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Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest Kindle Edition
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, thirty-seven, was Britain’s finest climber. Sandy Irvine was a twenty-two-year-old Oxford scholar with little previous mountaineering experience. Neither of them returned.
Drawing on more than a decade of prodigious research, bestselling author and explorer Wade Davis vividly re-creates the heroic efforts of Mallory and his fellow climbers, setting their significant achievements in sweeping historical context: from Britain’s nineteen-century imperial ambitions to the war that shaped Mallory’s generation. Theirs was a country broken, and the Everest expeditions emerged as a powerful symbol of national redemption and hope. In Davis’s rich exploration, he creates a timeless portrait of these remarkable men and their extraordinary times.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateOctober 18, 2011
- File size11908 KB
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Review
Praise for Into the Silence:
"A kaleidoscopic account. . . . Ambitious. . . . Entertaining. . . . Extraordinary."
—The Wall Street Journal
"Brilliantly engrossing. . . . An instant classic of mountaineering literature."
—The Guardian (London)
"Magnificent. . . . Davis tells the full story behind this almost mythic story, imbuing it with historic scope and epic sweep."
—Los Angeles Times
"A masterpiece standing atop its own world, along with the classic Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer."
—Salt Lake City Tribune
"Into the Silence is quite unlike any other mountaineering book. It not only spins a gripping Boy’s Own yarn about the early British expeditions to Everest, but investigates how the carnage of the trenches bled into a desire for redemption at the top of the world. . . . At its heart, Into the Silence is an elegy for a lost generation . . . a magnificent, audacious venture."
—The Sunday Times (London)
"Magnificent. . . . Impressive. . . . A vivid account."
—The Observer (London)
"Utterly compelling. . . . Not only a thorough examination of Mallory’s determined advances on Everest, but also insight into the psyche of post-war England. . . . A mesmerizing story of the human spirit."
—Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
"Powerful and profound, a moving, epic masterpiece of literature, history and hope."
—The Times (London)
"A brilliant book. I can’t praise it enough."
—Christopher Hitchens
"Davis has produced a magnificent, rigorously researched account of the expeditions that set out to regain glory for an empire in decline but, instead, created some of the most enduring legends of the 20th century."
—Financial Times
"A magnificent work of scholarship . . . and narrative drive. . . . [Davis] has written far and away the best account of this seminal chapter in the epic history of mountaineering."
—The National
"Davis is a fine storyteller. . . . A deep current of sympathy runs through the book. . . . One comes away with a feeling almost of tenderness for these men, of admiration for their stoicism in the face of extreme suffering, and their willingness to risk everything for a transcendent ideal. . . . The quest, finally, is not for the summit of Everest, or even for the story of how it eluded these men, but rather for a complex and compassionate understanding of the world in which they lived and died."
—The Boston Globe
"A gripper of a read . . . Silence revives the cliff’s-edge drama of those Jazz age climbs and drives home the tragedy of Mallory’s death."
—Outside
"An exceptional book on an extraordinary generation. . . . Monumental in its scope and conception it nevertheless remains hypnotically fascinating throughout. A wonderful story tinged with sadness."
—Joe Simpson, author of Touching the Void
"Brilliant. . . . The product of a decade’s research, Into the Silence has two supreme strengths, the first of which is the emotional, spiritual and historical context it provides against which to understand the central events. The other is the author’s effortless knack for sketching character."
—The Spectator
"Magnificent. . . . Fascinating. . . . To keep this mass of material from bulging out of the narrative is an impressive feat of literary organization and management."
—Geoff Dyer, The Guardian (London)
"Combining the pace of a thriller with a degree of detail as nuanced as any academic study, this is an atmospheric and exhilarating book."
—Time Out (London)
"Profoundly ambitious. . . . Impressive. . . . Monumental. . . . This is perhaps the first book . . . to survey the matter not as a record of high adventure, exploration, mountaineering technique or political history, but as zeitgeist."
—Jan Morris, The Telegraph (London)
"As breathtaking and astounding as any previous climbing literature."
—Publishers Weekly
"[Into the Silence] stands as a near masterpiece."
—The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
"Mesmerizing. . . . An epic worthy of its epic."
—Caroline Alexander, author of The Endurance
"Richly detailed, and often riveting, with vivid portraits of all the players, [Davis’s] book juxtaposes human ambition, courage and adaptive capability with the relentless realities of terrain and weather. It will stand as the definitive treatment of this subject."
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"A breathtaking triumph. An astonishing piece of research, it is also intensely moving."
