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

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

“In shape it resembles a cathedral, the roof of which, rising to a ridge in the centre, is otherwise regular in outline and covered in eternal snow … No wonder that this spot is believed to be the home of all the gods, that of the waters of its lake they drink, and that in its unexplored caverns they dwell.”

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

Thus it was not by chance that the greatest scientific undertaking of the nineteenth century was the literal measurement of India, or that through this endeavor would be discovered the highest mountain in the world.

Mercantile zeal, severe military reprisals, and the subversion of local elites all played a role in the maintenance of the Raj.

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.

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.

Between 1750 and 1900, only three Westerners had reached the Tibetan capital of Lhasa.

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