The Shadow-gloom and Weight of the Sacred

I've been fascinated with mounting climbing since I was a teenager--when I first read Into Thin Air. I suppose I could trace my fascination with mountain climbing back to the books by Jack London I read in my even younger days: Call of the Wild and White Fang. Or, to draw this out as long as possible, maybe it was growing up in western Oklahoma, a land epitomizing the geometric plane. Oklahoma, a land where the 2400 foot Mount Scott makes "mount" a dubious distinction.

The first time I became aware of Into the Silence by Wade Davis, I was immediately interested in the book because, not only do mountains (real, actual mountains) mythically possesses my imagination, but one of my favorite periods of history to study is World War I. Davis explores the impact of the first world war upon European society and, as well, how the war shaped the men who attempted to climb Mount Everest in the wars immediate aftermath (the expeditions involving George Mallory in 1921, 1922, and 1924).

Credit: Declan McAleese http://www.flickr.com/photos/djmcaleese/ CC BY-SA 2.0 Mount Scott towering over western Oklahoma.

Into the Silence was meticulously researched (seems like one review on the back cover stated that Davis spent 10 years researching the book) and this is apparent by the book's depth and richness. No character is simply introduced, we are provided his or her (usually his) complete background including, but not limited to, grammar school records, past lovers, and of course his role in the war. At times, this is too much as bit-players in the Everest expeditions are given treatments equal to that of George Mallory or Charles Howard-Bury and the reader is left feeling as if Davis is more concerned that everyone know how well he researched the project rather than just telling the story. But, this is a minor nuisance rather than a tremendous distraction. While the details are much and facts ever-present, Davis does not forget the story and we gain great incite into the mountain-conquering motivation of these war-survivors.

The war details are often graphic and unsettling, but they nonetheless draw us into greater understanding of how the war happened, why it lasted so long, and what war actually is (his account of the Battle of Loos is particularly harrowing). This is one of my favorite quotations describing a pre-WWI British attack upon the Tibetans:

‎"...[T]he British pushed on, fighting a series of skirmishes that climaxed in a two-month siege at Gyantse, where they endured tens of casualties while inflicting on the Tibetans some five thousand. With such a ratio of suffering, it is not surprising that the British generals had come by 1914 to view war as something glorious."

Into the Silence is a long book; you won't read it in a week (unless that's all you have to do), but it is a book well-worth reading. As far as I know, there is no other published book like it. It provides the facts, it tells the story, but these are not allowed to simply exist in a moral vacuum of ambiguity. Both facts and story are held accountable and, thus, Into the Silence presents the reader not only with a good adventure story and a thorough history, but a troubling moral dilemma upon which readers will continue to ponder long after the book is closed and shelved.