—William Shawcross, author of The Queen Mother
"Davis’s lucid and sometimes haunting prose, his masterly handling of a great volume of material, his vivid portraits of the astonishing cast of characters, and of places as diverse as Newfoundland, the trenches of northern France, and the Tibetan plateau, all contribute to this achievement. . . . A world apart from the gimmicks and media stunts that have surrounded the cult of Mallory and Irvine, Davis’s book stands as a fitting memorial to a story that is at once poignant and stirring."
—The Times Literary Supplement (London)
"Highly absorbing. . . . A heroic attempt to capture the scale of the undertaking to conquer the highest mountain on earth."
—The Newark Star-Ledger
"In recreating their astonishing adventure, Wade Davis has given us an elegant meditation on the courage to carry on."
—George F. Will
About the Author
Wade Davis is the bestselling author of fifteen books, including Into the Silence, The Serpent and the Rainbow, and One River, and is an award-winning anthropologist, ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker. He currently holds the post of National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence and has been named by the National Geographic Society as one of the Explorers for the Millennium. His work has taken him to East Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, and all over the world, but he spends most of his time between Washington, D.C., and northern British Columbia.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
On the morning of June 6, 1924, at a camp perched at 23,000 feet on an ice ledge high above the East Rongbuk Glacier and just below the lip of Everest’s North Col, expedition leader Lieutenant Colonel Edward Norton said farewell to two men about to make a final desperate attempt for the summit. At thirty-seven, George Leigh Mallory was Britain’s most illustrious climber. Sandy Irvine was a young scholar of twenty- two from Oxford with little previous mountaineering experience. Time was of the essence. Though the day was clear, in the southern skies great rolling banks of clouds revealed that the monsoon had reached Bengal and would soon sweep over the Himalaya and, as one of the climbers put it, “obliterate everything.” Mallory remained characteristically optimistic. In a letter home, he wrote, “We are going to sail to the top this time and God with us, or stamp to the top with the wind in our teeth.”
Norton was less sanguine. “There is no doubt,” he confi ded to John Noel, a veteran Himalayan explorer and the expedition’s photographer, “Mallory knows he is leading a forlorn hope.” Perhaps the memory of previous losses weighed on Norton’s mind: seven Sherpas left dead on the mountain in 1922, two more this season, the Scottish physician Alexander Kellas buried at Kampa Dzong during the approach march and reconnaissance of 1921. Not to mention the near misses. Mallory himself, a climber of stunning grace and power, had, on Everest, already come close to death on three occasions.
Norton knew the cruel face of the mountain. From the North Col, the route to the summit follows the North Ridge, which rises dramatically in several thousand feet to fuse with the Northeast Ridge, which, in turn, leads to the peak. Just the day before, he and Howard Somervell had set out from an advanced camp on the North Ridge at 26,800 feet. Staying away from the bitter winds that sweep the Northeast Ridge, they had made an ascending traverse to reach the great couloir that clefts the North Face and falls away from the base of the summit pyramid to the Rongbuk Glacier, ten thousand feet below. Somervell gave out at 28,000 feet. Norton pushed on, shaking with cold, shivering so drastically he thought he had succumbed to malaria. Earlier that morning, climbing on black rock, he had foolishly removed his goggles. By the time he reached the couloir, he was seeing double, and it was all he could do to remain standing. Forced to turn back at 28,126 feet, less than 900 feet below the summit, he was saved by Somervell, who led him across the ice-covered slabs. On the retreat to the North Col, Somervell himself suddenly collapsed, unable to breathe. He pounded his own chest, dislodged the obstruction, and coughed up the entire lining of his throat.
By morning Norton had lost his sight, temporarily blinded by the sunlight. In excruciating pain, he contemplated Mallory’s plan of attack. Instead of traversing the face to the couloir, Mallory and Irvine would make for the Northeast Ridge, where only two obstacles barred the way to the summit pyramid: a distinctive tower of black rock dubbed the First Step, and, farther along, the Second Step, a 100- foot bluff that would have to be scaled. Though concerned about Irvine’s lack of experience, Norton had done nothing to alter the composition of the team. Mallory was a man possessed. A veteran of all three British expeditions, he knew Everest better than anyone alive.
Two days later, on the morning of June 8, Mallory and Irvine set out from their high camp for the summit. The bright light of dawn gave way to soft shadows as luminous banks of clouds passed over the mountain. Noel Odell, a brilliant climber in support, last saw them alive at 12:50 p.m., faintly from a rocky crag: two small objects moving up the ridge. As the mist rolled in, enveloping their memory in myth, he was the only witness. Mallory and Irvine would not be seen or heard from again. Their disappearance would haunt a nation and give rise to the greatest mystery in the history of mountaineering.
