The party’s talents were wildly uneven, with several over-the-hill, out-of-shape veterans in leadership positions. Entrusted with choosing a team, the Everest Committee—a national board of exploratory experts formed for the express purpose of claiming the “Third Pole” for the Empire—valued years of hill-walking and Himalayan rambling over technical mountaineering skills. From the start, Mallory was at serious odds with the team’s leader, Charles Howard-Bury, and its climbing leader, Harold Raeburn, both much older than he. Of the former, he wrote Ruth, “He is not a tolerant person. He is well-informed and opinionated and doesn’t at all like anyone else to know things he doesn’t know. For the sake of peace, I am being very careful not to broach certain subjects of conversation.” Of Rae-burn: “He is dreadfully dictatorial about matters of fact, and often wrong.” Before the party even got near Mount Everest, the well-liked but fifty-year-old Scottish doctor, A. M. Kellas, died of dysentery.
