Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest

A classic account of exploration and endurance from the bestselling author of The Wayfinders.

In this magisterial work of history and adventure, based on more than a decade of prodigious research in British, Canadian and European archives, and months in the field in Nepal and Tibet, Wade Davis vividly re-creates British climbers' epic attempts to scale Mount Everest in the early 1920s. With new access to letters and diaries, Davis recounts the heroic efforts of George Mallory and his fellow climbers to conquer the mountain in the face of treacherous terrain and furious weather. He takes us beyond the Himalayas to the trenches of World War I, where Mallory and his generation found themselves and their world utterly shattered. In the wake of the war that destroyed all notions of honor and decency, the Everest expeditions, led by these scions of Britain's elite, emerged as a symbol of national redemption and hope.

Into the Silence is a timeless portrait of an extraordinary generation of adventurers, the likes of which we will never see again.