Never did Odell doubt that they reached the summit before meeting their end. Nor did he question the sublime purpose that had led them all to cross hundreds of miles on foot, from India and across Tibet, just to reach the base of the mountain. Odell wrote of his two lost friends: “My final glimpse of one, whose personality was of that charming character that endeared him to all and whose natural gifts seemed to indicate such possibilities of both mind and body, was that he was ‘going strong,’ sharing with that other fi ne character who accompanied him such a vision of sublimity that it has been the lot of few mortals to behold; few while beholding have become merged into such a scene of transcendence.”
CHAPTER 1
Great Gable
On the very day that George Mallory and Sandy Irvine disappeared on Everest, another party of British climbers slowly made their way to the summit of a quite different mountain and in very different circumstances. At 2,949 feet, Great Gable was not a serious or diffi cult climb, but it was said to be “the most completely beautiful of English mountains.” It anchored the fells of Cumbria, and from its summit could be seen a dozen or more of the rounded hills and rocky crags of the Lake District, where so many En glish climbers had first discovered the freedom of open space and the feel of wind and rain and sleet on cold hands jammed into cracks of granite and slate.
There were some eighty men and women in this solemn party, most of them members of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club, a loose association founded in 1906 and dedicated exclusively to the celebration of the English hills. Among them was the club secretary, Leslie Somervell, whose brother Howard was then with the Everest expedition, and Arthur Wakefield, club president since 1923. Wakefield had served as medical offi cer on the 1922 Everest expedition and had been the first to rush to the relief of the climbers swept away by the avalanche on the North Col that buried alive seven Sherpa porters. Death was something he knew well.
The most prominent fi gure on Great Gable this day was Geoffrey Winthrop Young, who brought up the rear, supported by his wife,
Len, as he struggled over boulders and wet stones in rain so fi erce it swept the cape from his back. Considered by many to be the greatest English mountaineer of his era, Young was the mentor of Mallory, and had been responsible for both Mallory and Wakefi eld securing invitations to join the Everest expeditions. This was his fi rst climb since losing his left leg to an Austrian shell on the night of August 31, 1917, at Monte San Gabriele while serving on the Isonzo Front, in Italy. In time he would summit the Matterhorn with a prosthetic limb of his own design, but for the moment it was all he could do to keep his balance and move steadily up the slope toward the others. A gifted Georgian poet and a fi ne orator, he was here at Wakefield’s invitation to help dedicate a bronze plaque inscribed with the names of those members of the FRCC who had been lost in the war, and to consecrate in their memory a tract of some three thousand acres purchased by the survivors and gifted by them to the nation as a living memorial. The actual deeds to the land had been presented by Wakefi eld to a representative of the National Trust several months before, on October 13, 1923, at the annual FRCC dinner at the Sun Hotel in the nearby village of Coniston.
“These title deeds,” he had told his audience that night, “represent the lives of those of our members who died for their country, men with whom in many cases we have walked over these fells, and whose friendship we treasured. The cost is great indeed. Sir, we hand these deeds over to you in the hope and belief that future generations will be inspired with the same sense of self-sacrifice and devotion to great ends, even at the cost of self- obliteration, that were shown by those who died and whose monument this is.” The names of the dead were then read, as those present stood in silence.
Now many of the same company of men and women gathered around a boulder at the summit of Great Gable. Covering the memorial plaque was a rain-soaked Union Jack, the very flag that had flown at Jutland from the bridge of the battleship Barham of the 5th Battle Squadron of the Royal Navy. Before drawing back the flag to reveal the bronze, Arthur Wakefield stepped forward and began to speak of the land, the breath of the moors, the spirit of freedom that had impelled them all to march to war. It was an inspiring address, wrote a reporter for the Manchester Guardian who was present, one that brought all thoughts back to those years of strain and trial and sacrifice.
Wakefield’s rhetoric was moving, heartfelt, and sincere, but his appearance shocked Young, who had not seen him since before the war. Both were scions of the British elite. Born six months apart in 1876, they’d gone to college together, attending Trinity at a time when no fewer than 195 members of Parliament, fully a third of the House, were Cambridge men, and of these 68 were from Trinity. Young remembered Wakefield as a short, broad-shouldered, curly-haired, good-looking northern lad with an attractive smile, well liked by all. But it was Wakefield’s prodigious strength that had led Young to recommend him to Captain Percy Farrar of the Alpine Club and the Mount Everest Committee as a candidate for the Everest expeditions. Wakefield, known to his friends as Waker, was a man who liked to walk. In 1905 he had set a record in the Lake District, traversing Scafell Pike, Helvellyn, Skiddaw, Green Gable, Kirk Fell, Steeple, Red Pike, and a score of other summits, covering some fifty-nine miles with a total vertical ascent and descent of some 23,500 feet in twenty-two hours, seven minutes. He had climbed in Switzerland in 1893, and in the spring of 1894 had encountered for the fi rst time the rock of the Lake District, the Central Gully of Great End. Powerful, cautious, methodical, he never fell.
