Everest legend Mallory and his Sikkim connection - i

PIC: BENTLEY BENTHEM

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 dig out the missing corpse of the 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 the Everest. It is also of great significance that Mallory was the only person to have participated in all three Mt.Everest Expeditions.

 
Like the earlier Everest Expeditions, the 1924 British Everest Expedition team arrived at Darjeeling and in two separate groups entered the land of Sikkim via Kalimpong – Pedong to Rongli. One of the group halted at Rongli Dak Bunglow while the second group rested at Ari Dak Bunglow (now popularly known as Aritar Dak Bunglow. But with poor transportation conditions, the mules and team were under severe exhaustion. 

 

PIC: BENTLEY BENTHEM

Rongli is my birthplace and to watch the photographs of the 1924 British Everest Expedition team members taking a bath on the Rongli River was a joy to watch. More than 80 years later, it seems hard to recognize the river bank but I feel proud that the legend has stepped in. The other classic photographs of the 1924 Everest Expedition team shot at Lingtam, Phadamchen, Kopup and Gnatong are precious to be kept for archives. 

The books that were 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 moved to Sedongchen (now Phadamchen) and halted a night at Gnatong some 12,000 feet. 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.