More video.
The four Brits groaned louder than I did. “That is rilly dis-gusting,” Marion said.
“Sickening,” John and Mad Tom agreed.
“It is a travesty, isn’t it?” Trevor said. “I mean those chaps belong up there if anybody does. It’s nothing less than grave robbing!”
And his three companions nodded. On one level they were joking, making a pretense of their outrage; but underneath that, they were dead serious. They meant it.
V
To understand why they would care so much, you have to understand what the story of Mallory and Irvine means to the British soul. Climbing has always been more important there than in America—you could say that the British invented the sport in Victorian times, and they’ve continued to excel in it since then, even after World War Two when much else there fell apart. You could say that climbing is the Rolls Royce of British sport. Whymper, Hillary, the brilliant crowd that climbed with Bonington in the seventies: they’re all national heroes.
But none more so than Mallory and Irvine. Back in the twenties and thirties, you see, the British had a lock on Everest, because Nepal was closed to foreigners, and Tibet was closed to all but the British, who had barged in on them with Younghusband’s campaign back in 1904. So the mountain was their private playground, and during those years they made four or five attempts, all of them failures, which is understandable: they were equipped like Boy Scouts, they had to learn high-altitude technique on the spot, and they had terrible luck with weather.