Extract from book:
VIII

A delightful boon of serendipity, the surprising blue poppy of Tibet; happy flower of an Arcadian world: a bright poppy that doesn't bear the mournful memories of the dead. It really was such a joyous sight, the heavenly blue of celestial bliss. Its vibrant colour so redolent of the sublime Eritrichium nanum . . . the highest and brightest of all the blue Alpines. I love the gentle beauty of flowers.

The ground here is not so good, scree and steeply angled rock, scattered with shards of detritus, so easy to skid and scud off from. Ware the delicate foliation of ice.

Such is the magisterial height of Everest, that we look down on all the other surrounding peaks . . . the inexpressible immensity of the view . . . words cannot compass this stupendous scale . . . We're already nearly as high up the mountain as our highest point in '22. This is the advantage of the 'English air' . . . the extra vim it provides. I'm almost sure I can feel the alveoli sponging up this precious oxygen.

The divine afflatus of the gas, how it slows the rate of breathing down.

The leader is the stroke of the party, and I've really set a cracking pace . . . the grim humour of that term pace for our agonising progress now. I'm just hoping Sandy is all right. Occasionally I stop to point, gesturing by hand signals or indicating with my ice axe anything to watch out for. Gesticulating in exaggerated dumbshow . . . just like Charlie Chaplin.

I cannot speak any more than he . . . we are in the kingdom of the mute . . . only the high-pressure hiss of the gas is our monotonous accompaniment.

We have no scallop-shell of quiet. I only hope, we have the equation of time, distance and atmospheres rightly balanced in our favour.

I told them, I wanted to climb Mt. Woolworth in New York, but Harold Lloyd beat me to it, in crazy comic style, in Safety Last, climbing that skyscraper in Los Angeles. One of the best films I've seen, funnier than Easy Street. Even I couldn't have matched his antic, droll technique, that hair-raising daftness and the death defying pirouettes. Such hare-brained stunts are best left to the professionals.

I earnt $700 less than Conan Doyle on my lectures in the U.S.A. . . . elementary Watson . . . you can't compete with fictional heroes . . . and any climbing leader could learn from Sherlock Holmes . . . practitioner of the art of perception raised to the preternatural.

But here I am, appearing now on film, who'd have thought it, climbing for the edification and entertainment of the public. I hate the idea of it . . . it makes me feel like a circus performer.

I remember that grousing, old curmudgeon, Lt. Col. Strut, an insufferably opinionated, porridge-with-salt-man, upon reaching the top of the North Col saying: "I wish that bloody cinema was here, if I look anything like what I feel, I ought to be immortalised for the British public".

Let's hope I have the darn luck of Buster Keaton, or the infinite capacity to cheat fate like Harold Lloyd. But Noel is making an epic, The Epic of Mount Everest. I think he'd like to have me coming down, not with the 'Ten Commandments', that's old hat now, but with a ghoulish, Tibetan devil or two, suitably wearing necklaces of human skulls.

After all, the public's currently agog with Tutankhamun: Noel's cinematograph of the expedition has to compete.

And so do I, against the last, snowy, inhospitable heights of Everest; such is 'the masquerade of the changeling nicknamed Free Will'.

But I've no choice just this minute . . . I've simply got to stop and rest a while. Sometimes, it's quite impossible not to admire the view . . .

Below me the great sweep of winding glaciers: slow, irresistible, crystalline rivers of glistering ice, and the landscape in its bleak state of glacial denudation. I'm reminded of climbing on Tryfan, looking down and into Cwm Idwal, it was there Charles Darwin perceived that the overgrown mounds in the cwm, were moraines left by retreating glaciers . . . glaciers die of hunger for snow.

It's curious to think that mighty glaciers, such as these, once ground and grinded in an ice-bound age, over much of Great Britain, that our own mountains were sculpted by glaciers. The 'Glacial Epoch' in Prof. Agassiz's phrase, 'a period in the history of our planet . . .'

It was some time though, before Agassiz's vision came to be generally accepted, the signature of the parallel roads of Glen Roy and the mountain of the evidence were not enough. A fundamental shift in mental climate often seems to require a near geological time span . . . as if it had the same, slow rhythm as a landscape.

