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George Mallory bookended the 20th century history of Everest with his pioneering attempts in the 1920s to climb the mountain – and with the spectacular discovery, in 1999, of his body high up on the North Face, preserved by the ice for 75 years after he had failed to do so. His flip remark to a journalist that he was climbing Everest ‘because it was there’ became mountaineering’s most celebrated quote, while masking other less noble reasons.
Mick Conefrey has become one of our finest gazetteers of the Himalaya, with successive books on K2, Kangchenjunga and later exploits on Everest. Now he turns his attention to a great conundrum of mountaineering history. Did Mallory reach the summit before dying – along with the moral question it prompts: should he have even tried, with imperfect oxygen equipment, given that he was putting not only his own life at risk but that of his much younger companion, Sandy Irvine, only 22 and fresh out of Oxford?
Mallory belonged to an older generation (he was 37, and had served in the first world war) and was climbing with the recklessness of a man who knew this might be his last opportunity to have a go at the summit.
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