When Britannia Ruled the Slopes

Wade Davis’s Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest is a departure for the explorer-writer. A Harvard-trained ethnobotanist, Davis began his career as a plant explorer before his investigations into folk preparations linked to the creation of zombies in Haiti resulted in his bestselling The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist’s Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis and Magic and a film spinoff. More recently, Davis has become internationally known as a passionate defender of tribal culture, exemplified by his Massey Lectures, published as The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World. None of this immediately impresses one as foundational work for a book like Into the Silence, which is not focused on the Sherpa or Hunza people, or Himalayan plants, but rather is a sweeping, meticulous and arresting account of the early British efforts to conquer Mount Everest. Wade Davis has done for Everest what Roland Huntford did for Antarctica: he has brought that world back to us, with all its lies and its truths.

Davis’s expertise ultimately proves of use. The first generation of Everest climbers had many attributes of a tribe. With few exceptions, they were the product of the spartan deprivations, ephebophilic gropings and brutal thrashings of Britain’s public schools. Next to Winchester, Charterhouse or Harrow, the Parson’s Nose on Clogwyn y Person in Wales or the Moine Ridge of Mont Blanc might have seemed like a veritable walk in the park to the boys. When the young men moved up to Oxbridge, the thrashings stopped, but the sexual activity blossomed into an atmosphere of full-blown homoeroticism, and occasionally practice, under the assiduous cultivation of their sexually tormented tutors. When Geoffrey Young, Britain’s greatest climber during the early 1900s, and an educator with a history of public school indiscretions, first laid eyes on George Mallory, he slavered over the young man’s beauty (his word) and took particular note of Mallory’s “oval violet eyes.” The fun all came to an abrupt end, however, with the outbreak of the First World War.

Britain did much of the legwork for its assault on Mount Everest through a series of largely clandestine surveys conducted during the 19th century, culminating in a major campaign in the early 20th century led by Sir Francis Younghusband, who commanded attacks on Tibetan soldiers at Guru, and elsewhere, en route to Lhasa. Younghusband’s was a needlessly bloody imperial adventure, but along the way he caught a glimpse of “the first streaks of dawn gilding the snowy summits of Mount Everest, poised high in heaven as the spotless pinnacle of the world.” Its vast scale thus established, and human obstacles duly subjugated, Younghusband became the natural choice to lead Britain’s Everest campaign through the good offices of the Royal Geographical Society’s Everest Committee. In his mind, its conquest became entwined with his destiny.

Mount Everest was a logical next step for Britain. Just as it had sought the Northwest Passage, the source of the Nile and the Poles, Britain was bent on claiming the prize of being first to put a man atop the world’s highest mountain. The plans were temporarily shelved during the bloody carnage of the First World War, when the ranks of qualified climbers (indeed much of a generation of young men) were greatly reduced. To the scarred survivors of the trenches, Everest offered “a sentinel in the sky, a place and destination of hope and redemption, a symbol of continuity in a world gone mad.” Qualification for the series of climbs depended on limbs, if not psyches, that were more or less intact. As George Mallory had a pair of both arms and legs, along with a great and proven gift as a climber, he became the natural vessel for the Empire’s hopes.

The climbs came in rapid succession. Mallory led the first reconnaissance mission in 1921, but was hampered by the summer monsoon. The 1922 climbs were astonishing successes. Mallory first climbed to 8,200 metres, fully 670 metres above the previous high point and just 610 metres below the summit. His record stood for less than a week, however. Two other members of the British team, George Finch and Geoffrey Bruce, assisted by oxygen, climbed to within just 518 metres of the summit. These were tremendous feats, but they had not produced the desired result. Although the monsoon was closing in on them, the decision was made to try again. Mallory later explained that they had risked another attempt, despite exhaustion and volatile weather, because retreat from a mountain “so nearly conquered” was too bitter a pill to swallow. In the subsequent climb seven porters were killed, but not a Briton lost, leaving the nation’s resolve intact.

These climbs were organized like military campaigns and involved large numbers of people, but ultimately it always seemed to come down to one man: Mallory. In 1924, they tried again, with Mallory claiming immodestly that he was “the strongest of the lot, the most likely to get to the top.” Whether he did summit Everest in June of that year, or not remains the subject of debate, although many suspect he failed. Earlier on the assault, Edward Norton and Howard Somervell managed to, without oxygen, reach a record height. Mallory had his work cut out for him. He died on Everest with a young, strong, but inexperienced climber named Sandy Irvine. His disappearance was hard to accept by his colleagues, but, adhering to the country’s fascination with romantic expiration, Somervell noted that “Everest is the finest cenotaph in the world.” Fitting words when applied to a member of a generation that had shed so much blood.

It would take almost 30 years before this cenotaph would finally be conquered by New Zealander Edmund Hillary—whose colonial background and chosen occupation as beekeeper provided a marked contrast from the preceding generation of Everest climbers. Hillary and his party also managed to subvert the aura of romantic tragedy surrounding the mountain. His party’s successful ascent occurred a mere 24 hours before the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the news of their success being delayed so as not to compete with the royal ceremony. “Well, George, we knocked the bastard off,” was the matter-of-fact way Hillary described his achievement to his climbing friend George Lowry as they descended from the summit.

Into the Silence is an epic endeavour, and Wade Davis is equal to it. A formidable researcher, the scholarship underpinning his substantial book is impressive, but Davis is equally a formidable writer, and Into the Silence stands out as an example of narrative non-fiction at its best. But there is something else. Davis is an explorer, and so he possesses the sensibility of an explorer, someone who has brushed up to death’s “frail barrier.” He understands what motivates men like Mallory in a way that few could.