16
" 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 difficult to recall the devastating collapse of the structure of life, and all its standards, which the recrudescence of barbarous warfare denoted for our generation. "
― Wade Davis , Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest
17
" 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. "
― Wade Davis , Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest
18
" Ahead of them stretched one of the most remarkable mountain vistas on earth. The Rongbuk Valley spreading south toward Everest rises in twenty miles but 4,000 feet, and it runs remarkably straight. From even a slight elevation, it appears to be flat, with its massive ice fields seeming to lie prostrate along the valley floor, as if detached from the mountain from which they flow. High ridges on both flanks draw the eye irresistibly to the head of the valley, where the sheer scale of the North Face, towering 10,000 feet, collapses perspective, creating an illusion of both proximity and depth, as if the mountain could be reached in a moment, or never reached at all. "
― Wade Davis , Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest
