(CNN) â George Mallory is renowned for being one of the first British mountaineers to attempt to scale the dizzying heights of Mount Everest during the 1920s â until the mountain claimed his life.
Nearly a century later, newly digitized letters shed light on Malloryâs hopes and fears about ascending Everest, leading up to the last days before he disappeared while heading for its peak.
On 8 June 1924, Mallory and fellow climber Andrew Irvine departed from their expedition team in a push for the summit; they were never seen alive again.
Malloryâs words, however, are now available to read online in their entirety for the first time.
Magdalene College, Cambridge, where Mallory studied as an undergraduate from 1905 to 1908, recently digitized hundreds of pages of correspondence and other documents written and received by him.
Over the past 18 months, archivists scanned the documents in preparation for the centennial of Malloryâs disappearance.
The college will display a selection of Malloryâs letters and possessions in the exhibit âGeorge Mallory: Magdalene to the Mountain,â opening June 20.
The Everest letters outline Malloryâs meticulous preparations and equipment tests, and his optimism about their prospects.
But the letters also show the darker side of mountaineering: bad weather, health issues, setbacks, and doubts.
Days before his disappearance, Mallory wrote that the odds were â50 to 1 against usâ in the last letter to his wife Ruth dated 27 May 1924.
âThis has been a bad time altogether,â Mallory wrote. âI look back on tremendous efforts & exhaustion & dismal looking out of a tent door and onto a world of snow & vanishing hopes.â
He went on to describe a harrowing brush with death during a recent climb, when the ground beneath his feet collapsed, leaving him suspended âhalf-blind & breathless.â
His weight supported only by his ice axe wedged across a crevasse as he dangled over âa very unpleasant black hole.â
Other letters Mallory exchanged with Ruth were written at the time of their courtship, while he was serving in Britainâs artillery regiment during World War I.
Throughout his travels, correspondence from Ruth provided him with much-needed stability during the most challenging times, said project lead Katy Green, a college archivist at Magdalene College.
âShe was the ârockâ at home, he says himself in his letters,â Green said.
The archivist recounted one note in which Mallory told Ruth: âIâm so glad that you never wobble, because I would wobble without you.â
Yet while Mallory was clearly devoted to his wife, he nonetheless repeatedly returned to the Himalayas despite her mounting fears for his safety.
âThereâs something in him that drove him,â Green said. âIt might have been his wartime experience, or it might have just been the sort of person that he was.â
âDocuments of his characterâ
In total, the collection includes around 840 letters spanning from 1914 to 1924.
Ruth wrote about 440 of those to Mallory, offering an unprecedented and highly detailed view of daily life for women in the early 20th century, Green told CNN.
Together, the letters offer readers a rare glimpse of the man behind the legend, said Jochen Hemmleb, an author and alpinist who was part of the Everest expedition that found Malloryâs body in 1999.
âThey are really personal. They are documents of his character. They provide unique insights into his life, and especially into the 1924 expedition â his state of mind, his accurate planning, his ambitions,â said Hemmleb, who was not involved in the scanning project.
âItâs such a treasure that these are now digitized and available for everyone to read.â
Frozen in place
Three of the digitized letters â written to Mallory by his brother, his sister and a family friend â were recovered from Malloryâs body by the Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition, which ascended Everest seeking the remains of Mallory and Irvine.
On 1 May 1999, expedition member and mountaineer Conrad Anker found a frozen corpse at an altitude of around 26,700 feet (8,138 meters) and identified it as Malloryâs from a name tag that was sewn into his clothes.
Malloryâs body was interred where it lay at the familyâs request, said Anker, who was not involved in the letter digitizing project.
âHaving done body recoveries in other places, itâs very laborious, and itâs very dangerous at that altitude,â he told CNN.
âWe collected some of his personal effects that went back to the Royal Geographical Society,â including the three letters that were later scanned at Magdalene College.
Mount Everest, the highest peak in the Himalayan mountain range, is also the tallest mountain on Earth, rising 29,035 feet (8,850 meters) above sea level on the border between Nepal and Tibet â an autonomous region in China.
Its Tibetan name is Chomolungma, meaning âGoddess Mother of the World,â and its Nepali name is Sagarmatha, meaning âGoddess of the Sky.â
However, these names were unknown to 19th-century British surveyors who mapped the region.
In 1865, the Royal Geographical Society named the peak Mount Everest after British surveyor Sir George Everest, a former surveyor general of India.
Mallory participated in all three of Britainâs first forays onto Everestâs slopes: in 1921, 1922 and 1924.
When he vanished in 1924, he was less than two weeks shy of his 38th birthday.
Many have speculated about whether Mallory and Irvine managed to reach Everestâs summit.
The climbers were last seen in the early afternoon of June 8 by expedition member and geologist Noel Odell, who was following behind and glimpsed them from a distance.
Odell later found some of their equipment at a campsite, but there was no trace of Mallory and Irvine.
â(Mallory) risked a lot despite the fact that he had a family back home and three small children,â Hemmleb said.
âWe donât know whether it was really irresponsible to make that final attempt, because we donât really know what happened. It could be that in the end, he simply had bad luck.â
So close, yet so far
Decades after Malloryâs death, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and New Zealand mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary became the first to reach Everestâs peak, summiting on 29 May 1953.
In the years that followed, thousands attempted to climb Everest, with nearly 4,000 people reaching its summit.
More than 330 climbers have died trying since modern records were kept, according to the Himalayan Database, which compiles records of all expeditions in the Himalayas.
Some of those bodies remain on the mountain, frozen where they fell and visible to climbers who pass them by.
âIf youâre out in this environment, you make peace with your own mortality and the deaths of others,â Anker said.
âYouâre above 8,000 meters, and when there are weather changes or your own systems cease to function due to the lack of oxygen, it gets serious really quickly.â
When mountaineers are close to a mountainâs summit, they sometimes proceed even under dangerous conditions due to so-called summit fever, a compulsion to reach the peak even at the cost of their own safety.
Itâs unknown whether Mallory was in the grip of summit fever when he died, but he might have thought that his reputation depended on summiting.
âThat was going to be the defining moment in his life,â Anker said.
By comparison, Malloryâs team member Edward Norton had attempted to summit four days earlier but turned back at roughly the same altitude where Mallory and Irvine were seen for the last time.
âI had a conversation with one of Edward Nortonâs sons a couple of years ago,â Hemmleb said.
âWhen I asked him, do you think it was mere luck that your father survived and Mallory died?"
He said, âNo, I think there was one difference: My father, Edward Norton, didnât need the mountain.ââ
As a climber himself, Hemmleb took that message to heart.
âThat is something I personally learned from Mallory,â he said. âYou need to be very careful not to make yourself dependent on that summit success.â
A century has elapsed since Malloryâs death, but the digitizing of these letters assures that his story will keep being told, Hemmleb said.
âThis will continue beyond my own lifetime, Iâm certain of that,â he added. âIn a sense, itâs the expedition that never ends.â
George Herbert Leigh-Mallory (18 June 1886 â 8 or 9 June 1924) was an English mountaineer who participated in the first three British Mount Everest expeditions from the early to mid-1920s.
