Office of the President

New Student Convocation — September 2, 2001

Because It's There

Little more than two years ago, in the early morning of May 1, 1999, five men left their camp high on the north face of Mt. Everest and began climbing. Like many others before and since, they sought eventually to scale the summit of the world's highest mountain. But on that day, and for days to come if necessary, they had a more immediate mission.

Months, indeed years, of planning had led up to that day. Any modern expedition up the world's great mountains dictates intricate preparation. Coordinating the efforts of climbers and support personnel, amassing and transporting large amounts of equipment and supplies, finding the money to pay for the whole endeavor — the challenge requires men and women possessed by a vision.

Those five men, and their teammates on the radios thousands of feet down the mountain, were on a very specific quest. They were detectives seeking to unravel one of the great mysteries of the twentieth century. They were searching for a human body, one of two that had disappeared on the mountain seventy-five years earlier.

As they reached the search area and spread out, one of them later recalled: "We found ourselves in a kind of collection zone for fallen climbers — Death is like a fog that looms in the air over the North Face of Everest; it hit me really hard. Seeing those first few bodies was eerie, grim, and humbling." Another climber noted: "Just seeing these twisted, broken bodies was a pretty stark reminder of our own mortality. I knew that in just a few days, we'd be up on that Northeast Ridge walking along the same route these climbers had fallen from."

But those bodies were clad in brightly colored GORE-TEX® parkas and plastic boots, equipment no one had dreamed of in the 1920s. In the continuing search, one climber moved lower down the thirty-degree slope, almost to the edge of the terrace from which the mountain dropped off for more than a mile to a glacier below. Zigzagging his way back up, he glimpsed, in his own words, "a patch of white that was whiter than the rock around it and whiter than the snow." Coming closer, he made out a different kind of body, one that had been there a very long time.

As his partners responded to his radio summons, one of them remembered: "There was absolutely no question in my mind that we were looking at a man who had been clinging to the mountain for seventy-five years. The clothing was blasted from most of his body, and his skin was bleached white. I felt like I was viewing a Greek or Roman marble statue." We weren't just looking at a body, we were looking at an era, one we'd only known through books. The natural-fiber clothes, the fur-lined leather helmet, the kind of rope that was around him were all so eloquent. As we stood there, this mute but strangely peaceful body was telling us answers to questions that everyone had wondered about for three-quarters of a century."

But what questions, and what answers? Lying facedown, virtually the entire head was buried in the mountainside, and parts of the body had been pecked away by birds. The expedition acting on a Chinese report from the 1970s had set out to find the junior partner on the 1924 British climbing team of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine. Initially the climbers believed they indeed had discovered Irvine, but the corpse did not match their expectations. As the climbers searched the remnants of the clothing, the truth finally hit them. One of them recalled: "I just sat down. My knees literally got weak. My jaw dropped. Next to me, Dave was saying, 'Oh, my God, it's George. Oh, my God.'"

Who was this man they called "George," a man who had died decades before any of them were born? Why did they hold him in such reverence and awe? Why had they risked their lives to find the body even of his junior partner?

On that June day in 1924, when George Mallory slid to a halt at 26,700 feet on the north face of Everest, his legend ignited even as he died. Earlier that day, Mallory and Irvine were last seen alive during a break in the clouds, moving along the ridge, apparently nearing the summit. Already, they had climbed higher than any humans before them; had they made it to the top? No one knew, and that very uncertainty haunted imaginations for years thereafter.

George was just short of 38 years old when he died, in his prime for a mountaineer. The son of an Anglican minister, he had made the roof of his father's village church his first climbing ground. He possessed a natural grace and strength for climbing, but most of all, a fierce determination to reach his goal. As he matured, he invented new routes up mountains and achieved a succession of "firsts" on peaks in Wales and the Alps. His imagination and daring won him widespread fame.

He studied at Cambridge, and then served as an artillery officer in the trenches of the First World War. A man of cultivated sensibility, he kept his favorite book on an ammunition box in his dugout at the front. It was a collection of four Shakespeare plays: "Romeo and Juliet," "King Lear," "Hamlet," and "Othello." From his hut, just as the 1916 Somme offensive was heating up, he wrote a birthday letter to his wife asking her to buy a copy of Shakespeare's sonnets for herself as his present to her. After the war when he returned to his climbing, in their tents perched on mountain shelves, George and his climbing partners read Shakespeare aloud.

Upon returning from battle, George tried to resume his career as a schoolteacher, and settle into a comfortable existence with his wife and three young children. But his heart was in climbing, and the British were preparing the greatest of mountaineering ventures — their assault on Everest. It was a grand adventure. No one knew much about the mountain, and for the climbers who would be the first, every step would be a discovery. Fortunately, George had an understanding and supportive wife.

