Anker and his team assumed that, taking the account of Noel Odell, the last person to see Irvine and Mallory alive at 8,600 meters, for granted and believing that the pair would never have been able to climb the second step on the approach to the summit with the means available in that era, both must have fallen more or less on the vertical section of the obstacle. It was slightly to the right of the normal route of the North, or Tibetan, face of Everest, where the first attempts to conquer the roof of the planet took place between 19, with Mallory participating in all of them. Conrad Anker, a member of the Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition, had barely been searching for his needle in the haystack at 8,200 meters for 90 minutes when he bent down to adjust a boot and noticed something strange beside it. In 1999, the case may have been solved, but the search confounded scholars of the English climbers’ fate. Collateral damage for those who manage the business of Everest, where apparently only one dead climber remains important: Irvine, who disappeared in 1924 and, with him, the camera that could reveal the greatest mystery in the history of mountaineering: did Irvine and Mallory reach the summit, becoming the first people in history to do so? Discovery of Mallory’s body This spring, 17 of the 500 mountaineers who have climbed or attempted to climb the world’s highest peak have perished. A century later, at the foot of Everest, corpses of aspiring climbers continue to pile up, but the trivialization of the horrific makes the list of the missing a minor statistic. Logic dictates that it should then be among those of Andrew Irvine, Mallory’s climbing partner, whose whereabouts remain unknown. The most coveted camera in the history of mountaineering disappeared in 1924, and until 1999 it was believed that it would be found along with the remains of George Mallory. Somewhere on the North Face of Everest is - or should be - an old Vest Pocket Kodak, whose film could rewrite the history of the mountain.
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