Take one drug-addled occultist, one forlorn aristocrat, an assortment of urgent colonials and you have, no, not the western canon but the earliest expeditions to K2, the second-highest mountain in the world after Everest. First measured in 1856 by Lieutenant Thomas George Montgomerie, it stands at 28,251 feet, on the present-day border of Pakistan and China, amid the Karakoram range — hence its name, Karakoram 2, now abbreviated. K2 was first climbed in 1954 by the Italians Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli — a year after Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Everest. It remains an exceptionally dangerous mountain; during the late 1970s and 1980s, a generation of British climbers perished on K2, among them Alison Hargreaves, Alan Rouse, Julie Tullis and Nick Estcourt. The implacable slopes are now decked in the tattered remnants of former expeditions, and monuments to the dead.
Mick Conefrey has already published a lucid account of the ascent of Everest — Everest 1953.
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