The British expeditions of 1921 and 1922 made great progress in exploring the mountain and learning to adapt to altitude. No one, including George, however, could reach the summit. In early 1923, George sailed to the United States on a lecture tour, which produced only modest success. Mountaineering was still a young sport, and few Americans took interest in the attempt to scale the world's highest mountain. In New York, a newspaper reporter asked George why he was trying to climb Everest anyway. George retorted: "Because it's there."

Whatever he intended, George's words have resonated and echoed through mountaineering circles to this day. Men and women climb mountains simply because they are there. On another occasion, George added: "There is no scientific end to be served; simply the gratification of the impulse of achievement, the indomitable desire to see what lies beyond." George once wrote to his wife: "Mountain shapes are often fantastic seen through a mist, these were like the wildest creation of a dream. We were able to piece together the fragments, to interpret the dream." George was a dreamer; he was a discoverer; yes, he was a romantic.

For twenty-nine years after George died, no one was able to climb Everest, but since 1953 many climbers have been to the top. Just this spring, a thirty-three-year-old blind American made it on sheer willpower. Reaching the summit, his climbing partner called out, "Look around, dude. Just take a second and look around." I suspect the blind man saw and understood much more than many normal people with sight. The mountain sharpens the senses and intensifies the very fact of being alive.

Two years ago, the men who found George understood him. They were on Everest for the same reason he had been — just because it was there. After removing his artifacts including his goggles, his altimeter, notes and letters he was carrying, they scoured the mountainside at considerable personal risk, pulling rock from the frozen ground. They buried him there, protecting his body from the birds of Everest and the prying eyes of future climbers. They left George where they found him, facedown, clinging to the mountain.

One mystery remained unsolved. Had George Mallory and Sandy Irvine actually made it to the top? Even now, no one knows, but expert consensus is that they failed. The key evidence may still be on the mountain. If a future expedition finds Irvine's body and camera, George's and Sandy's film could reveal the truth, at last. But we already know what is most important: they succeeded magnificently in their quest.

* * * * *

Well, what does George Mallory have to do with your first day in college? Perhaps, his own words best provide the answer. In 1919, he wrote of Europe's Mont Blanc: "A great mountain is always greater than we know; it has mysteries, surprises, hidden purposes; it holds always something in store for us."

The best definition of education I know was given at this podium by our baccalaureate speaker in 1988. He defined education as "a movement into a larger world." Here at Carthage, there are innumerable mountains just waiting for you to discover them. They are greater than anyone knows; they harbor mysteries, surprises, hidden purposes; they always hold something more in store for you. They beckon you to move into a larger world.

The arts and sciences are as glorious as an ocean of snow-capped peaks. They are inexhaustible, all-encompassing. Just a small sliver of knowledge can fascinate you, even as mountains did George. It is not the particular field that matters. You may discover a passion for physics, literature, economics, biology, history, or a host of other subjects. What matters is that you are open to something, better yet to many things outside yourself. What matters is that you continue questing, that you continue moving into a larger world, at age eighty just as at eighteen. What matters is that you fall in love with learning.

Falling in love is something that happens to us, not something we can compel. The largest single academic major among you right now is called "Undecided." You have a great advantage in majoring in "Undecided" because you are utterly free to explore and to discover the rich array of treasures available to you. Eventually, something may leap out at you, and you may start to fall in love with something you want to know more and more about.

* * * * *

A young girl from Kansas, several years younger than George, was not at all impressed the first time she saw an airplane at a state fair. She remembered, "It was a thing of rusty wire and wood and looked not at all interesting." By the time she was twenty, a pilot in a stunt-flying exhibition decided to dive at her and her girlfriend standing in an open field. Fascinated with fear and fun, she stood her ground, not wanting to give him the pleasure of scampering away. Looking back in later years, she mused: "I did not understand it at the time, but I believe that little red airplane said something to me as it swished by." Then, at age 23, she pulled on a helmet and goggles, and boarded an open-cockpit biplane for that first ride that changed her life. "By the time I had got two or three hundred feet off the ground," she said, "I knew I had to fly."

In 1920, aviation was still in its infancy. It was just seventeen years after the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk. It was only two or three years since the dogfighters of the First World War had taken to the air with an average life expectancy of three weeks. Flying was something done by men, and only a few of them.

Amelia Earhart knew she had to fly. She had worked first as a military nurse during the war, then as a social worker who taught English to immigrant children. But her passion was flying, and by 1922 she briefly held the women's altitude record of 14,000 feet. In 1928, she accepted an invitation to join two male pilots and became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. Without experience in multi-engine or instrument flying, however, she was only a passenger. The promoters of the flight were undeterred; they called her the "commander," and made her an international celebrity.

