Cottie Sanders

There is a woman who is often forgotten when we speak about Everest. But then why should she be remembered....she has never even seen the mountain. She has nothing to do with it. She has never even wanted to go to the mountain.

Cottie Sanders had nothing to do with Mount Everest. She had everything to do with Mount Everest's most beloved son - George Leigh Mallory. Most of the people who knew George wondered why he never got married to Cottie. They had something going. Even after they got married individually to others, they still had something going. There were times when they were not in touch with each other for years, but they still had something going. They did not meet for 3 years at a stretch, but they had something going.....smile.

Mallory got married to Ruth in 1914. Cottie got married in 1916. No one knows why their marriage did not happen in the same year, on the same date, at the same time, and to each other. But what the world knows is that love abounded.

When Mallory died in 1924, Cottie wrote about him. She went with the sheaf of papers she had written and went to Ruth Mallory. She told him "I do not need to tell you that I have written about George and that I intend to publish this. But then, George would have wanted that you are told. In these bunch of papers rests many years of feelings, many years of grief and many years of smiles".

What she wrote never got published. It lies in the library of Royal Geographic Society, just the one copy which Cottie wrote - handwritten. It recounts many things about Mallory which the world would never have known otherwise. It tells of an old Doctor Benson who young Mallory had taken for a climb in Wales. On an impossible ridge, while Doctor Benson watched, Mallory stepped across not bothering whether he fell and died. Doctor Benson was amazed at how someone could care so little about a fall and death. And Doctor Benson said something after returning from the climb, way back in 1909. He said "this young man will not live for long". Cottie writes saying she vowed when she heard that, that she had very little time to love George but she would love him well.

Cottie was correct. From that time, she had just 15 years more to love Mallory.

Cottie writes about a climb Mallory went for in the Alps with his mentor Geoffrey Winthrop Young. On their way back from the summit, Mallory suddenly realised that he had left his pipe (tobacco pipe) by mistake near the summit where they had rested. He asked Young to wait while he went back for it. And he went back climbing an impossible layer of slabs, like tiles on a roof, horribly slippery and very very dangerous. When he returned Young admonished him and asked him why he didn't go back up the normal route. Mallory replied innocently "because this was the shortest route". That is labelled in history today as the "slab climb".

Those slabs still exist. No one has dared to climb up on them till date.

Cottie tells us about Mallory, when he was a young boy, was locked in his room along with her as a punishment by his mother for some mischief they had been upto. After an hour, noticing that there was not even a sound from the room, his mother opened the room. Cottie was alone in the room and the window was open. When his mother asked where Mallory was, a scared Cottie pointed out the window : Mallory had climbed to the roof from the window, climbed over to the sloping, tiled roof of an adjacent church, and was in the process of climbing the spire of the church. Cottie tells us about how shocked and scared his mother was, and she tells about how calm Mallory was.

Mallory was then 8 years old.

Cottie tells us that Mallory was determined to reach the summit of Mount Everest when he left in 1924. She says "George called me before he left. I could make out from the tone of his voice that this was his last journey to Mount Everest. And I secretly knew that I would never see George again if he did not make it to the summit. Or even if he did. And suddenly I knew that the "for long" that Doctor Benson had mentioned was probably coming to an end. And I found myself reflecting whether I had done a good job of loving this man in the last 34 years I had known him. I found myself pleading to Mount Everest to let George come back this time. But then I knew, things would happen exactly as Mount Everest and George collectively decide. I had no say in the matter".

And she did not have any say as she correctly realised. George Mallory had loved her. Yet, he was destined to die. His destiny was written a long time back, when he climbed his first tree, when he went back for his pipe and did the slab climb, when he was clinging to the spire of that church and listening to his mother screaming from the window, when he looked up at a peak for the first time.....

Somehow, just like Mount Everest would never have been complete with a George Mallory, George Mallory would never have been complete without a Cottie Sanders.

-- Sandeep Chopra, 2 August, 2003