Although the geologist, Charles Lyell was initially sceptical, Agassiz's envisioning of an ice age was Lyellian in its attempt to explain former changes to the Earth's surface by reference to causes now in operation.

It was an illustration of Lyell's own insightful doctrine: 'The present is the key to the past, the past is the key to the present'. There is the true, Janus face of comprehension that sets the living pulse of real understanding.

Though neither Agassiz nor Lyell its inspirer accepted Darwin's Theory of Evolution . . . Lyell always said that he couldn't 'go the whole Orang'. Our deeply ingrained attitudes do not evolve over time . . . they make dinosaurs of us in the end.

I'm looking way across at Mt. Clare . . . with its magnificent High Gothic architecture, that fantastic ridge of cornices and towers, and the almost perfect pyramid of its perpetual, snow-dreaming spire. It's such a beautiful mountain, so I named it after my daughter. The R.G.S. wouldn't let the name stand, so it's officially on the map as Pumori, which does, at least, mean daughter peak.

I look at mountains geometrically, somewhat in the manner of a cubist, as Plato observed, 'god ever geometrizes'; geometry was my first love at school. Discovering Geoffrey had a similar eye, I threatened, only half in jest, to write a critical piece for the Alpine Journal. Promising to fully unmask the cubist movement in orosophy, adumbrating briefly, in outline, how it had anticipated Braque and Picasso.

Later, I learnt that Braque had said that he and Picasso, were like two mountaineers roped together . . . the closest bond of men exploring the unknown.

The sun is beginning to burnish the snow, so it's time to put my snow goggles on and get moving again . . .

Climbing in the green filtered world now of the goggles, in their curious submarine air . . . clambering up what was once a sea floor. The past is the key to the present.

Diastrophism . . . regions sink and regions rise, as so do the reputations of men, subject as they are too to the weathering and erosion of time.

The rocks are treacherously covered in a shivered cascade of brash, imagine a kind of lithic dandruff. This continual scaling-off from the rock collects in all the crannies and crevices, into scree casts of mutual attrition. It makes a damned awkward terrain . . . you have to watch your footing constantly. And it's made even more difficult now, with the narrow view field of the goggles.

At moments like this, you can really savour the wry humour of Donald Robertson's remark, 'climbers are always trying in self-defence to maintain the fiction that they are enjoying themselves'.

Mummery was surely right in his observation that 'the essence of the sport, lies not in ascending a peak, but in struggling with and overcoming difficulties' . . .

And that's just how Pater summed up the pleasure of writing, 'the delightful sense of difficulties overcome' . . . the feeling of delight in it . . .

People are always asking me to explain or justify the sport of climbing . . . but climbing, just like life itself, has no narrow rational purpose . . . all its sense lies in the doing.

The feeling of delight in it . . . in the current of alert senses . . . the intensely lived concentration, nerved with its fraught exhilaration, burning off the accretion of routine, the quotidian layers of sedimentation.

A reawakening to what it means to be alive, the unaccountable miraculousness of being . . . and that feeling of sheer delight in it.

Even on an expedition such as this, there are times when one has to consciously resist the easy, complicit fall into the mechanical way of doing things; the unconscious illapse into the robot state.

That condition of 'Rossum's Universal Robots'. 'Robots are not life. Robots are machines'.

The mechanical is an all unthinking grind, our humanity often needs startling back into life . . . so that it quivers heartfelt into being again.

Damn, I almost lost my footing . . . a salutary reminder . . . 'Right Mindfulness'. As they used to say, in the early days of guideless climbing, 'the Englishman likes to find his own way to heaven'. You have to be your own angel.

I've always loved those lines of Emily Bronte's:

     I'll walk where my own nature would be leading-
     It vexes me to choose another guide-

And my own heart too inclines to 'where the wild wind blows on the mountainside'.

Though Dr.Johnson wrote about mountains disparagingly, he thought 'their uniformity and barrenness could afford little amusement to the traveller', but he did, at least, recognise that 'he who mounts the precipices has a kind of turbulent pleasure, between fright and admiration'.

He didn't get quite as far as Herford's 'ecstasy that thrills the blood', but then the Doctor's understanding of climbing was a steep walk.

