Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest
Maps were the key to the very notion of India. They codified in two dimensions the geographic and cultural features of a subcontinent, even as they created the rationale for occupation.
Wade Davis • Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest
Military pacification of the frontier opened the way for the climbers, and the mountaineers, in turn, elevated their soldier escorts into the rarefied world of the climber.
Wade Davis • Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest
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.
Wade Davis • Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest
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Mercantile zeal, severe military reprisals, and the subversion of local elites all played a role in the maintenance of the Raj.
Wade Davis • Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest
Between 1750 and 1900, only three Westerners had reached the Tibetan capital of Lhasa.
Wade Davis • Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest
Like the entire British adventure in India, Curzon was at once pompous and vain, earnest, ruthlessly enterprising, and rigidly devoted to a mission of moral superiority.
Wade Davis • Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest
fomented intrigue in the palaces of Kathmandu.
Wade Davis • Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest
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.