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

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.

and refused to submit to the cardinal rule of the Raj, which forbade any native from hitting a white man, whatever the circumstances of the affront.

“There is no doubt that we are a very cruel people,” Winston Churchill wrote home from the front. “Severity always,” went the British motto, “justice when possible.”

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

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

a feat of exploration that would win him the Patron’s Medal from the Royal Geographical Society.

In just the decade before Curzon became viceroy, the British acquired new territories equivalent to fifty times the size of Great Britain. The overseas empire, a quarter of the land surface of the world, six times the size of the Roman Empire at its height, was nearly a hundred times larger than the home islands.

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

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.