One morning in June 1924, George Mallory and Andrew "Sandy" Irvine attempted to become the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest—at 29,029 feet, the highest point on earth. One member of the expedition caught a glimpse of them high on a ridge later in the day before clouds moved in and obscured the view. They were never seen again. Did they make it to the top and die descending or were they killed trying? "Their disappearance would haunt a nation and give rise to the greatest mystery in the history of mountaineering," Wade Davis writes in "Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest."
Mallory and Irvine are the subject of many biographies, and the history of attempts to climb Everest fills a small library. Yet Mr. Davis, an anthropologist whose previous books include "The Serpent and the Rainbow" (about zombie cults in Haiti), has written what will likely stand as the most thorough and absorbing account of the early British attempts to scale the mountain.
Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest
By Wade Davis
Knopf, 655 pages, $32.50
Mr. Davis's research is extraordinary, the scope of his book ambitious (perhaps overly so), his writing sensitive and graceful, and the story-telling entertaining. The book's subtitle, however, is misleading. The first chapter is a gory, slightly purple account of World War I, where Mr. Davis seeks to explore the effect of the conflict's carnage on individuals who will later join the Everest expeditions as well as on the collective psyche of the British nation. "In gullies choked with dust and infused with the scent of thyme and cordite, the agonies of the wounded haunted the survivors," Mr. Davis writes of the war. In his view, the Everest challenge was "embraced readily by a tired and exhausted people, to show that the life and death of an individual could still have meaning, that the war had not expunged everything heroic and inspired."
Mallory doesn't figure in this war chapter and indeed doesn't make an appearance in "Into the Silence" until about a quarter of the way through. Even then the book doesn't give much more attention to Mallory than to a half-dozen other fascinating figures, such as Francis Younghusband ("soldier, philosopher, mystic visionary, and spy"), who led the 1904 British invasion of Tibet, and E.O. Wheeler, an accomplished climber from Canada who made his mark on Everest not by mountaineering feats but by his prodigious and heroic mapmaking exploits.
"Into the Silence," more accurately, is a kaleidoscopic account of the first three British Everest expeditions, which between 1921 and 1924 mapped the approaches to the mountain and attempted to put a team on its summit. Given that it's doubtful (although possible) that Mallory and Irvine reached the top of Everest before being killed on the descent, they did not achieve the "conquest of Everest." Whether the mountain was even "conquered" when it was successfully climbed (and descended) by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay from the Nepal side in 1953 is an open question. Still, Mallory and Irvine's achievement needs no hype. As Mr. Davis notes, they did manage to "climb higher than any human being before them, reaching heights that would not be attained again for nearly thirty years."
The 1921 expedition was the first mountain reconnaissance, during which Mallory helped find the northern Tibet approach to the peak. His impression of Everest: "not a slender spike but built up on its great arête with the limbs of a giant, simple, severe and superb. From the mountaineer's point of view so far as we have seen it no more appalling sight could be imagined."
On the second expedition Mallory and his partners reached 27,000 feet without bottled oxygen. A second attempt several days later by George Finch and Geoffrey Bruce got 300 feet higher, establishing the usefulness of supplementary oxygen. Yet another attempt by Mallory ended in tragedy when an avalanche killed seven Sherpas.
Finch wasn't invited back on the third expedition, less than six months later, after a falling out with the organizing committee over lecture fees and photo rights. Mallory was conflicted about leaving his young family for another extended absence and troubled by the deaths of the Sherpas. "It sounds more like war than sport—and perhaps it is," he wrote to a friend.
By then Mallory, a former school teacher, was a national hero. When asked why he wanted to climb Everest, he famously replied: "Because it's there." Irvine, a college student, was a novice climber but a superb athlete and mechanic who was picked as much for his ability to tinker with the oxygen equipment as for his mountaineering prowess.
What happened to the duo on that last expedition remains a mystery. American climber Conrad Anker found Mallory's remains in 1999. He doubted that Mallory could have overcome the technical difficulties on the Tibetan side of the mountain to reach the summit—an assessment with which Mr. Davis concurs.
The two men were publicly mourned by King George V and an overflowing crowd at St. Paul's Cathedral, the first and only time mountaineers were so honored by the British. "Private grief gave way to national catharsis," Mr. Davis writes. Ultimately, the most fitting epitaph may have been given by the abbot of the Rongbuk Monastery in Tibet, Dzatrul Rinpoche, who commented on one of the earlier British attempts on the mountain. "I feel great compassion for them to suffer so much for such meaningless work," he said.
—Mr. Ybarra is the Journal's extreme-sports correspondent.