The definitive story of the British adventurers who survived the trenches of World War I and went on to risk their lives climbing Mount Everest
On June 6, 1924, two men set out from a camp perched at 23,000 feet on an ice ledge just below the lip of Everest’s North Col. George Mallory, charismatic and daring, was Britain’s finest climber. Sandy Irvine was a twenty-two-year-old Oxford scholar with little previous mountaineering experience. Neither of them returned.
In Into the Silence, acclaimed historian and adventurer Wade Davis vividly re-creates the heroic efforts of Mallory and his fellow climbers, setting their amazing achievements in sweeping historical context: from Britain’s nineteenth-century imperial ambitions to the war that shaped a generation largely broken by the horrors of the trenches. For a country in mourning, the Everest expeditions emerged as a powerful symbol of national redemption and hope. Based on more than a decade of prodigious research, Davis’s rich narrative creates a timeless portrait of these remarkable men and their extraordinary times.
On June 6, 1924, two men set out from a camp perched at 23,000 feet on an ice ledge just below the lip of Everest’s North Col. George Mallory, charismatic and daring, was Britain’s finest climber. Sandy Irvine was a twenty-two-year-old Oxford scholar with little previous mountaineering experience. Neither of them returned.
In Into the Silence, acclaimed historian and adventurer Wade Davis vividly re-creates the heroic efforts of Mallory and his fellow climbers, setting their amazing achievements in sweeping historical context: from Britain’s nineteenth-century imperial ambitions to the war that shaped a generation largely broken by the horrors of the trenches. For a country in mourning, the Everest expeditions emerged as a powerful symbol of national redemption and hope. Based on more than a decade of prodigious research, Davis’s rich narrative creates a timeless portrait of these remarkable men and their extraordinary times.