But this was not the man who appeared at Young’s side ready to pull back the flag to reveal the names of the dead. What stepped forward was a shadow of the man he had once known, with eyes that appeared to be focused into some distant past, as if on a memory that could not be embraced, a thought impossible to distill. Then, unexpectedly, the weather cleared; as Young recalled, “The sun broke through the clouds as he made his address under the highest rocks, and in the rather silvery gleam, with its faint halo of mist, I saw him for a few moments again as he had been in his very vital and sunnily serene youth.” Other witnesses remember Wakefield hesitating and then slowly beginning to sob as the fl ag drew back to reveal the names of those who had perished: caught on the barbed wire, drowned in mud, choked by the oily slime of gas, reduced to a spray of red mist, quartered limbs hanging from shattered branches of burnt trees, bodies swollen and blackened with flies, skulls gnawed by rats, corpses stuck in the sides of trenches that aged with each day into the colors of the dead. It was, according to Wakefield’s son, the last time his father ever displayed human emotion. He would go to his end never speaking of the war, consumed only by abiding hatred of all things German.
A Mr. Herbert Cain began slowly to read the names of the deceased: S. Bainbridge, J. E. Benn, H. S. P. Blair, A. J. Clay, J. N. Fletcher . . . There were twenty in all, from a club with a membership of 450, men and women, young and very old. Such rosters had become all too familiar. Young had dedicated his recent book, On Mountain Craft, published in 1920, to fi fty friends who had died—some on mountains, but most in the trenches. In another of his books, The Mountains of Snowdonia, he recalled innocent times before the war when climbing had the freshness of the dawn and some of the best minds and certainly the fi nest climbers of a generation— George Mallory, Siegfried Herford, John Maynard and Geoffrey Keynes, Cottie Sanders, Duncan Grant, Robert Graves, George Trevelyan, and many others—came together in Wales at the top of Llanberis Pass, at a place called Pen y Pass. By day they would climb and by night they would sing, recite poetry, debate, and argue. In ways impossibly innocent to the contemporary eye, they explored dreams of purity and purpose in a new century where all that mattered was authenticity and beauty, loyalty and friendship. Young was the inspiration for these gatherings, the maître d’ and impresario, and from the fi rst in 1903 he recorded each event in a photographic album, which he called the Pen y Pass diary. Of the honed and beautiful faces, the innocent glances—no fewer than twenty- three of the men would be killed in the war, another eleven so severely wounded that to climb again they would have to overcome immense physical impediments, just as Young himself had done.
But of the names read with such intense emotion from this memorial bronze on this cold and windswept day, there were two that especially haunted Young. One was that of Hilton Laurence Slingsby, the brother of his wife, Len, who stood stiffl y by his side. Geoffrey was twenty years older than she, and as he looked over the rocks and into the mist, he could see the face of Hilton as a young boy of nine when he had first led the lad up this very mountain. He recalled the day—August 20, 1917—when a letter had reached him in Italy with word that Hilton, after three years at the front, and having already survived a grievous wound, had been “killed in action,” a term, of course, that could mean anything.
The second name was that of Siegfried Herford, killed at Ypres in 1915. A friend of Mallory’s and arguably the fi nest rock climber of his generation, he was, as Young recalled, “a poet at heart,” a youth who came and went with the “spontaneity of the wind, so near to the light and wonder of the hills in spirit that his feats upon the cliffs only seemed natural.” As much as anyone who came to Pen y Pass, Herford had inspired Young to dream. “With our coming together,” he would write, “in that high air all cares seemed to drop from us, like clouds sinking below on that two way view down the pass.”
The litany of the dead had done much to quell such sentiments. In August 1917, when it seemed to everyone that the war might go on forever, Young recorded in his diary a list of good friends who had died, no fewer than twenty-five, and this left room for those he termed acquaintances; of these there were another twenty- five. Writing from Ypres in 1915, he’d spoken of the dead in more intimate phrases, as noted in his book The Grace of Forgetting.
In the new army around us I knew that there were many younger friends, those who would have become the leaders in mountaineering and in our country. I saw in passing Twiggy Anderson, the perfect hurdler and lively scholar, again an Eton pupil; Terrence Hickman of Kings, good friend of so many mountaineers; and J. Raphael the football player, whom I took to Wales to climb, and who ran hard up the steep slopes of all his mountains, springing on his toes, and explaining to me that that really was the correct way to climb.