It was Gray who was the first to cultivate an aesthetic appreciation of 'those monstrous creatures of God . . . pregnant with religion and poetry'. Only much later would Ruskin reverentially write, 'the mountains of the earth are its natural cathedrals'.

Though Ruskin was horrified at the idea of climbing them, to make a vulgar playground of the virgin, Alpine snows: 'one would as soon think of climbing the pillars of the choir at Beauvais for a gymnastic exercise'.

But as Sandy quipped to the reporters: 'It's the duty of the Alpine Club to climb as near as it can to Heaven'.

And today, we'll climb as far as this great vault of the white crested Earth goes to heaven . . . up even through the choir of the wind, scaling the heights along the North-east Ridge.

It was a North-east Ridge that led Whymper to the pristine peak of the Matterhorn, that legendary summit of the Golden Age.

It was his ninth attempt . . . this is my third. In reply to the chorus of 'what's-the-users', I'm reminded of Rutherford's toast at the annual Cavendish Laboratory dinner: "To the electron . . . may it never be of use to anyone".

And may Everest hold its own with the electron.

Notes to section VIII

The scallop-shell was the badge worn by pilgrims from medieval times. 'The scallop-shell of quiet' comes from the sonnet entitled His Pilgrimage: that Sir Walter Raleigh wrote shortly before his execution. 'Give me my scallop-shell of quiet/My staff of faith to walk upon/My scrip of joy, immortal diet'.

Mt. Woolworth - At the time of Mallory's lecture tour the Woolworth Building in New York, on 233 Broadway, Lower Manhattan, was the highest building in the world. It was 58 storeys high but the storeys were so large, it was in sheer scale, more in the region of 79-80 storeys. And the man behind it was, of course, the five & dime store man himself, Mr. Frank Woolworth - to the tune of $13 million. Work started in 1910 and it was opened in 1913. It was not superseded in height until 1931. It is still called the Woolworth Building and is now one of the oldest and most famous skyscrapers in New York. To see a really atmospheric, black & white aerial photograph of the neo-Gothic style tower of 'Mount Woolworth' above the clouds, look up the entry in Wikipedia on the Woolworth Building. It dramatically conveys the sense of why Mallory joked, that he wanted to climb it.

Safety Last - Harold Lloyd's greatest comedy stunt climbing up a skyscraper, still rightly regarded as a comic masterpiece. Shows what a comic genius can do with a minimal budget, but ideally only for those with a good head for heights. Harold Lloyd did all his own stunts and they were mostly for real.

The Ten Commandments - made into a hugely successful Hollywood epic in 1923, directed by Cecil B. DeMille - hence Mallory's joke about it being 'old hat' now. For Mallory in 1924, it was last year's sensation.

'I look at mountains geometrically' the idea behind an article Mallory threatened, tongue-in-cheek to write entitled, 'The Cubist Movement in Orosophy' - from Mallory's review Geoffrey Winthrop Young on Mountain Craft, Climbers' Club Journal, vol. 2, no.4, Dec. 1920.

Orosophy - As far as I can tell, Mallory's own coinage. From orology the scientific study of mountains. The oro coming from the Greek word for mountain and instead of the suffix logy (logos discourse) he has put sophy; from the Greek sophia wisdom: so literally mountain wisdom.

Donald Robertson (1880?- 1910) Described by an Italian priest as 'clearly an Englishman by his size and silence, but with a smile stolen from Leonardo'. He was a friend & climbing companion of Mallory's. In 1909 he climbed the Nesthorn and the Jungfrau, together with Mallory & Winthrop Young. And they then made an attempt on the precipitous walls of the aiguilles above the Mer de Glace. He wrote an article for the Alpine Journal entitled Alpine Humour, from whence I have taken the quotation. It was in this article, that Mallory perhaps, got the seed-crystal for his comparison of a day in the Alps to a symphony.

For the matters of common knowledge in mountaineering are the emotions which form its very blood. The night in the gite or hut, the rise in the dark, the tramp in the wake of the lantern, sunrise, the concert-piece of the day - scherzo, allegro, andante cantabile, andante maestoso, terminating in the coda of after years.

