Mallory’s Ice Axe
– displayed in an exhibition to commemorate the Everest expeditions of 1922-24
by Derek Sellen
It takes an ice axe, Kafka wrote,
to free the frozen soul inside you –
or dare the North-East Ridge again,
as Mallory did.
A wingspan of steel
mounted crosswise on a haft – this is the axe
that belayed the rope
and anchored
three
dangling
lives
above a glacier in ’22.
Or so it’s claimed – these axes
multiply like holy relics.
The scandalous young man
who’d posed for Bell and Grant
naked on the Charleston furniture –
“sculpted by Praxiteles”, Strachey said –
became a saint of Britishness
once he’d vanished in the summit clouds.
As hi-vis generations trek the slopes,
Chomolungma breeds new myth:
hippie rumour has it
that the snowboarder who descended
the couloir at speed
and fell
in a
crevasse
lives on with yak-herders in a Tibetan pasture.
Some survive, some disappear, some remain,
embalmed by ice in living attitudes –
a mausoleum for risk-takers.
The hundred-year-honed
ice-axe of dead Mallory knows the names:
Dorje, Lhakpa, Norbu, Pasang, Pema, Sange, Temba,
seven Sherpas, led into the path of an avalanche in ’22 ….
Hannelore Schmatz, who sat frozen against her backpack in full sight ….
‘greenboots’, never certainly identified, named for his footwear ….
Francys Arsentiev, who chose to climb without oxygen, known as the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ ….
Narwang Sherpa, who disappeared in May 2024 ….