They were killed very near to us, and the news came slowly and fatally. The toll of tragic loss, and not only among climbing friends, kept mounting. Dearest of all, Wilbert Spencer at La Bassée, Kenneth Powell the classic athlete, Nigel Madan a close friend, Werner of Kings, cousins John and Horas Kennedy. On other fronts, C. K. Carfrae, Guy Butlin, the brothers Rupert and Basil Brooke, Julian and Billy Grenfell . . . Gilbert Hosegood, very fair and tall, came to me in excitement because he had met his brother by chance as he marched with his company through Ypres; and he walked beside him in talk all down the Menin road. Not long after, I drove him south down the front to visit his brother’s grave, a lovely spot, and Guy du Maurier, his brother’s colonel, was more than kind to us. We were hardly returned to Ypres when news of du Maurier’s death also reached us. Hosegood joined up soon after, to take his brother’s place he said; he too fell.
Young had been at Zermatt climbing with Herford during the soft summer of 1914, when all of Europe glowed with weather so beautiful and fine that it would be remembered for a generation, invoked by all those who sought to recall a time before the world became a place of mud and sky, with only the zenith sun to remind the living that they had not already been buried and left for dead. Stunned by a mix of emotions—horror, incredulity, morbid anticipation, fear, and confusion—Young returned to London to find “the writing of madmen already on the wall.” He recalled, “I attended the peace meeting in Trafalgar Square, the last protest of those who had grown up in the age of civilized peace: and then the dogs of war were off in full cry.” Forty years later, near the end of his days, he would write, “After the hardening effects of two wars it is diffi cult to recall the devastating collapse of the structure of life, and all its standards, which the recrudescence of barbarous warfare denoted for our generation.”
He had been born to a privileged life, the second son of Sir George Young of Formosa Place, a stately eighteenth- century house of gardens and roses perched on the banks of the river Thames. His mother was Irish, a splendid storyteller and a great hostess, and their home regularly welcomed such luminaries as Robert Baden- Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts and the hero of Mafi keng; the poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson; and Roger Casement, the Irish nationalist and enigmatic champion of human rights who would be knighted in 1911 for exposing the atrocities in the Belgian Congo, only to be hanged for treason in 1916. Of his three siblings, he was closest to his younger brother, Hilton, who would lose an arm in the war. His childhood was one of action and fantasy, endless days outside in all weather and all seasons, among the bitter cherries and silver beeches, the weeping willows and ancient yews of a country setting that inspired within him a love of color and nature, rivers and the wind, mountains and rain. He never practiced religion in an orthodox sense, but all of his life was infused with a celebratory quest for the wonder of beauty and friendship, the sheer vitality of being human and alive.
At Marlborough, a school that would send 733 boys to die in the trenches, he was known for his good looks, his poetry, and his remarkable athletic abilities. At Cambridge he became a climber, of both mountains and the Gothic rooftops of the university colleges. His impish side penned anonymously The Roof Climber’s Guide to Trinity, thus beginning a long tradition of illicit midnight scrambles over slate and lead and gargoyles. Following graduation in 1898, he went abroad, living for three years in France and Germany and becoming fl uent in both languages. His true affection was for Germany; he translated the ballads of Schiller and the devotional poems of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In 1902, he returned to En gland to take a teaching position at Eton; there he met the young John Maynard Keynes, who would later join him on climbing trips to the Alps.
Young first encountered George Mallory in 1909, at a Cambridge dinner. At Easter he invited Mallory to Pen y Pass, and the following summer the two went off, at Young’s expense, to the Alps, where they were joined by Donald Robertson, a close friend and peer of Hilton Young’s. They climbed a number of peaks, none more dramatic than the southeast ridge of the Nesthorn, where Mallory nearly died. He was leading at the time, inching his way across fluted ice, seeking a route around the third of the four great towers that blocked the way up the ridge. Young would later recall his sudden astonishment: “I saw the boots flash from the wall without even a scrape; and, equally soundlessly, a grey streak flickered downward, and past me, and out of sight. So much did the wall, to which he had clung so long, overhang that from the instant he lost hold he touched nothing until the rope stopped him in mid-air over the glacier. I had had time to think, as I flung my body forward on to the belayed rope, grinding it and my hands against the slab, that no rope could stand such a jerk; and even to think out what our next action must be—so instantaneous is thought.” Miraculously, the rope held and Mallory was uninjured.
