Sport: Everest Is There

To an Alpinist, mountain climbing is the most dangerous and exhilarating sport in the world. To a climber of the towering Himalayas, it is chiefly dangerous. Above the Alpine altitudes, the rarefied atmosphere brings on an overwhelming lassitude and an indifference to danger. Such a fate may well have overcome Britain's George Leigh-Mallory and Andrew C. Irvine, when the swirling mountain mists cut them off from view in 1924 as they struggled up the last 1,000 feet of towering, forbidding Mt. Everest.* Why do men tackle a forbidding mountain? Mallory had his own...