Joanna Kavenna

K2’s fatal attraction

Mick Conefry describes the occultist Aleister Crowley as being among many sent mad by the treacherous mountain

issue 28 November 2015

  • The Ghosts of K2: The Epic Saga of the First Ascent

    Mick Conefrey

    Oneworld, pp. 336

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.

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