In another book, On High Hills, Young would remember and praise his companions on that dramatic climb: “To both of them life was a treasure of value; but it was also a talent to be reinvested for the profit of others. Neither hesitated to risk the loss of his share in it, if by doing so he could help to keep the great spirit of human adventure alive in the world.” Robertson would die a year later, on a rock face in Wales. A chapel would be built in his memory, and a monument erected within sight of the cliffs where he fell, and a trust established to bring En glish youths to the hills. Such were the sensibilities in the years immediately before the war, a time when powerful and virile men could speak of love and beauty without shame, and sunsets and sunrises had yet to become, as the painter Paul Nash would write, “mockeries to man,” blasphemous moments, preludes to death.
Product details
- ASIN : B004KPM1HG
- Publisher : Vintage (October 18, 2011)
- Publication date : October 18, 2011
- Language : English
- File size : 11908 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 690 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #326,932 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
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About the authors
Wade Davis (born December 14, 1953) CM is a Canadian anthropologist, ethnobotanist, author, and photographer whose work has focused on worldwide indigenous cultures, especially in North and South America and particularly involving the traditional uses and beliefs associated with psychoactive plants. Davis came to prominence with his 1985 best-selling book The Serpent and the Rainbow about the zombies of Haiti. Davis is Professor of Anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia.
Davis has published popular articles in Outside, National Geographic, Fortune, and Condé Nast Traveler.
Davis is an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. Named by the NGS as one of the Explorers for the Millennium, he has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.” In recent years his work has taken him to East Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, Polynesia, Tibet, Mali, Benin, Togo, New Guinea, Australia, Colombia, Vanuatu, Mongolia, and the high Arctic of Nunuvut and Greenland.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by [Cpt. Muji] (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons.
Wade Davis is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker whose work has taken him from the Amazon to Tibet, Africa to Australia, Polynesia to the Arctic. Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society from 2000 to 2013, he is currently Professor of Anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. Author of 22 books, including One River, The Wayfinders and Into the Silence, winner of the 2012 Samuel Johnson prize, the top nonfiction prize in the English language, he holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. His many film credits include Light at the Edge of the World, an eight-hour documentary series written and produced for the NGS. Davis, one of 20 Honorary Members of the Explorers Club, is the recipient of 12 honorary degrees, as well as the 2009 Gold Medal from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, the 2011 Explorers Medal, the 2012 David Fairchild Medal for botanical exploration, the 2015 Centennial Medal of Harvard University, the 2017 Roy Chapman Andrews Society’s Distinguished Explorer Award, the 2017 Sir Christopher Ondaatje Medal for Exploration, and the 2018 Mungo Park Medal from the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. In 2016, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada. In 2018 he became an Honorary Citizen of Colombia.
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Reflecting on these men, I knew WW I was indeed ghastly, but it was also the forge of heroes---especially in the form these uncommon men. Both my uncle and my father served in WW I, the uncle actually a volunteer in 1915, years before his country entered the war. For that reason I knew of the squalor, despair and unavoidable fates of those entrenched. These men Davis defines for us were indeed Homeric demi-gods. It seems each of them was an accomplished scholar, indefatigable mountaineer, and a poet, musician, doctor, warrior, writer, or artist to boot. Despite the quirks and passions they displayed, each was a model of achievement, certitude and colossal gifts. My aforementioned uncle had been born in 1895 and my own father in 1899---and they were, if not mountaineers, at least exceedingly accomplished and admirable men.
I deemed Davis' book a "semester course" because even its annotated bibliography is a book in itself. The amount of his research is simply Everestan, truly stupifying . I recommend it to all who want a grounding and a base-camp for further reading on the "Third Pole" as it is sometimes called.
The only portion which stuck in my craw was Davis' seemingly gratuitous trashing of Americans in the party which actually discovered Mallory's body. On page 569, he accurately (and to him at least) fairly demeans the Americans by referring to their "singularly inarticulate" musings, which included the words "awesome", "totally cool" and "bummer". Davis is indeed being accurate by citing these lamentable linguistic lapses. The latter are a sure earmark of the failure of American education to elucidate and inspire, but it just felt a little gratuitous. My solution would be for Wade Davis, on one of his trips to Europe, to spend an hour or so in the American graveyard at Coleville-sur-Mer. Therein lie thousands of Americans who, like Mallory and Irvine, will remain "forever young" as they say, by dint of sacrificing themselves in the major wars of the previous century. We Americans may be lurching toward Jerry Springer Nation status, but some of us know, some of us read, and some of us reach for the heights, if only by reading superb books such as this. Highly, highly recommended!
For some the detailed descriptions of the horrific battles of the war will be a bit much. Davis clearly feels that the waste of that war drove these climbers and includes graphic descriptions to help the reader understand that horror. If you want a book about the glory of battle, this is not for you.
