Into The Silence

The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest

If the quest for Mount Everest began as a grand imperial gesture, as
redemption for an empire of explorers that had lost the race to the
Poles, it ended as a mission of regeneration for a country and a people
bled white by war.

Of the twenty-six British climbers who, on
three expeditions (1921-24), walked 400 miles off the map to find and
assault the highest mountain on Earth, twenty had seen the worst of the
fighting. Six had been severely wounded, two others nearly killed by
disease at the Front, one hospitalized twice with shell shock. Three as
army surgeons dealt for the duration with the agonies of the dying. Two
lost brothers, killed in action. All had endured the slaughter, the
coughing of the guns, the bones and barbed wire, the white faces of the
dead.

In a monumental work of history and adventure, ten years in
the writing, Wade Davis asks not whether George Mallory was the first
to reach the summit of Everest, but rather why he kept on climbing on
that fateful day. His answer lies in a single phrase uttered by one of
the survivors as they retreated from the mountain: `The price of life is
death.` Mallory walked on because for him, as for all of his
generation, death was but `a frail barrier that men crossed, smiling and
gallant, every day`.

As climbers they accepted a degree of risk
unimaginable before the war. They were not cavalier, but death was no
stranger. They had seen so much that it had no hold on them. What
mattered was how one lived, the moments of being alive.

For all of them Everest had become an exalted radiance, a sentinel in the sky,
a symbol of hope in a world gone mad.