Everest legend Mallory and his Sikkim connection - i

As the old saying goes by, legend never dies. George Mallory and his teammate Sandy Irvine while trying for his third attempt to conquer the mighty Mt Everest went missing when they were just a few hundred meters below the summit. The year then was 1924 and it was 75 years later a search team was lucky enough to recover the missing body of legendary Mallory with his badge struck on his weathered cloth. 

This story of George Herbert Leigh Mallory had always fascinated my little fantasy. My excitation knew no boundary when I came to read that Mallory on three separate Mt Everest Expeditions (1921, 1922 and 1924) had passed through the valley of Sikkim on their way to Mt Everest from the north side of Tibet since the route through Nepal was closed for western foreigners. Failure of the 1921 and 1922 Everest Expedition did not deter him.

He once replied to a reporter ‘because it is there’ when asked why he wanted to scale Everest. The phrase went on to be a record book as one of the popular phrases and people around the world takes inspiration from his words when they think of climbing Mt. Everest. Interestingly Mallory was the only person to have participated in all the three Mt.Everest Expeditions,the pioneering effort to reach the highest mountain peak of the world.

Like the earlier Everest Expeditions, the 1924 British Everest Expedition team too had arrived in Darjeeling and in two separate groups passed through the land of Sikkim via Kalimpong – Pedong to Rongli. One of the groups halted at Rongli Dak Bunglow while the second group rested at Ari Dak Bunglow (now popularly known as Aritar Dak bungalow. 

Rongli being my birth place and to watch the photographs (Collection of Benthley Benthem) of Mallory and his fellow members taking bath on Rongli river was a joy beyond any words. More than 80 years later, it seems hard to recognize the river bank but I feel proud the route was part of the legend. The other classic photographs of the 1924 Everest Expedition team taken at Lingtam, Phadamchen, Kopup and Gnatong  are precious enough to be kept for archives. 

The books written on the accounts of these mountaineers had mentioned the jungle of Sikkim as a greenhouse with rich  and beautiful bio-diversities. From the bank of Rongli Chu they had moved to Sedongchen (now Phadamchen) and later reached Gnatong some 12,000 feet for a night halt. The mountaineers saw the scattered stone huts at Gnatong and wrote about the hamlet as ‘filthy, dry and bleak’ and ‘a most depressing place’ with its existence solely made up from the fact it was the only British outpost at the Sikkim - Tibet frontier. Here Mallory wrote “Goodbye beautiful wooded Sikkim and welcome – God knows what ! we will see.” And they entered Jelep La, the gateway of Tibet.

 

Published in Sikkim Express - 04.10.2020