The details of the expeditions are voluminous and at times perhaps more detailed than interesting. The level of scholarship here is amazing, but there are times you just want to get to the climbing. That said, the climbing is fascinating and the author's conclusions about the psyches of the climbers seem well supported. The impending sense of doom as men throw themselves into the death zone with what we would see as primitive equipment is palpable and while we know historically that the efforts will fail, at the end there is still a feeling of amazement at what was accomplished and horror at the cost. This book is not perfect but it is interesting and involving and a detailed description of a world that no longer exists.
Top reviews from other countries
The subject is compelling - the quest of George Mallory and other climbers of the 1920s to reach the summit of Mount Everest. But the way the author approaches the subject is even more compelling. He engages the reader; he introduces characters and has them move through scenes; he makes what seem to be tangents, revealing the context of people's lives, their prior experiences. These tangents then prove to be fundamental to the story. He takes the time - he allows himself to take the time - to present each character with cultural context.
The writing is beautiful. The human voices everywhere in the book, coming first of all out of his own grandfather's experience in the First World War, are stirring.
Davis shows that several British, Irish and Canadian men, badly scarred by the horrors of the First World War, sought in the after-war years to develop a secular ritual of climbing to the frozen summit of the world, in the Himalayas - a land of perpetual snows and glaciers and natural wonders where human destructiveness and folly had yet to make a mark. As if these men were turning the clock back on their own lives, recovering their own lost innocence.
Wade Davis shows, in counterpoint, how the Buddhists of Tibet followed spiritual rituals, in an altogether different dimension, where every feature of the landscape was rich with other meanings.
Actually, the climbers were visitors in the Himalayas, pursuing an ideal, putting themselves and the Tibetans and Nepalese who accompanied them at considerable risk. I have read several other books on Mallory recently, and found they stick to hero-worship with reservations, but offer little insight. Into the Silence is essentially a tale of two worlds, providing real insights about the interactions between Western mountain climbers and Himalayan peoples.
- This is a remarkable masterpiece of writing about the theme that “the price of life is death” for all those who had lived through the first world war or the Great War. Wade Davis tells the story of the early exploration into Tibet by Francis Younghusband, which began the first conquest of Tibet by a European and during that duration of looking at the possibility of climbing Everest, accounts of the most horrific war run in the most idiotic way of the great war that many of these climbers survived, and of the first three attempts to conquer climb Mount Everest in 1921, 1922 and 1924.
– The accounts of the First World War are remarkable, Davis has collected and researched diaries of those who climbed the mountain which include many of their accounts of war, which are truly horrific. The fact that the British generals refused to use steel helmet which would protect a man’s head much better than the cloth cap they used, refuse to use machine guns and choose rifles which shot at a much slower rate than the machine guns used by the enemy and in some of the attacks on the Germans, Allied soldiers were made to walk rather than run and rush the German trenches and were mowed down like cattle in seconds. The generals were truly incompetent but idealising british history. A couple of quotes amongst so many include the following:
- “Other witnesses remember Wakefield hesitating and then slowly beginning to sob as the flag drew back to reveal the names of those who had perished: caught on the barbed wire, drowned in mud, choked by the oily slime of gas, reduced to a spray of red mist, quartered limbs hanging from shattered branches of burnt trees, bodies swollen and blackened with flies, skulls gnawed by rats, corpses stuck in the sides of trenches that aged with each day into the colours of the dead.”
- “Vera Brittain, a nurse who had already lost her brother and her two best friends, and in time would lose Roland [her fiance] as well. “The dugouts have been nearly all blown in,” he wrote, the wire entanglements are a wreck, and in among the chaos of twisted iron and splintered timber and shapeless earth are the fleshless, blackened bones of simple men … Let him who thinks war is a glorious, golden thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking honour and praise and valour and love of country … Let him but look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin-bone and what might have been its ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its side, resting half crouching as it fell, perfect that it is headless, and with the tattered clothing still draped round it; and let him realise how grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled all youth and joy and life into a fetid heap of hideous putrescence! Who is there who has known and seen who can say that victory is worth the death of even one of these?”
– The book then focuses on the initial scouting group in 1921 with an attempt to climb Mount Everest, followed by two more in 1922 and 1924. This is real boys adventure stuff but it’s also a fascinating look into different cultures and landscapes. I think Wade Davis writes with remarkable pros and he is one of my favourite writers whom I could listen to him talk about anything.