Amelia exploited but never felt whole about that fame. She set about to make things right. In May 1932, on the fifth anniversary of Charles Lindbergh's first trans-Atlantic flight, she took off from Newfoundland with smelling salts to keep her awake and landed 13 hours 30 minutes later in Londonderry, Northern Ireland. She was the first woman and only the second human to fly solo across the north Atlantic.

Honors poured in. Reporting her feat, the French press ended with the question: "Can she bake a cake?" Amelia's response was all the more effective because of her grace and wit. She said: "So I accept these awards on behalf of the cake-bakers and all those other women who can do some things quite as important, if not more important, than flying, as well as in the name of women flying today."

Two years later, Amelia took on the challenge of flying from Hawaii to California after ten pilots had died in their attempts. Landing in Oakland, she was the first human to make that crossing. President Franklin Roosevelt sent a congratulatory note saying, "You have scored again...[and] shown even the 'doubting Thomases' that aviation is a science which cannot be limited to men only."

Finally, in 1937, came her grand venture. Amelia would fly around the world, on an equatorial route longer than anyone else had attempted. With her navigator, former Pan Am pilot Fred Noonan, she set out from Los Angeles to Miami, through the Caribbean, along the northeast coast of South America, across the Atlantic to Dakar, over the Sahara and the Red Sea to Karachi and Calcutta, then down through Rangoon, Bangkok, Singapore, and Darwin, Australia, finally reaching New Guinea just four weeks after departing Miami. Amelia and Fred had flown 22,000 miles; the remaining 7,000 would be across the open Pacific.

Re-outfitting their Lockheed Electra, they sent home their parachutes, which would be of little use over the ocean. On July 2, at 0000 GMT, they took off from Lae, New Guinea headed for Howland Island, subsequently described by the U.S. Navy as "a tiny piece of land a few miles long, 20 feet high, and 2,556 miles away." Amelia called in a positive sighting of the Nukumanu Islands 800 miles into the flight, and for six hours struggled to maintain radio transmissions with a coast guard cutter assigned to guide them into Howland. Then, contact was lost, and Amelia and Fred disappeared forever.

Amelia's death has been rated one of the ten most-reported news stories of the twentieth century. The American navy launched an exhaustive search without finding bodies or wreckage. She apparently vectored slightly off-course, ran out of fuel, and perished at sea. That explanation was too stark for some, however, and all kinds of popular stories and theories arose about her death or even her continued life. Like the 1999 Everest expedition that discovered George's body, divers have sought Amelia's plane decades after her death.

Why did she keep pushing herself? Why did she have to keep crossing oceans? Amelia still speaks through her own words. She wrote to her husband during one of her stops: "Please know I am quite aware of the hazards -- I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail their failure must be but a challenge to others." In another place, she observed: "decide whether or not the goal is worth the risks involved. If it is, stop worrying." Finally, Amelia noted: "Courage is the price life exacts for granting peace with yourself."

George Mallory discovered transcendent beauty in the mountains. Amelia Earhart wrote: "After midnight the moon set and I was alone with the stars. I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty...the reason flyers fly, whether they know it or not, is the esthetic appeal of flying."

* * * * *

Up the mountains, across the oceans, George and Amelia moved into larger worlds. They had trouble articulating why. George climbed the mountain because it was there. Amelia wanted to do it because she wanted to do it. In 1980, the man who made the greatest ascent of Everest, following George's route, climbing alone and without oxygen equipment, confronted the question of "why?" Reinhold Messner reflected: "There is no answer. I am the answer."

Yes. George and Amelia themselves were the answer. Everything they were was the answer. Each had a vision, and each displayed fierce determination in reaching for it. Their questing continued to the moment they died. Their example can inspire you and me to learn, to grow, to continue moving into larger worlds throughout our lives.

T. S. Eliot wrote:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Such is our ultimate discovery. We arrive back where we started, and we know ourselves for the first time.

You see, I have been talking not about George Mallory or Amelia Earhart. I have been talking about you, each of you.

Welcome to Carthage!

Acknowledgements:

The information and quotations about George Mallory come from:

Peter & Leni Gillman, The Wildest Dream: The Biography of George Mallory (Seattle: The Mountaineers Books, 2000).

Jochen Hemmleb, Larry A. Johnson, and Eric R. Somonson, as told to William E. Nothdurft, Ghosts of Everest: The Search for Mallory & Irvine (Seattle: The Mountaineers Books, 1999).

The information about Amelia Earhart comes from a variety of websites, including those of the Estate of Amelia Earhart and the Naval Historical Center.

The lines by T. S. Eliot come from "Little Gidding" in Four Quartets. Mr. Campbell expresses his appreciation to Professor Daniel Tobin for providing the reference.