The best and bravest

‘The candle is burning out and I must stop. Darling I wish you the best I can ­— that your anxiety will be at an end before you get this — with the best news, which will also be the quickest. It is 50-to-1 against us but we’ll have a whack yet and do ourselves proud. Great love to you. Ever your loving, George. ‘
Thus wrote the magnificent (and in many ways muddle-headed) mountaineer George Mallory on 27 May 1924. It was his last ever letter to his wife Ruth before he disappeared into the blizzard that swirled around the summit of Mt Everest, never to return. Did he reach the top? That is a question that cannot conclusively be answered and Wade Davis doesn’t try to. Instead, in his quite brilliant new book, he applies himself to the question of why. Why did Mallory want to climb the world’s highest mountain? Why did his desire grow into an obsession, which apparently persuaded him to push on, even as his chances of survival dwindled to zero?

Asked this question beforehand by an interviewer, he is said to have replied, ‘Because it’s there.’ Davis gives this vignette short shrift. Mallory probably didn’t say it, or if he did, he meant it not as a distillation of some pre-
Sartrean existential philosophy; more likely, he was bored by the conversation and needed a drink.

In any event, Davis has another explanation, to which he devotes the first 144 pages of his book. The British assaults on Everest in 1921, 1922 and 1924 (in all of which Mallory took part) cannot be understood, the author argues, except in the context of the first world war. Nor is it enough for him to state this, or briefly make his case.