– On a personal note I have travelled through Tibet, India and Nepal and it was interesting listening to the depictions of these countries and places that I have seen and visited, and hear as they were described at the turn of the 20th century. I’ve been to many places described, slept one night on Everest base camp (they have a Buddhist monastery there) in Tibet and visited many of these places described in the book. I’ve also drunk my fair share of Yak tea, cooked withYak dung - like watery tea strained through a smelly sock with the smell of petroleum. Tibet’s culture is truly remarkable and its people and beliefs are fascinating and well described. This is a book about death that can make you appreciate life. It could be travel reportage, boys' own adventure, a spiritual guide to different cultures and the very belief that ‘the price of life is death’ as so many of these men who tried to conquer the tallest mountain in the world had already lost so much.
– For such a long book I really didn’t want it to end, I loved every word of it – the spiritual, physical, the characters who attempted to climb the tallest mountain on the planet because “it was there“. I would recommend anything Wade Davis writes and I would certainly recommend this book.
出版社: Vintage (2011/10/18)
ASIN: B004KPM1HG のレビュー。
1921、22、24年、三回にわたるエベレスト遠征隊を描いた労作である。
1999年、マロリーの遺体が発見され、それに付随して数十冊の関連書が出版された。本書の著者は、その段階で、自身の著作の調査中断を出版社に申し出たそうだ。しかし、出版社側は著者に執筆を継続させ、10年もの調査にすえ、本書は完成した。
3回の遠征に参加した隊員・関係者(王立地理協会、アルパイン・クラブ、インド政庁、インド軍)すべてについて経歴を調査し、一時資料を捜索している。膨大な書籍も収集し、読み込んでいる。さらに関係者の子孫に会い、話を聞き、資料を見せてもらっている。
結果として、前半はとても登山関係の本とは思えない内容になっている。第一次大戦、チベットの外交問題、インド政庁の事情、ケンブリッジなど当時の上流とミドルクラスの生活感覚などが、事細かく描かれる。とくにいやでも目を引くのは、当時のミドルクラス、知識人の若者の間のfriendship(homosexualという語は英語に定着していないし、gayは昔からの意味しかない)のこと。そうとうに、あからさまな書簡が残っている。労働者階級とは隔絶した、特権的な生活であったわけである。
第7章でようやくチベット内に到着、この第一次1921年の記述が長い、長い、長い。E. O. Wheelerというインド軍の測量技師の活動が詳しく書かれているが、これは著者が子孫にあって日記を譲り受けた成果を発表したものでしょう。さらに著者は、実際にwheelerの調査した地をかなりの部分歩いている。ノース・コルまでは登っている。ちなみに、このWheelerという人物はその後もインド軍の測量技師として活躍し、第二次大戦中は、ビルマ戦線の地図制作に従事した。日本軍が戦ったのは、この男である。
しかし、ここまではまだ五合目だ。いよいよ、ノース・コルから本格的なアタックが始まるのは第二次1922の遠征である。
ここいらから、わたしの読み方が定まってきた。この三回の遠征は、もともと失敗・敗退すべきものだったのではないか? 単なる運の悪さや、ちょっとしたミスではなく、構造的な問題として、当時のエベレスト登頂が不可能だったことを書こうとしているのではないか? わたしはそんな読み方で進んでいった。
隊員の人選をめぐるトラブル、予算獲得のための隊員への縛り、現地ポーターとの問題、年功序列やジェントルマンの階級意識、それらが遠征への大きな負担になる。装備・食料・医療知識・気象情報など、当時では解決できない問題が多々ある。第二次大戦後と大きく異なるのは、携帯無線機がないこと。これは第一次大戦時と同じで、ちょっと離れた部隊のようすがわからない。後方への連絡は走って伝令が伝えるしかない。エベレストでも各キャンプ間の連絡がとれず、さまざまなトラブルが起きる。第一次、第二次で、クライマーの犠牲がでなかったのが、幸運と言えるほどだ。
さて、主人公マロリーである。やはりこの人物の描写が一番くわしいが、〈友情〉事情ばかりでなく、さまざまなことが暴露されている。暴露というと、言葉が強すぎるかな? 当時としては普通の好青年だったのだろうが、現地人の利発な若者を妻に伝える手紙がすごい(p329)。
そして最後にマロリーが登頂に成功したかどうか、そんな関心から本書を読もうとする人がいれば、やめておけと言いたい。エピローグの最後に短くまとめられているが、結論は99.99%明らか。むしろ、なぜ、登頂に成功したかもしれないという希望が長く続いたかが、本書全体で語られている。
以上、緑陰の友というには、ヘビーでディープな著作でした。
索引がひじょうに詳しい。本文には注がなく、そのかわり各章ごとに文書館や図書館の所在情報が載っており、関連書籍の案内もしている。どうせ一次資料を見ることなんてない普通の読者にや、これで十分。
地図はkindleで見にくい。わたしはFire HDで見た。地名などもう少し詳しく載っていればいいかなあ。
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