Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest

Their capacity for endurance, their strength and ability to carry loads at altitude, their perseverance, loyalty, and discipline, together with a cultural disposition that led them to embrace with magnanimity and apparent calm all the vicissitudes of life, would make them the foundation upon which all of modern Himalayan climbing expeditions would

fomented intrigue in the palaces of Kathmandu.

A British attempt to replace the Dalai Lama with the Panchen Lama went nowhere.

At the same time, India was itself a British invention, an imagined place defined by the ever-changing and expanding boundaries of political and commercial interests, which, in turn, were woven into reality by the mathematicians and technicians of the Survey of India.

If necessary to establish a point of triangulation and properly position a theodolite, they razed entire villages, leveled sacred hills, and crushed into fragments the façades of ancient temples.

The Tibetans, he wrote, were a “stunted and dirty little people,” their religion nothing but a “disastrous parasitic disease,” while their government was a theocratic regime, oppressive, inefficient, bizarre, tyrannical, and corrupt.

Astonishingly, it was not until 1878 that the actual culprit was identified: a lack of oxygen due to reduced atmospheric pressure at altitude.

Mallory himself, a climber of stunning grace and power, had, on Everest, already come close to death on three occasions.

Victoria, empress of India, never visited the jewel of her realm—Curzon