I have taken and quoted his phrase 'the masquerade of the changeling nicknamed Free Will' on two separate occasions. I thought that it was too striking and memorable to leave it, in his own words, 'in the place of bones'. And I have also used, towards the end, his rather poignant and touching description of the mountains as 'the great sleeping ones': 'he is not the greatest but the least of things, among the great sleeping ones who have but to stir in their slumber and he sleeps with them'. Which, of course, Mallory himself quoted.

The article was published at the beginning of March 1910 in the A.J. and at Easter of that same year, Donald Robertson fell while leading up the Eastern Gully of Glyder Fach. Tragically there was no coda of after years. He died as a result of a fractured skull. Educated at Eton & Trinity (Cantab.), he was Secretary of the Royal Commission on Electoral Systems. Winthrop Young felt that his death 'darkened the hills with clouds that never again quite dispersed'. Pointing out the often fatal consequences of a slip in those days, Peter & Leni Gillman, in their biography of Mallory, state that 'today's climbers, who would have placed a running belay and worn a helmet, would almost certainly have survived'. At the end of Alpine Humour Donald Robertson himself had written:

The faith of a mountaineer is, and must be, that a life lost in the legitimate pursuit of our aims is not a life thrown away, but a forfeit of a stake set for an exceeding great reward, the rendering up of a soul to the hills that made it a worthy sacrifice.

Tutankhamun - Almost immediately after the discovery in November 1922 of the boy King's un- robbed tomb -'Wonderful things - I can see wonderful things' in the famous words of Howard Carter - 'Egyptianism' became all the rage. An inspirational source for the kitsch of Art Deco and by 1923 the craze for the 'ancient Egyptian-style' extended from fashionable ladies hats to Huntley & Palmer biscuit tins. And at the British Empire Exhibition in 1924, you could not only see a scale model of Mt. Everest, you could also go and visit a large scale replica of the original, young Pharaoh's tomb, bearing the sign outside, 'TOMB OF TUT- ANKH - AMEN' - and all within Wembley Park. The two models were among the main competing attractions.

The scale model of Mt. Everest, at the British Empire Exhibition, is an indication of the degree to which the mountain had captured the popular imagination and is eloquent of the optimistic expectation that the 'Third Pole' would be finally conquered that year.

Walter Pater (1839-94) Still a deeply out-of-fashion, Victorian writer, aesthetician and art critic. Perhaps possibly best known now, because Oscar Wilde was perceived as being one of his disciples. He wrote in a finely crafted, 'musically languorous prose style'. His Studies in the History of the Renaissance, first published in 1873, is still around in paperback editions. W.B. Yeats included the atmospheric and evocative descriptive passage from it on the Mona Lisa, in his edition of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse. When Mallory was just up at Cambridge, in 1905, Pater's work would still have been being read and discussed. And Mallory's tutor at Cambridge, A. C. Benson had written a study of Pater, which Mallory, therefore, was obliged to read. The conclusion to Pater's Renaissance probably remains the best known and oft quoted passage (see notes to part XVIII), as it was seen as being 'a philosophy of sensationalist hedonism', and thus providing a licence for the decadence of the 1890's. The man himself was a rather timid Oxford recluse.

A. C. Benson (1862- 1926) The brother of the more famous novelist E. F. Benson. After his first meeting with Mallory, he wrote in his diary: 'a simpler, more ingenuous, more unaffected, more genuinely interested boy I never saw'. He encouraged him to read widely and to spend time on crafting his essays. Benson's own collection of essays, From a College Window, enjoyed great popularity at the time. Mallory wrote later: 'I have been so well taught here by Mr Benson that I could tell people how to write essays'. A. C. Benson is best known today, for being the author of the words for 'Land of Hope and Glory'.

Illapse - n a sliding in - vi to glide in. Chambers. In the text, I wanted that combined association and onomatopoeia of ill & lapse on the ear, to convey the pejorative of sliding into the mechanical way of doing things, the illapse into the unthinking nature of it.

Robot - 1923 saw the first production on the London stage of a new play by a Czechoslovakian writer & playwright, Carel Capek. The play was R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). And a new word - robot, which Capek had invented from the Czech robota - statute labour, entered the language . . . and the imagination. The film I, Robot is essentially the same story, but it lacks the freshness, originality and the intelligence of the original.